All the Artists' Children

What it means to have a parent who is also an artist.

Muntadas, Ordeal of Picasso’s Heirs. The New York Times Magazine. April 20th, 1980, 2012. 366 x 400 cm (wallpaper) Courtesy of the artist.

As an artist who is also a parent, I often think of a particular film as a cautionary tale about the responsibilities of balancing the raising of a child with the demands that come with an artist’s career.

In Nathaniel Kahn’s 2003 film “My Architect” —a documentary about his father Louis Kahn, who he barely knew as he died when he was 11 years old— the architect’s son undertakes a journey to trace Kahn’s mysterious and entangled personal past, which included having several children that were not aware of the existence of each other.

The film is a heartbreaking document of stories by relatives, friends and colleagues who detail the way in which Louis Kahn, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century, led a creative life that allowed no possibility for sustained or solid family relationships, leaving instead a path of emotional destruction behind each person he loved. What feels most ironic in these stories is that the women architects who had relationships with Kahn (including  Anne Tyng and Nathaniel’s mother Harriet Pattinson) remember Kahn more with grief than with grievance, apparently deeply conflicted about outright condemning him. Tyng says in the film: “He always said that work was the most important thing, that you can’t depend on human relations, that work is the only thing you can count on.” And Pattinson: “there was great love in what we were doing [the architectural work they were doing jointly] and that was the price I paid.” At some point in the film, Nathaniel arranges a first-ever meeting with his half-sisters to interview them about their father’s legacy. At the meeting, one of Nathaniel’s half-sisters says about her dad: “I think his vision was so different from the way his life really was that there was no way he would put them together at all.” At another, poignant moment, Nathaniel poses the question whether they are a family. They can’t really answer, instead asking “what is your definition of a family?”.

The Kahn family story is not too dissimilar from those of some highly prominent artists. This include the heirs of Pablo Picasso who, after his death in 1973, had to sort out the giant financial and emotional legacy of the artist, sometimes publicly through lawyers and privately amongst themselves , and the fate of Lygia Clark’s children and their known family feuds around her work and the management of her estate.

To be fair, the dramatic case of Louis Kahn or the other previously mentioned artists is not representative of the experiences faced by the majority of the families, including the children, of artists— some of which I interviewed for this column. Stories like Kahn’s, however, point at what seem to me to be two important aspects of the condition of “artist as parent”: first, that the demands of the artist’s career, which merge so directly with the personal, are very hard to keep separate from family life, and second, that the child of the artist can have difficulty finding themselves in the world,  particularly when the artist parent is renowned in their field.

Psychologist and researcher Surabhika Maheshwari produced a study in 2008 exploring the perspectives of children who have famous parents. Maheshwari interviewed various participants about the condition of being the children of someone famous, and she captures their thoughts around social expectations and the pressures they face in relation to the image of their parents.

Maheshwari writes: “Being the child of the famous can be especially hard, in part because of the danger that the child cannot live up to the parent’s public success, and only a modest success seems a drastic falling off”.

I wanted to understand the perspective of a few individuals whose parents were known and celebrated artists— and who are themselves prominent art professionals in their own right. I asked questions to Andrew Ginzel, who is a multimedia artist and the son of painters Ellen Lanyon and Roland Ginzel; Hannah Higgins, writer and scholar whose parents are Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and the late Dick Higgins, and Clarinda Mac Low, a performance and social practice artist whose father was poet and multi-disciplinary artist Jackson Mac Low.

My questions were in the order of what, in their view, are the challenges and benefits of being the child of an artist, and how they negotiated them.

Here are a few excerpts from my conversations with them. (the full responses can be read here).

Roland Ginzel and Ellen Lanyon, c. 1969

Andrew Ginzel:

My parents were always busy making things and I and my sister were in the midst of the activity. As newly minted MFAs after WWII they had few obstacles and thrived. It was a great milieu; yet parents are parents and at the time of adolescence I sought alternative social-economic models to aspire towards: the gallerists, the collectors, the liberal-minded dilettantes of the late 1960’s. […] They were also very social, so my sister and I were subject to benign neglect which meant we had a lot of freedom. One of the best parts was the extraordinary near-constant parade of visiting out-of-town artists, poets etc. (Claes Oldenburg, Allen Ginsberg), local personalities such as Studs Terkel and HC Westermann and Chicago eccentrics. A sense of competition did not arise with either parent perhaps because the mantra was to be unique. Nevertheless I feel both my sister and I early on sensed how facile both Ellen and Roland were creating the things they did and that we would never match what they could do so we would have to forge new creative trajectories for ourselves.

Geoffrey Hendrick’s Sky Bus (1968) with Tyche Hendricks, Hannah and Jessie Higgins. Photo: Geoffrey Hendricks.

Hannah Higgins:

While it's true that growing up in arts' worlds (close to success) might raise the expectations of the children of artists (who might expect to move into a spot with similar accolades as a parent the way that the children of famous doctors and lawyers might), the fetishization of innovation in the arts means that if the works looks anything like the work of the parent, the child will find it difficult to be seen. I fundamentally disagree with that fetishization of newness as it comes too close to what the market wants (the latest style isn't so far from the latest widget from a market perspective). Better to dig down into generalized creativity and community building. This is something intrinsic to Fluxus (I think) and explains why fame and fortune were of so little interest to its artists (original or not, first/second/third generation or not).  […] By the measure of mutual support in arts' worlds and drilling down into under explored dimensions of the parent's works, there has been success, though not of the commercially favored, market-visible kind. I would also say that my parents, while widely recognized in dissertations and articles, have never been prized by the marketplace, so that kind of officially sanctioned success was never part of the picture of why we'd do this.

Jackson and Clarinda Mac Low, c. 1970

Clarinda Mac Low:

I was initially convinced (by my father and through my own observation) that I definitely didn't want to be an artist and that led me to plan for a life as a biochemist. But then, when art-making (specifically dance and performance making) grabbed me by the throat in college, and I moved back to NYC to live that out, my background gave me a base to fly from. I already had some so-called social capital--the experimental dance world I entered was the same world that my father occupied, and people knew me, or knew of him. […]I ended up performing Yvonne Rainer's Trio A at Alice Tully Hall and then teaching and touring with it for 10 years after that because I was SGAG, and knew her from when I was a kid. But being a "professional child of an artist" often just means that people contact me to ask about him, or about what it was like to be his child, or if they can use some of his work (even though I don't actually own the rights...), or if I can talk about his work from my own perspective. I always enjoy those opportunities. He and I are close enough in values and interests that it never feels like an imposition, but more like an opportunity to honor him, and to stay in dialogue with him now that he is no longer alive.

Andrew Ginzel:

I began in the family spirit of making by having a series of childhood occupations which morphed from chemistry (elaborate lab) to cuisine  (a la Julia Child) to correspondence (Ray Johnson and his universe). The progression seemed and seems quite organic. Yet the parents were painters and I never painted. I bricolaged, built, collaged chemicals, food and then paper etc. By the time I was fourteen I was busy mailing and receiving yet it was not “art” so much as a new vein of being and making. […] By the time I was 28 and had put in nine years of NYC apprenticeship to other artists and begun to create the large “collaged” works in galleries , museums and public spaces it was all ever more remote from painting. So in a very real sense I am fully a parental product yet one who has taken a path made available on the account of the growth of the “art world” and its possibilities. Curiously, in the Covid lacuna I have begun to do something I never thought I would: make paintings!

Clarinda Mac Low:

I'd say the best part of being my parents' daughter (my mother was also an artist--not as "famous" but no less skilled and brilliant) was being surrounded by people living through their imaginations, and thinking about the political world through the lens of art. Any creative endeavor I took up was encouraged, and I had a constant supply of art materials and total permission for my imagination. My father was always hungry for knowledge and we were surrounded by shelves and shelves of books--anything I wanted to know was right at my fingertips, and our dinnertime conversations were wide-ranging and always interesting. […] The worst parts were probably being in a chaotic life always on the brink of penury, and a fair amount of benign neglect. But the neglect and chaos were balanced by a lot of love and permissiveness. Yes, it all damaged me, possibly quite a lot, but it also allowed me a lot of time to develop a rich inner life, and the skills to save myself from difficult situations, to remain resilient in the face of challenge. So sometimes the worst things are also the best.

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As the reader might have noticed, “benign neglect” is a term that comes up more than once in these reflections. It resonates in my mind with a comment once made by Natalia Dmitriyevna, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s widow, when saying that she had to raise their three sons on her own: “the way Aleksandr Isayevich saw it, they would just grow up on their own.”

Of course artist-parental neglect is not always benign, and it can be painful. Back to “My Architect”, the most painful moment of the film is perhaps at the end, when Nathaniel Kahn interviews Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares as they stand inside Kahn’s last work and perhaps his greatest masterpiece, the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban or National Parliament House of Bangladesh. Wares is moved to tears as he discusses the magnificence of the building and its importance for the people of Bangladesh. And then, speaking to Nathaniel as if he wasn’t speaking about him, Wares adds:

“He [Kahn] was also human. Now his failure to satisfy the family life is the inevitable association with great people. And his son would understand this and would have no sense of grudge or sense of being neglected. He cared in a very different manner, but it takes a lot of time to understand it.”

It should be mentioned that this same benign abandonment is balanced, as also mentioned by the previous interviews, by a sense of freedom and the possibility of creative exploration. In some cases this search led to the artist’s children to find their own path as artists in their own right. However, and interestingly,  in spite of this very real (and very human) desire to become known as “themselves” instead of someone in relation to their parents, Maheshwari’s study finds that the great majority of the participants she interviewed ended up in the same professional fields as their parents. In a way there is a separation, but at the same time a sort of continuation of an artistic practice. Regardless of the profession, it might be that the continuation of the parental legacy is part of the natural process of how we in our youth rebel against our parents, and then, when we turn their age, we start resembling and acting more and more like them, re-enacting even some aspects of the cultural inheritance that in some cases we hadn’t even realized we had absorbed.

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Envoi

(I leave you with a sidebar reflection:

Pollock was the babysitter of Thomas Hart Benton’s young son, who himself later became a successful musician. And I recently learned that Roberto Matta and his wife hired Guy Debord as an occasional babysitter. This might explain why, as Brian James Schumacher argues in a 2008 book, “For both the Situationist International (SI) and Gordon Matta-Clark, the city and its architecture were the sites where capitalist modes of control acted on the individual at the most insidious level.”  So Debord was in charge at some point of watching little Gordon so he would not make a messy situation around the house. Mutual inspiration, perhaps? One day we might need further examine not just artistic parenthood, but also the shadow cast by artists moonlighting as babysitters.)