The Brooklyn Rail

Gillian Jagger (1930–2019) and Vita Petersen (1915–2011) were dear friends. Gerda Blumenthal (1923–2004) was my aunt, my mother’s baby sister. All three were European. Vita emigrated to the United States in 1938, Gillian and Gerda in 1939. Gillian became a sculptor and teacher, Vita a painter, Gerda a teacher and writer. They knew rupture. I saw them all grow frail. Each provides a different way of thinking about creativity and aging. In her eighties, Gillian constructed fanciful, even wild sculptures of animals. At ninety-five, her eyesight fading, Vita painted small monochromatic abstractions of an almost unfathomable yet somehow communal privacy. My enduring image of Gerda’s last years is of her in her living room, almost immobile, her curiosity and faith intact.

Gillian was born in London. C.S. Jagger, her father, was a beloved World War I memorial sculptor. He died when Gillian was four. Her older sister died when Gillian was ten. After studying painting at Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to New York City, where she made plaster casts of truck tracks and of a cat stoned to death by kids in front of her apartment building and, most notably, of manhole covers. She began teaching at Pratt in 1968 and taught there for forty-five years. In 1978, with her partner Connie Mander, she bought a farm in Ulster County, in upstate New York, where she rescued horses, dogs and cats and made sculpture with trees, stones, horsehair, stanchions, barbed wire, lead, animal bones, deer carcasses and fossilized cats. Her sculptures fill three barns, the grandest of which still feels like a cathedral.

Gillian had long been obsessed with cave painting and in 2012, at eighty-two, she visited prehistoric caves in France. After returning home, she turned away from heavy, cumbersome materials, and with wire, mesh and cables began to assemble and weave the four sculptural horses that remain suspended by wires from the ceiling of her drawing studio. The last of them is a filly with a tail that flares like an evening gown—a frilly filly. Her stallion is convulsed and aroused and, like all these drawings in space, in its own way outrageous. Gillian made many sculptures that seem unable to escape the weight of their materiality and histories, even as they also seem uncontainable, fiercely resistant to the laws of space and time. While some of the late horses also seem trapped in dream, all are light, seemingly beyond age, their performativity unscriptable.

Vita Petersen (née von Simson) was born in Berlin. Her father was a statesman. Her ancestors include Moses and Felix Mendelssohn. Her older brother, Otto von Simson, an art historian, wrote a famous book called The Gothic Cathedral. Vita studied art with the German Expressionist Karl Hofer. She fled to New York to be with Gustav Petersen, a businessman from Hamburg, whom she married in 1939. She met the painter Mercedes Matter and through her became part of the Abstract Expressionist circle. Her touchstones included Paul Cézanne and Jackson Pollock, who for her connected the processes of painting with the spirit and forces of nature. I once said to her, as we stood by a bird feeder, “it would be nice if the birds would one day say thank you for forever feeding us.” Vita replied, “they bless you by being here.” At dinners she hosted, particularly during her last years, this is what she most communicated to her guests: thank you for being here. For her, as for Gillian, being was a miracle.

Toward the end of her life, she lost much of her ability to see color and shape. In her last nine months, using oil stick, pastel and acrylic paint, she made three dozen black and white paintings in which a dense and at times liquid darkness seems to be the condition of movement and light. These abstractions are in every way “late works”: expressionist, intimate, gestural and mysterious. They ask questions about human life, what human beings do and do not know, what we can and cannot see and touch, and what is of and beyond the earth.

Gerda, too, was born in Berlin. Her family fled to Moscow in 1937. In Riga, on their way out of Europe, fleeing again, she contracted polio. During her six months in the hospital, she became a reader. In New York, she converted to Christianity and received a PhD in French from Columbia. Her doctoral thesis became her first book: André Malraux: The Conquest of Dread. Simone Weil was an inspiration, and Gerda wrote about her, too. At Catholic University, she rose to University Professor of French and Comparative Literature. To students, her close and passionate readings of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Bernanos, Kafka, Musil, Mann, Rilke and Proust were unforgettable.

In her sixties Gerda was hit hard by post-polio syndrome. She had to give up teaching. During her last fifteen years, she rarely left her apartment. She spent her days in a lounger, listening to music, watching news, films and a great deal of tennis, and reading, always reading. I asked her about writing another book. But for her writing was intensely physical, and she no longer had the resources to do it. She seemed fine with this, fine with not leaving an archive, fine with knowing that she would survive primarily in the memories of students and friends.

Christ was the central figure—the main event—in her life. She loved Him and felt loved by Him. Her faith was the one part of her about which she would not speak. A few feet in front of her lounger, on the wall between the television and the couch, hung a photograph of a Romanesque sculpture of Christ, parts of His face and body blackened with centuries of dirt, His right hand raised in benediction. Gerda, the photograph of the sculpture and the space between her and it, have become for me a dimensionless image. I believe that this is indeed her image, one she created and would be pleased to be identified with, but it is my image, too. I know how to think about the images that Gillian and Vita left me, but how do I think about this one?