User:Rlee13/Tennessee Mitchell Anderson

Tennessee Mitchell Anderson (April 18, 1874 - December 20, 1929) was an American sculptor and the second wife of Sherwood Anderson, American novelist and short story writer. A self-taught sculptor, Tennessee Mitchell Anderson garnered critical acclaim for her own creative work, influenced Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson, and had numerous contacts in the literary movement known as the Chicago Renaissance.

Personal life and Marriage

Mitchell, born in Jackson, Michigan, was named after Tennessee Celeste Claflin, a leader in the women's suffrage movement and advocate for free love.

In the late 1890s, Mitchell migrated from Jackson to Chicago, where she pursued her interests in art, music, and dance and developed friendships with a number of artists and writers, such as Aaron Copeland, Bernadine Szold Fritz, Eunice Tietjens, and Harriet Monroe, art critic, patron of the arts, and editor of Poetry magazine. While in Chicago, Mitchell worked as a piano tuner and gave lessons in music and dance.

From 1909-1910, Mitchell had an affair with the poet Edgar Lee Masters while Masters was married to his first wife. Although the relationship did not last long, Masters refers to Mitchell numerous times in his work, such as in the poem "Ballade of Ultimate Shame: T.M., August 20, 1909-May 23, 1911," published in Songs and Sonnets, Second Series (1912), and two of his plays, Eileen (1910) and The Locket (1910).

In 1914, Mitchell met Sherwood Anderson, who had left his wife of 12 years and three children in order to pursue his writing career in Chicago. In 1916, they married, three days after Anderson's divorce from his first wife, Cornelia Pratt Lane (1877–1967). According to John Earl Bassett, Tennessee Mitchell was an "attractive, independent, liberated 'new woman.'" By many accounts, their marriage was unconventional. They maintained separate homes in Chicago and Anderson frequently traveled without her. Their marriage, writes one biographer, "had been predicated not only on an unconventional openness towards others, but on the two of them earning their own livelihoods." The couple separated in 1922, although their divorce was not final until 1924. Mitchell retained her married name.

Mitchell started an autobiography in 1928, but it was left unfinished at the time of her death. The seventy-seven handwritten pages describe her childhood in Michigan and move to Chicago, including her affair with Masters. In 1929, Mitchell wrote Sherwood Anderson about the autobiography, asking if she could include him in her memoir, although she expressed uncertainty about the role he might play in her autobiography. He never answered and Mitchell ultimately abandoned the project.

Sculpture

Mitchell began sculpting at the age of 46. In 1920, Mitchell visited her husband in Fairhope, Alabama, and, drawn to the colorful clays in the area, began to experiment with sculpture. Shortly after, photographs of her work illustrated a new collection of short stories by her husband. Anderson's The Triumph of the Egg (1921) included "Impressions in Clay by Tennessee Mitchell." Three of the seven pieces represented characters in the collection.

In 1924, she exhibited at a small gallery in Woodstock, New York. She also exhibited at the Madison (WI) Art Association in 1926 and at the Whitney Club Studio in New York. In 1929, she was one of a group of artists known as "The Ten," a group of Modernist artists featured at an exhibit at the Marshall Field and Co. Gallery in Chicago.

Reviews of Mitchell's work appeared in the Chicago's Evening Post, the Nation, the Chicagoan, and The Chicago Tribune. In general, critics appreciated "the unconventional liveliness and humor" of her work, although some of her pieces, including several with African American subjects and one that satirized censoring nudity in art, were controversial.

She was a member of the Chicago Arts Club, the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, the Romany Club (Chicago), and The Ten (Chicago).

List of Sculptures

• At the Opera
• Chicken Farmer
• Club President
• Fig Leaves
• Hallelujah
• In a Street Car
• Labor Leader
• Listening to Bertrand Russell
• Negro Madonna
• Negro Mask
• School Teacher
• Suggested by Mrs. Untermeyer
• Well Fed

Death

Tennessee Mitchell was last seen on December 20, 1929, and was found dead in her studio apartment in Chicago a week later. A maid reported that she had not been seen for several days, so police entered her home on December 26 and found her body. The police reported that she had died from "a hemorrhage of the lungs while asleep," but some of her friends suspected suicide, possibly an overdose of sleeping pills.

Sources

• Bassett, John Earl (2006). Sherwood Anderson: An American Career. Plainsboro, NJ: Susquehanna UP. ISBN 1-57591-102-7
• "Ex-Wife of Anderson, Novelist, Found Dead; Sculptress Had Lain Lifeless for a Week in Chicago House Before Police Broke In." The New York Times. Dec. 27, 1929. p. 12.
• Spears, Timothy B (2005). Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871-1919. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0226768740
• Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: A Biographical Dictionary (2001). Eds. Rima Lunin Shultz and Adele Hast. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.

External links

• Entry on Tennessee Mitchell Anderson at the Illinois Women Artists Project
• Obituary in The New York Times