Women Holding Things

Maira Kalman, a painter, designer and writer known for The Principles of Uncertainty and My Favorite Things, turns her attention to women and what they carry through life. Her paintings and short written reflections ask what women hold: their homes and families, their children and meals, their friendships, their work in the widest sense, and their memories, troubles, sorrows, triumphs and love.

The book grew out of a small limited-edition booklet that Maira and Alex Kalman made in the spring of 2021. It gathered recent paintings by Maira with her personal commentary and sold out quickly. This larger volume, again made by the two of them, keeps those original images and adds sixty-seven new paintings, each paired with personal anecdotes, recollections and reflections.

Most of the paintings are portraits of women, some ordinary and some famous, including Virginia Woolf, Sally Hemings, Hortense Cezanne, and Gertrude Stein, along with Kalman's relatives and other real people. The objects in their hands range from everyday things such as balloons, a cup, a whisk, a chicken and a hat, to abstract ones such as dreams, disappointments, sorrow, regret, joy and love. Kalman also plays with the many idiomatic ways we speak of holding: a woman might hold a book, a pair of shears, a child, or a grudge, or she might stand her ground.

Through these images, Kalman shows women's tenacity, courage, vulnerability, hope and pain, and suggests that many of the things we cherish, and those that weigh on or haunt us, persist across generations and link one to the next. A few men also appear, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Anton Chekhov, and some pictures show objects holding other objects, inviting readers to think about how things relate to one another.

The book is about the significance of what we carry in our hands, hearts and minds. Its subject will feel familiar to most readers, who will find in it a fresh way of looking at what matters in the world and in themselves.