20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 2-8, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com with the Carmel arts. All three—Burton, D’Orge and Carl Cherry—got close through the Forest Theater, after Burton had been Cherry’s mentor at MIT. In 1921, Burton and Cherry worked together on Countess Cathleen for the Forest Theater; Cherry was good with lights. It was already untoward when D’Orge, before she was Mrs. Cherry, became a Carmel’s newspaper carrier, but when, in 1925, she just walked out on her husband and teenage children for Carl Cherry in the middle of the night, the city was in shock. The affair quickly became quite serious. The couple discovered they were soulmates, to the point that they communicated in silence. “They were in love all the time,” Rosalind Sharpe Wall wrote in her 1978 book, About Jeanne D’Orge and Carl Cherry. They had their own existence. Carl Cherry was not your average Joe. Small, kind and quiet, he was a talented inventor who in 1936 created the blind rivet, a breakthrough in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Patented as the Cherry Rivet in 1939, it was widely used during World War II. They loved working in the same house too, happy to drink strong coffee and eat a diet that consisted of boiled eggs and sardines. D’Orge would smoke a lot of cigarettes; they did not drink alcohol. “It’s amazing to me that she lived out of the norm for a woman her age who broke a lot of rules,” Mitchell says about D’Orge’s “bad behavior.” In fact, Mrs. Cherry remained mischievous her whole life, eager to take action, such as take a trip to Lompoc to see a solar eclipse, and to learn about Zen, Kabbalah or theosophy. Children liked her and she loved to participate in the entertainment of her era: singing alone, reading out loud and acting in plays. D’Orge also had a special fondness for puppet theater. There were also rumors that there were spiritual seances at the Cherries’ home. In fact, D’Orge developed another, less documented, bohemian group around those mysterious gatherings. We don’t know the names of the members. The “Wild Cherries,” as they were called, lived in the fifth-oldest house in Carmel, formerly the Augusta Robertson cottage that then belonged to the Cherry family and now houses the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts. It was a two-story Victorian building, remodeled by the couple who removed the top story and had a ceiling skylight installed. With time, especially after Carl Cherry’s death, D’Orge came to be treated by the artistic community as a guru. D’Orge’s description of writing as if being touched by outside invisible force likely applies to her paintings too. She left about 1,200 works behind; some speculate that large works are missing from The Cherry archives. She took up painting in 1927, when she and Carl settled in the house on Guadalupe Street. D’Orge never studied painting and claimed she didn’t have a “technique” as a painter. She didn’t even consider her work as fine art, agreeing with some of her future critics. “Artists should be anonymous,” she was quoted as saying in Better Than Beauty: The Life and Work of Jeanne D’Orge by Jane Wilgress, who later became the director and curator of The Cherry. “People should know their work but not the artist.” Her art was never for sale: “How can I sell my ecstasies?” she once said. A few pieces were likely sold during her second exhibit at the Pat Wall Gallery in 1946; the first exhibit of 20 pieces took place in 1939 at Sibyl Anikeyev’s photography studio in Monterey. She was willing to show her works in smaller local venues, but decided her works would stay with The Cherry to never enter the marketspace. Her visual art was modernist too, perhaps too experimental for its time. She never belonged to any art organization. It is said that Salvador Dali visited D’Orge and was surprised and delighted with her work. Oscillating between abstract and landscape painting, her muted palette pieces (some on wood) become more dramatic the more a viewer analyzes them up close. In the 1960s, she had an exhibit at The Cherry, where her works rest now, waiting for another opportunity to shine. In the 1940s, before Carl Cherry died of spine cancer, the Cherries became rich due to his 1936 invention of the Cherry Rivet. Being a rich widow can instantly repair one’s reputation. From a talked-about hussy, D’Orge became a wealthy art benefactor. In 1949, two years after Carl Cherry died, Virginia Lee Burton came to visit her prodigal mother. That did not fix their complicated relationship. Nonetheless, D’Orge had enough energy to sketch her vision for the Carl Cherry Foundation, which she had created a year earlier. She wanted a gallery and a space for experimental arts and science and a place for serious lectures with speakers, such as American sexologist Alfred Kinsey. After her death, a theater was built deep inside the house, in a space that had previously been Carl Cherry’s workshop. In 1949, The Cherry went through a renovation. A few years later, Mrs. Cherry moved to Carmel Valley, becoming more and more interested in the Tantamount Theater, a puppet theater. D’Orge returned to Carmel to live the last year of her life. After she died of a heart attack in 1964, her ashes, just like Ansel Adams’ and Ed Weston’s ashes, were scattered at Point Lobos. Still, her mission lives on in the The Carl Cherry Center. Located in what had been Augusta Robertson’s old cottage, it is often beaming with lights and sounds of music today. The friends and relatives of Mrs. Carl Cherry were left with 1,200 of her artworks, as well as papers, correspondence and finally, the foundation. For a while, Virginia Lee Demetrios née Burton was on the board, by then a published writer and illustrator of children’s books, including the 1939 classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Virginia and her son, sculptor Artistides Burton Demetrios, may be proof that D’Orge’s artistic genes were passed down; Artistides’ father was also a sculptor. Demetrios’ works have been shown in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Artistides “Aris” Demetrios died in 2021 in Santa Barbara, after winning the “Santa Barbara Beautiful Award” for the most beautiful work of public art. The first protectors of the Carl Cherry Foundation were D’Orge’s good friends George and Angie White. Conceived by the Cherries together before Carl died, the foundation was established in 1948 to help support experimental fine artists and projects in the sciences. The original director of the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts was Jane Wilgress who, in 2004, wrote the book Better Than Beauty: The Life and Work of Jeanne D’Orge. Englishborn Wilgress tracked D’Orge’s roots in England, Scotland and California. Much of this reporting comes from that book, the most extensive publication devoted to Mrs. Cherry. The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts remains active, each year bringing diverse art exhibits, working with local schools, hosting art contests, presenting jazz, theater, animated films and pretty much every form of art the little space can handle. A space for art, that’s what it is. D’Orge’s version of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” something she felt strongly about. “Sometimes it’s no more than to give a writer a place to stay, keeping their stomach filled so he can write what he wants to write,” D’Orge once said in an interview. “There are no strings attached to the help we give.” Poet Anne Mitchell, also a board member of The Cherry, accompanied by her cat, Ziggy. Mitchell has been interested in Jeanne D’Orge’s poetry for a long time. AGata Popeda Hers is an “I poetry,” honest and not ashamed of itself.
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