Face-to-Face: Kate Millett portrait
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Carolyn Carr: I'm Carloyn Carr, I'm the deputy director and chief curator here
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at the National Portrait Gallery, and I'm delighted this evening to talk to you
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about Kate Millett. She is a major figure in our exhibition called
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"The Struggle for Justice," an exhibition that is about, really, social change
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in the 20th century, and clearly Kate Millett, along with Betty Friedan, whose portrait is on the wall next to her,
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were major leaders in the feminist revolution. I thought I would divide my remarks into three parts.
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First of all, to tell you something biographically about Kate Millett.
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Second, to talk about some of the statistics that were in the 1970 "Time" magazine article about her.
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And then, thirdly, to tell you something about the artist, Alice Neil, who did her portrait.
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We have this particular portrait, which was used as a cover for the August 1970 issue of "Time" magazine, because the
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National Portrait Gallery is the repository for the original art on Time magazine
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So, we have a lot of interesting portraits and it was particularly useful before we changed our by-laws in 2001
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to collect living subjects. This is how we got living subjects into our collection. Kate Millet was born in 1934.
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In fact, as I looked at this portrait of her done in 1970, when she was 36, I thought that's one of the nice things
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about portraits. It keeps you, they keep you young forever. Today, obviously, 40 years later, she is 76, very different
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time in her life. Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. She grew up there. Clearly her childhood played a leading,
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a major force in her politics. Her father was abusive, ultimately left, her and her two sisters. Millet was the second
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of three daughters and she saw that when her mother had to go out and earn a living to support her children, that jobs
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commensurate with her intelligence and ability were essentially not available to her. When she finally landed a job,
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selling insurance, the men in the company were given a salary as well as their commissions, she only earned her living
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by her commissions. Millet graduated in '56 from the University of Minnesota, Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude, magna cum laude.
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She then had a fellowship to study at Oxford where she got a Masters degree. She came back to the United States for a
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couple of years, decided that as many young people who were trying to find themselves, that perhaps she would earn her
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livelihood through sculpture. And so, she decided to set off for Japan. She went to Japan in 1961. She's had an
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interesting varied life and career. There she met her husband.
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Carolyn Carr: She met her husband, Fumio Yoshimura, I think was his name. And they came back to the States in 1965.
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Millett considered teaching, and realized in order to teach at the university level, she would need her PHD.
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So, she enrolled in Columbia University. And I have to tell you, I don't know how many of you here have struggled for your PHD, when you finish it, what you pray for is that somebody will publish it.
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Well, Millett had the good fortune to have a thesis topic, that was a hot topic, and that was timely.
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Her thesis for Columbia was the book, "Sexual Politics," and I had the pleasure of skimming that book again recently, and I was absolutely startled.
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And I could see why it made such a tremendous impact.
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It wasn't just nearly a thesis that women have been systematically put down, that it is a patriarchal society.
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It started with literary examples in the 18th Century and went on to the 19th Century and took it up to the mid 20th Century by
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quoting Henry Miller from the "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn",
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books that, I can tell you, in the 1960s, were outlawed in the United States.
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So she was clearly on top of her literature. A clever agent realized that this was a timely thesis.
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Betty Friedan had written the "Feminine Mystique" in 1963, had founded The National Organization for Women, which Millett had joined, in 1966 that is.
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It was a moment of change, a moment of realization. The reason, one of the reasons that Time Magazine selected her for the cover was that the book sold instantly 15,000 copies.
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Well, today we hear, a million copies here, a million copies there, but I can tell you for a dissertation, 15,000 copies, in hardback is a lot.
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Millett was not happy.
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Carolyn Carr: with being on the cover of Time Magazine and in fact she refused to sit for her portrait.
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And if you had been here in 1998, you could have heard her talk about the portrait
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and being, and Time Magazine, and the impact that it had on her life and her career.
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One of the reasons she did not want to be on the cover was the Women's Movement was seen as a leaderless movement.
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No one was supposed to stand out, get notoriety above the other. But that's not really how it happens.
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Every movement, while it's a collective entity, has somebody who stands out as the spokesperson, and that was Millett.
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The interesting thing about the Time Magazine article was not only did it make her a persona non grata amongst some in the Women's Movement,
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but it also noted that she was, to use the phrase of the day, bisexual.
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And this, talking about her lesbian interest, tanked the book sales in addition to embarrassing her mother tremendously
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And I like to think of the change that has occurred in society, uh- today, where people look at not what is someone's sexual orientation,
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but rather what kind of an individual are they, what can they contribute to society
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And in fact, let me- the Time Magazine article, you could probably find it online,
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is interesting because it both took the women's movement seriously at the same time there was a little jocular put-down in the tone of the writing.
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What fascinated me were this set of statistics that said in 1970, 9% of the faculties in universities were women
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Today, it's closer to 50%
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It said 7% of doctors were women
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Today med schools have an enrollment of nearly 50%
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And it said 3% were lawyers
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Well right now something like 51% of the classes in law school are women
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You have to remember this is the time when the men's school Yale strikes me, Amherst, Williams, were schools for men today
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They- within the next five years they all converted to co-ed
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It was a radical, dynamic change
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What happened to Millett after this article in addition to the fact that her book sales dropped?
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And how many of you have read "Sexual Politics"?
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Carolyn Carr: Take it out, its hard to find a copy.
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Take it out of the public library. They have several copies you will find it interesting,
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you will also be rewarded because Millett is a dynamic writer.
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She is, you can just feel the energy and the anger in every sentence
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as she lays out the literary case for female oppression.
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In 1971, she used some of her royalties
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to buy a farm in Upstate New York, which was to be essentially a feminist collective.
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She then proceeded to have a nervous breakdown,
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she was diagnosed as bipolar.
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This angered her enormously,
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the fact that she could be so easily incarcerated in a mental institution,
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and she got the laws ultimately changed in Minnesota
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so its not quite so easy to have somebody
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held against their will.
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She continued to write books about her relationship,
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about her mother's illness and again this energy is there.
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She is probably today not,
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well so much has changed in the kind of leadership that is needed for
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to continue the feminist revolution and she is probably
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not one of the people that you would automatically think of.
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I like to say that anger is a great catalyst but not a useful strategy.
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And I think that is an easy way of defining her subsequent life.
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As I said she refused to sit for this painting so Alice Neel,
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who was just in the 1970's beginning to ascend in terms of reputation,
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was asked to do her portrait and its done from a photograph.
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Alice Neel is one of the great figurative painters of the 20th century,
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and in fact the Portrait Gallery owns about six of her paintings
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including her great self portrait, a portrait of a
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Anyway, 6 self-portraits. Alice Neel was born in 1900. She went to the Moore College of Art and Design. She married a fellow art student, a Cuban, Carlos Enríquez,
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went back to live with his family after they had a daughter that turned, in Cuba, that turned out not to be a successful strategy on her part.
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The couple came back to New York, ultimately had another daughter, lost the daughter to diphtheria.
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Alice had a breakdown, the marriage fell apart, etc, etc.
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The interesting thing about Alice Neel is that she has always been a great painter.
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She was a great figurative painter in the 30s, in the 40s, and in the 50s.
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But Alice Neel got virtually no recognition until 1970.
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Until the same time as all this ferment was happening in society.
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There's an article that every contemporary historian, art historian, knows -called, was written in- published in art news in January 1971.
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It was written by Linda Nochlin and it was called "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists".
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And her thesis was that women were cut out of accessibility to schools,
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and the only sort of historical people that you hear about are women whose fathers were artists and therefore they got sort of homeschooling
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Anyway, this article was interesting because it again had its share of statistics
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and one of them that was mind-boggling was that of the hundred one-person exhibitions that the Museum of Modern Art had done over its lifetime, only 3 were devoted to women.
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So these numbers that point out these huge discrepancies were again facts that were useful in changing people's perception.
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Alice, who had been painting since the 30s, became the poster child in some ways of the movement among women artists to gain more visibility, she'd always been working.
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So, in the 1970s she gets a show at the Whitney, she gets a show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art,
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and literally her reputation grew enormously and continues to grow today.
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Why was Alice willing, in 1970, to paint from a photograph as opposed to a live sitting?
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After all, if you look at her portraits, she's great at capturing the personality of the individual
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I think it's because she wanted to be on Time Magazine, and also she too was a supporter of the feminist revolution
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And if you look at photographs of Millett at that time and you look at this portrait, I think you get a sense of the energy and intelligence of this individual.
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So, that's my little talk about this portrait!
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So if you have any questions, feel free to
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[Woman 1] Who, Neal? [Woman 2] Millett. [Woman 1] Millett? [Woman 2] She said she wanted to. [Woman 1] No, she didn't. She spent most of her energy.. Umm, working on this farm and collective and writing. If she had she taught it was only small, part time situations. At least, from the biographical information I read recently. [Woman 2] Is she still living? [Woman 1] Yes, Yes! [Woman 2] And, and is she on the collective, is that where she lives? [Woman 1] she, no, I, she may be there but the last, the last public, umm.. Visibility she had was that she lead a tenant's revolt against. [Woman 1] See that anger, it's very useful. [Woman 1] Against the city of New York, so they did not confiscate the apartment building in which she lived in the bowery. And unfortunately she lost that legal battle. And that's kind of where my access to information about her remains. [Woman 2] The, uh, time she came past the gallery in 1998 mentioned when she was discussing what, I mean, I know that's a whole lecture in it of itself [Woman 1] No [Woman 2] But I mean what was her mood then [[?]] Was she still angry? [Woman 1] Well she, she was, I must have been away because I don't remember hearing it and the only thing I have is a file copy of her speech which is absolutely fantastic and has that same hard-hitting energy in it. And what she does is, you know this is 28 years later, almost 30 years later, 3 decades later, and I want to tell you about Time Magazine at which point she looks at the covers and says "It's still a patriarchal society" and something like "90 percent of the covers are of caucasian men." And then she said, "The only women who appear on it," it's really wonderful, uh, "are entertainers."
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Carolyn Carr: The movie stars. The singers. She said, "Two of the political figures were taken seriously, one was Indira Gandhi, and the other was Margaret Thatcher, who she said was represented as a building."
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And so I have to go and find that Time Magazine cover of Thatcher and see what it really looks like.
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Then she said the other category, of course, is the wife of, the wife of the president, the wife of the general, you know, whatever.
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She had not forgotten her roots when she came to talk about this painting. But the first thing she said in the talk was, "I did not want this to happen."
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Unknown: [Question]
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Carolyn Carr: I can guess, and that is if you have ever been to Alice Neel's studio, she had lots of large plants sitting.
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She lived on the upper west side of New York, sort of near Spanish Harlem. I think she just filled it in with the plants behind her.
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One of her great paintings is of her daughter-in-law, called Nancy in the Rubber Tree, so I think that's where this comes from. She had a great sense of color.
