Pierre 1960 Self-portraits
As many of you know when I was a little girl I was a little boy. From the tender age of three until about seven, I was known in my family as “Pierre the Artist” who lived in Paris
It’s no surprise that Bastille Day was always a big day in my family.
But it was also my mother Betty’s birthday a special day to celebrate her which I do today. It was so fitting that her birthday would coincide with a holiday that is all about Liberty and Freedom, and breaking barriers, because it was my mother who encouraged me to be creative from the very start, unflinchingly supporting my childhood identity as that little French painter named Pierre.
She provided me not only with oil paints and sable brushes but with just the right costume, mustache, and gender pronouns to complete me. When strangers in stores would stop upon seeing this little mustached child and comment “What a cute little boy,” my mother didn’t blink, just smiled and nodded her head.
Sally Edelstein at The Art Center Highland Park June 2023, in front of Video with Pierre. How pleased my mother would be to know Pierre would make an appearance 65 years later at an art show.
As a child in the early 1960s living in the cookie-cutter post-war suburbs of New York, I was an artist from a young age. Resisting the pull to be a June Cleaver in training, by age 3 I insisted others address me as Pierre the Artist from Paris. Donning a requisite woolen beret, a striped French sailor shirt and a clip-on brown mustache to authenticate my Parisienne look,
The roots of my feminism were improbably seeded early. While neighborhood girls invited me to play house with their dainty melamine toy tea sets, I much preferred to play alone, fancying myself a struggling artist holed up in a cold-water flat in Paris reeking of linseed oil and turpentine. In a mid-century suburban world of Mallomars and Ding Dongs, any resemblances to Proustian madeleines existed purely in my imagination.
Once transformed, I was an expatriate without ever leaving the comfortable confines of my Long Island home. Something inside me wanted to break the norms even without having the language to express it.
In the rarefied masculine world of art, a female was far from being taken seriously.
Somehow as Pierre, I understood that. In a pre-feminist era, I pretended to be what I wasn’t, in order to be who I was.
Freedom of expression was my Bastille Day Mother Betty’s most precious gift to me and I celebrate her today.