[1] Born in Ithaca, New York, Williams—who preferred to be known as Clifford—spent most of her girlhood in New Haven, Connecticut, where her father, Henry Shaler Williams, taught geology and paleontology at Yale University.
[2] After studying with the painter John Henry Twachtman and at Yale’s School of the Fine Arts, she traveled to Europe, and was enrolled briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris.
The photograph resurfaced four years later in the French newspaper Comoedia, when Picabia cited it to refute the idea that “tactile art” had been invented by Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
The correspondence—uncovered in 1998 in Beijing and Taipei archives by Professor Chou Chih-p’ing of Princeton University in 1998[4]reveals that Hu’s early social and political views were heavily influenced by Williams.
Hu’s campaign for the adoption of the vernacular as the language for literary expression in China might well have been inspired by his exposure, through Williams, to the American avant-garde art movement.