An American Child of the 1960s Revisits England’s Victorian Radicals

Yale Center for British Art
New Art Examiner
October 12, 2020

Yale University in New Haven holds the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The museum’s founder and chief benefactor, Paul Mellon, a 1929 Yale alumnus, had gold-certified ties to England. First, his mother was English and many of his childhood summers were spent in the English countryside visiting her family. Mellon studied at Cambridge where he developed a passion for racehorses which led to his becoming a leading breeder. His father, the wealthy banker, Andrew Mellon, was briefly the American ambassador to the Court of St James in the 1930s. So one could credibly argue that Mellon’s Anglophilia had a solid foundation. The first British painting Mellon purchased was Pumpkin with a Stable-lad by George Stubbs. Eventually, his entire collection of British art went to Yale. He also financed the construction of the building designed by Louis Kahn.

When the pandemic was more abstract than real in early March, and the doors to museums were still open, I walked to the Yale Center for British Art, crossing the long stretch of the historic New Haven green to get there. Designed with great foresight by dissenting English Puritans in the 17th century, this green, at 16 acres, was large enough to accommodate the 144,000 people who they believed would be spared in the Second Coming of Christ.

I was going to see the work of another group of English dissenters, the Pre-Raphaelites, who had their share of members whose religious fervor matched that of the Puritans (see, for example, William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854-60), but who were also concerned with more secular matters such as social reform and artistic vision. The exhibit, ‘Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement’, draws from extensive holdings in the Birmingham Museums which, with its U.S. partner the American Federation of Arts, organized the exhibit.

My encounter with the Pre-Raphaelite artists (and poets) began a half century earlier in the 1960s, in a class at Georgetown called Conflict, Alienation and Negativity. I remember seeing a reproduction and being quite taken with the rapturous Beata Beatrix painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Shortly thereafter, I visited the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, which houses the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art outside Britain.

During the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s—assassinations, the high-stakes race to put a man on the moon, marches for civil rights, protests against the Vietnam War, a back-to-the-land movement—the fierce romanticism and utopian dreams of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites touched a chord. No doubt their popularity then can also be explained as a reaction to the rigid hold that late modernism had on art, up to and including Clement Greenberg’s orthodoxy. Modernism, especially its late manifestation in abstract expressionism, had stripped art of figuration and narration. A renewed interest in the Pre-Raphaelites signified that there was a place for both.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was founded in 1848, the same year that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, revolution swept through France and other parts of Europe, and the Chartists rallied—in the presence of the army—on Kennington Common in South London calling for workers’ rights. For Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, the PRB leaders barely out of their teens, a radicalized social consciousness was inseparable from an awareness of the stifling conformity and confining rules of the Royal Academy. They proceeded to challenge what was considered ‘correct’ in Victorian artistic practice. They disdained the over-emphasis on elements of science applied to art, such as Renaissance perspective, and what they perceived as the lifelessness of much of the art that received Academy approval.

The Pre-Raphaelites had front-row seats to the dying out of the old order, a decline that began in the 18th century—power that had been based largely on inherited land and wealth—and the ascent of capitalism in the form of rapacious and brutalizing industrialization and mechanization that went in tandem with worker exploitation and social dislocation.

The movement constituted a retreat from a rationalist–dominated status quo, offering instead a look back to the Middle Ages to find a way forward in the Victorian age. Of course, like most critiques of the status quo in relation to the past, theirs suffered from an overly rosy assessment of the conditions of life in earlier times. While agrarian society may have seemed preferable from the distance of a century or more, the reality was that land had always been in the hands of a few, and the peasantry were essentially powerless and at the mercy of the landowners for their survival.

In their opposition to the art establishment, the Pre-Raphaelites advocated an art whose first principle was beauty. Through the use of allegory, they believed art should convey moral lessons through stories from the Bible and mythological legends that were familiar to even the most uneducated, and were often handed down orally.

Their radical social agenda called for labor that was meaningful and humane, with the goal of achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth. Henry Wallis’s painting, The Stone Breaker (1857), for example, is a commentary on Victorian laws that mandated work, often physically harsh, for those who could not find regular employment, such as an entire day spent breaking up stone to build a road.

In the painting, a young man in sullied work clothes is hunched against a berm and some rocks, his head bowed as though he were asleep. His figure blends into the brown-black and burnt sienna colors of the earth. Near twilight, the landscape of trees in the distance has become dark blue, and the sky a fading sallow yellow with narrow bands of violet. The man, who has fallen through the cracks of the industrial age, perhaps unable or unwilling to work in a factory, has died from overwork and exhaustion.

The modern belief, whose origins stretch back at least to the early 18th century, that scientific and technological advancement was somehow synonymous with a higher level of civilization, was belied by the ravages of the factory system in the 19th century, blatantly visible to all with sensitive eyes. In the factories, the clock ruled, and the goal was to produce as much in the shortest amount of clock-time. From the factory and its emphasis on time, all aspects of cultural life were affected. Musing, immobility, singing, directionless wandering were seen as wasteful and were discouraged.

In their alienation, the Pre-Raphaelites dreamed of a simpler, gentler and more aesthetically infused way of life. William Morris and the formation of ‘the Firm,’ the artists operating at Red Lion Square, and the Arts and Crafts Movement that it spawned—all of which originated in Pre-Raphaelite ideas and attitudes—found models in the guild system of the Middle Ages. Art and social critic John Ruskin’s work, The Nature of Gothic (from The Stones of Venice), was a bible to Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

In London in 1888, architect Charles Robert Ashbee founded the Guild and School of Handicraft in the slums of Whitechapel. The guild was a center for textiles and metalwork made by craftsmen and apprentices living communally, many of them socialists, and many drawn from the ranks of the poor. In creating products by hand, the guild could achieve its two main goals: providing an alternative to dehumanized labor while, at the same time, eliminating poverty, which was often the consequence of unforeseen market fluctuations and worker exploitation. Although the guild ran into financial problems later on, it inspired the creation of other guilds in the early 20th century and had an influence on the rise of Western socialism.

As he championed art that was true to Nature, both in theme and assiduous painterly detail, and believed that beauty was art’s ultimate goal, Ruskin was the PRB’s greatest celebrity defender. However, fickle and prickly, Ruskin didn’t hesitate to both praise and criticize a painting by a PRB artist if, in his mind, the work veered too far from his ideals. Ruskin described James Campbell’s The Wife’s Remonstrance, part of an exhibit by the Society of British Artists in London in 1858, as “by far the best picture … full of pathos, and true painting.” However, he criticized the painting’s depiction of poverty as an example of a Pre-Raphaelite penchant for “ugly things better than beautiful ones.”

Though the Pre-Raphaelites presented a slower, quieter and more romantic (and romanticized) world, their beauty is often tinged with pathos, as in Millais’s The Blind Girl (1854-56). The vividness of the palette—the earthy sienna tones of the girl’s cape and gown, the shimmering pale green of the meadow in the background, the far distant rainbow—is juxtaposed with the knowledge that she is excluded from this visual paradise. The sign around the girl’s neck reads, ‘Pity the Blind.’ A younger girl who sits on her lap, perhaps her sister, stretches her body around to look back at the rainbow.

Often indifferent to academic artistic criteria, PRB painters were not averse to flattening pictorial space, similar to 15th century Florentine frescoes; or working with local color, using it lushly. “The colour of the Pre-Raphaelites was equally as uncompromising as their form,” wrote English art historian, William Gaunt in his book, The Pre-Raphaelite Dream. “They made the green of grass intensely green, the yellow of a flower as yellow as could be, the purple of a dress an impassioned and vibrant purple …”

In Arthur Hughes’s The Long Engagement (ca. 1854-59), rich in naturalist precision and symbolism, a betrothed couple stand beside a tree in the woods. A shadow enfolds the brown-clothed man, his face showing frustration, while the sad but hopeful face of the woman, who is in the center of the frame, is a luminous pearl. Her vibrant purple cape and the tactile green ferns and moss enhance the painting’s feeling of sensual melancholy. The painting suggests that marriage hinges on financial stability, and for the vast majority of couples who must adhere to the custom of pre-marital celibacy, that means a prolonged and difficult delay.

Unlike the French Impressionists rebelling against the strictures of the Paris Salon, and who sought in their canvases a sense of how things looked and felt, the PRB artists sought realism. One can speculate whether they might also have been responding to the advent of the daguerreotype. No doubt, in sensibility, they were influenced by the German Nazarene movement which, arose at the beginning of the 19th century in reaction to the perceived aridity and absence of spirituality in art since the Renaissance. Similarly, the Pre-Raphaelites leaned toward making art that was more devotional, whether drawn from the Bible or devotional in the sense of an eroticized spiritual love between a man and a woman. Or, in the case of the work of Simeon Solomon, between a man and a man.

Solomon was in the second wave of PRB artists. Jewish and unapologetically homosexual, he has only recently been given his due, despite his extraordinary accomplishments in treating both Biblical and androgynous themes in his work. Burne-Jones, a close friend, told Solomon that he was “the greatest artist of us all; we are mere schoolboys compared with you.”

With its Medievalist bent, the Pre-Raphaelite movement would continue to draw interest at various times during the 20th century. There was a particular potency, however, in the 1960s revival. Just as Victorians witnessed the destructiveness wrought by early industrialization, the post-World War II generation grew up in the aftermath of the devastation caused by advanced weaponry. The world had been brought to the brink of annihilation in the 1950s Cold War, as symbolized by air drills in classrooms where children hid under their desks. Economic success and access to a greater number of goods went side by side with the absurdity of living amidst the threat of extinction.

The growth of a counter-culture and the flowering of communes in the late 1960s, echoed Morris, the guilds and the spirit of agrarian community that the Pre-Raphaelites found so appealing. In the art world the Ruralist Movement begun by Peter Blake and Ann and Graham Arnold took their lead from the Pre-Raphaelites. We, too, longed for a new moral and spiritual order that would value human achievement not through tangibles, but through the immeasurable; the perennial joys, for example, derived from simple earthly activities such as looking up at the stars or witnessing over time the growth of a tree; whittling a piece of wood into an object; when every human being’s creative potential would be nurtured; when there would be alternatives to mass-produced goods; and when beauty was woven into the patterns of everyday life.

You Never Heard of Simeon Solomon?

VICTORIAN RADICALS
From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement
Yale Center for British Art
Gay & Lesbian Review
August 26, 2020

 IT WAS IN THE 1960s that I was first drawn to the artists of the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)—to their sultry, soulful women and their tender and gallant Arthurian men. The aggression and materialism of modern capitalist society were under attack in the ’60s, and many a countercultural youth, myself included, found a kinship with the PRB sensibility from the Victorian period: a love of nature and the bucolic, and the call for a simpler, gentler, and more æsthetically-infused way of life.

Right before the Covid-19 pandemic closed everything down in early March, I was able to revisit the work of these dissenters. It was a faux spring day as I walked across the historic 17th-century, Puritan-designed New Haven Green to the Yale Center for British Art to see the exhibit Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement. The exhibit drew heavily from extensive holdings in the Birmingham (England) Museums, which, in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts, had organized it.

There were the iconic works by the Pre-Raphaelite art stars: painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. These three young men were barely out of their teens when they founded the movement in 1848. Having seen only reproductions in the past, I was stunned by the beauty of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, in which Dante’s muse is seen in a state of rapture.

Also in the Yale exhibit were works by PRB-associated artists who came of age later, such as Maxwell Ashby Armfield and his dazzling Tristan and Isolde, made with watercolor, gouache and gold paint, and his Self-Portrait, with the brooding artist wearing a pink ascot, his delicate fingers holding a paint brush, a glass vase of lavender flowers standing nearby. (The work was used over a century later for the cover of the Oxford World’s Classics 2006 edition of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.)

The big discovery for me was Simeon Solomon (1840– 1905)—a name I didn’t recognize—who had two works in the Yale show: Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup (pen and ink, 1859) and Bacchus (oil painting, 1867). With a little research, I found that Solomon, younger than the first wave of PRB artists, was considered an equal by his peers. Artist Edward Burne-Jones, a close friend, remarked that Solomon was “the greatest artist of us all; we are mere schoolboys compared with you.” But as a homosexual man with two arrests made in public urinals, his reputation has suffered. (Art historians Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy have created the indispensable Simeon Solomon Research Archive, which continues to gather material related to Solomon’s life.)

In Bacchus, one of three versions that Solomon produced on the subject, the Greco-Roman deity is seen wearing a garland in his hair and holding a staff that rests on his shoulder. With soft eyes, lips slightly pursed, and a face like silk, a muscular neck and thick fingers that denote a strong hand, Bacchus is equal parts yin and yang. Who was this artist, I wondered, and why hadn’t I heard of him?

Solomon was the eighth and youngest child in an affluent, culturally sophisticated English Jewish family. Two of his siblings, Abraham and Rebecca, were also accomplished painters. At an early age, Solomon was influenced by the Bible and by Shakespeare, and he was drawn to Rossetti’s work. Precocious, he exhibited his drawing Isaac Offered at the Royal Academy when he was just eighteen. The work alludes to the account in Genesis of God testing Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham seems willing to comply, but at the last minute God sends a messenger to stop him, and a ram is sacrificed instead.

The turning point for Solomon was his arrest in London in 1873, at age 32, for attempting to commit “the abominable crime of buggery” at a public urinal with a sixty-year-old stableman. Both men were found guilty, and Solomon spent six weeks in detention. A year later, he was arrested again at a public urinal in Paris, charged with “outrage public à la pudeur” (outrage to the public decency), and served three months in jail. In the aftermath of these arrests, Solomon lost the support of most of his circle, including the sexually unorthodox poet Swinburne, a constant companion at one point, with whom Solomon was known to cavort around Rossetti’s house in the nude, much to Rossetti’s consternation. 

Solomon’s arrests were traumatic and demoralizing—he became an alcoholic—and they certainly affected his career. But despite intermittent periods of poverty and living at times in workhouses, the artist was undeterred from making art. In the period from 1873 to 1891, Carolyn Conroy tells us, there were thirteen exhibitions in which his work appeared, including the 1887 Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, which was devoted exclusively to Jewish art. 

What also seems to have followed from the arrests was a kind of liberation that allowed Solomon to explore his sexuality more fully in his work, along with the idea of love between men, which is the basis for his extraordinary prose poem of 1871, “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.” Writes Conroy: “Solomon’s personal journey of same-sex love, or ‘Divine Love’ as he alludes to it in the poem, reveals itself in hundreds of works.” These encompass “a spiritual mix of Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Greek myth. Many of these images maintain Solomon’s earlier use of the sexual and moral ambiguity of the androgyne.” 

The artist uses both classical and biblical allusions in an attempt to develop the model for a homosexual identity reconciled with a Judeo-Christian moral heritage. It is a quest for a spiritual center that goes beyond the sensual while not excluding same-sex desire, aspiring to a synthesis of desire with a higher, even a divine, form of love. 

In the late 1980s, during the height of AIDS-related homophobia, British playwright Neil Bartlett paid tribute to Solomon with his theatrical piece, “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” taking the same title as Solomon’s poem. Appearing nude on stage, Bartlett’s defiant performance echoed Solomon’s own refusal to bend his art to conventional expectations. Regarding Solomon’s life, Bartlett commented that the “fall of the artist” was “an unapologetic survival of ‘disgrace,’” his life “an instructive contrast to the neatness of the fable of Oscar Wilde.” 

Due to the way their lives were upended—on the basis of acts deemed morally repugnant and legally punishable—comparing Solomon to Wilde (who owned works by Solomon) is unavoidable. Solomon was short in stature—“certainly not good looking, rather the reverse,” wrote historian Oscar Browning, who knew the artist. Arrested twice, he was partly broken, but he remained unrepentant and prolific, and he was committed more than ever, post-arrests, to making art. The towering Wilde, shrouded in celebrityhood, clamoring for a courtroom brawl with Victorian justice, was ruined. In his martyrdom, wavering between repentance and unrepentance, Wilde grappled with the meaning of his suffering and, on his deathbed, converted to Catholicism. 

While it may be tempting to pigeonhole Solomon as a gay artist or a Jewish artist, historian Aileen Elizabeth Naylor believes this limits an appreciation of the wider scope of his work. She argues that a focus on his “marginalized identities” has been overemphasized, that his representations of the female figure have been sidelined, and that he needs to be reconsidered in relation to “the broader social and cultural contexts in which he worked.” 

Was Solomon a great artist of the Pre-Raphaelite and later the Æsthetic movement who happened to be Jewish and homosexual? Do these classifications matter? I would argue that his queerness does matter to the extent that it contributed to his partial erasure from art history, starting in his own lifetime. Gaining recognition for artists who struggled alone with internal conflict and survived bigotry and its penalizing effects is still very much a work in progress.

Grace Hartigan: Reluctant Feminist

New Art Examiner
April 28, 2020

Critical reappraisals of women artists continue unabated, as they legitimately challenge historical omissions and, in some cases, neglect.

In this environment the American University Museum in Washington DC mounted, in fall 2019, an exhibit of so-called ‘second generation’ Abstract Expressionist artists, Grace Hartigan and Helene Herzbrun. (This review concerns Hartigan only.)

It would be hard to argue that Hartigan has suffered neglect. Nevertheless, past focus has been on her work from the 1950s. The AU show was a corrective, including mostly post-50s works that were done after Hartigan had left New York and settled in Baltimore. The show also attempted to bolster Hartigan’s feminist credentials.

Hartigan is an ideal subject for a revisit. She emerged in the late 1940s and early 50s, among a mostly male peer group that included Pollock, deKooning and Newman, as an artist to be reckoned with. She defied Clement Greenberg’s orthodoxy about pure abstraction versus representation (she eventually successfully fused the two in her work), and was stung by his belittling of female artists (Greenberg nevertheless included her in the significant New Talent exhibition at the Koontz Gallery in New York in 1950).

It is understandable that Hartigan would be placed under the feminist umbrella, with such works as Pallas Athena-Earth (1961), Joan of Arc (1973) and Marilyn (1962), all of which reference powerful female icons.

Writing in the catalog for the AU show, art historian Norma Broude points out that Hartigan saw Marilyn as embodying both the private and public sides of the actress, as well as suggesting the dangers of fame. Her Marilyn is a counterpoint to Warhol’s silkscreens, which seemed novel at the time, but now look transparently empty. De Kooning’s 1954 painting of Monroe, stylistically akin to his other paintings of women, also falls short, giving the viewer no real insight into the subject. In contrast, Hartigan’s Marilyn shows empathy, complexity, nuance and depth.

Broude describes the ambivalence Hartigan felt about feminism, however. Hartigan was wary of the attention of feminists and refused to be categorized. But she is, Broude argues, an artist feminists can claim as one of their own. Broude goes further and suggests that Hartigan’s continued importance in art history may very well depend on the role of feminists in championing her work.

Maybe, maybe not. Hartigan’s work measures up as well as any of the Big Boys of her generation. What’s more, she was receiving a great deal of recognition even in the pre-feminist period.

It would be fair to say that Hartigan, a gutsy artist who followed her own path—not one laid down by critics or the New York art market—identified with historically important women of might, courage and grace because that’s who she was. Labels won’t suffice. Hartigan was one of a kind.

Latent Heterosexuality

Going Dutch By James Gregor
Gay & Lesbian Review
August 29, 2019

A CANADIAN TRANSPLANT to Brooklyn, Richard Turner, the protagonist of James Gregor’s comedic and captivating debut novel Going Dutch, is broke, self-absorbed, somewhat befuddled, and highly appealing. Pursuing a doctorate in medieval Italian literature at Columbia, he suffers from writer’s block, and his thesis has stalled. If he doesn’t submit something to his advisor, Antonella, soon, his fellowship funds will dry up.

Never having thought of himself as anything other than gay, Richard becomes enmeshed in a network of relationships that threaten to upend the life he always imagined he would have, thus giving the novel its dramatic tension. Living in typically overpriced Brooklyn, he shares a sun-deprived apartment with a straight roommate he barely knows. His eating habits are by necessity simple—macaroni and cheese, raisin bran, and other staples—his daily indulgence being a cappuccino at Sloppy, the local coffee shop in his increasingly flush neighborhood.

Gregor’s satirizing of Brooklyn’s rapid gentrification is dead-on. Sloppy has a diverse and hipsterish clientele drawn to “the quality and ethics of the coffee,” a place where “low-key celebrities frequently came in and let their adopted children crawl around on the floor,” even though the toilets were often stopped up and one might get a whiff of a dead rodent.

Richard had come to New York largely to be near Patrick, whom he’d met several years earlier in a study-abroad program in Rome. Patrick is the unforgettable “first one,” and his hovering presence is felt throughout the novel. While Richard tends toward self-doubt, Patrick has panache and confidence and is “oppressively happy.”

Unsurprisingly, the dating scene in this distracted urban world of endless possibilities takes place online via websites like OkCupid and Grindr and other social media meat markets of “faces and torsos and crotches.” Away from the virtual vortex, Richard often runs into men he’s encountered online. At the Boiler Room, “he knew that the guy wearing shredded denim shorts was HORNY KEWL AND MELANCHOLY, and his favorite thing was BEIN NAKED WITH PEOPLE I LUV.”

Early in the book, Richard sets out for Café Grumpy to meet Blake. Putting aside his reservations from Blake’s profile—he’s intoxicated with “that avatar of selfishness,” Ayn Rand—Richard is disarmed by “the genuine enthusiasm in Blake’s voice. Was Blake actually looking forward to the date? Most guys in New York were fidgetingly impatient to skip preliminaries, to get wherever they wanted to go, whether it be marriage, sex, or somewhere in between.” Blake is a lawyer who also acts in an amateur Tennessee Williams troupe, and he comes across as a potential “keeper.”

Meanwhile, at a departmental party, Richard chats with Anne, the Italian program’s intellectual standout. Suggesting they collaborate on a paper, Anne, whose family is affluent, begins inviting Richard to pricey lunches at “white-tablecloth restaurants” on the Upper East Side, where he can barely afford a bottle of Perrier. He often avoids her, as when a Grindr opportunity appears just before they’re to meet and he sends her a text saying “A FRIEND IS IN CRISIS.” Anne begins to see that he’s in a rut and offers to help him with his writing (i.e., write for him)—support that Richard sees as a possible lifesaver for his academic career.

Gregor is adept at creating the novel’s strongest element, the gradual, subtle, and credible development of the bond between Anne and Richard. At the same time, he leaves us with some doubt about Richard’s motives. Visiting her classroom, where she teaches undergraduates, Richard is “strangely excited” as Anne, small and a little plump, “is transformed, emitting waves of musky, indeterminately foreign glamour.” Is Richard attracted to Anne, and, if so, what are we to make of it? Gregor offers this: “But then, his heroic dedication to the male body—all his screensavers were Mapplethorpes, for instance—and his rigid indifference to the female body, had begun to seem passé. Once a kind of calling card, the fact that he was attracted to men wasn’t particularly novel anymore. Yet it was men he was attracted to; masc men if he was being honest. ... Still, for reasons unclear to him he’d felt unable to rebuff or even to clarify her overtures.”

The ethically dubious partnership bears fruit. Anne’s work on Dante’s theory about the use of the vernacular now belongs to Richard, and Antonella praises his submission. Richard qualifies to attend a conference in Montreal that Anne will be part of, and they decide to rent a room together. On one of Montreal’s hotter days, between conference sessions, they go for a swim at a public pool. Richard wears a red Speedo that Anne insisted on buying for him. Lying on their towels, applying sunscreen to one another, and taking dips in the water, they share a moment of emotional unity—even while Richard has an eye on the young men wearing swimsuits even skimpier than his. 

“What am I doing?” he wonders. People would think they were a couple. (Or, perhaps not, considering his swimsuit!) “He could get a raging sense of claustrophobia when a woman, one of his female friends, was affectionate with him in public.” Misrepresentation, inauthenticity? “They were shutting him off from his potential. But why was it more authentic? Was it more authentic?” When they fall into bed together just before leaving Montreal, their enthusiasm makes up for any lack of skill.

Back in Brooklyn, trying to absorb this new twist in his relationship with Anne, he happens to run into Blake at a bar where he had gone to meet Patrick and friends, and he goes home with him. Their bonds deepening, Richard gives both Blake and Anne “what they gave to him—friendship, romance, sex, or otherwise. No one was left out.” Except neither knows about the other, and Richard doesn’t seem to be considering the potential consequences. His obliviousness can seem cruel, and the reader, intrigued by the nuances and contradictions in his character, may become less sympathetic.

Of course, eventually the three must come face to face. Richard has agreed to move in with Blake. Isn’t this what Richard, as a gay man, has always wanted? The collision occurs when Anne spots them one Saturday morning in SoHo and invites them to join her for lunch at Sant Ambroeus: With dread taking hold, “All Richard wanted was for a knife to come down through the table and cut the room—the world—into two distinct, quarantined halves.”

The book’s plot can seem thin at times, but this is redeemed by the author’s perceptiveness in laying bare the protagonist’s, and our own, motivations: how we are drawn to another person; how, consciously or not—and often for the wrong reasons—we become bound up with that person; and how we sometimes fail to make honest and authentic choices, due to cultural forces or personal baggage. It also raises the question of whether sexual attraction is destiny, and whether emotional intimacy can sustain a relationship. At the novel’s center lies a mystery more complex and elusive than that of desire and identity: What makes two people want to be together?

He Believed in the Power of Art

Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader
The Gay & Lesbian Review
December 28, 2019

WHEN STEVE ABBOTT drove his VW bug over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco in the summer of 1974, there was a palpable queer energy, like a hot wire, running through the City by the Bay. To paraphrase Andy Warhol when referring to queer sexuality, if you had “a problem,” whether you lived in Augusta or Oshkosh, San Francisco was where you wanted to be. Abbott (1943–1992) had been a prominent Atlanta antiwar and gay activist, a poet, a political cartoonist, and the Gay Lib editor at the legendary underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird.

A year before he moved west with his five-year-old daughter, his wife had been killed in a car accident. When he told her that he was bisexual upon their first meeting at an SDS party, she responded with characteristically ’60s idealism: “That means you can love all of humanity instead of just half of it.” Her death is the subject of Abbott’s richly layered poem “Elegy.” (“Before my wife died, she dreamt of our fishtank breaking & all the fish flopping into the street. No one would help her save them.”)

Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility. The book was compiled by Jamie Townsend, a Bay Area genderqueer poet who first encountered Abbott’s work when she was browsing in a bookstore in the Berkshires and picked up a copy of Stretching the Agape Bra, a collection of his poetry that includes “Elegy.”

In 2013, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father was published. In it, Alysia Abbott tells of her father’s troubled, drug-fueled marriage to her mother, his commitment to raising Alysia as a gay single parent, coming out, life as a poet and literary mover and shaker, misguided romances (detailed in his funny/sad piece “The Malcontent”), and drug addiction. She describes their complicated relationship as she was growing up in a Haight-Ashbury apartment, with her father working odd jobs, including sweeping the halls of the building they lived in to pay the rent. She recalls how her father would often take her to readings where she would nuzzle in his lap.

In Beautiful Aliens, Townsend stresses Abbott’s belief in community. Indeed, an important part of his legacy is his tireless support for other poets. He organized countless readings, revived the periodical Poetry Flash, and created and funded the influential literary arts publication Soup, which showcased “New Narrative” gay and lesbian poets such as Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, and Kevin Killian. “New Narrative shatters linearity, proceeds by flashes, enigmas. ... Formalisms implode, stagnate. New Narrative explodes, speaking to and creating community,” Abbott wrote.

In a writer’s imagination, community can breach time, blurring past and present, as can be seen in Abbott’s tongue-in-cheek Lives of the Poets, a spoof with a serious edge, a who’s who of literary history that turns biography on its head and provides a fascinating guessing game. It consists of a series of biographical collages, some about the people celebrated in Abbott’s circumscribed sphere, such as poets Judy Grahn and Bob Kaufman (subject of an appreciative essay, “Bob Kaufman: Hidden Master of the Beats”); others universally recognized, such as Samuel Beckett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sylvia Plath. And there’s a third group: the unrecognized anonymous. “He lay in bed all day with the curtains drawn,” begins one that no doubt refers to Proust, and ends with: “He later became famous for writing about nothing.” In another, about someone unnamed: “A potential new friend doesn’t look gay because his jeans hang low and baggy, but [because] he kisses a sweater he’s just purchased.”

Like his fiction, Abbott’s poetry illustrates the scope of his interests and erudition, and often alludes to queer icons: St. Sebastian, Jean Genet, and the singer Prince among them. Irony is fused with indignation in “To a Soviet Artist in Prison,” dedicated to filmmaker and artist Sergei Parajanov (director of the classic film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Failing to hew to socialist realism, his work banned, Parajanov was accused of homosexual acts, and in 1973 he was imprisoned. Working with materials he scrounged together, he was somehow able to make small artworks. Abbott’s poem begins: “They tortured me today/when I created/ collage as a degenerate stance.”

While condemning repression, the poem also suggests that the power of a work of art is validated when it’s perceived as a threat (totalitarian Russia), as compared to art that’s tolerated but suffers indifference (the consumerist West): “The corners of my poster/ I tore/ so it would resemble the State/ and I stained it with my own blood/ (for this they hung me by my testicles).” And then the last stanza: “But I was lucky!/ When I crawled back to my cell/ I found this letter from Karl Shapiro./ ‘America made me silky, rich and famous,’/ he wrote,/ ‘But I am dying/ because no one listens to my words.’”

Abbott often uses the essay to call attention to artists he deems under-appreciated, such as the early 20th-century Russian Symbolist novelist Fyodor Sologub and the contemporary singer and performance artist Diamanda Galás. Abbott could be strident, as in his piece “Gay Lit’s Bad Boy,” putting the work of Dennis Cooper, known for the five novels in his “George Miles Cycle,” up against the more mainstream writing of David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes. We get that Cooper’s work, much of which involves sadomasochistic violence, is more outré, but does Leavitt deserve to be dismissed as sentimental and “formulaic”? Is Cooper, as opposed to Leavitt, “spiritually transformative,” as Abbott argues, or is he simply following his interest in obsessively exploring a dark, nihilistic side of life?

Abbott writes, reductively: “I think we must admit that transgressive eroticism constitutes the very essence of gay life (or at least did before AIDS).” He then offers a narrow rationale: “Since we as gays were defined as ‘bad’ to start with, we jumped into the bad with both feet. What other options did we have? Either that or celibacy.” How about the option of not allowing yourself to be defined by cultural bigotry?

Identity as enigma, the Sisyphean quest for a lover, sex, drugs, pain, death, transformation. These themes, handled nimbly and often with biting humor, recur throughout Abbott’s work. He proposes that art and life are dichotomous: “I don’t for a minute believe that Dennis Cooper (or Robert Gluck, William Burroughs, or John Waters for that matter) would literally advocate the extreme behavior their characters indulge in.”

The question of whether art can affect behavior is a perennial one, though it seems naïve to think that it cannot. Abbott quotes Georges Bataille: “With the death of religion, the novel becomes the bloody sacrifice.” Abbott goes on to say: “It’s the same sort of sacrifice ... that Catholics celebrate in their Mass.” In other words, art is a separate stage from human actions. But what about, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will (1935), an artistic tour de force that was used as propaganda by the Nazis to fire up the German people?

In fall 1992, Abbott entered San Francisco’s Maitri Hospice, founded by Zen master Issan Dorsey, a former drag queen, as a sanctuary for people with AIDS. In Abbott’s room were a small tin Buddha, a picture of Issan in blue robes, and a photograph of Alysia. He died in December, holding his daughter’s hand and surrounded by friends chanting “We love you Steve.”

Weight of the Earth

The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz
The Gay & Lesbian Review
February 28, 2019

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ made art that marries an inner world of sadness, anger, and loss with an external world of natural beauty and human destructiveness. His life was bracketed by abandonment and abuse as a child and, in later years, by the emotional and physical toll that hiv/aids exacted before he died at 37 in 1992.

In his teens, Wojnarowicz was selling his body to pay the rent and buy drugs. He began writing and making art at an early age and continued doing it feverishly for as long as he had the strength. Through drawings, photographs, collages, paintings, writings, music, and more, he doesn’t flinch from confronting homophobia and, with the onset of the AIDS epidemic, from calling out the hostile cultural climate, the invisibility and neglect of the queer community. This is the Wojnarowicz we mostly know: the artist as warrior.
In 2018, the Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night. The Whitney show demonstrated the extraordinary range of his accomplishments in so many media. And now, in Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, we see the artist as vulnerable and self-questioning. For two periods in his life, 1981–’82, and 1988–’89, he ad-libbed into a tape recorder touching on topics such as life in the city versus living close to nature, the distractions that interfere with artistic output, sensitivities about art as self-revelation, the dangers of art-world acclaim, loneliness and isolation, sex as a positive force or as an addictive drug, the elusiveness of intimacy and love, fear of “The Virus,” and fear of dying.

Woven throughout these tapes, which have a novelistic flow, are dream descriptions. For Wojnarowicz, the dream state holds as much credence as consciousness: “In a dream you can do anything—from fly to create horror to create pleasure to create incident to create weaponry to create repair.” Although the city shaped him as a gay man and an artist—hustling as a teenager in Times Square, frequenting the Chelsea piers and cavernous East Village bars and makeshift art galleries—Wojnarowicz is often dissatisfied with this ghettoized world and longs for the country: “I like the woods, I like landscape. … I love the sense of light and the sense of sound and the sense of space. … And those are things that nobody ever talks about here [in New York].”

In the 1981–’82 tapes, Wojnarowicz says he makes art “to make sense of my life,” but that he also craves “an emotional strength” that art can’t provide. He has no trouble scoring—“I find myself having sex a lot with men that are desirable, but I never see it beyond that moment.” But a fling in the park near 15th Street turns into something more. He goes home with Bill and they talk through the night. The artist, then 26, has lately been “withdrawing from most people because I don’t share their view of living, or their cynicism … whether it’s drugs or general drunkenness or a lack of motivation to do or make things.” He senses that Bill is “in touch with things that no other people I knew were in touch with,” and he sees the promise of a relationship. “It gives you a kind of strength, loving somebody or wanting to love somebody,” he says expectantly. Over time, though, it’s clear that Bill hasn’t been truthful and that he doesn’t want to commit himself to Wojnarowicz. The relationship ends on a note of disillusionment.

During this same period, Wojnarowicz describes being in a bar with photographer and close friend Peter Hujar, who undoubtedly had the greatest influence on him as an artist. (“Everything I made, I made for Peter,” he once said.) In assembling his drawing portfolio, he questions whether he should get rid of the ones that are “aggressive or upsetting.” As reflected in the journals, the artist sometimes wonders if potential friends or lovers will be turned off by his art. Hujar’s advice is clear: “I shouldn’t start compromising and trying to adapt to other people’s taste.”

Six years later, in November 1988, Wojnarowicz begins to record again. He has recently been diagnosed with AIDS-related complex (ARC). He had helped care for Hujar, who died of AIDS in late 1987, and he is living in Hujar’s loft. He knows the virus may kill him too. His tone is heavier, reflecting not only his anxiety about getting sick and possibly losing his mind, but also the shock of realizing he’s getting older and less desired: “Just standing on a street corner … waiting for the light, and just seeing young man after young man. I mean, most of them probably in their early twenties, mid-twenties, and all of them very beautiful in one way or another.” Watching his youth pass and a sense of foreboding coincide with a growing bitterness about the art world. His work isn’t getting the sold-out reception it once got. Still, what he values most is art making that isn’t driven by the marketplace: “That’s what I love about when people make things: I love that they just do it.”

Recognizing both the possibilities and limits of language, Wojnarowicz sees taping as a double-edged sword. “I just can’t stand my self-consciousness when I talk into this thing.” He’s also afraid of “someone witnessing this tape.” Nevertheless, “if I keep talking into it, I lose the self-consciousness and I can just do it and get at stuff that’s deep underneath all this.” For Wojnarowicz, excavating the self to repair the self is the essence of the creative enterprise.

In the winter of 1989, with so many of his friends gone, New York is “just a city of death.” He flies to Albuquerque to begin a ten-day road trip, seeking solace in the Southwest, whose deserts, mountains, and open sky he finds “absolutely embracing” and “frightening.” “Yeah, I’m alive, but … I could be dead another year from now. And I won’t see this road, and I won’t see the sunlight, and I won’t see these fast trucks driving by—the long, long road up ahead of me, and a long, long road in the rearview mirror.” Driving along, with whatever music is on the radio, he’s thinking of “people like Peter … just knowing that he’s never gonna hear this song.”

Wojnarowicz returns to the city, but he’s off again in May, this time driving a friend’s car to L.A. Crossing Arizona, “everything arrives at that low tone of color, where it’s no longer fighting the sun for its color or fighting against the sun to show its color.” He stops at a rest station to look for a drinking fountain: “A few silhouetted cactuses and a bunch of bees trying to drink some water … A couple of them were jerks. They fell in and drowned, but I pulled a few out that were still struggling.” In such moments, Wojnarowicz wishes “it could stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.”

A Certain Gorgeous Bleakness

The Paintings of Hugh Steers
The Gay & Lesbian Review
May 4, 2018

Bath Curtain (1992)

MAKING ART IS DIFFICULT. Doing it when you’re struggling with an illness you know is going to kill you is a higher level of achievement. “How do I embrace this thing and make it OK, or make myself able to live with it and produce and go on from there? How do I live every day with despair?” wrote painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers after he was diagnosed with HIV at age 25. The answer was: by constantly painting canvases depicting men who are ill, men in partial or complete undress, ambiguously intimate in their private spaces. Steers did this for the remaining seven years of his life, almost up to the day he died: March 1, 1995.

The raw force and beauty of Steers’ figurative painting is on display in a solo exhibition of work not shown previously, at Alexander Gray Associates through July 27, 2018. The Chelsea gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, last exhibited Steers’ work in 2015. In fall 2017, two of the artist’s works were included in AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. In 2015, Visual AIDS, a New York-based organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS awareness through visual art projects, published Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983–1994, a comprehensive look at Steers’ work with accompanying essays, including author Cynthia Carr’s profile of the artist.

Carr discusses Steers’ artistic influences as well as the complexity of his personal history and the troubled relationships he had with his family despite his glamorous WASP pedigree. As a gay man at Hotchkiss, an exclusive boarding school in Connecticut, Steers felt alienated. The friendships he made there were mostly with women who also felt as though they were on the outside looking in. One new classmate came to Hotchkiss from a school in Madrid. On her first day, she followed the custom of not bringing books into the dining room. Seeing this, Steers went over to her and said, “You dropped your books with such panache. I have to meet you.” Carr reports they became best friends.

Hugh Steers in his studio at Yale, ca. 1985

Born in Washington, D.C., to Nina Gore Auchincloss and Newton Steers, a mutual funds entrepreneur and later a U.S. Congressman from Maryland, Steers grew up in the affluent suburban enclave of Bethesda, Maryland. He was a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, the grandson of financier Hugh D. Auchincloss, who owned Hammersmith Farm in Newport and who was also the stepfather of Jackie Kennedy (Steers and JFK Jr. played together in Newport in the summer), a descendant of statesman Aaron Burr, and the nephew of American author Gore Vidal. In ways similar to Vidal, he considered all of this to be a very mixed blessing. He sought to make his way as a painter largely independent of his social connections. This extended to numerous periods in his short artistic career as he struggled to pay the rent on his rundown apartments that doubled as studios.

At first glance, a Steers painting is a tipoff that all is not right in the world. AIDS is often lurking, but to suggest that his paintings are solely about his own illness—a death sentence for thousands of mostly gay and bisexual men in this period—is to miss their broader significance. At the same time seeing them strictly through a political lens is equally reductive. If anything, as figurative paintings, they were anomalous if not retrograde at a time—the 1980s and ’90s—when the fashion was more toward conceptual and performance art, or photography, as illustrated by the popularity of Robert Mapplethorpe. Steers was attuned to the art that was in vogue, but he was doggedly committed to representational art and to depicting the male figure in a centuries-old tradition of the great masters, such as Caravaggio, Velázquez, and Goya (whose influence is evident in his work), and of more recent artists like Edward Hopper and David Park. In a 1992 interview, Steers commented on the mood in his paintings: “I think I’m in the tradition of a certain kind of American artist—artists whose work embodies a certain gorgeous bleakness.”

One of the bitter ironies of the AIDS epidemic is that it began at the end of the very decade, the 1970s, when gay men had created a community for the first time, and on a large scale. Gay liberation, though its roots ran farther back, essentially came out of the radical politics and cultural usurpations of the previous decade. It flowered with Stonewall and in the fervor of gay pride celebrations on Castro Street, in the Village, and in other large urban centers. Gay publications such as The Blade in Washington, The Advocate, which originated in Los Angeles, and San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine emerged to meet the interests of a growing audience. A new, openly gay literature arose with books by young writers, such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

Tribalism had been an element of hippie sit-ins and be-ins and other gatherings in the ’60s. Parks were filled with young men and women dancing to guitars and drums, the air thick with incense and marijuana smoke. A little later, hordes of shirtless gay and bisexual men would lose themselves in the crowd at all-night discos or flock to the beaches at Fire Island for entire weekends. Steers’ work, with its allegorical references—some of the figures wear paper bags over their heads; black cats and crows enter these spaces—is a reminder of how drastically things would change. AIDS was sending men back into isolation and darkness. The tribe was splintering. Does so-and-so have “it”? Could I catch it from him? These were questions that people, both gay and straight, were asking themselves in the early years of the epidemic.

The mood in Steers’ paintings, which usually involve two men in relation to one another, is antithetical to the crowd euphoria of the pre-AIDS period. A Steers painting isn’t about “us”; it’s more about “you and I.” Nor is it about the anonymity of the baths or the music- and drug-induced highs of the bars. These men are fenced in, their lives intersect; they are consigned to one another. They are lovers, or have been; or perhaps they were acquaintances brought together because, as a result of being sick, they were going broke. In many cases they appear to be dying. They inhabit a multi-layered emotional zone very different from that of the packed dance floors or the sun-drenched beaches of a few years before.

The paintings draw the viewer into a private space: a bare room with a bed, or a bathroom with a tub, sometimes the old-fashioned clawfoot style, a symbol of luxury in the Victorian era. In many American cities you can still find them: in gritty, unrenovated apartment buildings, like the ones Steers lived and worked in, tubs left over from the early 20th century when the buildings were constructed. In Steers’ paintings, the “claws” can seem animated and menacing.

In Bath Curtain (1992), for example, a man in white underwear sits on a toilet, his back arched toward the bathtub. His wrists are thin in contrast to his thick, muscular torso. He is holding the hand of the man who lies in the bath, his face shrouded by a white shower curtain, his arms and one shoulder visible. The large (64 by 72 inch) painting’s composition divides the space diagonally so that the figure of the seated man pushes left into the viewer’s space, echoing Pierre Bonnard’s many great “bath” paintings that divide or flatten the plane, such as Large Nude in the Bathtub from 1924. But while Bonnard’s figures often have a kind of muted emotionality, Bath Curtain is infused with a tenderness wrung out of suffering. The love between the seemingly healthier seated man and the leaner one bathing is palpable.

The influence of Bonnard can also be seen in Steers’ color palette, in the intermixing and soft suffusion of pale yellow, green, and violet tones on the windowsill, tub, and tiled floor. Yet there is a key difference. Bonnard’s female figures blend in with the walls and the other objects in the picture, as seen in Large Nude, while in Steers’ Bath Curtain, the harsh, hot, orange-red and brown flesh tones of the bent figure’s back are in opposition to the low-key colors of the surroundings. George Bellows’ boxing pictures come to mind, and also the use of a vibrant red for skin tones by Marsden Hartley, as in his Christ Held by Half-Naked Men (1940–41), a painting that also has a strong thematic connection to Steers’ Bath Curtain.        

Steers said this about his work: “A lot of my art has to do with that primal idea of drawing a painting of the hunt on the side of the cave. … It’s like a conjuring. I would like to be able to act or have someone care about me the way some of the people in my paintings act or care about each other. It’s as if painting it will make it become real.”

Although the figures in his paintings are sick and vulnerable, they are imbued with a physicality, an erotic fire. AIDS is ruining their bodies and impairing their mental faculties, yet despite this loss of power, there is defiance, affirmation—even a sexual affirmation. You can see it in numerous paintings in which a figure is wearing high heels. Steers had an interest in drag from a young age and used it symbolically as an antidote to defeat. An earlier oil on cardboard, Title unknown (ca. 1985), shows two pairs of bright red stilettos side by side. In one, a ripe pear appears in the foreground; in the other, the heel point of one of the shoes is stuck in a jar of Vaseline. Steers wrote: “Shoes like that are an amazing thing. They are so structured and there’s an architectural quality to them. They’re culture run wild, and yet they’re linked to a very sexual quality.”

Even in the late 1980s, the trappings of transvestism were not always met with open arms, whether in the gay world or the straight world. In 1994, the year before Steers died, he commented to art critic Holland Cotter that the commercial gallery that had been showing his work in the ’80s was finding his more recent “I’m-gonna-wear-heels-and-fuck-you” attitude less acceptable. Steers subsequently began exhibiting with maverick gallerist Richard Anderson, who risked showing up-and-coming artists and was more receptive to the way that Steers’ no-holds-barred work was evolving.

In Man and IV (1994), another large (65- by 47-inch) canvas, a tall, thin man wearing a white hospital gown that comes up well above his knees stands in white stilettos, hands on his hips, an IV attached to his forearm. He stares down the viewer in such a way as to say something like, “Yeah, I’m sick, and it sucks. But I’m not done.” Gender studies professor James Smalls, in one of the essays in the Visual AIDS monograph on his œuvre, mentions that Steers saw the figure in this painting, part of the artist’s “Hospital Man” series, as “a superhero fighting for the sexual rights of the sick.”

At the end of his life, despite many friendships with both sexes, and having had intimacies with men who might be described as lovers, Steers regretted that he had never had a “romantic” relationship. He was also quoted as saying that he never felt at home in the world, so it wasn’t that hard to leave. As a possible explanation, Carr mentions a line from Uncle Gore’s Palimpsest: “None of us brought up in a world of such crude publicness tends to trust much of anyone, while those who mean to prevail soon learn the art of distancing the self from dangerous involvements.”

What Steers did trust was painting. “There’s nothing like an exceptionally good passage of paint to make me feel good,” he said. When he died, his ashes were divided, with some scattered at Newport, another portion in Narragansett Bay. The remaining ashes were placed, along with his brushes and paints, inside his painter’s box, which was buried in the Auchincloss plot at the cemetery.

Martin Wong on the Lower East Side

The Gay & Lesbian Review
April 30, 2016

The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco), 1984

WHEN, IN AN INTERVIEW, curator and art chronicler Yasmin Ramirez asked American painter Martin Wong why he left his native San Francisco in 1978 and moved to New York, Wong said he went there “just to visit and then I ended up almost immediately living there.” Aligning himself with black and Latino graffiti artists and poets on the Lower East Side, including the legendary Puerto Rican writer and ex-con Miguel Piñero, his friend and sometime lover, Wong nevertheless described himself as a “tourist” there. If indeed he felt like an outsider—and Wong, Asian and gay, could certainly look like one, flamboyantly dressed, as he often was, from head to toe, like an urban cowboy—as an artist he penetrated deeply into the social terrain that he was observing.

It was in New York—city of darkness in contrast to San Francisco, city of the golden sun and the azure sky—that Wong found himself in the late 1970s, and it is where he created his most important works. It was as if New York’s underside seemed more real to Wong than the phantasmagoric, hallucinatory world of San Francisco in the Counterculture years, even though that city had emerged as the epicenter of (largely white) gay cultural life.

Wong died of AIDS-related causes in 1999, and the memory of his extraordinary output over a short span of about two decades in the ’80s and ’90s has begun to fade in recent years. This situation has been partly corrected by the comprehensive show mounted this past winter, Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, jointly organized by Ramirez and curator–poetry scholar Sergio Bessa (he also edited the superb catalog), at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. (The exhibit continues at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, from May 14 through August 7, 2016; and moves to the U.C.-Berkeley Art Museum September 12 through December 10, 2017.)

Much of Wong’s most noteworthy art addresses, with anthropological acumen and a vivid fantasism, Latino and black life in the 1980s on the decaying Lower East Side—“the Loisaida”—as well as life behind bars, the inevitable adjunct for many of the people who lived there. Wong depicts the bleakness of pre-gentrified Loisaida, but he also locates aspects of its vibrancy and beauty, whether it’s a couple holding one another in the rubble of a vacant lot (Sharp & Dottie, 1984) or two firemen kissing in front of what looks like a deserted brick building in 1988’s Big Heat. (As a boy in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong was never as happy as when standing on a fire truck. Firemen appear often in his work, such as in his 1988 text painting, I Really Like the Way Firemen Smell, and My Fire Guy, also 1988, which shows a fully uniformed fireman in bed tenderly cradling a puppy.)

Wong’s life can be conveniently divided into two parts, his early life on the West Coast and his life in the East. He came from a middle-class Chinese-American family, a doted-upon only child growing up in relative comfort in the 1950s and ’60s. He enjoyed collecting, along with his mother, artsy tchotchkes and Asian artifacts, showed a talent for drawing the human figure (his early self-portraits in this exhibit demonstrate a stunning ability), and studied ceramics at Humboldt State University in Eureka. He returned to San Francisco from Eureka for a period in the early 70s and became an artist activist, providing materials for the gender-bending, communal-oriented Angels of Light, an offshoot of the Cockettes.

With his move to the East, an altogether new life began. Wong was in his early thirties when he traveled to New York, where he stumbled upon the run-down Meyer’s Hotel at South Street Seaport, which is where he would live and paint for three years, refining his representational painting techniques, largely unknown to the outside world. It is there that he painted My Secret World (1978-81, 1984), a work that would prove seminal to his vast output in the 1980s, illustrating as it does many of his artistic concerns. When Ramirez asked him in that same interview in 1996—the transcript of which is included in the catalogue—what would characterize “classic Martin Wong themes,” the artist answered: “Bricks and jails.”

My Secret World, 1978-1981, 1984

With its pollution-dimmed brick façades and chiseled inscriptions, My Secret World (left) offers a sort of voyeuristic view, through two large openings that aren’t quite windows, into the artist’s room at the Meyer’s Hotel. It is a small room with a tidily made bed and a simple dresser. Parts of several of the artist’s earlier paintings can be seen on the wall: one shows a large eight-ball, another a pair of dice. A third painting, from 1980, titled Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder (the last two words aren’t visible), refers to the New York serial killer Son of Sam. It consists of American Sign Language hand gestures that spell out the title. Books atop the dresser include Picturebook of Freaks, Famous Disasters, How to Make Money, Magic, Flying Saucers, Pirate Stories, and Unbeatable Bruce Lee. In his catalog essay, poet and critic John Yau points out that “Wong’s images of bad luck and good luck are part of his worldview, along with his interest in different kinds of language, from the aural hallucinations of the insane to the hand signals of ASL.” The books that he puts on display attest to his male hero worship and interest in male adventure, a desire to make both art and money (a common conflict for many artists), his Asian identity, and his inward sense of alienation.

Wong’s aim as a painter was far more than just to act as a documentarian; otherwise, photography would have suited his purposes. His use of paint, particularly in his ubiquitous portrayal of brick walls and buildings—layering up earthy browns, burnt sienna, and ochers in a richly textured, sensuous way—is an aesthetic nod not only to his own experience making art from clay but also to the history of modernism, with its emphasis on paint as a tactile medium, the importance of color dynamics on the surface of the canvas, and the many uses of abstraction. Beyond that, one can see influences as disparate as R. Crumb, the countercultural cartoonist of “Mr. Natural” fame in the ’60s; Fernando Botero, the great Colombian painter of bulbous human figures; and Mondrian, with his commitment to geometric shape and balance (Wong owned a Mondrian drawing).
One recurrent element in numerous Wong paintings, the spelling out of titles through American Sign Language—which he began doing in 1980 with Psychiatrists Testify—can come off as slightly gimmicky, especially in paintings in which the ASL gestures are dominant. Fisted hands that resemble gnomic people, they can be a distraction, introducing the framework of a visual language that feels out of place. It’s as though Wong were trying too hard to be cryptic; or that somehow his realism isn’t enough in an art world that demands irony, sophistication, and double meanings. On the other hand, signs and symbols often do work for Wong, as in Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball, that symbol of random answers, and in the exquisite Chinese Altar Screen, with its echoes of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Magritte.

A pivotal event in Wong’s life was meeting Piñero in 1981, at ABC No Rio, the alternative arts center on the Lower East Side, where Wong was exhibiting his work. In and out of prison for theft and drug possession, Piñero, who co-founded Nuyorican Poets Café, is best known for his play-turned-film Short Eyes, which describes the intricate power relationships and rituals of degradation in prison society. Piñero told Wong prison stories and revealed a world unknown to the artist. Wong tells Ramirez that “when Piñero was here I would just meet all of these beautiful gangsters. Yeah for awhile I lived with Piñero, and for awhile I lived with [graffiti artist] Lee Quinones and both times I guess it was like living with a Puerto Rican movie star or an ex-movie star.”

It is evident throughout his body of work that Wong was a painter with a keen understanding of art history, not just in the 20th century, but going back to the Renaissance and earlier. It’s interesting that Wong made his first sale of a major work in 1984 to that great temple of art antiquities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting was titled Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Miguel Piñero). Wong also worked at the Met’s bookstore for a time in the late 1980s.

An icon of the Western canon, the Annunciation has been painted by El Greco, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, and countless other artists. In Wong’s version shown here, 1984’s The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco), a man dressed in a white prison uniform kneels before a shirtless and muscular inmate. The painting has overtones of an attempted seduction, without any sense of coercion. Looking at the painting, one can imagine that the man who’s kneeling is trying to convince the other man, who seems ambivalent, to give it a try. One could imagine him saying something like, “I know you’re straight, but we’re in this place and somehow we have to survive.” The title’s reference to the Annunciation could be interpreted as purely ironic, but that would be too reductive. In a prison world where one may not always get to choose one’s sexual partner, same-sex love represents a more humane possibility, rare as it may be, to create a genuine human bond.

After he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wong left New York and returned to San Francisco to spend his last few years living with his parents. Growing in his mother’s small back yard, amid a handful of his early ceramic pieces, were succulents and cacti, exotic plants with origins in another part of the world that could nonetheless thrive in this alien coastal climate. Painted in stark black and white in 1997-98, Euphorbia Obesa and Mammillaria Wildii Crest, for example, contain orb-like forms, striated and furrowed, that call to mind close-ups of the brain. Considering the artist’s courage and brilliance, and the disease that was slowly killing him, it seems fitting that they are among Wong’s final paintings.

An Opening of the Field

Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle
Curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff
Pasadena Museum of California Art
The Gay & Lesbian Review
October 30, 2014

Jess, The Enamored Mage: Translation #6, a portrait of Robert Duncan, 1965

ART HISTORY can be a dry affair: a reinterpretation for the umpteenth time of the Mona Lisa’s smile. But sometimes it can bring to light an undervalued artist or an overlooked cultural moment. An example of the latter is an exhibition titled An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, whose importance extends beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and American cultural history to encompass GLBT history as well. The show’s title refers to Robert Duncan’s 1960 volume of poetry, The Opening of the Field, whose cover sported an illustration by his partner Jess. The word “field,” argues co-curator Christopher Wagstaff, is “a metaphor for the cosmos or an expanding state of awareness.” After runs at New York University and American University in Washington, D.C., the show has now arrived in southern California.

Although a few of the mid-century Bay Area artists represented here are somewhat well-known, the majority are hardly household names. Among them are Helen Adam, George Herms, Edward Corbett, Eloise Mixon, Philip Roeber, Ronald Bladen, Harry Jacobus, and Virginia Admiral (known mainly as actor Robert DeNiro’s mother). The show illustrates and gives coherence to their common bonds, providing, perhaps for the first time, an understanding of their ideas and influences. But it primarily brings to the fore the two men at the center of this mid-20th-century cross-fertilization for whom life and art were inseparable.

Jess started life as Burgess Franklin Collins, a nerdy if handsome introvert, the product of a conservative family. A chemist, he fulfilled his service during World War II by helping to produce plutonium for the Manhattan project. “When they dropped the bomb I knew science was made by black magicians,” he later said. This theme, society’s idolization of scientific advances at the cost of spiritual awareness, persists throughout his work. In the late 1940s, Jess had a dream about the coming annihilation of the world. Shortly thereafter, he left science, severed ties with his family, moved to San Francisco, became simply “Jess,” and began to study art. A heavily wax-crayoned work on paper from 1959 shows his continued fascination with mass destruction. The darkened back of a man is seen against a vivid sky, his right arm pointing to a fiery mushroom-like column of light in the upper right. The sun is lower left and off-center. The thickly textured piece, echoing Van Gogh in its style and Albert Pinkham Ryder in its allegorical content, is titled Qui Auget Scientiam Auget Dolorem (“Who Increases Science Increases Grief”).

Robert Duncan, the more outgoing of the two, was the adopted child of Theosophists. His parents believed their gifted son had lived in Atlantis in a past life, and they encouraged his early interest in the arts, literature, and philosophy. While both were Californians—they met in San Francisco in the summer of 1950—Jess and Duncan’s backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar. And yet, despite Duncan’s absences due to teaching assignments and lecture circuit tours and Jess’s preference for staying at home and working, in their 37 years together (ending at Duncan’s death in 1988), they complemented and supported one another creatively. They were a model for many friends—straight, gay, and otherwise—of how to be in a committed relationship.

In the 1940s, before settling in San Francisco, Duncan had traveled abroad and spent a few years in New York. In a film shown in the exhibit, Duncan describes how he tried unsuccessfully to find employment there. Not wishing to hide his homosexuality, he was denied jobs because of it, or, on the other hand, was offered employment because of it. In the end, he preferred to wash dishes. While sexual freedom was certainly not a fact of everyday life in the Bay Area in the post war years, the atmosphere in San Francisco, compared to the rest of America, was somewhat more conducive to “doing your own thing.”

At the entrance to the exhibit, a short documentary film takes the viewer inside the house that Jess and Duncan shared in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was a world unto itself, filled with books and art, including Jess’s paintings and collages (or “paste-ups” as he called them) and Duncan’s large, wax-crayon-on-paper drawings. Also on the walls were works  by friends including: Wallace Berman, best known for his complex photo collages; Edward Corbett, a great and under-appreciated West Coast abstractionist; the eccentric poet and collagist Helen Adam; George Herms, who created startling mixed-media assemblages from found debris; and R. B. Kitaj, an anomalous figurative artist who drew on influences as disparate as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Jewish history and culture. Some of the works were gifts or were traded for another’s work. The commercial sale of art was not part of this crowd’s vocabulary.

In mid-century America, the focus was largely on East Coast artists, notably the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Although touted as the first flowering of an authentically American art movement, abstract expressionism had multiple roots in Europe. Inherent in it was a rather doctrinaire view of art history. It sought to cleanse the canvas of all narrative information, such as any figurative components. The painting was to be distilled down to its purest elements of color and line. In contrast, artists on the West Coast were less confined by orthodoxies. To be sure, the West had its share of great abstract expressionists—Clyfford Still, another of Jess’s teachers at CSFA, being the best known. But Still was tolerant of artists who deviated from pure abstraction in their work, as did the circle around Jess and Duncan, who borrowed from a diversity of sources.While two-dimensional works comprise most of An Opening of the Field, the show also includes stone sculptures, assemblages, Duncan’s handmade books of poems, and a 37-minute film by filmmaker–poet James Broughton. “The Pleasure Garden,” both satire and allegory aimed at societal repression, perfectly sets the stage for the exhibit. Made in 1953 and shot in London’s Crystal Palace Gardens, Broughton’s Chaplinesque short film follows several eccentrics as they cavort in an Edenic setting in which their nemeses, Col. Pall K. Gargoyle and Aunt Minerva, attempt to rein in any kind of physical or emotional expression. In the end, the two moralizers are expelled from the garden and the inhabitants can again pursue their desires.

The art of Jess, Robert Duncan, and many of those affiliated with them was infused with Romanticism and myth. Writes Christopher Wagstaff: “myth for these two artists involves the disclosure in time of what is primordial and time-free.” Dreams, too—as well as a belief in the transformative importance of the imagination and the idea that art can involve joyful play—characterize their works. For them, art and life were interchangeable: a canvas, a drawing, a poem was not so much a thing confined by its finishedness as something alive and ongoing. In a statement regarding his æsthetics, Duncan asks, “Why should one’s art then be an achievement? Why not more an adventure?”Of the two, I think Jess was the stronger and more original painter. But then, Duncan was first and foremost a poet. (A complete collection of his poems is to be published soon.) Duncan’s writings, with their allusions to dreams, mythologies and fairy tales, clearly informed much of Jess’s work. The two often collaborated, with Jess providing the visual elements for Duncan’s poetry, such as Jess’s ink-on-paper illustration for his 1955 poem “The Song of the Borderguard.” With its spare lines and monochromatic blacks and whites perfectly balancing one another, it recalls the work of the late-19th-century artist Aubrey Beardsley and art nouveau.

Jess’s relationship with Duncan also contributed to Jess’s use of sexual imagery. His A Thin Veneer of Civility (Self-Portrait), an oil wash on canvas from 1954, is in its soft beauty among the show’s most striking and powerful works. From a distance, the nude, boney male figure in the long vertical canvas—its predominant colors muted browns, yellow, and a warm red—appears to be leaning back and… what? Urinating? Masturbating? On closer viewing, we see that he is actually using a ball of string to play with a cat that’s turned over on its back at his feet. Above in the upper right is a faint image of his lover Duncan’s head. “Tender, tongue-in-cheek, and pointedly sexual, the painting blithely breaks nearly every taboo of its time,” remarks Michael Duncan in the superb exhibit book.Jess said that a dream is the perfect collage, the elements artlessly and seamlessly fitting together, conveying the dream’s own logic. His “paste-ups” present what is undoubtedly a dreamlike world. Filtered through a Freudian prism on the interior psyche, collage has its roots in Cubism, evolving and flourishing under Dada and Surrealism, as seen in works by earlier 20th-century artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst (to whom Jess acknowledged a debt). It is arguably the most narrative of all modern art forms. Like a novelist, the collagist has a story to tell. But the process, rather than being preconceived, is somewhat serendipitous. The collage elements—magazine cut-outs, pieces of fabric, found objects—are often haphazardly assembled, products of the mind’s conscious and unconscious riffing off visual juxtapositions and puns.

Through collage, Jess, as a gay man and a misfit in 1950s America, was able to express his alienation, anger, anxieties, and homosexual longings. He used contemporary advertising materials and text—for example, ads for shaving cream and sportswear. He found, and sometimes made explicit, the underlying homoerotic elements of this imagery. In some collages, handsome, muscular and unclothed men appear in sexual positions. He used satire and humor fearlessly, poking fun at himself and his own urges. Defying convention, he could bend hetero-oriented material into homoerotic juxtapositions, exacting a kind of revenge upon the dominant culture that had rendered invisible his preferred mode of erotic expression.

Look Back: Patti Smith’s Memoir, Just Kids

In July of 1967, Patti Smith, then 20 years old and waif-like, from a south Jersey working-class family, got on a bus for Philadelphia to connect with a bus bound for New York City. Her yellow-and-red plaid suitcase contained a few items of clothing, colored drawing pencils and a copy of poet Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” 

A lot of people were dropping out back then, taking off from wherever they were and heading somewhere else. (Full disclosure: Smith and I are the same age to the day.) I took off, too, a few years later than Smith, in 1971. I hitched a ride cross-country to San Francisco, arriving with the clothes I was wearing and about $25 in my pocket. But unlike many young hipsters of the time who got it out of their system, say, in six months or a year, went back home, cut their hair and applied to grad or law school, I was determined to stick it out. And, in my own way, I did, staying for a few years along the fringes of San Francisco’s alternative subculture and attempting a life as a photographer and writer. In 1967, Smith’s odyssey was just beginning, would be long and drawn out, too, and would climax in artistic success and notoriety. 

Arriving in Philadelphia, she discovered she was short the price of a ticket. “I went into a phone booth to think,” Smith writes. “It was a real Clark Kent moment.” But then luck intervened, and “…on the shelf beneath the telephone, lying on thick yellow pages, was a white patent purse. It contained a locket and thirty-two dollars, almost a week’s paycheck at my last job.” With some hesitation, Smith decided to keep the money and take the purse with the locket to the ticket counter (there was no ID in it). “I can only thank, as I have within myself many times through the years, this unknown benefactor.” 

There would be other benefactors during the artist/poet/singer’s (she of the solemn-voiced, penetrating rant, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine…”) creative ascent, though her own grit and determination were two of the three major elements. The third was her romantic and artistic coupling with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (he of the highly stylized, coffee-table-book pornographic male nudes). 

Just Kids, Smith’s memoir of life with Mapplethorpe in the late 60s and 70s, is a love story. Regardless of how one feels about the work of these two artists, I think it’s a must-read, especially for anyone trying to forge a life out of art. It is sad, joyful, compelling, annoying and heartening all at once. The chief take-away is this: If you’re hell-bound on achieving success as an artist, you need to be tough and you can’t give up. And though Smith never explicitly says so, her memoir also reads as a cautionary tale about how ambition can get out of hand, as illustrated by Mapplethorpe’s career trajectory. 

Theirs is also a New York story: two  artists ravenous for success in the Big Pond. Although in many ways New York is still a mecca for creative people, in the 60s and 70s it was considered the only game in town for an artist who wanted to be taken seriously. Most of the artists I knew in Washington at the time struggled not with whether to move to New York, but with when and how. There were only a handful of first-rate DC galleries 35 to 40 years ago, whereas now strong art outlets abound in the city from different areas of Northwest to the latest scene on H Street Northeast. 

 How many artists would be willing to go through what Smith did after arriving in New York, sleeping wherever she could, which often meant curled up in Central Park? A waitressing job ended “after spilling a tray of veal Parmigiana on a customer’s tweed suit.” But she was able to get a cashier’s job at Brentano’s bookstore. “I would hide in the bathroom while the others left,” she writes, “and after the night watchman locked up I would sleep on my coat. In the morning it would appear I had gotten to work early. I hadn’t a dime and rummaged through employees’ pockets for change to buy peanut butter crackers in the vending machine.” 

Then she met Mapplethorpe, the former altar boy who saw life and art through the prism of a sacred/profane, darkness/light duality:  “…Robert, though shy, nonverbal, and seemingly out of step with those around him, was very ambitious. He held Duchamp and Warhol as models. High art and high society; he aspired to them both. We were a curious mix of Funny Face and Faust.” Their prospects slowly improved—they had each other—but their days were still a struggle for food, shelter and art supplies. 

Luck came around again, however, and they landed a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel, the famed residence of many creative figures in financial decline.  By then, Mapplethorpe was hustling at Times Square, which he called “the Garden of Perversion. ” He told Smith: “Hustler-hustler-hustler. I guess that’s what I’m about.” In my mind, Mapplethorpe’s ambition over-rode his talent. His photographs, after you got beyond the shock value, were nothing new. They were highly stylized in the tradition of earlier salon photographers like Cecil Beaton and Carl Van Vechten, with influences from less commercial people such as Man Ray, Edward Weston and even Imogen Cunningham. They were aimed at a highly affluent audience who would pay big bucks to display an ornately framed photograph of a guy’s dick hanging out of his pants next to a Ming vase. 

Mapplethorpe may have been a tenacious self-promoter, but his skin was thin in other ways. I was writing about photography in the late 70s and early 80s, and I approached him at his opening at Harry Lunn’s gallery on 7th Street. I asked him, straight-faced and in total seriousness, how his out-there S&M photographs were any different from what you might find in a male magazine on 42nd Street. Sam Wagstaff, his patron and lover, was standing a few feet away. I had interviewed and written about wealthy, Gary Cooper-handsome curator/collector Wagstaff when his superb photography collection was on exhibit at the Corcoran. His feelings hurt, Mapplethorpe walked away from me whimpering to Wagstaff about how my question had offended him. 

Living at the Chelsea Hotel led Smith and Mapplethorpe to some of the city’s hippest venues, chiefly Max’s Kansas City where Warhol held court. Smith writes that Mapplethorpe was enamored of Warhol, felt he was his equal. “The politics at Max’s [was] very similar to high school,” she says, “except the popular people were not the cheerleaders or football heroes, and the prom queen would most certainly be a he dressed as a she, knowing more about being a she than most she’s.” 

As Mapplethorpe made collages using photographs from—guess where?--male magazines he picked up on 42nd street, Smith wrote her poetry and did rock reviews for periodicals like Crawdaddy. Amid chronic financial pressure (“If we were out of money we just didn’t eat”), Smith was awakening to the implications of Mapplethorpe’s sexuality. What brought things to a head was Mapplethorpe’s affair with the socially well-connected David Croland, a top model at Boys, Inc., and the former lover of the beautiful Susan Bottomly, better known as International Velvet who starred in several Warhol films. Mapplethorpe began to move in the higher echelon of hip, queer New York society, largely accessed by Croland, through whom he was introduced to Wagstaff. It was Wagstaff who bought Mapplethorpe his first real camera, a Hasselblad, and financially jump-started his career. 

Smith and Mapplethorpe’s worlds diverged even more after she met drummer/playwright Sam Shepard. Smith and the married Shepard had an intense artistic and romantic relationship. Smith was now reciting her poetry in bars and clubs around New York, but her major breakthrough was a performance at the highly prized St. Mark’s Poetry Project. With Lenny Kaye backing her up on electric guitar, Smith opened by singing Mack the Knife and went on to recite some of her own poems like “Oath” and “Fire of Unknown Origin.” There were cheers and boos, as this was the first time there had ever been poetry fused with rock n’ roll at a St. Mark’s reading.

Smith is forthcoming about her influences: Dylan, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Marianne Faithfull and Edith Piaf, to name just a few. The Beat poets, Ginsberg et al, though in descent by this time, also made their mark on her. You can hear their anger echoing in her rhythms and voice tone. And as much as Smith’s work from that period, chiefly her breakthrough album, Horses, holds up to a fair degree (I still enjoy listening to it), it falls short of the level of the best work of her idols. Which is fine. Giving comparative grades to artists is a futile enterprise. Nevertheless, listening to Morrison’s Light My Fire or Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, for example, can still give me goose bumps, just as the songs did when I first heard them over 40 years ago. 

Smith’s memoir is marred somewhat by her apparent inability to cast a negative light on anyone. Maybe it’s her nature, but it affects the book’s credibility. Surely there were a few creeps among the artistic crowd or at least a couple of sleazy moments in the upswing toward major recording deals. Ironically, the closest she may get to being judgmental is in reading between the lines about Mapplethorpe’s personal and career choices. Unwittingly perhaps, she builds a case for Mapplethorpe’s selling his soul to the devil. Nevertheless, though Smith and Mapplethorpe were, eventually, romantically separated and moving in different worlds, their fierce personal and artistic loyalty and their generosity toward one another never faltered. And for that at least, one can’t help but have a great amount of respect for them.

Patti Smith photo: Beni Köhler

September 11 Triptych

3 canvases
20” x 24” each
acrylic
2001

In the aftermath of September 11, there was, for me, only one choice about what kind of painting to make: It would emanate from my deep anger and sorrow.

Color was the first thing I considered. I felt compelled to paint darkness and, after that, an intense red. The dark color is rendered along the spectrum from black to green. The red isn’t just a pure red; it is, at times, rose, crimson, even a sort of pink. As I worked I noticed the remaining white area on the canvas, and I chose to leave it as a kind of floating white space with some color worked into it.

The words followed. Lines from Psalm 23 had been repeating themselves in my mind ever since the event, and I painted them onto the first panel. (Each panel contains lines from that psalm.) I had been reading news materials, and I wove in something I read about the chaplain who died giving Last Rites to a fireman.

The middle panel contains a description of the inferno. I was steered to literary sources, too; thus the lines from Allen Ginsberg’s great Beat poem, Howl.

My source for the third panel was the ongoing series in The New York Times, “A Nation Challenged: Portraits of Grief.” These short biographies make each person real. I strung lines from many of the stories—selecting specific qualities, incidents—into a kind of single narrative. In doing so, I, like many others, try to ensure that those who died are remembered as individuals and not as abstractions.

Notes to Myself

Notes to Myself, 2010

I’ve been scribbling things down on paper my whole life. On the back of bills, business cards, grocery receipts, anything that’s handy, as a way of holding on to what feels important to me in the moment: maybe a turn in my life’s direction; someone I’ve noticed; an unidentifiable fear. Some of this is at the edge of my awareness--as if I were trying to lasso a bird in the air--and writing it down makes it more concrete and provides some sense of control. Over time, the scraps of paper mount into small dusty piles and eventually get tossed in a box. Years later when I open the box and happen to read these jottings I encounter a self in formation, inchoate, raw, messy. These canvases reflect some of these “notes to myself” from an earlier time in my life.