The Ransom Center’s recently-processed archival collection titled “1932 German Elections Ephemera Collection” was assembled in the 1930s by the German-American book seller Paul Gottschalk. The sequence of events that the collection documents—that is, the rise of Adolf Hitler to [Read more…] about Paul Gottschalk: the German bookseller who anticipated a contentious Nazi-era elections legacy
Letter in Sunwise Turn collection sheds light on forgotten artist/daredevil
Among the papers of Mary Mowbray Clarke included in the Sunwise Turn archive is Ms. Mowbray Clarke’s personal correspondence. The major portion of these letters span the years 1905–1917, from about the time she married John Mowbray Clarke up to the opening of the Sunwise Turn bookshop in partnership with Madge Jenison. A large portion of this correspondence was with her friends in the artistic and cultural community of New York in those early years of the twentieth century. A good number of these correspondents were public figures whose names are still recognized—Vachel Lindsay, Jerome Myers, Ezra Pound, Beatrice Wood—but others are essentially forgotten. One such person was the artist Howard Kretz Coluzzi.
Kretz Coluzzi was born in New York in 1876 or 1877 to Dr. F. Henry and Thekla Kretz. He was brought up in a cultured household in comfortable circumstances and first came to public attention in May 1899 when he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River. Fished from the water by the crew of a passing boat, the 22- year-old National Academy of Design student told the magistrate at his hearing the following day that he couldn’t explain his jump but that he “felt sure I would not be injured and that I would come out all right.” He added that he’d previously made high jumps into Schroon Lake in the Adirondacks that had seemed more dangerous to him than this leap.
While Kretz Coluzzi continued to display eccentricities, along with, apparently, considerable artistic ability and a fair measure of ordinary human sociability, he never again attempted a feat of such bravado. Howard Kretz’s acquaintance with Mary Mowbray Clarke was probably a result of her husband’s role in presenting the 1913 Armory Show, at which Kretz Coluzzi exhibited. With the Mowbray Clarkes and Madge Jenison hard at work readying their shop for its late 1915 opening, Kretz Coluzzi pitched in with freely offered decorating ideas and practical woodworking skills.
The Sunwise Turn quickly became a springboard for another creative venture for the artist: the Lewisohn sisters’ Neighborhood Playhouse. Alice and Irene Lewisohn had been pupils, and eventually good friends, of Mary Mowbray Clarke, so Howard Kretz’s artistic association with the playhouse was, if not inevitable, at least not surprising. Kretz Coluzzi produced ideas for set designs for several productions at the playhouse between 1915 and 1919.
His theatrical work was significant and appreciated, notwithstanding his notable absence at a critical juncture during the preproduction of Lord Dunsany’s The Queen’s Enemies in 1916. When he finally showed up just before dress rehearsals, he explained his absence as having been provoked by the cutting down of his favorite tree on his mother’s estate. Years later Alice Lewisohn Crowley wrote, “This was the way Howard functioned. Still, this uncertain source contributed a spark to the family spirit and was as indefatigable in work as in mourning.”
At some point in the 1920s Kretz Coluzzi forsook New York, where he’d spent years commuting between Manhattan, with its cultural excitement, and the Adirondacks’ green solitude, for northern New Mexico. In Santa Fe he spent his last years drawing and painting, teaching (at least some of the time at the Santa Fe Art School), and engaging in various hijinks. He died on March 27, 1942 from an infected cat scratch.
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![Final page of letter of June 10, 1913, in which Howard Kretz mentions his fear that the resort camp’s cows will be “insulted [by his mother’s new fence] and tear down the fence because they are not allowed to tread the tennis courts to pieces.” He closes with his signature and a sketch of two presumably insulted cows. The letters in this 1913–1916 group are all signed “Howard Col Kr” or “Howard C K,” so his practice of identifying himself as Howard Kretz Coluzzi was evidently still in the future.](https://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/files/2015/02/Sunwise_Turn_17_5_002_edited-1.jpg)
A note from James Purdy cheers up “Wicked Witch of the West” actress Margaret Hamilton
The papers of American author James Purdy (1914–2009) at the Ransom Center include a missive written to Purdy in the spring of 1971 by the actress Margaret Hamilton (1902–1985). Hamilton is, of course, best known for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.
The communication fills three pages of a whimsical Rosalind Welcher greeting card and continues onto both sides of a sheet of the actress’s personalized note stationery. From internal evidence in Hamilton’s letter, as well as from an earlier one in the collection from playwright Neal Du Brock to Purdy, it’s evident she had starred in Du Brock’s dramatization of Purdy’s novel The Nephew. The production was presented by the Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, New York in early 1971.
Du Brock’s adaptation wasn’t particularly well received and closed with considerable gloom among the play’s company. Purdy evidently wrote a consoling note to Du Brock, which led Du Brock to suggest that Miss Hamilton, who had clearly felt stung by the reviews, might be cheered by a positive word from the original author.
Purdy’s ensuing note to Hamilton seemingly helped lift the actress’s spirits, and she responded in her letter of April 23, 1971, “how very dear of you to write me…and perk up such a dismal Easter.” She went on to say she was then in Boston at her alma mater, Wheelock College, recovering from the flu and looking forward, upon her recovery, to appearing in a play with the school’s drama department.
After recounting the hectic events surrounding the production of The Nephew and its treatment in the press, the scarcely wicked witch continued with the observation that “it is amazing how vulnerable we all are—to negative criticism—we remember each phrase—do we remember the kind or approving phrases? No! It really boils down to one man’s opinion. And we do ask for it!” Hamilton closed with an invitation to Purdy to “come & have tea or a drink… sometime this summer if you are in New York.”
The James Purdy papers are currently being processed and will be available to scholars once cataloging is complete.
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