The recently renovated Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica has an attractive circular bar in the lobby, a steakhouse and music venue in the basement, and a gallery in the back of the main floor, Gallery 33, which the night I visited last week, was holding an interesting exhibition devoted to Anais Nin, with artifacts, artworks, letters, portraits and personal belongings from Nin, or about her (such as paintings Henry Miller made for her) as well all as artworks inspired by contemporary artists inspired by Nin. The exhibition, ANAIS NIN Celebrating a Renegade runs through March 22nd.
Celebrating a Renegade was curated by Amber Artucci, The Georgian Hotel’s creative director in collaboration with Elizabeth Banks’ production company Brownstone Productions whose producer Brandon Milbradt is developing an Anais Nin limited series and was one of the evening’s hosts along with Tree Wright from the Anais Nin Foundation who was also in attendance.
Among Nin’s exhibited artifacts are three of her “Circle of Friends” drawings, listing groupings of her friends in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, and the tendrils of each of their connections as they spiral out (if you look closely enough there are quite a few famous names to recognize).
There was a desk and typerwriter, and a traveling bag filled with notebooks, photos, letters and manuscripts – all courtesy of the Nin Foundation and Brownstone Productions.
In addition to the never before exhibited Henry Miller watercolors and letters from Miller to Nin (she financially supported him for over 20 years), there is a gorgeous portrait by Don Bachardy that conveys Nin’s impish and seductive charm.
The contemporary artists exhibited include Colette Standish’s collages, Michelle Magdalena Maddox and Javiera Estrada’s photos and a painting by Chloe Strang.
Nin is perhaps best known as a writer of erotic stories, “Delta of Venus” being among her best-sellers, and for her diaries, the majority of which were only published posthumously.
If you recall reading Nin in your youth, or are only discovering her now, or have never heard of her, there’s a reason for that: Nin is a writer whose reputation seems to rise and fall over time, whose books disappear and return to the shelves, often in response to seismic convulsions in American society. Her popularity often peaks at times of resurgent feminism, and often is derided or dismissed in times of relative comfort. Accordingly, Nin’s re-emergence seems tailor made for our current moment, in which a part of the society would like to turn back the clock on women’s rights and even on their own agency and control of their own bodies.
As a feminist icon there is much to admire: Nin was very much a woman who forged her own way. Born in France to Cuban parents, her parents divorced when she was two and her mother took her to live in Barcelona before settling in New York when Nin was a teenager (But she would never lose her French accent). When publishers rejected her, she bought a press and printed her books herself. She loved who she wanted when she wanted including Henry Miller and analyst Otto Rank She had an abortion (which she wrote about). She wrote about everything in her life: her loves, her ambitions, her dreams, even her fabrications and her mistakes – of which there were many.
Nin’s detractors write of her narcissism and egotism. There is the matter of her bigamy: Nin for a time was simultaneously married to two men, a fiction she maintained for years trying to keep her various stories straight. And there is also the matter of her adult consensual affair with her own father, about which she chose to feature and publish in the second volume of her diaries, titled Incest (no sublety here). And, of course, the erotica she wrote for pay.
Of course we need not like the person to like the work. And we need not like the work to like what a writer represents. In Anais Nin, we have a renegade whose work continues to inspire a new generation even when Nin herself was controversial and her own actions problematic. And if she were here, or at the Georgian last week, I’m sure she would have written about it.