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Nata Piaskowski photographs are held in museums throughout the United States, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Ms. Piaskowski, described by friends as an exacting artist and inquisitive, gentle spirit, had a life touched by tragedy but brightened by creativity. Her mother and father died in the Warsaw ghetto at the hands of the Nazis. Ms. Piaskowski, born and educated in Lodz, Poland, was living in Switzerland at the start of the war and in 1942 immigrated to the United States with her husband. Not long after their arrival, her husband committed suicide. The brightness came to Ms. Piaskowski through art. Living in Carmel, Ms. Piaskowski met Weston and Johan Hagemeyer and became involved in the town's artistically progressive community. In 1947, she moved to San Francisco with painter Martin Baer, her partner until his death in 1961. The two had a great love and a lively circle of friends that spanned from the Bohemians to the Beats. She did portraits of photographers including Weston, painters including Gordon Onslow-Ford and poets including Robert Duncan. She was a regular at seminal literary events including Allen Ginsberg's first reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Although Ms. Piaskowski had long dabbled in photography, her career began in earnest in 1948 when she studied with White, known for his textural photographs, at the esteemed California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The school's guest lecturers included Adams, Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. "Her compositions were magnificent," said Robert Emory Johnson, an artist who curated Ms. Piaskowski's last major show at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon. The retrospective included black and white images from 1948 to 1992 and ranged from a painterly still life to an ethereal picture titled "Rock and Sea." [Courtesy of Carl Mautz, December 2007] |
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