“Everybody’s saying, ‘Well, what do you mean by remorse?’” said the artist Maira Kalman, whose latest book, “Still Life With Remorse,” is a meditation in words and pictures on the nature of remorse, memory and family lore.
“And I say regret is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined the roast, I’m sorry I didn’t come to your birthday party.’ Regret is OK,” she said. “Remorse is, ‘I’m sorry I ruined your life.’ Remorse is deep sorrow and guilt. There is more history. There’s more, ‘What did I do to somebody?’”
It was a late afternoon in early November, less than two weeks before Ms. Kalman’s 75th birthday. She was sitting in her apartment in Greenwich Village, drinking tea she had brewed with fresh mint.
She has lived there for more than 40 years, with her husband, the graphic designer Tibor Kalman, before he died in 1999, and raised their two children there: Lulu works in the culinary world, and Alexander is an artist who also works closely with Ms. Kalman on her projects. She has an art studio a few floors below in the same building.
The idea for the book came in part because of aging: “That sense of: What are the things that are wonderful? What do I want to do? What’s happened?” But also because she heard the word “remorse” a lot. “Over and over again in context, out of context,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’”
Ms. Kalman was at an artist residency in Italy when she began work. “I was sitting there looking at the ocean and thinking of one story after another about remorse, and I thought, ‘This is perfect, the perfect setting,’” she said with a laugh.
Her new book combines short, poetic writings, both funny and melancholy, on cultural figures — Tolstoy and his wife, Sophia Behrs; Kafka; Chekhov and their particular brands of remorse.
Ms. Kalman’s process is to follow her interests and her emotions. “What happens to me — and this is how I do all my work — is that I wander around, not in a daze but in a kind of daydream, and things appear,” she said. “Whatever jolts me or makes me stop in my tracks, usually with joy.”
Sometimes she writes first; other times she paints first. Often she paints from photographs. For the chapter about Tolstoy, for example, she collected photos of his family. “His wife was an amateur photographer, so there are hundreds of photos of them,” she said. “He was always looking deranged and furious.”
She also covers her own family history, which stretches from Belarus to Tel Aviv to New York City. “So many of the stories in my family were about this heartbreak of what you haven’t done well in your life,” she said.
Nor does she spare herself. In the chapter Dream, she wrote:
I dreamt
someone else was stupid
for a change.
Such a relief,
albeit a fleeting one.
The accompanying paintings, which are on display at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Chelsea until the end of November, are brightly colored and mostly absent of humans, filled with images of interior spaces — flowers, fruit and candlesticks.
On the coffee table in her living room was a big bouquet of roses a friend had brought her the night before. The roses were a pale shade of pink, a color that is a theme in the paintings throughout her book. “There’s no more pink left in the art supply store,” she joked. “I pinked out.”
Ms. Kalman was born in Tel Aviv. Her father was a diamond dealer whose work brought the family to America in 1954. He opened an office on 47th Street, and they lived in Riverdale in the Bronx.
Her mother, Sara Berman, who wore white all the time, was the subject of a 2017 show by Ms. Kalman and her son, “Sara Berman’s Closet,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ms. Kalman’s sister was a painter who now mostly does interior design. “Other than that, there isn’t a soul who did anything creative at all,” Ms. Kalman said. “All the women were funny and eccentric and had a great sense of storytelling.”
Ms. Kalman attended the High School of Music & Art near Lincoln Center, now LaGuardia High School, and studied the piano. She still plays, and her new book has a few classical “musical interludes” — that is, paintings of sheet music — included.
Her parents moved back to Israel when she was attending New York University. It was at N.Y.U. that she met Tibor Kalman, in a summer class in 1969.
“I was failing math and economics and was taking those classes over, and he was failing stuff too,” she said. “So we met, and it was really wonderful because the group of people, the failures, were so funny and interesting that it was a wonderful summer and brought me Tibor.”
On their first date, they went to Washington Square Park, and he ordered a black coffee to impress her. They both ended up dropping out of school.
Mr. Kalman became a lauded graphic designer who designed several album covers for Talking Heads, among other artists, and was the founding editor of Colors, a cult favorite magazine owned by Benetton. They lived in Rome for two years in the 1990s because of that work.
“Still Life With Remorse” is dedicated to her late husband and late mother. “They were my greatest loves besides my children,” Ms. Kalman said. “They were my greatest loves and my greatest champions, and they made sense of the world for me.”
Ms. Kalman lives alone and takes daily walks in Central Park and is an avid watcher of foreign mystery series. “Miss Merkel,” a riff on Miss Marple about the former chancellor Angela Merkel solving crimes in small German towns, is a recent favorite.
Her apartment has a long hallway filled with a vast collection of books, arranged by subject matter: photography into performing arts, into art and architecture and design, into gardens, and industrial design into graphic design.
On shelves opposite the books are treasured objects: silk thread from Japan, a framed photograph of her mother-in-law (who is still alive and “the femme fatale of her retirement community,” Ms. Kalman said) a photo of her husband in Hungary — he was born in Budapest — and a dog painting she found.
Downstairs in her studio she has a box filled with oddly named food from all over the world, including the Idaho Spud Bar and Just Brutal potato chips from Russia. On a wall is embroidery she had made of phrases used to describe colors in “Madame Bovary.”
Ms. Kalman has an apartment in Tel Aviv and has family there. “I have been back since the beginning of the war, and it was an extraordinary experience,” she said. “I have relatives who are very right wing. I have relatives who are very left wing, some in the middle, and there’s a tremendous amount of opposing ideals and opposing ideas. But they’re all incredible people. So I don’t know what will happen.”
For her 75th birthday, Ms. Kalman was planning a trip with her son to visit her husband’s grave at a Westchester cemetery, followed by lunch at the counter at the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art. “The last time I went there, the two people next to me ordered a million desserts,” she said. “I said, ‘Are you having some kind of dessert tasting?’ And they said, ‘No, we just ordered all the desserts.’ And I thought these people know how to live.”
She already knows what she wants to do for her next projects. One will be a kind of follow-up to “Still Life With Remorse” on the topic of joy. Another will be a tome on trees, for which she has a stack of books for inspiration. She’s not sure what will be in the book on joy other than a painting of Sarah Bernhardt standing in front of the sea in Normandy.
To start the creative process, she’ll once again visit her husband’s grave. “I have a coffee and a doughnut,” she said. “Now I have a chair and a table. I’m going to sit next to the grave, and I’m going to write the beginning of joy and see how it works.”
“It may not work, but we just hang out,” she said. “It’s incredibly relaxing, and everybody’s spirits lift, and it’s easier to talk. Maybe it’s easier to talk to a dead person than it is to a living person.”
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