Lyanne Malamed: Art Eternal

Introduction

During her impressive six-decade career, beginning in the mid-1950s, Lyanne Malamed (known professionally as Lyanne) invented a rich and enchanting visual world firmly rooted in art history. She repurposed traditional poses, gestures, and symbolism into painted environments that celebrate the entire cycle of life—from childhood to old age and beyond (Plates 1, 4, 5, and 7). A humanist existing in an often-jaded art world, Lyanne followed her own path, which resulted in work that is both original and compelling. 

Youth and Education

Born in 1931, during the Great Depression, Lyanne Schneider’s initial exposure to art was limited to reproductions in art history books. She did not visit a museum during her formative years because none existed near her hometown of Alton, Iowa, at the time.2 Nonetheless, Lyanne pursued a professional art career. 

In the 1950s, it was rare for women in the rural Midwest to attend college. But Lyanne broke expectations by working her way through Briar Cliff College, a Catholic institution forty miles away from home, in Sioux City. Lyanne thrived in college. Among other things, she did layouts and illustrations for a student publication.3 

Lyanne’s world further expanded when she attended the MFA program at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, from 1953–56. There she had the opportunity to visit art galleries and museums. Typical for American art schools at the time, the curriculum was based on the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, which focused on rigorous figure drawing. Lyanne utilized these technical skills to paint in whatever manner she chose. 

Her professors, however, rejected the long-outmoded approach of French academicism in their own artwork. They also spurned American art that was popular at the time, including Regionalism—a product of the Midwest, where they were living. Regionalism is exemplified by clearly rendered rural subjects, such as the Iowan Grant Wood’s (1891–1942) American Gothic (1930; The Art Institute of Chicago). They also shunned the radical New York School of Abstract Expressionism, epitomized by the swirling nonobjective art of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956).4 

Rather, Lyanne’s professors—the Ukrainian-American Eugene Ludins (1904–1996) and the native Argentinian printmaker Mauricio Lasansky (1914–2012)—favored the European modernist movements of Expressionism and Surrealism that stressed emotion over beauty.5 These artists created multi-figural compositions with abstracted elements that influenced Lyanne. 

Early Career (1956–1980)

At university, Lyanne met Sasha Malamed, a recently minted PhD from Columbia University, who worked in the biology department. The couple married in 1956 and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for Sasha’s new position at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. Lyanne continued her art while also working as a librarian in a predominantly African American community. In Cleveland, the Malameds avidly participated in the Civil Rights Movement. They also met a lifelong friend, the ceramicist and painter Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011).

Lyanne’s career began on a high note the following year with a two-person exhibition at the Karamu House, which is dedicated to promoting multicultural arts. Her co-exhibitor, Harold W. Bradley, had been a classmate of Lyanne’s at the university and had played on the football team. At the time of the exhibition, Bradley was playing professionally with the Cleveland Browns.6 

Lyanne’s most significant contribution to this exhibition was Young Negro Girl (Fig. 5), a student work that displays her professors’ preference for expression while it also leans toward abstraction. Another work from this time, I’m King of the Mountain (Plate 1), anticipates her later work in terms of its complicated composition, symbolism, and fancifulness. Notably, Lyanne’s work was also exhibited in two annual juried shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as in a traveling exhibition that the museum organized.7 

In 1958, Sasha accepted a teaching position at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, where Lyanne continued to work as a librarian. While she enjoyed living in the center of the art world and visiting art museums, Lyanne was not swayed to change her artistic style. Her artwork was widely shown in five major galleries in Manhattan, from 1959 through 1964. Lyanne also won first prize at the New York City Center for Young Negro Girl, in an exhibition judged by artists Leon Kroll and Bernard Perlin.8 

Five years after her son, David, was born in 1962, the family settled in suburban New Jersey. Sasha was employed by Rutgers Medical School/the Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine, where he soon became a prominent professor.9 While opportunities to display her artwork could not compare with what they had been in New York, Lyanne did have a notable solo exhibition at the Somerset Art Association in 1975, where she exhibited Icarus and Madonna No. 2. (Plates 2 and 3).

Lyanne continued focusing on the female form, at a time when women’s topics were in the air in both life and art.10 She created numerous paintings of mothers with their children, such as Madonna No. 2. At the same time, inspired by Professor Ludins, she produced complicated compositions, such as Icarus, in which figures—whom she termed the “Little Brown People”—lived in a magical realm.11 Lyanne soon combined both tendencies by placing her female subjects in invented worlds as the basis of her mature work. 

Mature Work (1981–1998) 

In 1981, Lyanne had an epiphany that launched her signature style. While attending a matinee concert with Sasha, she realized that most of the audience consisted of elderly women, many of whom were widows. At the age of fifty, Lyanne could not yet fully identify with them. But empathy compelled her to explore aging women in her artwork. Reflecting on works by artists such as the German Kathe Köllwitz (1867–1945), she treated her subjects with a rare understanding and dignity while adding her own modern sensibility (Fig. 6). 

While elderly people have been depicted throughout art history, for example, by the seventeenth-century Dutch artists Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals, they have never been a popular or sustained subject in art. Western civilization has been youth-oriented since its onset—with the idealized female kore and male kouros statues of Archaic Greece in the sixth century BCE. At this time, most people passed away before they reached forty years old. Although their numbers have increased throughout the centuries along with their longevity, senior citizens are still marginalized by society. In terms of art, ageism, including images of elderly people and artwork by older artists, has been one of the last taboos in art.12 

As Lyanne articulated, age discrimination is especially hard on elderly women: 

They are treated differently from men. It’s a much lonelier existence . . . these women are frequently alone and should not be ignored. They are valuable assets to our society.13 

Having the financial resources to paint whatever she wanted, Lyanne continued with elderly subjects for two decades, until her work became popular. Her solo exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Center in 1982 announced her new undertaking, as it consisted entirely of paintings of older women. In works such as Infinity (Plate 5), Lyanne expressed a new sense of gravity, counteracting timeworn stereotypes. For example, according to one eighteenth-century iconographic source, old women should personify longevity, drunkenness, avarice, melancholy, and envy in art.14 In contrast, Lyanne’s women are stoic and isolated in their own thoughts. Yet these are not portraits of actual women. They are “tronies”—fictional character types with believable human expression, inspired by seventeenth-century Dutch art.15 The repetition of thirteen figures on Infinity’s three panels alludes to the sheer number of widows in existence. 

Eileen Watkins, a critic for the Newark Star-Ledger, articulated Lyanne’s success in breaking stereotypes of older women, calling her:

. . . the artist who rebels against the compliant image of the serene grandmother or matriarch . . . and forces us to face up to the unpleasant reality of women bred for traditional roles who outlive their husbands . . . who are left poor, disillusioned, fearful and bitter.16 

In this statement, Watkins credited Lyanne with deconstructing the old “type” to invent a new sort of elderly female. 

By the mid-1980s, Lyanne’s work became even more sophisticated and distinctive in terms of both subject matter and materials. She created a realm in which mature women assumed poses and guises connecting them with the afterlife. Separate Faces (Plate 8) represents a breakthrough in her art. Here, two robed matrons appear in an allegorical narrative reminiscent of the Parthenon Procession (ca. 538–432 BCE.; Musée du Louvre, Paris). Like the Classical relief sculptures, these figures are posed in profile and exude a solemn dignity. 

Based on historical and cultural precedents, Lyanne incorporated symbolism to strengthen her message about the elderly. Separate Faces includes a crystal, symbolic of divine light, which is the offering in this mysterious funerary ritual. She also added masks, an attribute of Melpomene, the ancient Greek Muse of tragedy. In Greek theater, for example, actors wore a separate mask for each emotion they conveyed. Likewise, Lyanne added masks to “hide panic, terror, and fear from the rest of society and thus protect the dignity that is retained by these individuals.”17  In the late 1960s, coinciding with postmodernism’s antiauthoritarian approach, painting was seen as increasingly obsolete in the art world.18 However, artists like Lyanne found ways to push the medium further. Lyanne did so by incorporating clay to add depth and permanence, as well as by adding sheets of
23K gold leaf to her paintings.

Gold leaf disrupts the illusion of three-dimensional space by reflecting light and casting an ethereal glow. Lyanne paid tribute to late medieval and Early Renaissance art, which used gold to designate a realm reserved for sacred beings—one in which her elderly women exist.19 Her work from this era was well-received at several museums and galleries, where she exhibited alongside numerous recognized artists. Some of them, like Miriam Beerman (1923–2022), Nancy Spero (1926–2009), and Sheba Sharrow (1926–2006), also painted old women but without Lyanne’s commitment to the subject. 

Later Work (1999–2012)

Remarkably, Lyanne’s style did not change after Sasha passed away in 2001, a week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Her work had already transformed a couple of years earlier, with flatter space, delineated forms, and a more optimistic tone. This is especially noticeable in her paintings combining figures from different generations.

In one of Lyanne’s most compelling allegories, Bird Catchers III (Plate 13), two partially masked elders teach a young girl how to catch birds for food. They pass along this once important skill to future generations.20 Birds, symbolizing winged souls—departed loved ones—appear frequently in Lyanne’s work. With its heavenly gold background and figures in costumes from a bygone era, childhood, old age, and the deceased appear together to complete the cycle of life. 

Lyanne’s Visionary series (Plate 14) casts women as clairvoyants who use peculiar instruments to predict the future. Here, a middle-aged woman balances a parrot at the end of long rod from which orange spheres dangle. Mystery prevails, as parrots are known to reveal secrets, just as women have been stereotyped as gossips. The matron appears to be at home in this surreal environment; she understands what others do not and can even predict their futures.21 

Old-Age Style (2013–2016)

After the publication of the book Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman in 2012, Lyanne moved to the retirement home of Shannondell at Valley Forge, in Audubon, Pennsylvania, to be near David and his wife, Sandy, and her grandchildren. Her work reflects a newfound freedom from conventions, which typifies an artist’s so-called “old-age style.” While Lyanne had lost a little of her technical edge, she made up for it by conveying a sense of whimsicality. It is amusing, for example, that one of the women in Four with Masks One with Long Nose is clearly telling a lie because her long nose is reminiscent of the fictional character Pinocchio (Plate 16). 

Lyanne’s final series was done in the medium of egg tempera. Tempera painting has been used for millennia, in ancient Egyptian painting as well as in medieval manuscripts and Early Renaissance panel paintings. It was often combined with gold leaf until oil painting replaced it during the fifteenth century. Tempera is a fast-drying and water-soluble medium with a matte finish that can either be opaque or transparent. 

Although few artists use tempera today, Lyanne was motivated to revisit it after seeing breathtaking murals in tempera and gold leaf at the nearby St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church of Valley Forge. This was decades after last working in that medium during her college days. David assisted her in making tempera from eggs, water, and colorful spices or chalk for pigmentation.22 

Throughout her career, Lyanne painted many brides, whom she envisioned as transitional figures between childhood and adulthood. Under a Huppah (Plate 21), on a small panel, resembles the much larger oil painting Under the Huppah from 1999 (Fig. 7). However, the flatter medium of tempera is conducive to adding decorative elements, such as the flowers strewn in the background. This is also more lighthearted than the earlier work, as the couple floats above the ground in their new state of marital bliss.

Lyanne’s last signed and dated work, Woman Sketching Birds from 2016 (Plate 25), concludes her lifelong dedication to past art in her own work. On the back of the canvas, Lyanne wrote: “A Sketch after Max Beckmann,” who was a German artist (1884–1950). Specifically, the painting refers to Beckmann’s drypoint entitled Italienerin. Fittingly, this final work functions as a symbolic self-portrait: It depicts a young woman with red hair (not that different from Lyanne’s own auburn tones) and a bird on her head, who is sketching birds. 

Conclusion

Lyanne Malamed invented magical worlds that are both stunningly beautiful and full of meaning. Using the vocabulary of art history, she explored all stages of human life with dignity, through a staunch humanistic lens. But Lyanne’s mature work, which shatters stereotypes of elderly women, makes her strongest statement. Wearing ceremonial costumes, these figures may hide their true selves behind masks, but they are also wise, nurturing, and enchanting. Appropriately, Lyanne placed them in front of shimmering gold backgrounds. Like holy figures in medieval and Early Renaissance art, she renders them worthy of our adoration. Lyanne passed away in 2022 at the age of ninety with a desire for her artwork to live in perpetuity, just like the timeless characters she created. 

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Lyanne Malamed. I am grateful to David and Sandy Malamed for giving me the opportunity to continue working on this remarkable artist. 

Endnotes:

  1. Lyanne Malamed, Artist’s Statement, 1986. Lyanne Malamed papers, Birchrunville, PA.
  2. Diane P. Fischer, “Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman,” in Lyanne Malamed, Eternal Woman (Bridgewater, NJ: Flying Bird Press, 2012), 6. This book is the primary reference on Malamed, authorized by the artist. See also Diane P. Fischer, “Art for the Ages: The Paintings and Drawings of Lyanne Malamed,” Lyanne Malamed: Paintings and Drawings (Bedminster, NJ: Somerset Art Association, 2004).
  3. See Briar Cliff College, Prologues 14 (1953): 42.
  4. For definitions of the American styles of Regionalism and Abstract Expressionism see: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/american-regionalism/ and https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/abstract-expressionism
  5. For definitions of Expressionism and Surrealism see: https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/expressionism and https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/surrealism/superior-reality-of-the-subconscious
  6. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 10.
  7. Cleveland Museum of Art, Thirty-Ninth Annual Exhibition of Work by Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen, May 15–June 23, 1957, and Fortieth Annual Exhibition of Work by Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen, May 14–June 22, 1958.

    Lyanne also participated in the Thirtieth Traveling Exhibition of Oils by Cleveland Artists, September 1958–March 1959. This exhibition traveled to seven venues in Ohio, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, D.C.

    I would like to thank Tess Hamilton, Collections and Processing Archivist, Ingalls Library and Museum Archives, The Cleveland Museum of Art, for sharing the following information:

    Lyanne Malamed Entry Card to 1957 May Show. Cleveland Museum of Art May Show Records, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives, Cleveland, OH,  https://archive.org/details/CMAMS11460

    Lyanne Malamed Entry Card to 1958 May Show. Cleveland Museum of Art May Show Records, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives, Cleveland, OH,  https://archive.org/details/CMAMS11822
  8. New York City Center of Music and Drama, Inc., May 1960 Exhibition (New York, 1960).
  9. Coincidentally, Toshiko Takaezu, moved nearby around the same time and spent time with the family both at home and abroad.
  10. On the development of women’s issues and art, see Eleanor Heartney et al., After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art. 2nd ed., (Munich, New York: Prestel, 2013).
  11. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 12–13.
  12. Robert Berlind, “Art and Old Age,” Art Journal 53, no. 1 (1994): 19–21.
    https://doi.org/10.2307/777521.
  13. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 1.
  14. Herbert C. Covey, Images of Older People in Western Art and Society (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1991), 42.
  15. For a discussion of women as tronies, see Jane Kromm, “Anger, Envy, and Aging: Early Modern Transgressive Old Women,” in Frima Fox Hofrichter and Midori Yoshimoto, eds., Women, Aging, and Art: A Crosscultural Anthology (New York, London: Bloomsbury Visual
    Arts), 49.
  16. Eileen Watkins, “Sensitive Portraits of Older Women Dominate Exhibit at Clinton Gallery,” The Sunday Star-Ledger, November 7, 1982, sec. 4: 12.
  17. Lyanne Malamed: Paintings and Drawings, 1.
  18. For a definition of postmodernism see: https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/postmodernism
  19. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 19.
  20. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 25.
  21. Lyanne Malamed: Eternal Woman, 28.
  22. Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Make Tempera Paint at Home.” https://youtu.be/jBJwbEI6N1U.

Diane P. Fischer, PhD

Diane Fischer is an art historian, educator, and administrator, who is well versed in writing, speaking, and curating at a variety of institutions, including internationally. She is an experienced lecturer as well as television and radio presenter who has successfully enhanced public appreciation of art. Fischer Fine Art, Diane’s consultancy business, has been in operation for over twenty years. She advises clients on all aspects of their collections. At present, her major project is promoting, exhibiting, donating, and selling the artwork of Lyanne Malamed (1931–2022).

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With a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Diane attended the MA Program in the History of Photography at the University of New Mexico and earned a BFA from Cornell University. She has taught at Pratt Institute, Seton Hall University, Montclair State University, Crestview College, Muhlenberg College, and Furman University.

When she was Chief Curator of the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, Diane oversaw the re-installation of the collection and special exhibitions after a major renovation and expansion. She has also curated numerous other exhibitions there and contributed an essay to The Samuel H. Kress Memorial Collection catalogue. As a curator at the Montclair Art Museum, she organized several exhibitions, highlighted by Paris 1900: The “American School” at the Universal Exposition that traveled to four venues, including one in Paris; its accompanying book was translated into French. Some of her other many publications include essays in Re-presentations and Re-constructions in Nineteenth-Century Art, and The Poetic Vision: American Tonalism.


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