The Brooklyn Rail

“Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations,” writes Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in Touching the Art, a book that, on its face, is a biography of Baltimore artist Gladys Goldstein, but—because Sycamore is so comfortable writing into this gap—ends up being so much more. Goldstein, who died in 2010, was the author’s grandmother. “She was the first woman among her cohorts to be hailed in the New York art world, just at the point when abstract art of the US avant-garde was being commoditized,” explains Sycamore, by way of detailing how the Abstract Expressionist painter internalized 1960s art world misogyny alongside her peers. “Almost all of them have a story they tell over and over about how some famous critic wrote that they painted like a man.”

As with any family story, Sycamore must deal with historical erasure, which in this case includes her mother throwing out Goldstein’s diaries in a cleaning binge. Moving to Baltimore and poring over old correspondence, gallery programs, and video interviews, Sycamore pieces together Goldstein’s life. How well did she know Grace Hartigan, another Abstract Expressionist painter working in Baltimore? Peripherally, it turns out. How did she view herself within the establishment? That would change over the years. For Sycamore, a day at the museum means ignoring warnings to keep her hands off the art, especially when the visual is also tactile. “Is that ink?” she writes of a Goldstein painting. “Almost like a fingerprint right underneath her signature, leading into the lace decaying off the page.” When she re-examines Goldstein’s collage work, she touches the glued candy wrappers her grandmother gave her as a kid, reinforcing how personal this documentary work is. In 1976, Goldstein painted a portrait of the author, who now returns the favor.

Touching the Art takes aim at Baltimore’s self-marketing as a creative mecca while artists are used “as tools for displacement, a sad story that has obliterated so many neighborhoods” and that involves the overwhelming whiteness of the city’s art institutions. Sycamore delves into the city’s racist history, which brings us back to Goldstein, who was afraid to visit her old house because it was in what had become a Black neighborhood. Freddie Gray, killed by police while in custody in 2015, was arrested five blocks away from where Goldstein grew up. “I’m thinking about the legacy of Jewish complicity in structural racism, but also the legacy of the South.” Gentrification and its harms to marginalized people have long been themes in Sycamore’s writing, whether in her 2020 memoir The Freezer Door, where she calls out “the mythical neighborhood where everyone belonged,” or in her 2004 anthology That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, where she reminds us that even though policies define the shape of gentrification, personal complicity determines how quickly it transforms a neighborhood.

This hybrid work of biography, social history, and criticism weaves memoir seamlessly into the mix. Sycamore remembers how Goldstein called her work centering queerness “vulgar” in letters and on the phone. “When I was a child, Gladys offered me the tools to imagine myself outside of normalcy. And yet, once I came into my own self, she wanted to put me back in that stifling space.” We can feel the author’s hurt. It becomes clear why Goldstein downplayed the queerness of her friend, the artist Keith Martin, whose life Sycamore devotes a significant part of the book to exploring, as part of correcting the record. Sycamore reveals that she wrote the book partly using money she inherited from Goldstein—yet more proof of the complexity of artmaking.

Years ago, when Sycamore first disclosed that her father (Goldstein’s son) molested her as a child, the family didn’t believe her. “When Gladys received the letter, she called me up and said: Are you sure this happened? And I said yes. And she said: How am I supposed to go on living? She went on living, and she did not support me—it was my father’s pain she was worried about.” In her 2013 memoir The End of San Francisco, Sycamore explains how her father consulted a false memory syndrome specialist and “gathered the whole family to figure out how to convince me I was wrong.” Sycamore never originally intended her father to be part of Touching the Art, but this is one of the lessons of the book: through art, our lives are connected in ways that can take a lifetime to figure out. “So if I write about her art without him I’m just telling a lie.”

Touching the Art is ultimately a story of parallel lives. Goldstein disapproved of Sycamore dropping out of college in search of a different community at nineteen, even though Goldstein did something similar at twenty when she divorced her first husband for a life that felt more authentic. Chronic pain forced Goldstein to give up large-scale painting for smaller work, and years later, it forced Sycamore to adopt different writing routines. How would both artists influence each other over the decades? What legacy do generations of artists leave one another? Art is never created in a void, but it creates voids that can be written about. Touching the Art rejects easy answers for a stretching of forms—perhaps one that Goldstein bequeathed to Sycamore. When Goldstein writes about wanting to evade categories, and that “someday they’ll invent a new one for me,” we can hear Sycamore typing the very same sentiment into the textual collage that became this book.