Making Space for Beauty in Miniature

A. Cerisse Cohen reviews Christine Coulson’s “One Woman Show.”

By A. Cerisse CohenJanuary 29, 2025

• Fiction

• Art & Architecture

CHRISTINE COULSON’S One Woman Show (2023) embraces an unusual formal conceit: it tells the story of one woman’s life via museum wall labels. Each entry begins with the title of an “artwork,” its year of construction, details about whom the artwork features, and the name of the collection to which the artwork belongs. Coulson follows these headings with brief paragraphs that ostensibly describe the work of art, though the art demonstrates fantastical agency. These wall labels become sites for conflict and character development, the fractured structure blurring the boundaries between visual art, life, and literature while implying questions about objectification and ownership.

One Woman Show marks a return to the aesthetic subject matter of Coulson’s 2019 debut, Metropolitan Stories. Billed as a novel, that volume read instead as a story collection about the artworks and people who adorned and staffed the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following a summer internship there in 1991, Coulson worked full-time at the Met from 1994 through 2019; toward the end of her tenure, she wrote wall labels for the museum’s new British Galleries. It’s clear that Coulson is writing what she knows, and a passionate, lively imagination also pervades her prose. In One Woman Show, she sketches the outlines of a bourgeois 20th-century woman’s life with wit, exquisite detail, and poetic brevity. Coulson’s writing is not the place to find dissections of class and colonialism at the Met and in the art world at large, nor is there any hand-wringing about taking pleasure in the aesthetic. Instead, the writer embraces delight. Her enthusiasm is infectious and propulsive. It does what a good wall label does: it helps her work come alive.

The epigraph for One Woman Show offers a definition. “Garniture,” we learn, is a noun that connotes “a set of decorative objects (such as vases or urns).” Notions of adornment arise, as do images of vessels. The “set,” or a cohesive collection, becomes important, and the term resonates with a sense of theatricality. Decorative objects will form the “set” against which Coulson’s story plays out.

An exhibition title subsequently appears: “One Woman Show” will open on October 17, 2023, made possible by “gin, taffeta, and stock dividends. Additional support has been provided by quiet fortitude and a sly, necessary wit.” Gin, taffeta, and stock dividends situate the reader in a nostalgic, boozy past as they conjure the American fortunes that support such museum shows. Money is acknowledged before the text even begins. The book, and the art it details, wouldn’t exist without it. It’s accepted, up front, as a requisite for the story that’s being told.

Coulson begins her tale with “MASTERPIECE, AGED 5, 1911.” Notably, no medium is given, though the figure’s name is. She is “Caroline Margaret Brooks Whitaker (known as Kitty), b. 1906.” She belongs to the “Collection of Martha and Harrison Whitaker (known as Minty and Whit).” A running gag, throughout the book, is that each character gets a preppy nickname: Kitty’s coterie contains a Biff, a Bunty, a Gogo, a Topper, and a Ham.

And after this fanfare, Coulson finally gives us our first glimpse of her protagonist, the woman who has earned this “One Woman Show.” Coulson writes:

With arms folded in deliberate contrapposto, Minty and Whit Whitaker observe their daughter, Kitty, positioned in a strip of expensive morning sunlight. The five-year-old knows she is being watched and adjusts herself to advantage. Her glaze glows, enhanced flawlessly by her subtle sculptural design. She is all fireworks, this golden child, a delirious display of Bernini verve and unrivaled WASP artistry.

Coulson wields her expertise to generate a point of view that is simultaneously fun and erudite. Art historical terms and names—contrapposto, sculptural design, Bernini—merge with a simple description of parental adoration. The sunlight is “expensive,” the artistry is “WASP.” At an early age, Kitty recognizes her objectification and tries to leverage it. She seems to be made of porcelain or some kind of ceramic, glazed and sculptural. What’s most unusual about this “wall label” is that the artwork itself is alive and conscious. While Coulson captures a scene, freezing the parents, the light, and the glowing glaze in time, she allows her subject to move and to adjust.

The book advances through Kitty’s life at a clip; a span of six pages, for example, ages the character from 27 to 39. She goes to school, marries, travels abroad, suffers significant losses. On gray pages, we receive wall labels about other characters, including the women in Kitty’s initial bridal party. Coulson intersperses sections of dialogue among all her descriptive texts, giving voice to her artworks and texture to her larger project.

Kitty is wily and freer than one would expect an early 20th-century socialite to be, and Coulson also defines her with a small quirk: Kitty steals. In an entry titled “PETTY THIEF, AGED 27, 1933,” Coulson writes:

With increasing mastery, Kitty quietly appropriates small tokens of novel ornament from a range of sources. A fountain pen, a silver fork, a green glass marble, a hatpin in the shape of a miniature owl, collected as if they were Grand Tour souvenirs. Each object follows another bloodstained loss within her vessel at the peak of its production. Each theft brings unexplained relief.

Here Coulson returns to her motif of woman-as-vessel and notes that Kitty’s thefts attempt to make up for her significant griefs. The character gives birth to an infant who dies a moment after entering the world, and her beloved husband dies while fighting in World War II. White, wealthy, and beautiful though she may be, Kitty suffers plenty. Coulson is unsparing as she gives Kitty setbacks to overcome. While Kitty’s suffering of hardships is not the sole reason we care for her, they do reframe a life that would otherwise seem ideal. Even a woman with all Kitty’s advantages can feel a gnawing lack, and she attempts to make up for this by taking what is not hers. That itself is a decent metaphor for how much of American wealth gets made and cruelty perpetuated.

Yet Kitty’s story is not really about the ills of American inequality. If anything, it laments that tales like Kitty’s have faded away, packed up in archives and museum vaults. Kitty, aged 117 and a ghost, finally finds herself “pulled from display because of lack of relevance, lack of interest, lack of edge, lack of struggle, lack of story […] broken, irrelevant.” Coulson’s larger project is to unpack Kitty, an object of the past, and give her new life.

But to what end? The writer makes no claims on her story’s contemporary relevance. As Coulson revels in the decorative and in historical femininity, she evokes the films of Sofia Coppola. She is more in dialogue with a movie like Marie Antoinette (2016) than she is with literary and journalistic peers such as Robyn Schiff or Lauren Elkin, who in recent years, respectively, published a book of poetry about working at the Met and a reconsideration of feminist art about the body. These two writers situated themselves clearly within current discussions of gender politics and the inequalities that art and its institutions perpetuate.

This is not Coulson’s work, nor does it need to be. But one might wonder about the relationship between Kitty—surrounded by beauty and wealth, yet ultimately constrained—and her creator. Coulson has written about an institution from inside it, with little distance from her material. It’s possible that Kitty’s problem isn’t that she lacks edge, but that she lacks the je ne sais quoi—or the curatorial and trustee championship—that allows an artwork to remain on view throughout the generations.

It’s also possible, à la Coppola, that surfaces themselves are Coulson’s true theme. That’s a project unto itself, difficult to pull off in a nonvisual medium, though the writer certainly has enough storytelling ability and insight into the visual realm to make it work.

In the interest of disclosure, I feel a kinship with Coulson as I read her work. I’m enchanted by museums and galleries, the objects they contain, and the people they employ (I’m one of them). There’s something moving and transportive about encounters with historical art and artifacts that no other medium can provide. Looking at a centuries-old brushstroke or handcrafted object offers more immediate intimacy than reading any book or watching any film; pre-photography acting and music performances are entirely lost to time. It can be tempting for an enthusiastic writer to want to convey just what they find so magical about the visual realm and the world it has produced.

This adoration can, especially in violent times, feel decadent. In certain circles, one can feel pressured to defend an appreciation of fine art, and of any single object with incredible financial value. Coulson only lightly engages here. She creates a woman who’s also an object, who’s unable to escape the fact that she is part of a larger “collection” with discreet ownership. She is bound by her time and place.

This fact is not, however, what’s responsible for Kitty’s sufferings, or for her thefts. Kitty suffers because her body doesn’t work the way she wants it to, and because brutalities continue in the world and in her own home. She is powerless to stop a war, and the most she can do in the face of a violent second husband is to leave him. Where Kitty herself finds pleasure is in small transgressions, like those thefts, and in her brief romantic liaisons. And, finally, in one visual object: a Braque still life she hangs in her living room. Kitty, Coulson writes, “has grown to love the painting and its stolen words, among them one of her favorites, the French word for ‘quotidian.’”

And if that’s the best that this enormously privileged character can hope for, then why not make space for beauty in miniature, in domestic proportion, “chipped, cracked, and packed away” though it may become?

Ultimately, One Woman Show is less an argument about gendered constraints than it is one for taking art and artifacts out of storage and making them more accessible—if only for their ability to grant new delights (for whom, exactly, remains an open question). That’s enough to sustain Coulson’s propulsive and highly enjoyable narrative, and it’s reason enough to preserve objects of the past, flawed and filching though they may be.