Mary Pinchot Meyer, 1920-1964

By Zachary Vincent

Half Light, 1963-4, plastic paint on canvas

Mary Pinchot Meyer invites consideration of the role of biography in describing the lives of artists. For a publication which prides itself on its rigour and, especially, for a section composed so much of biography (‘Born This Week’), writers rarely take the time to seriously interrogate the question of why we write artist biographies. This piece, the first ‘Born This Week’ article of a new academic year, seeks to do just that by taking as its subject the life of a woman better known for her connections to classic mid-century American conspiracy theories than for her art. This asks how biography can illuminate, add to, or detract from the art this publication is interested in.

One story of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s life can be written as a navigation of class, gender, art, and a complex portrait of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Born 14 October 1920 to a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Mary Pinchot was raised in an opulent fashion with a childhood which set her up well for life amongst the upper crust of American society. After attending Vassar College and finding promise as a journalist, Mary Pinchot became what her upbringing always intended her to become: Mary Pinchot Meyer. Reporting and publishing were replaced by marriage to promising statesman Cord Meyer and, thrice over, by motherhood. Despite the challenges which managing a young family and a household posed, Pinchot Meyer threw herself into painting upon the family’s move to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Training at the Cambridge School of Design in 1949, she quickly began the balancing act between family and art which would define the rest of her life. Moving to Virginia and, subsequently, Washington D.C., Pinchot Meyer became involved with the Washington Colour School artists and turned to abstraction in her practice. With her marriage a source of increasing strain and after the tragic death of her son, Pinchot Meyer pursued divorce in 1958. Her artistic practice began to blossom as she found a community of people in a promising young group containing artists such as the visionary Minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt and the painter Kenneth Noland. As Pinchot Meyer’s friendship with Truitt eventually led to a shared studio space, her increasingly intense romantic relationship with Noland became a source of inspiration for them both.

It was in this setting that Pinchot Meyer produced the work she would be best known for: ‘tondos’, or shaped canvases, upon which a thick plastic paint was applied in a geometrically abstract way and carefully chosen colour was used to suggest multiple-dimensionality and movement. These works, like Half Light (1963-4), led to her successful November exhibition at the Jefferson Place Gallery. She was also included in the Pan American Union’s traveling exhibition Nine Contemporary Painters, which intended to show the world the promise of geometric abstraction and colour experimentation. Pinchot Meyer’s growing success, however, was to be cut short by a tragic and yet-unsolved encounter on the night of 12 October 1964 which left her dead from a bullet wound in the streets of Georgetown.

If the above biography is an exploration of an artist who eventually superseded the gendered expectations of her time to catch a tantalising glimpse of success, consider the following alternative. Mary Pinchot Meyer was an American aristocrat who, in 1945, married the man who would become a CIA agent notorious for his affiliations with assassination projects across the world. Acting upon her growing suspicion that Cord Meyer was not the man she thought she knew, Mary Pinchot Meyer left her husband and began a life of debauchery in mid-century Washington D.C. as a socialite. Her brushes with drugs and the mafia were a source of interest in her own time, but more recent commentators have been especially taken by her c.1961-3 affair with President John F. Kennedy. Suspicions regarding the timing of Pinchot Meyer’s death in the year after Kennedy’s and accusations that her diaries were burned have led to conspiracies placing Pinchot Meyer at the centre of their JFK assassination stories. The drugs, her sexual exploits, and her CIA connections have overshadowed any mention of art in the popular biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer.

This asks several questions of readers today. Would Pinchot Meyer’s study, art, exhibitions, and artistic relationships be sidelined for the sake of sensationalism if she were a man? Is the narrative of Pinchot Meyer as a housewife-turned-political-pawn a fair representation of who she was? It certainly does not seem fair if it removes art from the story of her life. What little is left of Pinchot Meyer’s voice today is her art. Half Light could be seen as an attempt by the artist to take control of her own reality through mastering colour and geometric forms. It can also be seen as literally tearing the ‘canvas’ of social expectation and reshaping it as she wished. Perhaps, though, its implied motion, never ceasing, is a reflection on a life spinning progressively out of control. In any case, the fact that Half Life is the only accessible surviving work by Pinchot Meyer makes it challenging to construct a larger narrative that does justice to the artist. When writers construct biographies, we take positions which highlight parts of people’s lives and ignore others. Mary Pinchot Meyer provides a timely reminder that the relationship between art and life is complex and challenging, but incredibly important and very worthy of continued consideration. By challenging conventional narratives and seeking deeper truth, perhaps better biographies and better understandings of art are possible.

Bibliography

Ahlander, Leslie Judd. ‘The Jefferson Place Gallery’. The Washington Post, Times Herald, 24 November 1963.

Berger, Mollie. ‘Mary Pinchot Meyer’. Jefferson Place Gallery. Accessed 5 October, 2023. https://jeffersonplacegallery.com/mary-pinchot-meyer/.

Burleigh, Nina. A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.

Cohen, Alina. ‘The Forgotten Female Artist Who May Have Been Murdered by the CIA’. Artsy. Published 16 May, 2019. Accessed 5 October, 2023. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-female-artist-murdered-cia.

Morrow, Lance. ‘Woman, Interrupted: Mary Pinchot Meyer’. Smithsonian 39, no. 9 (December 2008): 87–94.