Pauline Gibling Schindler

Pauline Gibling Schindler (March 19, 1893 – May 4, 1977) was an American composer, educator, editor, and arts promoter, especially influential in supporting modern art in Southern California. Her husband was architect Rudolph Schindler.

This article is about the arts promoter Pauline Gibling Schindler. For the suffragist Pauline Schindler O'Neill, see Pauline O'Neill (suffrage leader).

Early life and education

Schindler House isometry

Sophie Pauline Gibling was born in Minneapolis in 1893, the daughter of Edmund James and Sophie Schlarbaum Gibling. Her father was English-born. Pauline Gibling was raised in the New York City area, and attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, where she was classmates with Alfred Kinsey.[1] She studied music at Smith College, in the class of 1915.[2] After graduation she spent two years at Hull House in Chicago.[3] She married Rudolph Schindler in August 1919; they lived briefly at Taliesin the next year before moving to Los Angeles, where Schindler worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. Their home, the Schindler House in West Hollywood, was completed in 1922, an experiment in shared living, called "the built evocation of Schindler's collaboration with his wife."[4]

Career

While still in Los Angeles, she taught at the Walt Whitman School in Boyle Heights, and served with Rudolph on the school's board. Through the school, they met Edward Weston, whose sons were students there.[5] The couple hosted social gatherings at Schindler House, with Pauline mainly inviting artists and political thinkers.[6] Pauline wrote an affidavit of support for Richard Neutra's visa into the United States in 1923, and the Neutras later lived at Schindler House for a few years.[7]

After separating from Schindler in 1927, Pauline moved to artists' colonies at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. She edited a weekly newspaper called The Pine Cone and later another publication, The Carmelite,[8] where she clashed with fellow editor Lincoln Steffens,[9][10] and at Oceano, where she helped to edit a monthly arts journal, Dune Forum.[11] She also lived at Halcyon, Santa Fe, and Ojai during these years.[12] She returned to the Schindler House in the late 1930s, and lived there with her ex-husband until he died in 1953, and with others until her death in 1977.[13] She painted her side of the house pink, added carpeting and updated the plumbing in her later years.[14]

As a musicologist she published as "Sophie P. Gibling." [15][16]

Personal life

Pauline Gibling and Rudolph Schindler had one son, Mark. They divorced in 1940.[17] Pauline had a brief relationship with John Cage, who was almost twenty years her junior, in the 1930s.[18][19]

Legacy

The non-profit Friends of Schindler House was formed by Pauline in 1976, shortly before her death, to maintain the house. It has since become an arts center, and is open for architectural tours.[20][21]

A musical performance based on Schindler's life, Pauline: An Opera, was presented by architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena at Schindler House, in October 2013.[22]

References

1. Jonathan Gathorne-Handy, Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (Indiana University Press ): 14. ISBN 0-253-33734-8
2. Smith College Alumnae Association, Annual Register (1917): 117.
3. Thomas Lawson, "Rhapsody in Pink: Stephen Prina Paints," East of Borneo (April 11, 2013).
4. Lisa Zeigler, "California Moderne," World Monuments Fund (Spring 2003): 40-41. Archived 2011-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
5. Beth Gales Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (Getty Publications 2011): 253. ISBN 1606060708
6. "Sites: Schindler House", The MAK Center for Art and Architecture website.
7. Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture (University of California Press 1994): 42-43. ISBN 0520085892
8. "Pauline Schindler and The Carmelite: Two Meteors in Carmel's Orbit," Carmel Residents Association Newsletter (November-December 2010). Archived 2014-10-25 at the Wayback Machine
9. Peter Hartshorn, I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint Press 2011). ISBN 1582436479
10. "Dispute Over Carmel Paper Amuses Coast," Daily Capital Journal (February 26, 1929): 3. via Newspapers.com
11. Dune Forum 1(5)(May 15, 1934): 131, masthead lists her as "Associate Editor."
12. Reuben W. Borough, "Halcyon, Lone Survivor of State's Utopias, is Little Noticed, Likes It," The Fresno Bee (August 6, 1968): 29. via Newspapers.com
13. Charlie Hailey, Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place (LSU Press 2008): 231. ISBN 080713323X
14. Thomas Lawson, "Rhapsody in Pink: Stephen Prina Paints," East of Borneo (April 11, 2013).
15. Sophie P. Gibling, "Types of Musical Listening," The Musical Quarterly (1917): 385-389.
16. Sophie P. Gibling, "Problems of Musical Criticism," The Musical Quarterly 2(2)(1916): 244-248.
17. Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis in Modernism (University of California Press 2007): 153. ISBN 9780520257955
18. Stacey Allan, "The Brief Love of John Cage for Pauline Gibling Schindler," East of Borneo (January 7, 2011).
19. Thomas S. Hines, "'Then Not Yet "Cage"': The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938," in Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, John Cage: Composed in America (University of Chicago Press 1994): 84-88. ISBN 9780226660578
20. The Friends of Schindler House website.
21. Bill Rollins, "Schindler House: All but invisible amid high-rise buildings and trees, home built in 1921 continues to influence inspire", Los Angeles Times (March 13, 1983): r1.
22. "The Perils of Pauline Schindler," Arts Meme (October 15, 2013).

Other sources

• Crosse, John (2014). The Carmelites in "Bohemian Crossroads: Art & Culture Collide Then Subside on the Monterey Peninsula" edited by Ted Wells. Guardian Stewardship Editions. ISBN 978-0991134908.