Minna Citron

Unidentified photographer, Minna Citron, ca. 1948. Collection of Christiane H. Citron, Denver. Born in New Jersey but raised in Brooklyn, Minna Wright was the much-desired daughter and fifth child of well-established merchants.1 She married in 1917 at the age of twenty to Henry Citron, following a courtship of getting to know one another through their common interests in dancing and sports like tennis, golf, and horseback riding.2 Her overbearing mother, having been widowed in 1905 when Minna was just eight years old, wholeheartedly approved the marriage, encouraging her daughter to follow societal norms that “girls must marry.”3 Although Minna Citron did not recognize her ambitions to be an artist until around 1924, she realized almost immediately that she desired more independence to pursue interests outside of her marriage. When the United States entered World War I only two weeks after their marriage, she joined the American Red Cross Motor Corps. Her husband objected to this volunteer activity, presumably because it distracted from the expectation of her full-time duties as a wife, and balked at the idea of her driving the ambulance (they compromised and she instead rode inside as a nurse). Because of her husband’s prosperity working for his family’s paper box manufacturing business, Citron had a fair amount of help caring for the couple’s two sons—born in 1919 and 1923—but she was unhappy in her life and marriage (compounding things, her domineering mother had moved in with the young couple).4 She watched as her friends had “their two babies” and “eas[ed] their way out of the house and into professions.”5 One friend, in particular, enrolled in the psychology program at the New York Social Work School, and Citron tagged along to a lecture by Marion Kenworthy (1891-1980). Sigmund Freud’s ideas were already in the air, and this and other experiences reinforced a growing consciousness of her personal growth as an individual from the “immature girl” her husband had married.6 On the advice of a psychologist at her children’s school, she entered psychoanalysis with Frankwood E. Williams (1883-1936) around the middle of the decade. Citron recalled in later autobiographical writings that she hoped the lengthy process of analysis would allow her to “achieve more personal freedom” and “grow up.”7 She began to test new waters by attending art classes at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (1924-25), the New York School of Applied Design for Women (1925-27), and the Art Students League starting in summer 1928. She pursued classes with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaïdes, among others. Flexing her independence outside the home, she also regularly attended Miller’s Wednesday night tea party at his studio and remembered “I’m free!” when taking the bus back to her apartment.8 Shortly thereafter, Citron embarked on two European trips, first in June 1931, taking her older son Casper to Paris with a group of classmates from the Art Students League, and the following summer she went to Germany with her younger son.0 Citron’s professional breakthrough was her “Feminanities” show at Midtown Gallery in May 1935 (the title intentionally elided the words “femininity” and “inane” to form a pun suggesting Citron’s views about the depleted state of women’s civic engagement).9 Previously, she had two solo shows in 1932—one of paintings at Brownell-Lambertson Gallery in February and the other of drawings and lithographs at the New School in November—and neither generated much critical notice. This third exhibition at Midtown caused such a stir that every local paper carried a review and even the national Time magazine offered a short feature.10 Citron’s paintings called attention to the superficiality and immaturity of middle-class American women by parodying aspects of their daily life, like shopping and beauty culture. In the post-suffrage decades, collective feminist action had waned as several disparate ideological factions comp