“The heart is a bit sad on all four corners, when it’s such a clear fall day in the middle of summer and all is wide open.”
TRQ: Sonja Sekula, Born April 8, 1918
Painter and poet Sonja Sekula, now considered to be one of the most important Swiss artists of the twentieth century, was born in Lucerne, Switzerland. When Sekula was eighteen years old, her family moved to New York where she studied with George Grosz, attended Sarah Lawrence College, and enrolled at the Arts Students League.
After only six years in New York, Sekula at the age of twenty-four had met Andre Breton, and socialized with the Surrealists Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta. She was included in Peggy Guggenheim’s “31 Women Artists” show in 1943 and had her first solo show there in 1946.
Sekula moved to the Betty Parsons Gallery after Guggenheim closed her space. At Parsons Sekula had a number of shows, despite the pressure Parsons faced from her leading male Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock to focus exclusively on their work. Parsons continued support of unorthodox, feminist and gay artists like Hedda Sterne, Alfonso Ossorio and Sari Dienes lead to the departure of Newman, Rothko and Pollock.
Openly lesbian, Sekula had a number of relationships with women. From 1935 to 1936, she was involved with writer and photojournalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach. In 1945 she fell in love with painter Alice Rahon, wife of painter Wolfgang Paalen. In 1947, Sekula moved to a loft on Monroe Street, and John Cage was among her neighbours. On a visit to St. Tropez in 1949, she met and fell in love with Manina Thoeren. However, it was only in 1963 did Sekula’s work, in the paintings Amies and Lesbianes II, reference feminine same-sex love.
Sekula suffered from depression and schizophrenia, and her mental health issues were known to those in her social circles. In 1938 Sekula attempted suicide for the first time at the age of twenty. In 1943, poet Charles Duits describes her with “eyes, clear, green, surrounded by dark rings, protruding slightly from her face, wide open, [to which they] added a hallucinatory stare. An invisible cloud enveloped Sonja, lending her movements gentleness and slowness. She was caught in a transparency, isolating her from the world.”
Sekula would be instituonalized multiple times during her life, during which she would be treated with injections and shock therapy. By 1955 her mental health had declined so much so that her parents took her St. Moritz for care. A year later, in 1956, as her schizophrenia progressed and the modernist art of her era began to fade, Sekula wrote to Parsons that “I am these days unable to paint and no doctor can bring back the necessary confidence.” She was found at one point wandering the streets, claiming to be Christ.
Tragically, Sekula hung herself in her studio in 1963. As requested, Sekula was buried in St. Moritz.
In 1971, Finch College in Manhattan had an exhibition of her most important work, which had been nearly forgotten after her death. Fifteen years later, in 1996, the Kunstmuseum in Switzerland, and the Swiss Institute in New York, exhibited works from the span of her career. Swiss pianist and composer Irene Schweizer, wrote a jazz symphony, Many and One Direction, in tribute to Sekula in 2004.
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