Getty Research Journal

Getty Research Journal, no. 11 (2019): 39–80 © 2019 Thomas S. Hines 39 Although she was chiefly, and somewhat patronizingly, known for being the wife of the renowned architect Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887–1953), and for being a “muse” to a long list of famous people, Pauline Gibling Schindler (1893–1977) was, in her own right, a significant and underrecognized writer and political activist. She was an especially perspicacious critic of architecture and the related arts. In 1927, for example, she wrote the first major article to be published in an East Coast newspaper on the early work of the architect Richard Neutra (1892–1970). In 1930, she mounted an exhibition at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), on a group of modernist architects in Southern California, featuring Neutra, Schindler, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) and his son, Lloyd (1890–1978), and other figures who were then less well known, such as J.R. Davidson (1889–1977), Kem Weber (1889–1963), and Jock Peters (1889–1934). This show preceded by two years the epochal Modern Architecture exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1932) that included several of the same figures. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Pauline would reprise the essence of her 1930 show with articles in national magazines , on two of which she served as the issue’s guest editor. In the early 1930s, she also edited a left-wing weekly paper in Carmel, California, the Carmelite, and was associate editor of Dune Forum, a West Coast journal of opinion. Through all of this, she remained a left-of-center social and political activist, which led in the mid-1940s to her joining the American Communist Party [Communist Party USA]. In addition to politics, the arts, and architecture, Nature and the natural landscape constituted the sustaining force in her life. ——— In 1933, the fledgling young composer John Cage (1912–92) wrote to Pauline,1 his senior by nearly twenty years, that, until their recent affair had begun, he had not realized that she was so “wild and intoxicating.... And your hair is some kind of promise. I don’t know of what, perhaps that it will reach your shoulders and that I may bury myself in it.”2 Though their intimate romantic relationship would continue for just over a year, the two would remain close lifelong friends. Cage exemplified the famous, or soon-to-be famous, figures whom Pauline would know throughout her life in the roles of friend, lover, muse, and critic. From Critic and Catalyst: Pauline Gibling Schindler (1893–1977) Thomas S. Hines 40 getty research journal, no. 11 (2019) her earliest years to the end of her life, she would attract, inspire, and occasionally exasperate a consequential array of creative figures, including, among others, the biologist Alfred Kinsey (1884–1956), the photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958), the art patrons Galka Scheyer (1889–1945) and Walter and Louise Arensberg (1878– 1954; 1879–1953), the writers Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), Ella Winter (1989–1980) and Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959), and especially the architects Schindler, Wright, Neutra, and Gregory Ain (1908–88). She was born Sophie Pauline Gibling on 19 March 1893 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the daughter of Sophie Schlarbaum Gibling, of German descent, and the English-born businessman Edmund James Gibling—a comfortably established couple with high cultural and intellectual ambitions for Pauline and her sister, Dorothy. Sophie Schlarbaum Gibling was a liberal political activist, and Edmund was an insurance executive who, largely for business reasons, moved their family in Pauline’s early years to South Orange, New Jersey, within the New York metropolitan orbit. There she attended Columbia High School in the Maplewood district of South Orange, where a favorite classmate turned out to be Kinsey, who would later become the distinguished biologist and sexologist. The young Kinsey was also a budding pianist, specializing in Beethoven’s music, which was another source of affinity between him and Pauline.3 One of her earliest writings, describing their school life, already displayed her talent for evoking atmosphere: “The two hundred pupils arrived soon after eight o’clock, their lunches in collapsible metal boxes, and gathered for assembly in the main study...