A daringly observant memoir about intergenerational trauma, fine
art, and compartmentalization from a returning Soft Skull author and
Lambda Literary Award winner
A
mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching
the Art is queer icon and
activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s interrogation of the
possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class
mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and
cannot do.
Taking
the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the
legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an
abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young
artist, then disparaged Mattilda’s work as “vulgar” and a
“waste of talent” once it became unapologetically queer.
As
she sorts through her grandmother Gladys’s paintings and handmade
paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In
fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys’s
place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract
Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight,
intergenerational trauma and class striving.
Sycamore writes, “Art is never
just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a
safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a
clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over
and back, over and back, welcome.”
