Mother Joins the Circus
When I went to that first punk rock show, that sense of community and that tribe of those people, those like-minded kids that maybe all felt the same,… I thought it was so cool, like, this is where everyone could come. These were the misfits. These were the weirdos. These were the freaks ... there's some reassurance in that, like, "Oh, this is where [I] belong.” — Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) 11/2021 interview on NPR
In 1980 our mother, Katherine Bradford packed her 10-year-old twins into an old station wagon and left rural Maine to settle in New York City. It was a move us kids were firmly against….We sensed, even then, that this all had something to do with art. — Arthur Bradford
There’s a fine line between being an artist and a kook. — Gene Pool
Katherine Bradford, Mother Joins the Circus, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches, Courtesy of Adams and Ollman
In Flying Woman, Katherine Bradford’s current retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art, curated by Jaime De Simone, much is made of her life in Maine as an adult and mother. There is a timeline that articulates important dates and events in her life and a wall of photos outside the exhibition that features images of a smiling Bradford, husband and children in front of her garden’s stand of cornstalks. These date from her first go-round in Maine as part of the 70s back-to-the-land movement.
The checkerboard of photos also includes later photos that describe Bradford’s transition into the artist we now know. We see her children a few years older, we see Jane Wyatt who became her partner. We see Bradford’s hair growing grayer and morphing into her trademark chop, but none of the timeline, the photos checkerboard or even the paintings included in the exhibition tell the story of her exodus from Maine to New York through the eyes of the three individuals who experienced it: Bradford herself and her twin children. Bradford has, however, wrestled with this transition in the way she knows best — in paintings.
In the first version of Mother Joins the Circus (2019) the central motif is a horizontal figure — the mother, Bradford says — linked mortise-and-tenon fashion with the male and female figures who hold her aloft. The painting’s title is interesting because of what is omitted. In the history of freedom-seekers who set their sights on the circus, the seekers don’t typically “join” the circus; they “run away to join” the circus. And the seekers are not typically mothers - the trail of tears that would follow a runaway mother is sad to contemplate, but so is the isolation of a woman adrift without a tribe, without somewhere she fits. Katherine Bradford, when she ran, was running toward something as much as away, and she didn’t go alone.
Katherine Bradford, Circus Lady, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, Courtesy of Adams and Ollman
As a young woman and mother in the late 70s, Katherine Bradford had a lot to lose. She had attended a prestigious boarding school for girls and then Bryn Mawr College, married soon thereafter and quickly bore boy-girl twins. The family was living in Maine where her husband was debating a run for governor, but Bradford was gradually recognizing her attraction to a different side of life. Many artists from New York summered nearby, and, as she become acquainted with Yvonne Jacquette and Lois Dodd, among others, Bradford’s vision for herself began to diverge from woodstoves, organic gardening and a possible future as first lady of Maine. One anecdote about Bradford tells how, with guests in the house for a luncheon for her husband’s campaign, she escaped out a window to get back to work in her studio.
As she shared with me recently:
“I had to be very careful and closeted about how much I wanted this life and how much time I was spending on it. I got divorced and took my two children in the 80s to New York with me and they were school age. I think my family thought I was taking the kids to New York so they could be in better schools than they were in in Maine which was part of it. But I was very interested in being an artist in New York and learning as much as I could actually living in New York among the artists I had been reading about, among the freaks — the sideshow aspect of the artist community. You and I take that for granted but I find I have to explain to people, even dealers sometimes, how the art world is somewhat like a circus because we are performers and our value is in our individuality. The more outlandish the talents we have, the better….Definitely it wasn’t just my children who thought I had joined the circus but a wider circle of my family and friends.”
Katherine Bradford, Circus Ring, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches, Courtesy of Adams and Ollman
This disapproval, however, was no match for the pull of the tribe. Bradford’s children, now parents in their 50s and successful in their fields, recall the strange culture they had entered. According to son Arthur, ”The children of artists live in a confusing world. Their parents are chasing an unconventional dream, and the presence of little dependents, with conventional needs, can be a bit of a hindrance, frankly. This is not to say she was not also a devoted mother. Surely she was.” Daughter Laura: “It would have been so easy for her to stay within the lines; to have stayed married to Dad. To have had summers in nice places, a beautiful house, interesting dinner parties. I was mad at her for being so weird and choosing to have friends who were poor and difficult.”
Bradford may have furnished their new apartment home with furniture captured from the street and served meals cooked on a hotplate, but at least the three were together. Louise Nevelson and Grace Hartigan both made the cruel decision to abandon their offspring, opting to pursue careers and ways of life that embodied their values and ambitions. Both children and art careers require a lot of stamina and raising children is not cheap. Many artists decide against it. Ann Patchett examines her disinclination to become a mother in There are No Children Here, a recent essay. “I have just enough energy to write, keep up with the house, be a decent friend, a decent daughter and sister and wife. Part of not wanting children has always been the certainty that I didn’t have the energy for it, and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing. . . . History offers some examples of people who’ve done a good job with children and writing, I know that, but I wasn’t one of those people.” It is hard to cycle day in and day out between being, as Flaubert suggested, a bourgeois and a demi-god.
Bradford’s circus series was shown at Adams and Ollman Gallery in 2020 and evolved from the mundane beginning that some of her figures whose limbs were brightly colored appeared to wear tights. It’s not a revolutionary subject - from the middle of 19th century on there has been a linkage between the fine and circus arts. In Paris, for instance, Montmartre’s Cirque Medrano was tightly woven into the artistic fabric: Seurat, Picasso, Degas and Lautrec were all given free access to rehearsals to sketch performers at work which led to finished paintings. In the twentieth century, Calder created circus-themed work and, Igor Stravinsky and Georges Balanchine were commissioned by Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey to create a ballet for 50 elephants that was produced and performed in 1942.
Katherine Bradford, Bare Back Llama Rider, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 inches, Courtesy of Adams and Ollman
What strikes one about Bradford’s circus paintings is how much they eschew Greatest-Show-on-Earth spectacle. They are small- to modest-scaled, the figures clunky and inelegant. Tabula rasa faces over generalized torsos lure viewers into narratives of their own conjuring. In one, figures with barbells populate a circus ring. In another, two figures in tutus perch atop a horse that is half-submerged in water, as if ferrying the ladies to dry land. Wonder seems to be a through-line in Bradfords’ paintings — from her starry nights to swimmer paintings — and she says she was captivated as a child by “the mystique of the circus life, the otherness of the world, the people, that they were kind of a tribe apart, a tribe apart with a certain dignity from being so vulnerable. They had an audience as we as artists have an audience, a constant audience, people who watch what we do.”
For me, Mother Joins the Circus, is the standout in the group, not just for its provocative title that hints at autobiography but also for the ambiguity of its image, pregnant with associations. Bradford offers that in the painting “I’m making fun of myself rather than circus people… you can figure that I am the mother/artist joining the circus,” and acknowledges that she is “beginning to own autobiography a little more. I don’t think when I began I had a very strong idea about myself and my life and who I was and what I was going through but now I feel that it is popping up more and more. When I do a painting I look at it after I am finished and that is when I figure out what it might be about.”
The composition at its most basic shows three figures yoked together. Yet the arms of the standing man and woman circle the mother’s torso loosely, reminiscent of the brass rings magicians slip back and forth over their “floating” assistants to prove there are no strings attached. Are these really embraces? One viewer told Bradford that it looked like “Mother” was going to be stuffed into a cannon. To me it looks like she is being held like a battering ram. Other readings are equally likely. Mother Joins the Circus may just be a hydra-headed metaphor for the three-ring life that Bradford and her children pulled off, for better or for worse.
Still these paintings seem compassionate. Now nearing 80, Bradford has a long life to look back on and consider. As I think about the swimming horse in Bare Back Circus Riders (2019) that could be a flotation device, I ask her if painting has been her life raft. “More than that,” she responds emphatically. “It’s my castle.”
Katherine Bradford, Bare Back Circus Riders, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, Courtesy Adams and Ollman