The Companionate Arts

Two young moderns occupy a cluttered bohemian studio: a short-haired woman in a plaid skirt reclines on a low stool examining a canvas on an easel, while a languid young man sprawls in a chair beside a typewriter-laden desk, papers strewn across the floor. Abstract paintings hang on the walls—deliberate shorthand for avant-garde pretension. The caption reads The Companionate Arts, punning on the era's heated debate over "companionate marriage" (Judge Ben Lindsey's 1927 proposal for trial unions), here recast as the live-in artist and writer couple, equal in ambition and mutual indolence. Gibson, then Life's editor-publisher, turns his own magazine's cultural milieu into gentle self-satire: the New Woman and the New Man, stylishly adrift together.