Stella Bowen: Ramon Guthrie
Art, Love and War
- Periods:
- To England
- An artist's journey
- Inner worlds
- The return to England
- The war years
Period: The return to England
Ramon Guthrie
painted in Paris, c. 1928
oil on wood panel 46.1 x 37.8 cm
signed l.r., incised “STELLA/BOWEN”, not dated
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
gift of Harris Whittemore, through the Friends of the Dartmouth College Library
P.963.170
Ramon Guthrie (1896–1973) moved to Paris from New York shortly before his twenty-first birthday. From the mid 1920s he divided his time between teaching posts in America and France, and in 1932 he helped to arrange Bowen’s trip to America.
An accomplished scholar, Guthrie was a disciple of the French novelist Marcel Proust. He also painted, and wrote fiction and art criticism, but he is best known for his poetry. His major work, Maximum security ward (1970), includes this affectionate tribute to the bohemian district of Montparnasse:
Montparnasse
that I shall never see again, the Montparnasse
of Joyce and Pound, Stein, Stella Bowen,
little Zadkine, Giacommetti . . . all gone in any case,
and would I might have died, been buried there.