Zelda Fitzgerald is best known as the crazy lady who married F. Scott (Hemingway: “Anytime you got him all straightened out and taking his work seriously Zelda would get jealous and knock him out of it.”) She and Scott settled in Baltimore in the 1930s, where she went nuts and he drank too much. For Zelda, Baltimore was “a place of tortured years, unfulfilled ambitions and mental disasters,” or so goes the usual, melodramatic account.
It probably was a pretty awful time, but some nice art came out of it, and now’s our chance to see a few of Zelda’s original watercolors, paintings, and first editions of her novel, Save Me the Waltz. The exhibit was curated by Laura Maria Somenzi, a Hopkins junior, who says that the work shows “Zelda Fitzgerald’s coming into an artistic independence and an artistic language that is distinctly hers, and also as a way to claim an identity separate from her celebrity husband.”
The work is up at the Evergreen Museum through January 29, but it’s available for viewing by reservation only. Reservations are requested by emailing evergreenmuseum@jhu.edu or calling 410-516-0341.
