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Kay Boyle

Purchase any original watercolor painting and the entire cost will go to Black Women’s Blueprint—providing a blueprint for black liberation through a feminist lens. Black Women’s Blueprint envisions a world where women and girls of African descent are fully empowered and where gender, race and other disparities are erased.

Original 11x17” watercolor portrait of Kay Boyle as featured in The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. Framed as shown in alternate images. Comes with a copy of the book signed by the illustrator.



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As she appears in the text:

“Caresse Crosby, then Polly Peabody, inventor of the modern bra, was married with two children when she met Harry Crosby, six years her junior, at a picnic in Boston in 1920. Harry threatened to kill himself if she didn’t divorce her husband, marry him, and change her first name so it formed “a cross” with his. In Paris, burning through Harry’s trust fund, the couple founded the iconic Black Sun Press and published some of the first works of Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Anaïs Nin, and Henry Miller. The couple vowed to commit a joint suicide on Halloween of 1942 by jumping out of a plane, but Harry beat her to it, shooting himself and his lover, Josephine, in a New York hotel room in 1929. Caresse and Harry Crosby published Kay Boyle’s first book, Short Stories, at Black Sun Press, and when Kay needed money for an abortion, Harry paid. Edmund Wilson insulted her 1944 novel Avalanche, calling it ‘feminized Hemingway.’“

Read more about The Art of the Affair, by Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon. ︎︎︎