The Thriving of Woodstock Art School Pioneer Gladys Brodsky

For more than a half-century, Gladys Brodsky has been a member of a coterie of visionaries, bon vivants and broadly drawn characters who defined the Woodstock Art School movement. Spend a late autumn Sunday afternoon with the painter-sculptor, who still creates and exhibits in galleries locally and nationally, and she will take you, thoughtfully but dry-eyed, on a tour of her variegated past, when this loose-fitting fraternity thrived. Brodsky was one of the few women allowed to enter this boys’ club, in equal parts thanks to her talent, her demure beauty and her fearless mouth.

Brodsky’s world is a chaotic explosion of energy and color. And today, it is perhaps a little more so that, since she is preparing to head for Florida, where she conducts art classes in a vocational school for Latino and African-American students. She is in the middle of packing, having just returned from her weekly breakfast with fellow artists, where the focus of each gathering is humor, she said, rather than art and shop talk.

On the kitchen table of her studio loft, Brodsky has fanned out evidence of a life well lived: prints of her paintings and sculptors, as well as snapshot images of the people—most, like artist-husband Walter Plate, long gone—who accompanied Brodsky on her journey as an artist. Her crowd is captured in countless black and white miniatures, and their urgency, vivacity and irreverence fairly bleed through the modest squares.

Even before birth, Gladys Brodsky was meant to be an artist. “My mother went to museums when she was pregnant, hoping I’d be an artist,” she said.

Brodsky first came to this area in the early 1940’s. She would visit her first cousin, who was married to Emile Ganzo, a celebrated expatriate German painter and printmaker and an eminent member of the local art scene. A few years later, she met her first husband, portraitist Robbie Robinson, at art school at Temple University in Philadelphia. Together, they put down roots in Woodstock: the couple purchased 130 acres and invited fellow artists to come and populate their new commune. “We didn’t call it that back then,” she said, “but we did have a lot of parties.”

The union with Robinson soon dissolved— “it was a college romance” —and Brodsky also dated famed caricaturist David Levine before she married “my real husband”, Walter Plate. “Bud” Plate was a Long Island-born, classically educated artist (Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris) who would become recognized as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. His prodigious talent—his work belongs to the collections of the Whitney and Tate—was only enhanced, his widow says, by his resemblance to Richard Burton. The couple raised two children and were together for 20 years before Plate’s unexpected death at age 47.

Asked if her intimate connection with artists who were lovers and husbands caused a synthesis or borrowing of styles, Brodsky wrinkles her nose. “Would you ask a man that question?” she snaps. She then relaxes slightly, and explains that she came of age in an era when “one of the best things that anybody could say to you was, ‘you draw like a man.’” She admits, however, that “it was inspirational” to date a fellow artist, and to visit museums together. “My first husband taught me how to paint,” she said. Acknowledging her own reverse brand of sexism, Brodsky adds, “I told him I would live with him for three years, if he taught me how to paint, because nobody [at Temple University] was teaching technique.”

During this time, both Plate and Brodsky flourished as artists. Her first solo show took place in Woodstock in 1954. She would eventually head The Woodstock Art Association and nurture fellow artists. But where Plate’s career was supplemented by a teaching position at Renssalaer Polytechnic, Brodsky was unable to do likewise. When inquiring about openings for art instructors at SUNY New Paltz, Brodsky was told plainly by an interviewer, “We don’t hire women.”

“I was so naive at that time in the ‘50s,” Brodsky said, that she simply apologized for her oversight and left the interview.

The Woodstock art scene was composed of “very wonderful people” who flocked to this area after World War II from other states but also from overseas. The epicenter of the art world had just relocated from Paris to New York, and now the seismic vibrations were rippling out to nearby regions like Woodstock, which had been drawing artists since the early 1900s. “It was like a renaissance time in Woodstock, very exciting.”

First having made their mark in The Woodstock Art Association, artists were soon mounting shows in New York City galleries and elsewhere. If fame was an objective, it was not the overriding one, Brodsky said. Woodstock artists looked askance at those in the Hamptons, since that beachside artists colony was quickly becoming a playground for the wealthy. Here, there was a marked camaraderie. When one artist scored a Manhattan gallery debut, everyone would pile into a jalopy and attend the opening to lend support—and, perhaps, to make their own art world contacts. “It was much more [about] artists helping each other get to where they wanted to go.” The Woodstock artists had at least one big party every week, where artists of modest means could pool their resources to have a good time.

“It wasn’t as much a time of greed; it was more of a time for art for art’s sake. For love. And also, we had no television, no Thruway, no nothing.”

Unlike others, for whom making art was an incessant and consuming passion, Brodsky had more pragmatic concerns as a widowed parent. (Plate died in 1972.) Brodsky found work as an art teacher at The Woodstock Elementary School, a career move that put her at odds with contemporaries in both worlds.

“I was considered a square for having a regular job [by] the artists,” she said, “and I was considered a hippie [by co-workers] being an artist in the schools.”

Brodsky was able to retire at age 55 and begin painting full-time. By then, however, the Woodstock art scene has devolved: it had become smaller and perhaps less centralized, less tight-knit. “Now, we have local artists; we don’t have nationally-known artists.” But the scene continues for a new generation, Brodsky said, with galleries like Elena Zang and Fletcher continuing to champion local artists.

The sexism of the art world remains a fascinating topic for Brodsky. She has recently written a screenplay which seeks to prove that behind every famous male artist there is a long-suffering female muse. Titled Murder in the Abstract, it is both historical fiction and a murder mystery, replete with black comedy. featuring real-life art world people such as Jackson Pollock and his wife-agent Lee Krassner, as well as Brodsky’s sister-in-law Marion Greenwood, yet another lover of Diego Rivera. Brodsky describes this opus as The First Wives’ Club meets Frida.

The politics of the art world, whether marked by sexism, capitalism, or fanatic ideology, have always been oppressive, Brodsky said. In the 40s and 50s, the tenets of Abstract Expressionism dictated that works be pure in their detachment from reality. Figures or social concerns had no place on the canvas and people would be ostracized for such transgressions.

Likewise, abandoning your signature style for another approach would be considered heresy, both to your adherents and to your agent. Brodsky bucked that rule early on. “You’re supposed to stick with one style, and I’ve never chosen to do that. I like to be influenced and change; I don’t feel that I have to have a particular style marked on my work.”

True to her word, Brodsky’s oil and acrylic and multimedia works vary in tone and energy from work to work. Some pieces echo the cruel, chaotic beauty of Francis Bacon, funneled through the brittle compassion of Egon Schiele. Others approximate the multi-hued, upbeat tableaux of Milton Avery. Having traveled to Havana years ago on an art excursion with a former mistress of Castro, Brodsky immortalized Cuban life in its peacock bravado but also in its primal nature. Like Contemporary Realist Eric Fischl, she does not shy away from nudes in her South Beach, Florida, series, but Brodsky’s preening, unclothed sunbathers are here to provide wry commentary on modern narcissism, while Fischl seeks to unmoor us with the starkness of coming-of-age sexuality. “I’m generally more sensuous. I like sexy women, earth mothers.”

Having just passed a milestone birthday—which she refuses to divulge, citing art world ageism—Gladys Brodsky acknowledges the rejuvenating life-force imparted by working in her studio. “It’s really how I define my life. If I don’t paint, I change into a totally different person.” She cites an unsettling example. Time had passed since she had been painting. One day, Brodsky was surveying her bedroom and realized that she had installed a dust-ruffle on her bed. “I’m doing my nails, I’m wearing high heels, I’m putting ruffles on things,” she scolded herself. Was she becoming a Stepford Wife?

The remedy? Brodsky rushed back to her canvas.

Jay Blotcher, a Roll arts writer since the debut issue, hopes to find a Schiele or a Grosz under the tree on Christmas morn.

Art work: Goddesses Three, mixed media; gladys in the 50's, South Beach 7, mixed media; Gladys with bartender & scholar, John Brown at the Seahorse, 1952

Gladys, hanging upside down,early 50's; Woodstock Artists, 1950 | photos courtesy Gladys Brodsky Plate