Eva Palmer-Sikelianos

9 January 1874, New York, to 4 June 1952, Delphi | Performer, cultural organizer

The costumes Eva Palmer-Sikelianos made were part of the work, not an illustration added afterward. She wove, directed, composed, and trained performers in pursuit of an art that could organize daily living as well as a stage. Her engagement with ancient Greece brought cloth, voice, movement, and the practical expense of performance into the same project. Artemis Leontis’s biography places that sustained experiment at the center of her life.

Born in New York in 1874, Eva belonged to the Palmer family’s world of money, music, and intellectual debate. Her father, Courtlandt Palmer, founded the Nineteenth-Century Club; her mother, Catherine Amory Bennett, later married the surgeon Robert Abbe. The family must be understood as several lives, not a single explanatory background. Eva’s brothers and sisters also belong in the archive. Their different careers and surviving traces help prevent her unconventionality from being mistaken for an absence of family or material support. [2,3]

She studied at Bryn Mawr before developing an artistic and intimate life in Paris. Her relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney was also a collaboration: performance and the recovery of Greek texts offered ways of making female desire visible within an aesthetic language the women valued. The work should not be reduced to an attractive prelude to Eva’s eventual marriage. Her relationships with women are part of her history in their own right. She first met Natalie Barney at Bar Harbor, in 1893 by one account and about 1894 by Leontis’s. In Paris she performed with Colette in Dialogue au soleil couchant in Barney’s Neuilly garden. [1,4]

Raymond Duncan and his wife, Penelope Sikelianos, helped connect Eva’s experimentation to Greece. She married Penelope’s brother, the poet Angelos Sikelianos, in 1907. In the Delphic enterprise, theatrical revival required more than literary enthusiasm. Choruses needed training, costumes needed making, and visitors required roads, water, and accommodation. Leontis’s chronology records Eva’s spending and mortgaging of property for the first festival in 1927. Prometheus Bound, athletic events, music, and craft exhibitions were assembled into a program that sought international attention. The financial result was damaging. A second festival followed in 1930.

The economic history is inseparable from the artistic one. An inheritance could make a difficult undertaking possible and could then be consumed by it. Eva’s return to the United States in 1933 followed the exhaustion of her resources. Later restrictions on her return to Greece, discussed by Leontis in relation to Cold War politics and Eva’s criticism of American imperialism, complicate any easy account of freely chosen expatriation.

Her surviving record is dispersed among institutions in Greece and France. Letters to Barney are especially important because they connect the more publicly remembered festival organizer with the woman whose earlier relationships and daily work were less often retained in conventional accounts. The recovery of those letters has altered the questions scholars can ask.

Eva illuminates a Constellation that extends beyond Paris: into New York households, Greek performance, textiles, patronage, and the politics of movement. Her life asks the archive to attend to how an artistic vision was actually made, financed, and maintained.