STELLA KRAMRISCH
Time for us to get back to Natacha. When Natacha had recovered from her ordeal over in Spain and her heart attack to the point where she could travel, she decided to leave the chateau at Juan-les-Pins. In 1939 she returned to New York. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, Natacha's initial plan was to go to Arizona to try to clear up some allergies that had been plaguing her, but instead The Big Apple called her and she ended up renting an apartment at 140 West 55th Street.
Then, as I have already blogged about, she became heavily involved in astrology, among other things, and did readings in that apartment, relying on her past association with the upper society of her past dealings with 'The Roerich Society' to fuel her passions in the various fields she studied and lectured about.
It was at several of these lectures that one Stella Kramrisch began to attend, and quickly became Natacha's student.
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Stella Kramrisch (May 29, 1896 - August 31-1993)
The two women would be lifelong friends. Stella had been involved in (Eastern) Indian Art and was very interested in Natacha's findings and perceptions of the religious aspects of the Indian culture.
Natacha and Stella bonded over more than art. We know about Natacha's history in ballet. Stella was trained as a ballet dancer when she grew up in Austria. From what I've read, both women had about the same ability in dance but did NOT have the same experience when it came to their dance teachers. Natacha had a much rougher time during her ballet years, as we know. Stella's experience in dance was, from all I've been able to find out, a pleasant and enriching one.
Both Natacha & Stella shared a lifelong love of animals and flowers, textiles, art, and history; as well as similar research topics, colleagues, and friends
Natacha's interest had been enhanced during a 1936 trip with her second husband, where she met Howard Carter (who is a primary discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun) on a tour of Luxor and Edfu. She was so taken by Egypt that she "felt as if she had at last returned home,'" confirming her strong belief in past lives. Her interests in astrology, mythology, dream analysis, theosophy, and comparative religions funneled her studies into Egyptology, and she befriended the Mellon's-American philanthropists who awarded her a grant to research symbols on ancient scarabs in 1946.
Dr. Stella Kramrisch was a renowned scholar of Indian art who had taught at the University of Calcutta and the University of Pennsylvania. She joined the Museum's staff as curator of Indian Art ... and this was the beginning of a decades-long curatorial career. Natacha's interest in Himalayan art possibly originated with her interest in George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (mentioned in an earlier blog post) who founded the Institute for Harmonious Development of Man. His philosophies combined the teachings of Eastern and Western Christianity, Sufism, Zoroastrianism, and Tibetan yoga.
Stella Kramrisch
Due to her extensive academic and personal friendship with Stella Kramrisch, Natacha gave the Museum of Indian Art several South Asian (especially Tibetan and Nepalese) artworks both during her lifetime and after her death. She also gave a large number of books to the Museum's holdings.
Beginning in 1952, Natacha began to donate some of the artifacts she found in Egypt to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and these donations continued over the years. There is now an exhibit called the Natacha Rambova Collection of Egyptian Antiquities at that museum. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has The Natacha Rambova Gallery of Nepali and Lamaistic art. The Library of Congress holds some of Natacha's paperwork and manuscripts and The Roerich Museum holds some of Natacha's work from when she lived and worked there.
There are miscellaneous letters that Natacha wrote scattered all over the world, it seems, that are being hoarded by Rudy/Natacha collectors who are too covetous to let them go to museums where they belong. These letters have been obtained at auctions, and are limited to love letters between Natacha and Rudolph Valentino.
The letters account for a minuscule part of Natacha's life and I have found that they are very unimportant in the realm of this fascinating woman's lifetime, at least to me. They are reprinted on the Facebook groups and photos of them piled on top of each other (from auction house photos) are posted over and over. Many times, the letters are re-typed (mostly because Natacha had horrible hand-writing) and many people do not like the look of her typewritten letters. Fans of Rudy seem to be obsessed with Rudy's perceived unrequited love.
But I have some letters for you to read. They are all typed, but they were typed by Natacha, herself. They are all signed by Natacha ... there is no mistaking her funny little signature. For those who are wondering, no, she was not left-handed. She was right-handed and this is just how she wrote. It really explains why she preferred to use a typewriter. I know there are many more letters than this, but today I am concentrating on the ones I could get that related to her correspondence to Stella Kramrisch, and I feel there were even more of those. I do not have any of the responses from Stella, unfortunately. I did not ask for those when I made my request. I feel lucky to have these! Enjoy.
In this letter, dated 2/6/54, Natacha supports Stella as she decides between teaching at the University of Pennsylvania or coming to the Museum to be a curator
Letter dated 2/26/55, Natacha & Stella often sent bouquets to each other
Letter dated 7/14/55, A possible reference to the previous photo of Stella & her cat
An undated postcard from Natacha to Stella ... from Egypt
Letter dated 1/8/56, Testament to their shared passions
Letter dated 12/12/62, Here we see mention of Dorothy Norman (info on Dorothy below) and a note about one of Natacha's many gifts to the Museum, a book for the library collection
Letter dated 7//30/63, this is the last letter sent to me. I cannot say if is the last letter Natacha wrote to Stella or not, but Natacha was becoming very ill around this time - notice that she was now living in Connecticut with her companion, Mark Hasselriis and Helen Ducey, her helper/chauffeur was also present to help out.
I looked up a photo of Dorothy Norman, just because I wanted to post it here so we would know who she actually was since she was important to Natacha, and I found some pretty astounding information. Dorothy Norman would take a blog in itself to describe, but there is only a small part of her life that had to do with Natacha. There was a recorded interview (interviewer is William McNaught) done with Dorothy before she died and she spoke of Natacha. It is now housed at the Smithsonian. I really wanted to embed this portion of the audio interview here on the blog, but I could not figure out how to do it, and it would take too much time to contact the Smithsonian to have them send it to me, so I decided to be happy with the transcript.
Dorothy was a photographer. I mean, that is like saying Gene Kelly was a back-up dancer, but for our purposes, a photographer is what she was for this blog post. She met Natacha through the subject of this blog, Stella Kramrisch. I think that Dorothy, Stella and Natacha all bonded over their feelings about politics just as much as the work Stella was doing in India. I could go on and on about the connection to Ghandi, and you have no idea how tempted I am, but I won't. I know, I get carried away, but once I start down a rabbit hole, it just keeps going and going ...
There occurred a meeting at Stella's house in Calcutta between the three women, and it really came down to Natacha and Dorothy disagreeing on certain points about Indian art and religion. Well, probably best to just get on with it in Dorothy's own words:
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WILLIAM MCNAUGHT: We were going to talk about another person who helped you bring about The Heroic Encounter. That was Natacha Rambova, who you said was Valentino's --
DOROTHY NORMAN: Rudolph Valentino's wife. She was very beautiful -- she looked like an intellectual Garbo, when I first met her.
WILLIAM MCNAUGHT: When was that?
DOROTHY NORMAN: It was in the mid-forties. It was then that a crucial turning point in my life occurred when I knew that I was not made for public office and politics, nor was I meant to be involved in social welfare work. The arts and writing had been suppressed too long again.
WILLIAM MCNAUGHT: For a long time.
DOROTHY NORMAN: I had been publishing Twice a Year for almost 10 years, Stieglitz died in '46, I had been doing my column for the Post since '42 and I felt I should not be doing certain of these things any longer. I'd outgrown the need for that kind of education because everything I did was a kind of self education, which I shared in a sense, through Twice a Year, through committees and through writing. But I wanted to do the book on Stieglitz after his death, and that was going to take research into his earlier career, before I'd met him. I wanted the book to be as authentic and as complete as possible a document of the evolution of his career. I wanted to do that book, and I knew that would take time. Symbolism and myths, through my talks with Natacha, in particular, and with Stella Kramrisch were taking on greater and greater meaning for me. When I went to Europe, to the Eramos conferences, certain things began to come together for me, and the myth of the hero seemed to be the myth of the development of each of us. The myth of the hero became for me the story of man's development, our necessary development of the potential within each of us. It became more and more of a personal drama that was translated back and forth for me in terms of myth itself and in terms of what I was going through in terms of the development of my own life. The quest of the heroic aspect of man against all tyranny. I felt that pictures and words could be combined to create an exhibition that would communicate to everyone something in terms of a collective experience that just reading a book separately by oneself wouldn't communicate. Although I wanted to write about the hero, I kept seeing what I wanted to do in terms of images and words together. This evolved into an exhibition because of the feeling that words and pictures have to be merged and that through the messages -- modern and ancient -- one could see how what was involved were both a universal and eternal quest; a quest that had to be undertaken by each generation anew, and by each individual anew. So my idea, which I suggested in the first panel of the exhibition, was something that had to be observed afresh in terms of our universal and eternal problem -- a problem that each of us has to face. We must develop the potential in ourselves and in our civilization against all obstacles presented by the tyrant. So here again, my whole life was coming into focus at a new level. "Civil liberties" was symbolically the fight against the tyrant. It was the fight against censorship, against repression, against everything that would thwart the creative, evolving potential in man. As this theme became, let me say, intensified into a major statement, the pictures and the words began to speak to me, instead of my trying to fit them into what I was thinking about. I said to Stella one day, "Nobody thought this was going to work, nobody gave me any encouragement, they said it's not possible to do this." I stayed away from Natacha, because she said, "Dorothy, this is a terribly subtle and difficult thing to do," and I replied, "All right, Natacha, I have to do it." I said, "I am not going to come to see you during this period. I am going to do this completely on my own." Of course, I did go to see any number of people to check different parts of what I was using and saying -- but I didn't go near Natacha while I was working on The Heroic Encounter. I had talked with Marian Willard, who was very much interested in symbols. We had become great friends. As I talked to her about my ideas, she said she would do the exhibition. I began to design it out here in East Hampton. At the time, Alexy Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar, who had had such a great influence of the makeup of magazines, became terribly much interested in what I was doing, and he said, "Let me design it for you." That was so extraordinary. I said, "Oh, Alexy, that is wonderful; I have no way of paying you." There he was, the editor of a big and flourishing magazine, and he was offering to design my exhibition for nothing. "I'll do it," he said, "as a labor of love, just as you're doing it as a labor of love." And we sat down, and I started to tell him what I wanted to do. Then he became quite ill, and it was impossible for him to design the exhibition. Somehow, the design of the exhibition became clearer and clearer to me, and I began to lay it out on the floor in East Hampton myself. One section began to flow into another and so the exhibition evolved. I had the photographs I collected blown up, and I had them placed as I felt they should be. Then I decided to make a catalog book of the exhibition, because it was too bad just to let it disappear. The exhibit was going to be distributed by the American Federation of Art. The book is a photograph of the exhibit plus text. When the exhibition was hung at Marian Willard's gallery, I telephoned Natacha and said, "Natacha, would you come to see the exhibit?" The catalog wasn't ready yet, because I had decided quite late that the exhibition must be made into a permanent thing. I said, "Would you come to see the exhibition before it opens?" She came, and we walked around the room which was quite large, and she read every word, and she looked at every image. We kept going. I didn't ask her any questions. She didn't say anything. I thought, "This is really a trying experience, just agonizing." We got to the last panel, and her eyes filled with tears. She threw her arms around me and said, "Dorothy, you have done it. I congratulate you." She burst into tears and embraced me, which for Natacha was so unusual, it was fantastic. I felt like flying on wings, because it'd been a very difficult thing to do and to get ready on time for the announced date of the exhibition. And now Natacha said everything was right! It was a miracle.
WILLIAM MCNAUGHT: Was this 1957?
DOROTHY NORMAN: '58.
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March 28, 1905 - April 12, 1997
I did nothing to the format, the spelling or the grammar of the text from Dorothy Norman's interview.
I hope you have enjoyed this look into another side of Natacha. Next, I plan to dig a little deeper into Natacha's Egyptian treasures that she found.
Darkmum
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