Caresse Crosby - Political and Artistic Activity

Political and Artistic Activity

Although her husband Bert was often drunk and infrequently home, Caresse did not lack for company. Caresse extended an invitation to Salvador Dalí and his wife, who were long-term guests, during which he wrote much of his autobiography. In 1934, Dalí and his wife Gala attended a masquerade party in New York, hosted for them by Crosby. Other visitors included Buckminster Fuller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Max Ernst, Stuart Kaiser and other friends from her time in Paris. She had a brief affair with Fuller during this time. By 1941, having divorced Bert, Caresse moved to live in Washington D.C. full-time where she owned a home at 2008 Q Street NW from 1937 to 1950, and she opened the Caresse Crosby Modern Art Gallery, what was then the city's only modern art gallery, at 1606 Twentieth Street, near Dupont Circle.

In December, 1943, she wrote Henry Miller to ask if he had heard about her gallery and asked if he would be interested in exhibiting some of his paintings there. In 1944, she spent some time with at his home in Big Sur, and later opened his first one-man art show at her gallery.

Read more about this topic:  Caresse Crosby

Famous quotes containing the words political, artistic and/or activity:

    Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.
    James Madison (1751–1836)

    In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)