Benedict Studios Archives

This entry is post 13 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

Greenwich Village in New York City was where you went in the 1910s if you were eccentric, gay, radical, or artistic. Pioneering activists, artists, and writers began settling there in the early 1910s. They set a tone for free-thinking and free-living that, along with cheap housing and cheap restaurants, and good light for art studios, seeded the quickening growth of a creative community. And the magnetic pull drew Isabel early in the emergence of America’s Bohemia. She began to work in Washington Square, and live nearby by about 1912.ⁱ

The Village offered a counterbalance to the more proper, staid uptown neighborhoods, and its residents thought of it that way, as is clear from John Reed’s poem, “A Day in Bohemia.”

Yet we are free who live in Washington Square,
We dare to think as uptown wouldn’t dare,
Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious;
What care we for a dull old world censorious,
When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious?
Blessed are thou, Anarchic Liberty
Who asketh nought but joy of such as we!
–Excerpt from “The Day in Bohemia,” 1912, John Reed, journalist, poet, communist

The Village drew mostly unmarried men and women for the chance to live “unencumbered by family obligations.ⁱⁱ” It’s easy to think of Isabel seeking to be so unencumbered; to at once free her self to do the creative work she loved and to find the freedom that only some young women were exercising in the early part of the 20th century.

The people of the Village came to be called “Bohemians.” The word means someone with unconventional social habits and lifestyle. But Isabel used to say that a bohemian is a person with an art studio who doesn’t really do art.

The Benedict Studios, Washington Square, where Isabel Cooper worked in the 1910s

In this rich mix of eccentricity and creativity, she found work in an interior decoration shop in Washington Square, and lived nearby.ⁱⁱⁱ The community brought her plenty of chances to try her hand at art and design. She continued to live and work there into the early 1920s.

Isabel had moved far from the staid Victorian parlor of her aunts’ home to be a part of the raucous scene of Village tea rooms or all-night parties of artists, winding down only as the sun came up. Aunt Mary and Aunt Harriet must have grimaced at the thought of what their niece had become.

Isabel came to know other Greenwich Village artists and writers including the radical journalist John Reed, who was buried in the Kremlin, a reward for his coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Sinclair Lewis, who based at least one character on aspects of Isabel.

Along the way, her social circles led her, by 1916 or 1917, to meet William Beebe, the naturalist-explorer, who liked parties, especially dances, and was well connected in the Village. And he opened a new stage for her adventurous life.

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ⁱ In her scrapbook, Isabel noted, on a picture, a Washington Square studio she said a Dorothy Randolph “bequeathed” her in 1912.

ⁱⁱ George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, Basic Books, 1995.

ⁱⁱⁱ John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

This entry is post 12 of 21 in the ongoing series Isabel Cooper

In the 1910s there was no training for scientific illustrators in New York, and Isabel Cooper didn’t know she was destined to do that kind of work. She loved art, and wanted to be an artist. Newly independent, she saw that she needed work that would satisfy her but also pay her a living.

Isabel had done a freshman year, 1909-1910, at Bryn Mawr College. By her account she was a lackadaisical student.ⁱ Those who knew her later saw a wide-ranging and powerful mind that could have taken her deep into almost any kind of scholarship. But art drew her most.

After freshman year, she returned to New York. She enrolled in Fine Arts at Columbia Teachers College, and began studies at the Art Students’ League, then and still an independent art school in Manhattan. And she found a mentor, taking summer classes with the painter Alon Bement at Lyme Connecticut.

In her training, she tracked close to the path of Georgia O’Keeffe, who also studied at Columbia, at the Art Students League, and with Alon Bement, all at about the same time.

Isabel gravitated toward design classes, and began to work in interior design, perhaps as a surer way to make a living. Paid and unpaid, she tried: drawing from life, rug and tapestry design, clay sculpture, pottery, metalwork, interior decoration, and stage costuming.ⁱⁱIt is unfortunate we don’t have any examples of Isabel’s craft or design work from this time. Somewhere rugs she designed may still survive.

Isabel was good at interior design. It’s likely she worked in the early 1910s for Anton Hellmann, who had a interior decoration practice and school at the Benedict Studios on Washington Square.ⁱⁱⁱ

But she found interior decorating too commercially demanding.^iv Then she tried costume design. She was good at that too, and creating distinct costumes and stage hangings, each time something unique, satisfied her. But then a theater manager, liking a particular costume she had done, demanded fifty more just like it. As she must have conveyed carefully to her interviewer, “commercialism continued to poke its homely snout into her artwork.^v”

Something was still not right. She was built for novelty and adventure, not commercial toil. In fact, later in her life, after she was married and didn’t need to support herself, she resisted selling paintings. In gallery shows, she’d price her work high to ward off buyers. Only a few paintings got away from her in shows, and she tried more than once to buy paintings back.

Once launched in her career as a scientific artist in 1917, Isabel looked back at these years as “going bleakly about my various occupations, such as assisting at the legerdemain of interior decorators, or degrading oriental perfections to terms of modern rug factory…^vi” She was ready for something more interesting.

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ⁱ Letter, Isabel Cooper to Charles D. Mahaffie, October 17, 1926.

ⁱⁱ John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

ⁱⁱⁱ The Upholsterer, June 1916, Vol. 55, p. 83.

^iv John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

^v John Monk Saunders, “Jungle Creatures ‘Sit’ for Her in Their Own Back Yards,” American Magazine, February 1926, Vol. 101, p. 26.

^vi “Alumnae Activities,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, 1924.

Isabel Cooper and Greenwich Village

Resisting the homely snout of commercialism