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Ike’s paintings hung all over the house, while hers were restricted to the tiny room where she spent evenings and weekends working on her technique. Once, when the couple gave a party, Ike allowed her to hang one of her paintings in the living room. When guests congratulated him on the best work he’d ever done, he was infuriated. ”13 In a photograph taken around this time, Grace poses in a folkloric, off-the-shoulder blouse, one hand planted on her hip. She looks disgruntled. Above her hangs Ike’s romanticized painting of her, with longer hair and the same blouse in a lower-cut version.

The New York “art world” in the late forties was a tiny, impoverished group of men and a few women who met in cafeterias over five-cent cups of coffee and who were sadly accustomed to rejection from the elegant galleries on 57th Street. 9) Wealthy collectors favored Europeans of acknowledged pedigree, not necessarily the artists who emigrated to the United States as a result of World War II. Most Americans were either ignorant of or baffled by the new abstract art, and their negative views were heartily supported by massmarket magazines and newspaper art critics.

12 It wasn’t until she began to hang out with accomplished painters in New York that Grace heard discussions of key modern-art issues like maintaining the flatness of the picture plane (avoiding the illusion of perspective, in which distant objects appear smaller than close ones). What she had been doing with Ike was “poetic and imaginative and dreamy,” she said later. ” This method had nothing to do with mastering a technique or understanding aesthetics. ” Today, we talk about putting in 10,000 hours to master a subject.