HALIFAX — The Commons recently received a request from Lyman Orton, proprietor of the Vermont Country Store, for help identifying the people and place depicted in a painting that he has acquired for his Lost Vermont Images collection.
The painting, Family Restaurant, was made by Kyra Markham, an influential painter and printmaker of her time who lived in West Halifax between 1946 and 1959.
Orton would like to know who the people in the painting are, and what restaurant is depicted.
Donnel Barnum, the store's senior illustrator and archivist, believes the scene depicted is from the 1950s and is most likely from somewhere in Windham County.
According to information on the website of Sotheby's, where the 19-by-24-inch tempura-on-masonite painting was auctioned in 2011 for $5,000, the painting is dated 1954.
The artist of the mystery painting is far from a total mystery herself.
As a brief biography of Markham by the Terra Foundation for American Art put it: “Influenced by her career in theater, Kyra Markham's paintings, drawings, prints, and murals explore the fantastic and the macabre aspects of modern politics and society.”
The daughter of a Chicago jeweler, she was born Elaine Hyman in 1891 and studied drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago and tried an acting career.
She befriended and became the romantic partner of author and playwright Theodore Dreiser, moving to New York in 1914 to live with him in bohemia. There she took the name Kyra Markham.
Dreiser's niece, Vera Dreiser, wrote in a memoir that Markham “had an allowance from her father and was 'liberated.'”
Markham made an impression on H.L. Mencken, who was not favorably impressed with her multidisciplinary creative endeavors.
“After vain attempts to stagger humanity as a writer, a painter, and a musician, she took to the easier art of the stage,” Mencken wrote witheringly in My Life as Author and Editor.
“Also, she took to fornication, and by the time Dreiser met her, she had passed through the hands and beds of a good many other men, including actors, journalists, and artists of various varieties,” Mencken wrote.
A prizewinning artist
After a brief marriage to Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., the son of the famed architect, the artist met David Stoner Gaither, a scenographer who encouraged her to paint. They were married in 1927.
“She executed striking mural decorations for several New York restaurants, jazz clubs, and nightclubs until the 1929 stock market crash eliminated such commissions,” the biography continued.
In the 1930s, her artistic career gained traction, and Markham began winning prizes for her lithographs, which were acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.
In 1936, she joined the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the New Deal programs during the Great Depression. She was also an artist and stage director for the Fox Film corporation.
“Markham excelled in dramatically rendering scenes extracted from daily life or dream-like fantasies with detailed realism,” the Terra Foundation biography said.
The artwork was part of the social realist movement, which, according to the Oxford University Press, is a term “used to refer to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions.”
The biography noted that “For the 1939 New York World's Fair, she executed 40 dioramas for the Hall of Inventions. In 1941, Loew's Ziegfield Theater in New York exhibited her allegorical paintings and drawings of legendary women. During World War II, she created paintings and prints to boost home front patriotism and satirize Nazism.”
On the other hand, for decades, Markham's art also appeared on greeting cards for the American Artists Group, and she also illustrated stories and children's books.
Art in Halifax
“Following her 1946 move with her husband to a farm in Halifax, Vermont, Markham ended her printmaking career, yet she continued to paint and draw,” the Terra Foundation biography said.
Mark Purinton of Buckland, Mass., worked for his neighbor, Robert Strong Woodward, and wrote of the landscape painter's long friendship with Markham, who lived with Gaither on Tucker Road.
Both artists, Purinton writes, were active members of the Southern Vermont Artists Association, and both participated in an annual exhibition in Manchester.
“Along the way we would drive through West Halifax to pick up additional paintings, lithographs, or sculptures from Kyra Markham to take up to the exhibition,” he writes.
“She and David, a tall large man, lived in an unkempt little green house, overgrown with small trees,” Purinton writes. “There was no running water and the kitchen sink, undrained, was situated in the middle of the kitchen. All the other rooms in the house were crammed to the ceilings with lithograph materials, paintings, and various art supplies.”
In a 2009 blog post, artist David Brewster wrote of his conversation with Dorothy Christie, who now lives in Markham and Gaither's farmhouse.
“According to Dorothy, Kyra was a prima donna, 'very opinionated and conscious of herself,' an actress from way back. Kyra was tall and striking with piercing black eyes. Even though she smoked like a chimney she weathered well,” Brewster wrote.
After Gaither's death, Markham moved from Halifax, taking an apartment in Jacksonville briefly before moving again - to Haiti. There she painted until her death in 1967.
A forgotten era?
For someone who had achieved some notoriety in her life, Markham is far from a household name.
According to Mary Francey, professor emerita of art and art history at the University of Utah, “In part Markham's contribution, like that of many of her associates, has been forgotten because much of the work done during the 1930s has not survived.”
“In addition, most of her work during this period is social realist in content and style, an approach that was not considered a relevant response to a newly affluent post World War II society,” Francey wrote.