Christie Mcdonald
The Life and Art of Anne Eisner:
An American Artist between Cultures
Available: Amazon, ACC Art Books, Barnes and Noble
The Life and Art of Anne Eisner (1911–1967): An American Artist between Cultures traces Anne Eisner’s life from her early life and artistic career in New York, through living at the edge of the Ituri Forest in the former Belgian Congo, now Democratic Republic of Congo, to her return to New York. Anne Eisner came of age in the 1930s and 1940s, during the struggle among artists and intellectuals to combat fascism and create a better world. Leaving behind a successful career as a painter, Anne followed Patrick Putnam, with whom she had fallen passionately in love, to Epulu, a multicultural community he had founded in the 1920s. As an American woman and painter, Anne’s focus on cultural and aesthetic values and her belief in freedom and equality brought an eccentric perspective to the colonial context. Unanticipated challenges forced her to think about who she was, as she agreed to marry under unfamiliar conditions, became “one of the mothers” in the community, hosted researchers and tourists, and attempted to care for Putnam in his tragic decline. This book follows Anne’s story, based on letters, journals, and documents that reveal her experience of living between several cultures. That her art sustained her throughout as a discipline (sketching, drawing, painting) reveals to what extent, despite great challenges and heartache at certain moments, she was able to express joy in creativity; the beauty of her art testifies to its transformative power. In her later work, she continued to explore how cultural transition and memory nourished her art.