Elizabeth McCausland

Elizabeth McCausland was an art critic who argued that photography and public art mattered more than the gallery market, and she was Berenice Abbott's partner for thirty years. She wrote for the Springfield Republican from 1923 and then for Parnassus and other journals, and her criticism is unusual for the period in taking documentary photography, printmaking and the Federal Art Project as seriously as painting. She wrote the text for Changing New York, Abbott's survey of the city demolishing and rebuilding itself, and the captions are hers: they name rents, occupancies and the dates buildings were due to come down, which is what turns the pictures from nostalgia into a record. She also campaigned for the Federal Art Project against the congressional attacks that eventually killed it, and wrote monographs on Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Hartley and George Inness. She and Abbott met around 1935 and lived together in New York until McCausland died in 1965; the relationship was known to their circle and unmentioned in print in either of their lifetimes, which was the ordinary arrangement. She was blacklisted from some publications in the 1950s for her left politics. Her papers are at the Archives of American Art, and the recovery of her reputation has followed Abbott's, which is itself an illustration of how such partnerships get recorded. She wrote under her own name at a time when few women held staff critic positions in American papers. Changing New York was reissued in full in 1997 with her original captions restored, most of which the 1939 edition had cut. She and Abbott are buried apart.

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