Alice Austen’s Larky Life | The New Yorker

Austen’s trajectory, like that of many artists in New York, lastly hinged on the vicissitudes of actual property. At Clear Comfort, she constructed an existence of exceptional self-determination—for thirty years, she lived there alongside Tate, with whom she’d fallen in love throughout a trip within the Catskills. (One giddy sequence of pictures depicts a younger Tate dancing outdoors within the solar.) But Austen’s household cash was misplaced within the crash of 1929, and he or she and Tate, after struggling to help themselves, have been obliged to unload a lot of their possessions—together with a group of shells, lending a bittersweet edge to the present present’s title. In 1944, they bought the home. Tate ultimately moved in along with her household, who rejected Austen; Austen moved to the Staten Island Farm Colony, a pauper’s hospital.

Alice Austen (left) and Gertrude Tate, at Pickards Penny Photo Studio, in Stapleton, Staten Island.

A former Life journal author rediscovered Austen’s work in 1951, and a brand new surge of curiosity and help restored her to a measure of ease, earlier than her loss of life in 1952. Clear Comfort was preserved due to the efforts of Austen’s new followers (together with the photographer Berenice Abbott). It operated for a time as a reasonably typical historic-house museum: the roped-off rooms held an assortment of roughly interval furnishings, with little that was particular to Austen’s life there. The home’s official accounts elided her relationship with Tate, inspiring the activist group the Lesbian Avengers to stage a protest outdoors of it within the nineties. In 2017, although, it was named a National L.G.B.T.Q. Historic Site, and as we speak it foregrounds Tate as an important a part of Austen’s story.