BY PAUL BRODEUR
PROVINCETOWN ARTS
2009
Anne Peretz knew she wanted to be an artist from the moment she set foot in Paris as a twelve-year-old, when her father, Henry Labouisse, was directing the Marshall Plan in France. “I was unbelievably excited by the prospect of living there,” she says. “The idea of becoming an artist in Paris captured my heart and soul. Right away I started taking my easel out to paint the bridges along the Seine.” Within a short time, Peretz was attending Saturday classes at the Academie de la Grande Caumiere, a well-known art school in the Fifth Arrondissement, and when she was fourteen she studied with Andrew Lhote, the noted painter and theoretician, who influenced a generation of French and expatriate artists. Since then, her dream of becoming an artist has become a reality, and in July of this year and in the summer of 2010 some of the work she has executed during the past dozen years will be exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Peretz is first and foremost a painter of landscape. Some of it has been inspired by her travel to the far-flung places—Morocco, Spain, Provence, Tuscany, Greece, Vietnam, Mexico, New Zealand, and Israel—but the preponderance of her oeuvre has been inspired by the sand dunes, freshwater ponds, and salt marshes of Outer Cape Cod, where she has spent much of her time for more than forty years. Her dune pictures—some as large as six by ten feet—dwarf the diminutive Peretz, a dark-haired, small-boned woman with a flashing smile, who looks ten years younger than her age. Peretz considers sand dunes as standing for the power and violence of nature. “Look closely at a dune and you’ll see that it is in motion,” she says. “Rivulets of sand, tufts of grass, and beach plum bushes are constantly shifting and tumbling down its side. A dune is always convulsing, retreating, losing ground to wind, rain, and sea. Dunes are about turmoil. They’re about layers behind layers and colors behind colors. They’re more than just sunny places to sit and look out across the ocean.”
Peretz has painted the dunes of Truro on single canvases, in triptych and polyptych form, and in all seasons and weather. For the most part, she employs Expressionist techniques, using layers of ochre, raw umber, and green mixed with sand to provide texture, and applying them with a palette knife to give the finished work a sculptural effect. Sunlight illuminates mountains of sand that tower above an unseen but elemental sea. The observer is forced to acknowledge the vast indifference of nature. Peretz is never sentimental but neither is she pessimistic. One senses somberness and isolation in her painting but never desolation because the work is always full o f drama. By transforming the harsh reality of landscape into abstraction, she enhances its power and produces an austere result that combines ascetism with athleticism. Although far too young to have been influenced by Lhote during the brief time she studied with him, her work reflects his famous dictum that atmospheric fluidity provides the way from realism to poetry. She arrives at this effect with careful deliberation, but without being overly self-conscious. “Sometimes I just put oil and turpentine on a brush, fling it at the canvas, and hope it lands in the right place,” she says, with a laugh. “If it doesn’t, I simply wipe it off with a rag and try again. I have a lot of fun that way.”
Peretz loves to swim in the ponds of the Wellfleet Woods, so it is not surprising that one of her favorite motifs is a headland at Horseleech Pond, which she has painted many times. Like her dune paintings, she has rendered the pond at various times of day and in different conditions—in the morning, at sunset, and during rain. Above all, the Horseleech series shows how Peretz’s work reflects and summons up mood—hers and that of the viewer—as well as the atmosphere that cloaks and is conjured up by the pond. As a result, her pond canvases have much in common with scenes of marshes bordering the Pamer River to which she has given a sculptural effect by spreading overlapping layers of paint with her palette knife.
In recent years, Peretz has become fascinated by old pilings that used to be seen along the harbor front of Provincetown, and has completed a number of paintings of them. “I love the geometry of pilings,” she explains. “How they jut out of the sand and mud at different angles, leaning this way and that in clumps and pairs. I find them full of melancholy. They’ve been abandoned by whatever piers and wharves they once supported, and all the years of bearing weight, being subjected to the ravages of storms, and undermined by the shifting of the bottom beneath them have taken their toll and changed the way they look.” Not surprisingly, Peretz’s paintings of the pilings present a bleak and disjointed existence at the edge of the sea, and, like her depictions of the dunes, evidence of the impermanence of all things created by man and nature.
Several large, square canvases represent a massive and steep-angled quarry in Tamariu, Spain, whose façade is illuminated by strong sunlight suggested by layers of white, brown, and orange ochre. Green bushes growing at the base, together with a fringe of trees at the top and a deep blue sky beyond, give the multiple planes and shapes of the quarry’s face a depth and power that force the viewer to acknowledge the sheer dynamic of the rock. While in Tamariu, Peretz also painted a series of large square canvases called Tamariu Woods, which Joseph Leo Koerner, Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, has described as masterpieces. These pictures (some measure sixty-six by sixty-six inches) depict the massive trunks and upper branches of trees growing up and sideways from the top of a cliff as they lean toward the Mediterranean Sea. Professor Koerner has written:
“Peretz manages to make us feel not simply that we behold trees on the coast of Spain, but that we stand there in our bodies, as well. She heightens this doubling by making her effigies almost life-sized. This invites us not merely to scan the trees with our eyes, but to reach out and touch them.”
Equally powerful and even larger are paintings that Peretz executed during a four-month stay in Israel in the late winter and spring of 2000. A landscape entitled Jerusalem to the East is infused with a searing light that almost obliterates the white stone dwellings of an Arab village sitting upon a hill in the background. Indeed, the painting is so ablaze with light that viewers might almost be inclined to shield their eyes. Other paintings depict a hardscrabble terrain strewn with boulders, punctuated by olive trees, and striated by terraced hills. Still others reveal the geometric clustering of buildings and rooftops in the Port of Jaffa. All of them are bathed in a harsh light that combines radiance with austerity.
“Before I went to Israel, I asked a painter friend who lives there what I should bring,” Peretz remembers. “He said to bring lots and lots of white paint, and when I thought I had enough to pack even more. Boy, was he right! The light there was merciless!”
In 2006, Peretz made a trip to Vietnam with her friend Arien Mack, a Professor of Psychology at the New School, who spends summers in Truro. Upon her return, she embarked upon a series of paintings of rice paddies, which present a foreboding quality that is unlike most of her other work. “Rice paddies are another form of the harsh landscape that has always intrigued me,” she says. “They also present geometry of squares and rectangles that I find fascinating. I use lots of brown and black when I paint them because I associate them with a very dark and sinister past.”
By way of explanation, Peretz described the life she led after joining her father in Paris. Her mother had died when Peretz was six, and, although she loved Paris, she hated he French private school she attended. “I was rebellious,” she recalls. “I began playing hooky and spending my days at a local shooting gallery where I collected stuffed rabbits and other animals.” When punished for her truancy, Peretz contrived to set her desk on fire and got the boot. At that point, her father decided she should go to school in the States.
The school Peretz was sent to was Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut. She then attended Smith College, where she studied painting with Mervin Jules and drawing and woodcut with Leonard Baskin. Meanwhile, she had met her first husband, Peter Farnsworth, a medical student at McGill University, whom she married at the age of twenty, before graduating from Smith. For a year, she lived in Montreal while her husband was doing his internship. Then, while he was completing a year of residency in New York City, she completed the requirements for her college degree at the New School, where she studied with Anthony Toney and Moses Soyer. Since the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps had paid for Farnsworth’s medical education, he was required to spend the next two years serving in air force. As a result,, he and Peretz, who had given birth to their son and daughter, were sent to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines in 1962.
“I had already participated in two marches to protest our growing involvement in Vietnam,” Peretz remembers. “When I first arrived at Clark, I bought a subscription for I.F. Stone’s Weekly for the base library, which never got displayed. I also started writing letters to senators and congressmen. All I got back was “thanks for your interestand blah, blah, blah.” At that point Peretz started hanging out at the officer’s club swimming pool to find out what the fighter pilots, who were flying missions every day, were up to. At first, she couldn’t get much out of them, but then they started to open up, telling her they were strafing targets in North Vietnam and machine-gunning Vietnamese peasants as they worked in the rice paddies. “That’s why my rice-paddy paintings are so dark and harsh,” she says.
Shortly after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed by Congress, Peretz wrote a letter to the Manila Times voicing fierce opposition to an illegal war that had been based upon what everyone now knows to have been concocted information—that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. “I never expected to see my letter printed on the front page of the newspaper’s Sunday edition, let alone next to a photograph of a huge American soldier with a gun, who was towering over a tiny Vietnamese,” she remembers, “but that’s what happened.”
On the next day, the telephone rang and a colonel asked to speak to Captain Farnsworth. The colonel ordered him to order Peretz not to speak to anyone about her letter. Fifteen minutes later, the telephone rang again, and the colonel asked her husband if her father was, by any chance, a five-star general? When her husband replied in the negative, the colonel asked if her father was an ambassador. As it happened, Peretz’s father was President Kennedy’s ambassador to Greece, and, as such, was considered to hold a high military rank.
Later that week, word came that the area commander, a four-star air force general, wanted to see Peretz. “I was thrilled,” she recalls. “It seemed as if my antiwar efforts might have hit the jackpot. I got all dressed up in my little Hong Kong silk suit, and was picked up by the colonel with a limousine and driver, and brought to the office of the commanding general, who was sitting behind the largest desk I’ve ever seen before or since. After the colonel and I sat down, the general started by telling me that a year earlier he’d had the honor of attending his son’s graduation from the Air Force Academy. He went on to say that he had been particularly moved by a recitation of the pledge of allegiance, which had been part of the ceremony. At that point the colonel handed him a piece of paper, and, reading from it, the general recited the pledge. When he finished, he looked long and hard at me. I looked back at him and remember shrugging as if to say, So?”
Peretz continued her story by saying that the general had then set out upon a new tack, telling her that he’d had the opportunity to witness the excitement and bravery of the young pilots who were engaging the enemy in Vietnam, and to see how proud they were to be representing their country. Peretz replied that she didn’t think anyone should be proud of fighting a war that was illegal and of little purpose. She could tell the general was getting agitated because by now his face had become flushed. A moment later, he started down another path, telling her he understood that the base hospital, where her husband worked as a pediatrician, wasn’t typical of the normal air force culture.
“He seemed to be suggesting that I might have been unwittingly influenced by dissident opinion there,” Peretz remembers. “he floundered about with that notion for a while, until I suddenly realized he was working himself up to ask me a question, and decided to help him out. I inquired whether he wanted to know if I was a member of the Communist Party. Then I told him, “No,” and that was the end of the interview.
Peretz and Farnsworth divorced soon after returning to the States, and two years later, she married Martin Peretz, who ran the social studies program at Harvard University, and later became the owner and editor in chief of the New Republic. (He is still the magazine’s editor in chief.) “Back in the sixties, Marty and I were involved in lots of political activity,” Peretz recalls. “We were supporters of John Lewis’s Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Students for a Democratic Society. In addition, I worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaignin 1968.”
The following year, Peretz’s life took a different turn. She had come from a family with a long tradition of public service. Her mother and father had met while working in a settlement house designed to help poor immigrant families in Manhattan, and her father’s work with the Marshall Plan and two United Nations agencies had influenced her greatly. By the time she was at Miss Porter’s School, he had married Eve Curie, Marie Curie’s daughter and biographer, and was living in Beirut and working for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency. During school vacations, she accompanied him on trips to refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan. “I remember spending Christmas in Gaza—a wretched place where everyone lived in tents—at a time when UN Peacekeepers were stationed there,” she says.
The turn in Peretz’s life took her to the Simmons School of Social Work in Boston, which she attended between 1969 and 1972, and from which she received her Master’s Degree in Social Work. She then started practicing as a therapist. The more she dealt with clients in low-income housing projects, however, the more she came to realize that counseling them had become too focused on the mother and was not sufficiently sensitive to family members and their surroundings. In 1982, together with a therapist named David Kantor, she founded a nonprofit family therapy and community outreach agency called the Family Center. It was designed to engage poor families by helping all members work together to identify bad habits, as well as their strengths, and by so doing encourage them to resolve destructive family problems, and raise their children in a healthy environment.
The Family Center has been a resounding success during the twenty-seven years it has been in operation. Today, it not only provides help to more than five hundred families each year, but also trains dozens of family workers touse its programs and models in other agencies. In recent years, Peretz has stopped going to the center every day, but as its founder and president she still works with staff to develop programs, such as the Parenting Journey, which helps parents examine their lives, decide what they like and don’t like about their own upbringing, and undertake to transform behavior they regard as repeating their own bad experiences. “In one program, we ask parents to bring with them an object that’s important to them,” she explains. “In this way, we try to persuade them to tell us their story. Many of these people come to us with feelings of deep shame and failure. We try to counter that right away by accentuating the positive. The philosophy behind the Family Center can be simply stated. It is to empower parents.”
Peretz and her second husband recently divorced after thirty years of marriage. These days, she takes the summer off from the Family Center to concentrate on her painting and tend to her duties as a grandmother—she has four grown children and seven grandchildren, all of whom take turns visiting her at her home in Truro so that she is rarely without the company of youngsters from June to September. She also has a wide circle of friends to whom she is extremely loyal. As a result, her forays into the political world are fewer than before, although she finds time to support media watch groups and voter registration organizations. Last October, she also found time to join a group organized by one of her sons, whose members traveled to Cleveland for a week to work telephones for the Obama campaign and go door-to-door to get out the vote. “I was assigned to drive a van,” she recalls. “I spent my days dropping people off at the polls, delivering chairs, water, apples, and other stuff. It was a wonderful experience. An incredibly loving atmosphere.”
In summing up the dimensions of Anne Peretz’s career, one salutes the artist whose uncompromising view of the world has produced work of undisputed quality, the social worker and innovator whose caring instincts have brought comfort and insight to thousands of troubled families, and the activist who has always refused to be deflected from her values.
An accomplished woman, indeed.
Paul Brodeur is a novelist and longtime contributor to the New Yorker, having uncovered dangers to the environment and human like such as asbestos and the hazards of microwaves.