1

It has been noted in some instances that the family of a deceased artist will manifest hostility to his memory, treating it and his work with scorn. In such cases we can intuit the artist's absorbing devotion to his art, to the detriment of those for whose welfare he is responsible. In other instances, an artist's children give their lives over to the cult of his creations, maintaining his fame or magnifying it posthumously. Without doubt, if an artist's significance for the history of art could be determined with certainty at his death, the course of action to be taken by his relatives would not be difficult to decide. Yet they could hardly decide with perfect foresight, for not only does each epoch alter the history of art, but an artist's relatives cannot be objective—for better or for worse—concerning his worth.

Faced with these limitations, I have chosen a middle course with respect to my father, preserving his works as much as possible without undue expense, but eschewing any commitment to his memory. There must have been a good reason why my father—Eugene Paul Ullman—enjoyed some renown at the beginning of the century and was deemed a very talented painter by respectable critics. Whether his work is beautiful enough to deserve some kind of revival, however, is a question I cannot answer. On the other hand, I am not loathe to attend to the redress of some injustice done to his memory through sloppy scholarship and shabby editorial policy. Moreover, what is done in this case for the sake of vindication will also contribute to literary history in a small way in light of my father's association with such literary figures as Booth Tarkington, Arnold Bennett, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.

My father wrote unpublished memoirs about some celebrities he knew and is himself mentioned in a few books,¹ but in the latter the information is often erroneous. For example, in their biography of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb state that the Ullmans (Eugene and first wife Alice Woods) were divorced in 1903, this being in fact the year of their marriage. They became separated in 1914 and divorced shortly after World War I. The Gelbs' error annoyed my half-brother Allen, who said it illegitimized him.

Alice Woods also wrote some memoirs very late in life. My half-niece, Martha Ullman West, plans to use these as the basis of a biography which will elucidate further the relation of Eugene and Alice with American men of letters in Paris. More research in manuscripts should turn up new information. For example, I recall my father telling me that it was in his studio that Alan Seeger wrote “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” There is no documentation to corroborate the statement, but only part of the poet's correspondence has been published. More evidence will undoubtedly appear; nevertheless, I will here record what I know of my father's career and his literary associations and correct the errors in scholarship which I have found concerning him.

2

My father was one of five children of Sigmund Ullman mentioned in The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography.² The two oldest died in their middle twenties, leaving James (1870-1933), Eugene (1877-1953), and George (1880-1968). Though James took over the direction of his father's factory,³ all the boys had to serve an apprenticeship at some time in the trade, manufacturing printing ink. Eugene was not excused from such training, even though he was the favorite son of his mother, who perceived his artistic talent and encouraged it. He had already been considered an outstanding student at the Columbia University Grammar School, where he obtained prizes in Latin, German, and drawing. After one year in business school (Packard's?), he was allowed to study with William Merritt Chase, under whose aegis he became an instructor in 1902 in the New York School of Art. He taught the “Sunday Painting Class for Men and Women.”⁴

This is not the place to detail my father's triumphs and rise to minor fame, but its principal stages do bear some relation to his literary connections, and they explain why his father was willing to support him on an ample allowance until 1918. When Sigmund Ullman died, he left one-sixth of his fortune to Eugene and one-sixth in a trust for his daughter-in-law Alice. Even though, according to Arnold Bennett, my father's recently acquired mother-in-law thought him rich, at the time of his marriage he depended entirely on his father for support.⁵ By the time of his own death, fifty years later, he had almost exhausted his inheritance. Had my father been truly wealthy, his fortune would have withstood this fate in spite of his generosity and, ultimately, his foolish senility.

On his mother's side there seems to have been a talent for the fine and the graphic arts; on his father's, a tradition of interest and concern for materials.⁶ My father enjoyed talking about paints, varnishes, oils, and fixatives. He claimed he could tell genuine ivory black (unavailable after the start of World War II) from the color of the same name made with ordinary bones instead of real ivory.

Artistically, Eugene Ullman was considered extraordinarily gifted; we have the evidence not only of the critics but of a sentence in the original version of Gertrude Stein's “Three Moral Tales,” discussed below. He had the means to travel and in his youth spent considerable time in museums. I remember as a child his leaving our Paris home for Holland to see an exhibition of privately owned old masters, including a Vermeer that had supposedly just been discovered. On his return he declared that it was a fake and explained why by pointing out the clumsiness of the composition on the catalogue reproduction. Time proved him right. Though not considered an expert by the academic professionals, he had a keen eye and intuition. No doubt his literary acquaintances listened, sometimes perhaps even willing to swallow his bluntness. In 1906 he was awarded the Temple Gold Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy, the highest prize given for art in the United States. The winning picture, Portrait of Mrs. Fisher, was bought by the John Herron Art Institute of Indianapolis, which also acquired a smaller painting of his.⁷ His wife's connections may possibly have had some influence on the purchase.

Alice Woods Ullman was the daughter of Judge William Allen Woods (1837-1901), who issued, with Judge Grosscup, the injunction against the Pullman strike and presided at Eugene Debs' trial for violating it.⁸ Before becoming a federal judge, he had sat in the Indiana supreme court. The New York Sun of 13 November 1903 carries news of rumors to the effect that the marriage of Alice Woods to E. P. Ullman was secret, and of attempts by the families of the bride and groom to deny them. In any case, the entry in Bennett's Journal for the same day does hint at something mysterious.

The Woods were friends of the Tarkingtons, as Booth Tarkington's father was also a judge. There may possibly have been a family connection, as Mrs. Woods' maiden name was Newton, which was also Tarkington's first name, though he did not use it. In any case, the relation with Alice was reinforced by literary interest. Though her writing seems dated now, it was usually well reviewed in the New York Times, Boston Transcript, Saturday Review, and Independent. She published several short stories and six novels, one of which was illustrated by May Preston, whose liveliness and wit so charmed Arnold Bennett.⁹ Alice's first novel, Edges, is of considerable topical interest.¹⁰ Her last one, The Thicket (1913), said to be her best, was not well distributed, owing to the publisher's remissness. All these novels deal more or less with women's attempts at social liberation from Victorian mores.

Eugene's association with Booth Tarkington appears to have sprung from his relationship with Alice Woods. The extant letter of introduction from Tarkington (reproduced below) was written in December 1914 when my father was visiting Alice and their sons in Indianapolis after their separation. A problem had arisen with regard to a generous monthly allowance that Sigmund Ullman had assigned to his daughter-in-law after the separation. After settling the matter, Eugene left for France on 13 December. Apparently, the money had not reached Alice. In any case, Eugene may have had doubts about her ability to spend it wisely. He once told me (perhaps exaggerating) that Alice was incapable of running a household and that after their separation the French couple they had employed as servants had filched enough to buy themselves a farm in Normandy. On the other hand, Eugene seems to have failed to profit from the career opportunities Alice sought to bring his way. Alice told my mother (the divorced first wife educating the second) that she had once invited to dinner a wealthy Hoosier couple touring Europe. At the table the man began to expound his views on art, and Eugene interrupted him, saying, “You have no right to hold any opinions about art.” They bought no paintings. Ullman's pride may also have spoiled a possibility of reconciliation casually essayed by Gertrude Stein, or so it appears from his memoirs. He also resigned his associate membership in the Beaux-Arts, of which Mrs. Woods had boasted to Bennett (Journal, 1:128), perhaps over its refusal to admit some young modern painters, who eventually shunned him.

Suzanne Lioni, my mother, came also from a coterie world of early twentieth-century art and artists. She was divorced, after a youthful marriage, from an unsuccessful artist. While in this household, she helped raise her husband's nephew, who became the historical novelist, French Academician, and Minister for Cultural Affairs, Maurice Druon. Her older sister Marcelle had been a great friend of Modigliani, Soutine, Van Donghen, and Helleu. Marcelle once took her father to Modigliani's studio to get him to buy one of the three portraits he did of her: Marcelle, La Femme à la cravate noire, and Buste de femme. My maternal grandfather dashed her hopes by saying afterwards: “If I had a daughter who looked like that, the last thing I'd do would be to have her portrait painted.” One portrait now hangs in the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts, the other in the Boston Museum. When Marcelle came to visit us, she would dutifully follow my father to his studio, where he was eager to show and comment upon his work, and my aunt, remembering her glory days in those studios of yore, would sit stiffly, uttering an occasional forced, “Oui, oui.”

One should note that while Alice Woods' connections may have influenced the Indianapolis museum purchases, my father's great teacher, William Merritt Chase, was likewise a Hoosier and may have been equally influential. My father is mentioned in several places in Chase's biography,¹¹ which includes the information that “Ullman begins a portrait of me tomorrow.”¹² This portrait, bought by the French government, shows Chase full length in all his dignity, with his silk hat, pince-nez, gloves, cane, and spats, quite a contrast to the figure of Whistler as Chase presents him in the portrait now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum.¹³

Articles on my father's work are too numerous to dwell on here. Reproductions in major newspapers show how his style changed with the years. At the end of his career he had developed an individual, very realistic yet delicate style, which the New York Herald Tribune critic Royal Cortissoz greatly admired. French critics also held him in high esteem, including G.-J. Gros in Edouard-Joseph's dictionary of artists.¹⁴ In his younger years we notice some vacillation between attempting to please the Beaux-Arts and creating a sensation. For example, for a news service article printed in several papers with a date line of 15 August 1910, the Philadelphia Inquirer carries the headline: “Yankee's Picture Shocks Gay Paris. Ullman's Nude Had to Undergo Alterations Before It Could Be Hung in Salon.”

Ullman's work also caught the attention of magazines, some of them Sunday sections of well-known newspapers. Some of the most noteworthy works include:

After the Bath. Reproduced in New York Times (13 January 1924) and the Spur 23, no. 2 (15 January 1924):28, which included very favorable comments by Lula Merrick.

Devant la Glace. Reproduced in Les Arts, no. 175 (1919):6. This led to Ullman's being named an associate of the Beaux-Arts.

Portraits of Mrs. Booth Tarkington, William Merritt Chase, and Madame Hanako, the Japanese actress. Reproduced in the Burr McIntosh Monthly 15, no. 60 (March 1908).

Portrait of Mrs. Arnold Bennett at home. Not reproduced until 18 January 1948 by the Bridgeport Sunday Post. It was erroneously labeled as a portrait of Mrs. D. H. Lawrence.

Lady at the Buffet. Cover of the Atlantic Daily News, vol. 12. I have two numbers with this cover, one for Thursday, 15 August, the other for Wednesday, 18 August 1912. This publication was presented gratis to every passenger on every ship of six major steamship lines.

Portraits of Sigmund Ullman and Miss Gardiner (whom Eugene Ullman's brother George later married). Reproduced in the Journal de l'Atlantique (3d year, 5th day, n.d.). The issue also contains an article about Eugene Ullman.

In addition, the Craftsman for December 1908 contains an article of glowing praise by Katharine Elise Chapman, who calls the portrait of Mrs. Tarkington “the very embodiment of the American woman in her present status and environment; an environment made up of deference, honor, freedom, culture and opportunity.”¹⁵ The article also contains a key statement of Eugene Ullman's artistic credo:

Briefly put, his theory is that painting is a matter of sensation, not situation; that among the great painters the situations are merely used as so many pegs on which to hang sensations of light and color, of whatever comes properly within the scope of ocular sensation. Philosophy, literature, romance, which so often figure on canvas, all belong to the expression of situations and are out of place in that great art which is born solely to represent sensation. And so, feeling that the vital sensations are those of the live, glowing conditions of life, portraiture inevitably would be the means of Ullman's expression, for to him it is the exposition of the life all about him.

We may detect here a reaction against late nineteenth-century genre painting, especially the kind produced in Germany. Though the last sentence quoted may be misleading, my father was just as much a painter of landscapes and still-lifes as of portraits and nudes. He did, however, eschew other genres. At times he appears tempted to stray from his creed of aesthetic purity into “situationism.” Conversely, he could never be swayed by abstractionists or cubists, who were all younger than he. He conceded that abstractionism could be art but maintained that it was not painting. Gertrude Stein must have tired of his esthetic puritanism, for, in the last analysis, he abhorred showmanship, comparing her, in his memoirs, to Barnum. Whether tacit or explicit, some reproach must have transpired in his attitude. The problem was that Eugene Ullman was basically an optimist. Though he worked hard, he never had to do it for a living. No cosmic malaise, no premonition of universal cataclysm, no feeling of rebellion at the inexorability of time, no bewilderment at the subjection of women, no awe at the newly discovered convolution of space ever beclouded his view of life and art—at least then. It should be noted that even though he was apparently an accomplished amateur musician, his argument with Bennett concerning Wagner centered on the stage settings.¹⁶ His view of reality was basically eidetic, for he sensed that through visual phenomena the subject is most cognizant of the object. How well this explains his delight in the reflections of porcelain and glass, which he demonstrates by placing an empty bowl in the center of a still life, or a flower vase in the foreground opposite Mrs. Bennett. And how different it is from cubism!

Despite his optimism, he nevertheless concerned himself with causes. He volunteered in the American Ambulance during World War I, working as a carpenter in the hospital, making contraptions to hold up wounded legs in slings.¹⁷ One day some wounded zouaves were brought to the hospital. He placed his easel in the middle of the ward and, in the midst of all the suffering, painted one of his most colorful canvases. Obviously the visual sensation mattered more than the situation. A painter who had wanted to show the horrors of war, in that era, would not have chosen zouaves.

Another of my father's causes centered on a childhood experience. Sigmund Ullman had an old servant who had been a slave. One day, as the family was driving through Harlem with the servant, the latter exclaimed, “Misser Ullman, look at all dem niggers! Ain't it terrible?” Eugene was profoundly affected by the fact that an American of several generations’ standing felt ashamed of his people before an enriched immigrant (Sigmund Ullman had come to the States in 1855 at the age of 14). Years later—he told me—on becoming a member of the Paris Society of American Painters, he learned that Henry Ossawa Tanner, one of its most distinguished members, on whom the French had bestowed several honors, had never received proper recognition in the organization. The members had probably failed to appoint him to international juries or to hanging committees, as specified in the organization's constitution. Not only was Tanner black, but his wife was white. At an annual meeting, Ullman stunned the old guard by requesting a secret ballot, got himself elected by the young turks, and, once in office, righted the wrong.

Later, at the beginning of World War I, as president of the American Art Association of Paris, he organized a show for French painters who found it difficult to exhibit—among them Matisse. After the war, he became president of an independent group of American painters living in France, and during the Second World War he helped form the Four Arts Aid Society, of which he was elected honorary president.

Ullman's aversion to German taste, discussed in Bennett's Journal entry for 19 June 1904, was not limited to opera. In his unpublished memoirs, he inveighs against German influence in the U.S. I remember his telling me that brown gravy constituted the prime piece of German sabotage of American cooking. But then, as Guy Pène du Bois noticed, my father was a gourmet, and thus a francophile gastronomically too.¹⁸ In many things his devotion to Franco-American friendship is evident. One example is the letter of introduction from Tarkington to Mackenzie reproduced below.

3

References to my father's association with literary figures are scattered throughout newspaper articles, memoirs, and scholarly studies. Much of the information, however, contains errors, omissions, or conjectures. Noel Stock, for example, in his biography of Ezra Pound, writes that “during March and April [1911] Pound had his portrait painted by an artist named Ullman who finished it about 17 April.”¹⁹ Since Stock did not learn the artist's first name, he found it convenient to leave Ullman out of the index. Moreover, on the next page, the name of Margaret Cravens, in whose Paris apartment Pound seems to have done some writing, appears as Craven. I had heard my father speak of her and Pound but, to my recollection, not the fact that he had painted the latter's portrait. It is certainly not mentioned in the clipping I have from the Paris Herald, no. 27,679 (the date has been cut out), which reports an interview with Alice about Margaret Cravens' suicide some time after Pound left Paris. Alice and Margaret, both Hoosiers, were close friends. The newspaper clipping makes no mention of Pound, of course. Subsequently, it was brought to my attention that Donald Davie's Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor contains a frontispiece with the caption: “The portrait of Ezra Pound as a young man is reproduced by gracious permission of Mrs. Drusilla Lodge, of Madison, Indiana.” In reply to an inquiry on my part, Mrs. Lodge kindly wrote me: “I do have the portrait of Ezra Pound, signed ‘To Margaret Cravens—Eugene Paul Ullman.’ I also have a portrait of my cousin, Margaret Cravens, signed ‘Eugene P. Ullman.’ They were painted in Paris, probably 1911, where my cousin and Ezra were friends.” So much, then, for the Pound connection, and for the policies of Oxford University Press, which, let us hope, has not made a habit of reproducing art without giving credit to the artists.²⁰

An editorial error in the notes and appendix to Arnold Bennett's Journal needs correction if one is to understand the references to the Ullman family. In the three-volume edition of the Journal, “Ullman” is mentioned five times, “Mrs. Ullman” once, “Alice Woods Ullman” once, “the Ullmans” once, “to Ullman's” once, and “at the Ullmans'” four times. This adds up to fifteen mentions, ten between 13 November 1903 and 15 May 1905, and five between 25 September 1907 and 23 October 1911. On 28 January 1906, however, he writes “George Ullman” and in the next entry for 2 February “the two Ullmans.” It should be obvious that Eugene Paul Ullman did not need a first name in Bennett's diary, but that his younger brother George did; and that “the two Ullmans” refers to the two brothers, while “the Ullmans” means Eugene and Alice. The editor, however, seeing only one masculine first name and failing to investigate further, thought there was only one man involved and had Alice married to her brother-in-law.²¹

The foregoing explanation should clear up what would otherwise seem like an incongruity, for two very different personalities emerge from Bennett's reminiscences about Eugene Paul Ullman and his brother George. The former is perceived as a creator of “magnificent pictures” (Monday, 14 November 1904) and accomplished amateur violinist who gets Bennett to accompany him (Saturday, 3 December 1904), while the latter sits passively, admiringly listening to the writer play the piano (Sunday, 28 January 1906). We never know what interesting things, if any, George said to Arnold Bennett, but Eugene's argument about Wagner (Sunday, 19 June 1904) and has complaints about perambulator storage space (Monday, 15 May 1903) seem memorable.²² To my knowledge, my uncle George never wielded brush or bow. He appears in Who's Who in American Art, but as a collector, and only in the edition published after Eugene's death—as if he had waited for his brother's demise to assert his dubious place in the artistic world. George's first wife, Marian Gardiner, sister of a classmate of Eugene at Chase's school, may well be the “disappointed young American actress, disgusted with the world,” mentioned in Bennett's Journal for 6 April 1904.

My grandmother's diary entry for 8 March 1914 reads: “George from Avignon. They are touring Italy in Arnold Bennett's car.” Both my uncle George and aunt Marian were frequently ill, and, though surrounded by the finest French furniture, which George could afford—having taken over the family business after James's death and then become chairman and president of the corporation into which it was merged—they looked often unhappy. It is a family joke—perhaps a malicious invention on my father's part, though I have heard it from others—that they did not get married until Uncle George had bought for their nuptial bed a genuine Louis XIV canopied marvel, which then collapsed on their wedding night. To this accident my father attributed their childlessness. George later published a volume of insipid love poems to his wife entitled Captive Balloons. When Eugene returned from Europe in 1940, George most generously had the partitions wrecked in the coachhouse apartment of his Ridgefield estate in order to turn it into a studio for Eugene. In the Beinecke Library there is a letter of condolence from George to Alice Toklas, reminding her that he had nothing to do with Gertrude's and Eugene's quarrel, and informing her that his brother had quarrelled with him too.

Eugene Paul Ullman wrote a memoir about Arnold Bennett, used in part by James Hepburn in his edition of Bennett's Letters. Its eight typed pages contain some insightful comments which need not be reproduced here except for three paragraphs about the author's taste in furnishings. These remarks are corroborated to some extent by Ullman's painting of the Bennetts among Empire furniture, with Marguerite in the foreground and the author playing the piano in the background.

Everything he did was always carefully arranged for. He hated, for instance, to spend an evening alone and he used to write down his appointments very pointedly and hand you his little book for verification. I once asked him whether he wanted a receipt with a special stamp required in France to make it legal. We used to rag each other although we were good friends.

Well, he came to tea, and I remember how he enjoyed the petits fours. They certainly impressed him. When he used to give tea parties he established a system of statistics as to where and when to get the best. He spoke to us about renting a “flat.” He had already decided that the proper thing for a young author to do was to live in Monmartre [sic]. That plan was very carefully worked out in London. All the dishes on the menu of life in Paris had been served to him from the library shelf pre-digested. After about two weeks we received an invitation to have tea with him. And lo and behold, the place was thoroughly furnished. There was absolutely nothing missing. There was a clock on the mantel flanked by candlesticks and they belonged to the race of clocks and candlesticks so cherished by the petite bourgeoisie. Ugly they were when compared to the beautiful things that could be bought in Paris for a song in those days at the junkshops or so-called antique shops. The carpets were thick and flamboyant and the curtains hung in festoons coaxed into their appointed places by a well-meaning upholsterer. He had bought everything in one day at the Bon Marché. That was that. But it was not that. That was not it. That was not done and it must be changed. And changed it was and that was Bennett.

It was not long before he became acquainted with quite a few painters, both men and women, and the young American students who came to Paris, and especially the women who were fascinated by the antique shops, junk shops, flea markets, ginger-bread markets and all of the other markets that spring up in Paris at regular intervals. And what they did not bring home with them besides fleas! Of course, those who had taste found some very charming furniture, porcelains, and decorative objects. Bennett, who was always very much alive to everything around him and always ready to learn, sat up. We were invited to tea again pretty soon and again, lo and behold, all of the Bon Marché stuff was gone. Out it went. All was now “Empire.” Again not a detail lacking. There was an Empire clock on the mantel and the candlesticks were duly in place. The carpets were also thick, properly green. Everything was in green and gold and the mahogany shone as mahogany could only shine in a British bachelor's rooms. Bennett started to make the rounds of the junk shops but he bought nothing but empire. But everytime he found something pretty good one of the older objects was discarded. He kept on buying bigger and better empire pieces as he became more and more prosperous. Although Bennett was very open-minded and progressive there were certain lines he followed in those days and when he had once made up his mind definitely upon anything he stuck to his opinion and his conduct was in keeping with it. He had come to the conclusion that Empire was it, and Empire it was.

To my knowledge, there is very little extant material on Ullman's relation with Booth Tarkington, except perhaps in Alice's memoirs. The whereabouts of Mrs. Tarkington's portrait are unknown. I have a telegram of condolence for my half-brother Paul's death, and a letter with kind comments about the reproductions in the catalog of the posthumous exhibition of his works. There is also a letter of introduction which my father never used.²³ It was written at the time of his trip to Indianapolis to visit Alice and their two sons, before he returned to France to volunteer in the American Ambulance:

11000 North Pennsylvania Street
Indianapolis, Indiana
Dec. 2, '14
Cameron Mackenzie, Esq.
McClure's Magazine, New York, N.Y.

Dear Mackenzie:

Eugene Paul Ullman, the painter, of whom I think you have heard, and whose pictures you probably know, has been in Indianapolis for a few days and tonight spoke of a matter in which I thought you would be interested. Ullman has just come from Paris and is going back on the 12th. He is a friend of Henry Davray, French publicist and journalist—translated Meredith and Wells, and writes in English as in French—and Davray has some articles he is anxious to do for American reading. Ullman's interest is “unpersonal,” like mine, but he would like to arrange the matter for Davray. We've had so much more English and German, I believe the French side—I mean such things as a Gen. [illegible] article—would be darned interesting. Ullman would like to talk it over with you.

Yours sincerely,

Booth Tarkington

We have dealt up to now with errors and negligence in biographical research. Now we can turn to deliberate omission, this being the case with Gertrude Stein. Miss Stein could not, of course, erase from her published work mentions of my father. She gave him a copy of Geography and Plays inscribed, “To Eugene with love for constant friendship.”²⁴ “Eugene Paul,” a complete sentence, can be found on page 166 and “What Eugene said” on 366. The date of publication, 1922, is shortly after the Ullmans' divorce and long after their separation. The friendship, whose intimacy can be gathered from Eugene's letters to Miss Stein preserved in the Beinecke Library, was independent of Alice Woods'. Nevertheless, it came to an end.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Stein writes that “somebody brought the Infanta Eulalia and brought her several times,” not mentioning somebody's name, even though she remembered quite well it was Alice and Eugene. The omission has been remedied in a note by Donald Gallup to his edition of letters to Gertrude Stein and, in fact, by Miss Toklas herself.²⁵ Equally significant is Stein's definitive abridgment of “Three Moral Tales.”

In 1947 Julian Sawyer, having learned that my father had materials pertaining to Gertrude Stein, visited him at his Westport home. What my father had was a typescript entitled “Moral Tales of 1920 and 1921,” now in my possession, typed by Miss Toklas with occasional corrections penned by Miss Stein. In the last of its three sections, Gertrude Stein speaks about Eugene Paul Ullman and another painter, Louis Favre, also referred to as Emil. Before letting Mr. Sawyer see the typescript, my father showed it to some friends (among them, I think, Karl Anderson, Sherwood's brother), who fixed upon some Steinian turns of phrase that could be interpreted as innuendoes: “Eugene Paul a fairy told me all. … Eugene and Emil are not father and brother. Eugene is a father. Emil is a brother. … Emil Favre is he at all is he at all one with me. Pauline my queen. He is young and he is seen. He is never seen with a woman.” My father's friends advised him that Gertrude Stein implied something about his relation to Favre, a particular instance of the pot calling the corningware black. Instead of lending Mr. Sawyer the original typescript, my father had it copied, making several carbons on unglossed yellow pages, the backs of which were utilized for “An Open Letter to Mr. Julian Sawyer.” Consequently, no one could read the Stein piece without glancing to see what Ullman had to say about her. In the letter he clarifies “my relations with Gertrude, whom I knew for thirty-six years, and intimately for twenty-six. Gertrude, Alice Toklas and I were very close friends. We met several times a week and dined at each other's studios very often. We also did considerable motoring throughout France, and spent several weeks at the same hotel at Saint-Rémy-en-Provence. The party consisted of Gertrude and Alice, Braque, the artist, and his wife, my sons, Allen and Paul, and myself.” “Moral Tales,” he adds, “was written at a critical time of Gertrude's life. She was trying to decide as to the most practical policy in art for glamour and investment, and from that standpoint she finally chose wisely in resisting any influence I may have had.”

It must be pointed out that Ullman had influence and important connections in the French art world at the time, which he used in order to help artists he considered worthwhile. He explains how Favre was brought to his studio and how he bought several of the young man's paintings (which are now in my possession). According to Ullman, Miss Stein “was very enthusiastic about Favre's pictures.” Apparently, Ullman also did a portrait of her, the whereabouts of which are now unknown. Ullman's letters to her in the Beinecke mention an artist's certificate, a document obtainable from American consulates, necessary at the time, I believe, for American artists living abroad to have their work sent to the States duty-free. We could speculate that, if she had the portrait, she told my father that she wanted to ship it to America. Perhaps this was not her true intention.²⁶

Mr. Donald Gallup has informed me that “Three Moral Tales” appear in volume 8 of the Yale edition from a “shortened typescript … the shortening … done on Gertrude Stein's instructions.” While material about my father is “very definitely in two earlier typescripts and in the original manuscript,” the published version omits mention of him. It retains some passages about Favre, but it is impossible to ascertain from them who Favre was or, for that matter, that he was a painter,²⁷ as the original version makes clear. In any case, Ullman's open letter to Julian Sawyer, of which I sent a copy to Mr. Gallup (who then kindly informed me that the Beinecke has correspondence from Favre to Miss Stein), may be of some use to scholars in understanding the circumstances under which “Three Moral Tales” was written.

My father's memoir about Miss Stein begins thus: “When the time came that I could no longer get along with Gertrude Stein, I felt sorry. She had proven that she could be an affectionate and valuable friend but her unlimited ambition and love of power were her guiding passions and she could purge her friends with a nonchalance on a par with Hitler's or Mussolini's—minus the blood. She was much too jolly and intelligent ever to become the traditional Lucrezia Borgia. She was a rare companion and she and Alice Toklas were marvelous hosts.” He then goes on to state his artistic creed, as opposed to Miss Stein's. In the original version of “Three Moral Tales” Stein writes, “When I was mistaken I am not mistaken. Eugene Paul is never mistaken. He is never mistaken for another.” In this case, her cutting wit might not have been fully perceived by my father, who could be at times obstinately argumentative, at least in his later years, when he unsuccessfully sought to persuade through iteration and exaggeration rather than logical discourse. His stubbornness may already have been in evidence during his younger years, as there is some hint of it in Bennett's Journal entries for 19 June 1904 and especially 29 April 1908.

Since Ullman's admiration for the more refined aspect of French taste permeated his mentality, he loathed the iconoclasm of those young artists who spoke of burning down the Louvre, and therefore his general attitude was bound to clash with Gertrude Stein's. The contrast between the two can be illustrated by statements they made about one another, and from which we can conclude that despite their long friendship they never fully understood one another (or perhaps that they understood each other only too well). Miss Stein undoubtedly wrote the passage about Ullman in “Moral Tales of 1920 and 1921” because it bothered her that he was “not deeply interested” in her work. In fact, Ullman wrote in his memoir that “she knew that I did not relish her writing.” It is also likely that she exscinded the passage from the final version because she had found many friends who appreciated her and more than made up for the lost one. In this original version, Miss Stein writes: “Eugene and I mean I mean Eugene. I mean that Eugene is not restless. I mean that I seem to be all clean. And why do pearls stain. … And now Eugene you are not deeply interested and yet you are. You have partaken of that interest and what does Thorndyke say. He says that of all the American painters you are the most highly gifted with respect to natural endowments and I do really think that you are now very happy. Thank you very much.” The last sentence, which ends the piece, is the only one quoted here that is also found in the published version. The exscinded material indicates, I think, that this last sentence possessed emphatic significance within the context, which it lost through the omission of the references to Ullman.

In 1949 Ullman, Ary Bitter, the sculptor, and Jean Besnard, the potter, son of the famous painter Albert Besnard, formed an exhibiting trio at a studio on the Rue Campagne-Première. I remember my father once asking Besnard, “Why do you do things like that?” pointing to one piece of pottery that he felt was imbued with a somewhat cheap taste. Besnard answered by saying one had to eat. Obviously, Ullman allowed himself to criticize his friends for not being as pure as he himself was, forgetting that he could afford it and that perhaps others were not willing to starve for art's sake. Seen in this light, the critical time in Miss Stein's life, alluded to by my father in the open letter to Sawyer, may have been related, as either cause or effect, with her friend's possibly explicit faultfinding.

We now realize, of course, that Gertrude Stein's art is just as pure as Ullman's, in its own way. He never intuited its ultimate meaning and she, in turn, perhaps alludes to his tenacity in maintaining an artistic outlook free from the impact of worldly cares when she writes, “Eugene Paul a fairy told me all,” as if he were epistemologically satisfied with a dream world. For me personally, “Eugene and I mean I mean Eugene” is an exquisite poeticization of those despairing words (“But, Gene! But, Gene!”) uttered by so many friends and relatives confronting my father's argumentative pertinacity. Moreover, Miss Stein seems to tell us that Ullman was interested in the intellectual movements about him but would not be part of them, that he was not so moved by them as to allow them to inform his own art. His work rejects ideological content and ignores the restlessness of the times.

Supposing perhaps that he was accused of living artistically in an ivory tower, he countered in 1947, as a disappointed old man, by writing on the back of the copies of the Stein typescript that she, Gertrude, lived in another kind of tower: “From her intellectual Berchtesgaden tower in the rue de Fleurus, she gathered more and more power. Nevertheless, she was capable of committing friendly acts. Also, she could be capricious and a nuisance, and intentionally or unintentionally she could break people's careers. Her childish, weak and incompetent hands seemed like an afterthought, and, as she developed, they never did catch up to her strong, well-constructed, highly arched and capable feet. However, each of her extremities always knew what the other was doing. … Like Barnum, she was jolly. She could chuckle silently. Her friends and admirers could probably tell you why, but few ever held anything against her because they felt that she was an artist, and often she was.”

This passage must be read in the light of Ullman's artistic inclination. For a nonpornographic painter of nudes, feet often pose a problem. My father was always looking at feet whenever he could and commenting on them, struggling with how to render them on canvas. In his memoir on Miss Stein, he wrote: “She wore sandals when nobody else did. Her feet were perfectly constructed with very high and bridge-like arches. Her hands were weak and chubby, rather fat. Her beautifully made sandals were once the cause of great disappointment to her although she knew how to take it. It happened in Monte Carlo. I took her and Alice Toklas to the Casino and she was not permitted to enter on account of her sandals! In those days it was considered improper either to break the bank or commit suicide with one's toenails showing.”

Accordingly, it would be wrong to interpret the mention of hands and feet in the open letter to Sawyer as metaphors for literary inability and the power to crush artistic reputations. For my father, visual phenomena, plastic reality, was the primary aspect of reality itself, the key to all comprehension. By observing her hands and feet be could perceive in what way Gertrude Stein's behavior in the civilized world might be analogous to some putative method of survival in the wild.

Furthermore, he had too much trust in his visual perception to distort on canvas what he saw, in order to facilitate its literary interpretation. Why should being “gifted with respect to natural endowments” not make him “very happy”? It was nature, devoid of intellectual cogitation, which communicated to him visually the highest truth as he comprehended it. Besides, the impression of self-contentment apparently observed by Miss Stein may have stemmed from his optimism. A review in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune for 11 December 1936, headlined “Rare Delicacy Marks the Work of Eugene Paul Ullman,” notes that it “bears the mark of an original and optimistic personality.”

It has been said that painting was the leading art of the early twentieth century. In order to attain this status, though, it needed to appeal to more than people's pictorial appreciation. Otherwise it could not have been at the forefront of a cultural movement, or part of it for that matter. Only thus could there exist both cubist painting and Cubist literature, both surrealist painting and surrealist poetry. A tendency that insists on the prominence of the pictorial—or “sensation,” as my father had put it—and which judges all else to be accessory, necessarily asserted its independence from literary movements and declined any close cooperation with them. Lacking an alliance with the pen and unaided by its persuasive power, an art of “sensation” was bound to fall by the wayside.

Yet, who is to say that an eidetic approach to the universe is less valid than a dialectic one? Obviously, the quarrel between Gertrude Stein and E. P. Ullman had an intellectual basis. And if such a painter represents anything at all in the history of American art, it must be the rare delicacy mentioned above, which would quite naturally mark the last stage of the Chase school. Undoubtedly, my father must have had an influence on Paris expatriate writers with respect to the plastic arts, as many of them listened to what he had to say. But as an admirer of traditional French taste, how could he have avoided being deliberately forgotten by the intellectual innovators centered at the rue de Fleurus?

Notes

1. Besides the ones mentioned in the present article, Ullman left memoirs about Dr. Barnes, Chase, Emma Goldman, and Picasso. He was going to write about the following persons but never got around to it: Karl Anderson, Braque, Rupert Brooke Calvocoressi, Jo Davidson, Henri Davray, the Abbé Dimnet, Guy Pène du Bois, Friesecke, Gibson, Juan Gris, Kisling, Eva Le Gallienne and her mother, John Singer Sargent, Alan Seeger, Tanner, Tarkington, Whistler, and S. J. Woolf.

2. (New York, 1953), 38:381.

3. By no means does this indicate that artistic talent was lacking in James, an accomplished amateur photographer, or his branch of the family. His grandson, James Weil is a poet and was, until recently, proprietor-publisher of the Elizabeth Press.

4. See the prospectus of the New York School of Art for 1896-1902.

5. The Journal of Arnold Bennett (1896-1910) (New York, 1932), 1:128. This is the entry for Friday, 13 November 1903.

6. A maternal great-uncle served as chief draftsman of the Central Pacific during the building of the transcontinental railroad. S. J. Woolf, well known for his portraits of celebrities, was Ullman's double second cousin (double because two brothers married two sisters); and Eleanor Modrakowska, an etcher represented in the National Gallery's permanent collection, was his first cousin. Interest in materials seems to date from Ullman's paternal grandfather, a maker of bronze powder in Bavaria, who nevertheless entertained himself, I am told, by playing the violin while his wife ran the business. E. P. Ullman quit playing the violin because it kept him from his work; he had obviously been forewarned.

7. Ullman also received the Bronze Medal at St. Louis in 1904, the second prize at the Worcester Art Museum in 1905, the first class medal at Orleans in 1905, and the silver medal at the Panama Canal Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

8. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 18:303-4. Raymon L. Solomon, Director of the History Project of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has informed me that a history of the court is in press, with a sketchy biography of Judge Woods. Books on the Pullman strike, the Whiskey Ring and the “Bench and Bar” books on Indiana are also useful for research on him.

9. Journal, 2:30 (23 October 1911).

10. (Indianapolis, 1902). It was considered daring, and even now still possesses documentary interest; H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture (Newman, Okla. 1978) lists it in his bibliography.

11. Katharine Metcalf Roof, The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase (New York, 1917), pp. 196, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 210. The last three references are not listed in the index.

12. Ibid., p. 207.

13. When the French government purchased Ullman's portrait of Chase, Dujardin-Beaumetz, the Minister of Fine Arts, is reported to have said that it equalled anything Whistler ever did (see the Craftsman 15, no. 3 [Dec. 1908]:314). In 1950 the French government acquired a Connecticut snowscape by Ullman. He is also represented in the Guild Hall at East Hampton, the Tampa Museum, the Museum of Franco-American Relations in Blérancourt, and the Art Museum of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

14. Edouard-Joseph, Dictionnaire biographique des artistes contemporains (1910-1930) (Paris, 1934), 3:356. His son Allen is entered on the same page. The whole family, Alice, Eugene, Allen, and Paul, figure in the Bénézit, and three of them in the Vollmer and the Thieme-Becker.

15. Craftsman 15, no. 3:308-15. Here the artist is called Paul Ullman, an attribution that could eventually have caused some confusion; his son Paul, two years old at the time, eventually became a painter himself. If Katharine Chapman convinced Ullman that his conception of Mrs. Tarkington was the embodiment of woman in an atmosphere of freedom, she did him a disservice, for it was his friend Gertrude Stein, whom he perhaps never truly understood, who was really free.

16. Bennett, Journal, 1:182 (19 June 1904). Forty years later, my father had not changed his mind about Wagner and “fundamental German vulgarity.”

17. He told me that he returned to the States at the start of the war in order to go to mechanic school so he could become an accomplished ambulance driver. Perhaps he found no sponsor to buy an ambulance for him. One wonders if he asked his father and got a refusal. I have been told that the father tended to be pro-German and the mother pro-British at the start of the war, and that for three months before Sigmund and Pauline died—at about the same time—they were not talking to each other because of this.

18. Guy Pène du Bois, Artists Say the Silliest Things (New York, 1940), p. 224. My father swore he could taste the difference between a chicken plucked when the carcass was still warm and one wet-plucked in a centrifuge.

19. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York, 1974), p. 139. This information is apparently taken from a letter Pound wrote to his parents on 17 April 1911: “Ullman has finished my portrait. It's a good bit of paint and a good likeness. Will send you photo of it later.” I am grateful to Mr. Gallup for providing this reference.

20. For more information, see Martha Ullman West, “Lady with Poet: Margaret Cravens and Ezra Pound,” Helix (Australia), nos. 13-14 (1983): 15-22.

21. It is also possible that the editor, in order to conform to the original error, changed the last entry: “When Alice said something cutting about George [?] May said, ‘Now you're making a noise like a wife’.” A look at Bennett's manuscript should resolve the problem. The biographical transformation of Eugene into his brother was given its final touch by Margaret Drabble, who wrote that George Ullman was a painter and connected him with an unfortunate episode: “At the beginning of May (1907), Bennett developed an acute gastric illness (diarrhea with blood, he says in his journal) for which he blamed a dinner at the Ullmans'.” Arnold Bennett (London, 1974), pp. 109, 123, 138, 160. Yet this biography might have contained the correct information had attention been paid to a note accompanying James Hepburn's transcription of a Bennett letter to my father which is now in my possession. Letters of Arnold Bennett (New York, 1970), 3:x, 100-101.

22. Eugene's complaint about perambulator storage (Monday, 15 May 1905) and Bennett's evening at the Opéra Comique with “the two Ullmans” (Eugene and George, not with “the Ullmans,” Eugene and Alice) (Friday, 2 February 1906) bear further explanation. The perambulator was for Eugene and Alice's son Allen, born 25 April 1905. Paul was born on 4 April 1906. Thus, Alice had a nine-month-old baby and was seven months pregnant. She could hardly have been one of “the two Ullmans” who walked all the way home from the opera, quite a distance indeed.

23. The letter is in my possession. My father did eventually correspond with Mackenzie, I believe. According to a diary kept by my grandmother (kindly lent to me by a cousin, Mrs. Pauline Schwartz), he was in Indianapolis from 28 November to 4 December 1914, to see Alice, who had returned home after their separation.

24. Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (Boston, 1922). Incidentally, the “Alfy” mentioned at the bottom of p. 369 must be the painter Alfred Maurer, who introduced the Ullmans to Miss Stein.

25. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933), p. 137. Donald B. Gallup, ed., The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York, 1953), pp. 47-48. See also James R. Mellow, The Charmed Circle (New York, 1974), pp. 13, 148-49. Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (London, 1963), pp. 70, 122, 152-53. Miss Stein also wrote in her Autobiography (p. 137) that the idea of using Romeike's clipping bureau was Miss Toklas' when in fact it was Alice Woods Ullman's suggestion.

26. Though I still have many of my father's paintings, the portrait is not among them. Several of E. P. Ullman's works were badly damaged during a flood in his son Allen's California home, some beyond repair. It may have been among them.

27. Except perhaps from the remark, “How pleasantly are painters published. They publish them in sets.” Gertrude Stein, “Three Moral Tales,” in A Novel of Thank You, intro. by Carl Van Vechten (New Haven, 1958), volume 8 of the Yale edition of the unpublished writings of Gertrude Stein. Some light may be cast on these lines by two handsome Favre lithographs now in my possession. A forthcoming book by my niece, Martha Ullman West, about her grandmother, using a long memoir left by the latter, will give further particulars about the friendship.