Portraits from the Past
Midcentury Greenwich Village was a happening place, making the studio of a noted artist whose daughter was at Columbia Nursing a magnet for students of the time.
Senior Seminar (from the left, Patty Gleason, Pamela Scott, Peggy McEvoy, Jean Monahan, Lois Mueller, Paula Grossman, and Yvonne Corpuz)
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Columbia Nursing students had an open invitation to the Greenwich Village studio and gallery of portrait and landscape artist Gene Ritchie Monahan, the mother of Jean Monahan (now Jean Kelly), BS ’60.
Her studio became a gathering place, refuge, and jumping-off point for nursing students to explore New York City and its vast cultural offerings. A successful artist, Gene Monahan was a revelation to many of the students, at a time when young women’s career choices were often seen as being limited to teacher, nurse, or secretary.
Jean Kelly—known as Jeanie—described the scene in a recent biography of her mother:
“The studio gallery was a feast for all the senses. There were exhibits on the walls and paintings in progress; music from WQXR wafted through the studio,” along with “the perfume of my youth... coffee, cigarette smoke, and turpentine.”
During those years, Gene painted dozens of portraits of nursing students that offer a glimpse of the times and a glint of each sitter’s personality: peaceful, shimmering “Meditation in Yellow,” for example; focused, intense “Carolyn” in red; and “Yvonne,” with a sideways glance, in crisp blue. Jeanie and several of her classmates also posed in their uniforms for a group portrait titled “Senior Seminar” that her mother painted in 1960.
Last spring, Jeanie brought several of the portraits to Columbia Nursing’s annual reunion to give away to her classmates, as part of her goal to find homes for her mother’s paintings and other works.
“Our family goal is to have our unassuming mother recognized as a significant pioneer woman portrait artist of the 20th century,” she says.
A new adventure in New York
Genevieve “Gene” Ritchie was born in 1908 in Duluth, Minnesota, and discovered her passion for making art in high school. Just after she graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA, Art Digest magazine featured a self-portrait of her on its cover, calling her its “find of the year.”
She married George Monahan in 1934. Commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army Ordnance Department, he was stationed stateside for the duration of World War II. During this time, Gene Monahan—with two children and a third on the way—went back to school to earn a master’s in art education. She then became supervisor of art in the Faribault, Minnesota, school system, a position she held for the duration of the war.
“After the war, as the family traversed from place to place, there was little time for painting,” her daughter later recounted. “However, art, or the creative process, was involved in most of her activities of daily living. If it was a recipe book she needed, she bound a book. An ashtray? She hammered one out of brass. A bowl? She threw one on her wheel. A dress for an opening? She made one (without a pattern).”
In the early 1950s, George Monahan was stationed in Colorado Springs, the family settled down, and Gene at last had more time to paint. “Usually these were portraits, always from life, of those around here, whether family, friends, or a store clerk with an interesting face,” her daughter recalls.
When George retired from the Army in 1953, the family decided to move to New York City—he to explore the fledging field of electronics, while Gene pursued her artistic career.
George was hired to write the operations manual for the first U.S. nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, while Gene soon found success in the art world. She entered a portrait in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Show and won first prize, which included a scholarship to the New York Academy of Art and Design, where she became a teaching fellow.
Tuesday nights at Gene’s studio
Her studio, on the first floor of the brownstone where the family lived, at 22 East 13th Street, was a haven for young artists and—once Jeanie began studying at Columbia—nursing students and medical students as well. “If my mom was there, her door was open,” Jeanie recalls. She was always ready “to hear the latest tale of triumph or heartbreak or to have an intellectual discussion.”
Gene’s openness and warmth came from her being “a pioneer woman from Minnesota,” Jeanie says. “She was always excited to meet somebody new.”
Portraiture was her specialty, and visitors could count on Gene inviting them to sit for her. Meeting at her studio became a weekly routine for nursing students, who “would gather on Tuesday nights and paint each other or just hang out,” Jeanie recalls, to talk about the news and issues of the day.
“It was one of those pivotal times,” she adds. “I felt like we were transforming from the old men to a new, enlightened political scene.”
Her mother was on the cusp of the feminist movement, Jeanie notes, and struggled throughout her career with being a woman artist in a man’s world. “She was very interested in the fact that when she was reading the reviews, the critics would say, ‘Oh, he has masterful brush strokes and strong this and that,’ because they would see her name as Gene and think that it was Eugene. So they thought she was a guy.”
Falling in love with opera
Lois Muellar Glazier, BS ’60, is one of the nursing students who found a home at Gene’s studio. Gene was “a very warm and outgoing individual, so it was fun to go down there and hang out every once in a while,” Glazier says.
Spending time with Gene was eye-opening for Glazier, because it was the first time she’d met someone’s mother “who did anything but cleaned and cooked. And that was a totally new thing for me.”
After growing up in suburban New Jersey, “just living in New York was a very expanding experience, because you had all the museums and theaters and the opera,” Glazier says. Nursing students even received free opera tickets back then, thanks to a generous alumna.
“I had never been to an opera. And so there were a group of us that started going to the opera . . . and I developed a lifelong love of opera because I started going as a student at Columbia.” And when My Fair Lady was a hit on Broadway, Glazier joined a group of nursing students and medical students to camp out overnight on the sidewalk for tickets.
“I really missed the liberal arts part of my college education when I went to nursing school, because it was so heavily into the sciences and everything. And so I was using the city as my liberal arts education. Part of that was hanging out at Gene Monahan’s art studio.”
After graduation, Glazier taught nursing for several years, earning a master’s degree in 1965. She then completed a PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Kansas and in 1974 joined the faculty of a new baccalaureate nursing program at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, later becoming its assistant dean and ultimately serving the school for 26 years.
Learning how to look at a painting
Patricia Gleason Daugharty, BS ’60, first came to the studio to pose for Gene’s students. In return, Gene taught her how to paint.
“I met some really interesting people,” Daugharty says. “I actually learned how to paint a portrait, but I also realized at the time [that] being a painter is a very, very meticulous process, and it just didn’t really suit my personality. It just was not my thing, but what it did do was show me how to look at a painting.”
The experience also helped spark a lasting love for art, art history, and museums. Daugharty took the Fine Arts Museums two-year course in art history and has subsequently served for over 30 years at that museum as a docent in San Francisco, where she has lived with her husband since 1967.
Peggy McEvoy, BS ’60, began visiting Gene’s studio soon after befriending Jeanie. “She was one of the first people I met there at [Columbia] Nursing, and I was very impressed with her because she’d already worked in a hospital. She knew a lot more than any of us did.” McEvoy had studied art but was in nursing school because “my father said, ‘You’re going to die of hunger as an artist, so you have to go to nursing school.’”
But McEvoy neither went into nursing nor returned to art. Instead, she went on earn a doctorate in public health from Columbia in 1979 and had a distinguished career in public health. When the United Nations launched UNAIDS in 1996, she was tapped to lead the program in the Caribbean, serving 21 countries, a position she held until her retirement.
‘Best job ever’ at Bellevue
In 1960, Gene and George decided to return to Minnesota, where she founded an artist colony at Rainy Lake, on the Canadian border. Every week for a decade, Gene made pen and ink sketches for the Rainy Lake Chronicle, a folksy newspaper with a worldwide distribution.
Back in New York, after her graduation from Columbia Nursing, Jeanie Kelly took a job in med-surg at Bellevue Hospital. During college, she had volunteered in the hospital’s emergency department and knew that’s where she wanted to be, so when a job opened up she applied and was hired to work on the night shift. Soon, she was promoted to her “best job ever”: night supervisor of Bellevue’s three emergency services.
Jeanie left the workforce in 1962 to marry and raise her family. When the time came to return to work, she decided to find a different, less demanding profession. She enjoyed 30 years as a successful floral designer and decorator, a job that also required hard work and long hours. As she wrapped up that phase of her life, Jeanie, too, decided to return to Minnesota to help her mother.
“One of the highlights of that particular period of time was the day I looked out the window and it was minus 40 degrees,” Jeanie recalls. She told her mom to pack her bags and get ready to go south. They took a three-month road trip across the United States, visiting Gene’s old college friends and Jeanie’s nursing school classmates. When they returned to Minnesota, they woke up to four inches of snow on top of the car. “But you know, it was a wonderful time for my mother and myself.”
Kelly, Daugharty, Glazier, McEvoy, and several other members of the Class of 1960 continue to stay in touch. Jeanie believes that an experience they shared may have helped forge their strong bonds. That class was the first whose members were allowed to marry while they were students, and several did. By the time graduation neared, two members of the class were visibly pregnant—and were told they could not walk with their classmates in the ceremony.
Banding together, the Class of 1960 said they would boycott graduation en masse unless their pregnant classmates were allowed to participate. The administration backed down and allowed everyone to take part in the ceremony.
For Jeanie, joining her classmates to support one another was a new and empowering experience, she recalls. After growing up with two brothers, “all of a sudden, I had a lot of sisters.” She still feels the same way today.