Tennessee Williams. No Refuge but Writing. At The Morgan Library and Museum

I have decided that this will probably be my last visit to a New York City Museum. I am nearing 80 and although in good health, save for a strong case of emphysema, I am finding it more and more difficult to get to and around the City...more annoying, really, than difficult. And I decided on this exhibition as my last because many years ago I knew Peter Hujar, slightly, I knew Tennessee Willams, slightly, and they had known one another, slightly, at that same time and so I could not let the occasion pass without commenting on it: This is the first time, late in my life, when persons I have known have been the subject of museum exhibitions. But it is also an example of it being a small world. In the exhibitions there were some other familiar faces from my life experience and so the social triad became the leitmotif of the day.

What follows immediately will be notes, random notes, with a nod to Mr. Williams’ notes for writing plays. At the end I will comment on Peter’s photography.

To begin: The setting.

The Morgan Library and Museum.

I moved to New York just after Labor Day 1959. The first winter I lived on East 47^th Street near Third Avenue and then later on 82^nd Street also near Third Avenue. After a summer of summer stock in 1960 I sublet an apartment on Second Avenue and 25^th Street. I lived in that neighborhood for about four years. It was probably at that time that someone or other suggested to me that I visit the Morgan Library ...it being within the distance of a Sunday walk. It could have been the set designer I worked for: he had studied at the Yale School of Drama under Donald Oenslager and he knew that his wife, Mrs. Oenslager, was active with the Morgan Library as a volunteer. Whatever the date of my first acquaintance with the Library, I was somewhat more familiar with it in 1964 when I took a friend and his visiting mother there. In 1965 when my mother came from Kansas to see the World’s Fair, I took her there as well.

` I cannot say that everything about the Library has been of interest to me. I have never cared much for Middle Eastern cylinder seals, nor for Gothic painting ...except for its brilliance of color. Not being religious illustrated bibles and books of hours leave me cold ...although I do understand that the art of painting , in the west, began with these tomes. But I do like drawing and in the late 80’s, when I was studying figure drawing with an artist on West 26^th Street, (perhaps it was she who suggested a visit) I discovered that the Morgan is one of the very best venues for the study of master drawings of the West. Since that time I have rarely missed any of the many excellent drawing exhibitions presented there from other collections.

And while the original buildings are the very definition of sumptuousness, over the years I have come to see them as an example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s remark on classic revival architecture: “It is a copy of a copy of a copy.”As for the recent expansion, see this blog 2008, it was not my cup of tea on first encountering it and over the years my opinion of it has become even less positive: this is a really badly designed museum space. It is not an entity so much as it is now a series of isolated galleries all of them to the sides of an unattractive dining area thrust into the open, vacuous, center court. Why that space was not used as gallery space, as it had been in the past, is a mystery to me. Does New York really need yet another museum dining room? And if it does must it be presented as so completely dull and beside the point?

Tennessee Williams

In 1956 Mr. Williams was at the high point of his Broadway career. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had continued his success and his work had achieved a similar acclaim in Hollywood. He, however, was not happy. With little fanfare, apparently his agent Audrey Wood was unaware of it, he went into production for a new play, Sweet Bird of Youth, which was staged at Studio M, a small off Broadway-like theater in Coral Gables, Florida ...as per the publication of the play in a 1957 issue of Theatre Arts Magazine. I believe I remember being told that Peter Harvey, the set designer at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, worked as the designer on this production.

For most of its history Broadway has had a make or break creative environment and it makes perfectly good sense to do out of town workshop productions before getting into the heady atmosphere of the commercial mecca. Unfortunately there were very, very few regional theaters at that time.

Enter Owen Phillips. In 1956-57 Owen began his first year as managing director of the Coconut Grove Playhouse. If Tennessee Williams was agreeable to having his new work performed outside New York City, he was more than agreeable to hosting him at The Grove, all of it to be paid for by producer George Engles’ Texas oil money. And it would be an additional feather in his cap if he, Owen Phillips, were to be the director as well of the new plays ...Owen had previously been director and managing director at the Barter Theater in Virginia. He and Tennessee were nearly the same age, Owen, a nelly-assed queen, still lived with his mother, a Southern Belle from an earlier epoch, and Owen assumed that he and “Tom” would see eye to eye on everything artistic as well.

Enter Peter Hujar.

During the winter of 1957 Peter went down to Miami to visit his friend Paul Thek who was the sometimes boyfriend of Peter Harvey. Photographs show that these chaps were also friends with Tennessee Williams and his boyfriend Frank Merlo. At the end of his visit Peter Hujar returned to New York as the boyfriend of Paul Thek.

My entrance. (Ahem)

In that same issue of Theatre Arts Magazine there was an ad soliciting hopefuls to come to The Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, to study acting and to appear in plays with Broadway and Hollywood Stars! When I went to college as a theater major in 1957 it had been my intention to focus on acting. But I was given a job in the university scene shop and because I had a natural ability to paint faux finishes, the resident designer turned me into a scenic artist almost overnight. But as I still wanted to be an actor, I left college and went to Miami in late August 1958. No sooner had I completed the first three or four classes than I was cast in a workshop production that was presented at Studio M. Invited by Owen Phillips, Tennessee Williams attended with his friend Frank Merlo. The cast was introduced to them after a performance.

When the play closed after its two week run, Owen had a cast party at this home. Tennessee graciously accepted an invitation and appeared with his mother. At the end of the evening one of the other young actors was asked to drive the William-es back to their hotel in Downtown Miami and he, not wanting to sit in the front by himself and feel like a chauffeur, as he had when he drove them to the party, asked me to accompany him. And so I did.

Settling myself in the front seat of the car I was immediately aware that I had entered into the presence of theatrical legend. I knew that this woman was the model for the mother in Glass Menagerie. But little did I think that she would soon launch into a recital of her recent visit to her daughter Rose in the institution where she had been placed. Tennessee Williams was quiet and disinclined to promote the conversation ...with his fame and his personal life in conjunction, he responded as if his privacy was being completely violated. Unfortunately Miss Edwina did not take the hint. Out of respect to him my friend and I made chit chat about the passing scenery along the highway.

Soon after the workshop production closed, the Playhouse announced that they were to present the world premier of Williams new play, Period of Adjustment. But unfortunately for Phillips, it was to be directed by Williams himself. That was his only demand. (Owen was crushed; but soldiered on.) A designer, fresh out of Yale, see above, was hired to do the sets and I, with my impressive one year college resume, was designated his assistant ...as well as local scenic artist, there being no one else with that talent in all of Miami; Peter Harvey had moved on to New York at the end of the previous season.

Delighted for their friend’s good fortune, T’s chums Gore Vidal and William Inge took up residence in the theater during the rehersals to give him moral support (and to keep the spirits flowing.) In fact Gore Vidal was so enthralled with the idea of directing that he signed on for a run of his play: Visit to a Small Planet.

This time agent Audrey Wood knew what was going on and she too camped out in the theater to prevent T. from making a complete career blunder. It was obvious that they were no longer getting along; the tension in the air was palpable. (There was also tension between T and Frank Merlo.)

After the weeks of rehearsals the play opened to some acclaim and Mr. Williams and his pals hosted a party for the cast and crew in the home on Biscayne Bay of Mrs. Marion Vacarro. (Her husband was, I believe, United Fruit. She was referred to as The Banana Queen, but not to her face.) At the close of the play there was yet another party at the home of Owen Phillips, now referred to by T and his chums as “Goody Phillips”, with a tip of the hat to Arthur Miller. And once again, at the end of the evening, my friend was asked to drive the pack back to their hotel. I too was asked to “go for the ride” even though there was no space for me. “You can sit on my lap” a voice slurred from the backseat. Wary, I nonetheless accepted the offer. Of course it was Mr. Williams. I apologized for being so skinny and having such sharp bones. But he assured me that at that late hour it did not matter. There was much laughter all the way to downtown Miami; but about what I did not know. Looking out of the corner of my eye I saw three of America’s reigning playwrights, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Gore Vidal plastered into stiff upright positions like bobble dolls gurgling with laughter.

Ten years later, in 1969, a play that I had written was read at the O'Neill Playwrights conference and as a result I received a Rockefeller Playwrighting grant administered by Audrey Wood. When I made my first ...and as it turned out my only...visit to her enormous corner office in the JC Penney Building on 6^th Avenue and 52^nd Street...she told me, regretfully, that she had no idea what to do with me. I suggested Hollywood scripts, as she had done for T. No she said. In the end I was dismissed without further input from her. But I was in good company. My fellow playwright and friend from that summer, Derek Walcott, was similarly dismissed. He did, however, go on to receive the Nobel Prize for literature ...even without her assistance.

In the exhibition I noticed that prior to signing with Audrey Wood Tennessee Williams had been scouted by Freda Fishbein. In the late 60’s after I had been writing on a daily basis for several years a friend felt that I was ready for some commercial attention and introduced me to Miss Fishbein. She assured me that despite her age she understood modern theater: she had discovered Elmer Rice. For several years she did read my work and encouraged me to press on. Eventually she retired and handed me off to a person I did not care to know.

A month or so after the run of Period of Adjustment, Jessica Tandy, the original Blanche du Bois, and Hume Cronin appeared at the theater in a program of one act plays, Triple Play. I was also the assistant to the house manager and so it was my job to open the theater at 6 P.M. so that they could go to their dressing room and prepare for the evening performance. When I worked in the New York film industry in the 1970’s their son Chris was a friend and fellow union member.

Toward the end of the season the play Look Homeward Angel closed on Broadway and the cast agreed to extend the run to two more weeks in Miami. For some reason I was elevated to set designer. (I was still only nineteen!) I was warned that the star, Miriam Hopkins, would chew me to pieces if I was not careful. It turned out to be quite the contrary: when Miss Hopkins requested a change to the steps on the set, I had the union carpenter take care of it immediately. And it was done quickly and to her satisfaction. Thereafter I was her pet. I don’t know that I have ever known that Miriam Hopkins starred on Broadway in the original production of Band of Angels. Seeing her on that playbill has brought back many of these memories.

Eli Wallach starred in the original Broadway production of The Rose Tattoo. In the 1970’s his son Peter video taped one of my off off Broadway plays. Peter and I shared the same birthday. I was introduced to Eli at a gathering. He was rude.

In 1980 I worked on a film shot in New York that starred Ben Gazarra, the original Brick in Cat. He too was rude...unbearable. Later I learned that this had been a low point in his life.

In the summer of 1957 I worked as a busboy at the Teller House Hotel in Central City Colorado. In August at the opera house next door the touring Broadway play, Separate Tables, starring Geraldine Page was performed for the month. I had a nodding acquaintance with her as she sometimes had breakfast at the hotel. After a party one night during which I had played an over the top villain in a melodrama spoofing the hotel and acting company, word came to me that Miss page wanted to say hello. Shyly I went to her and announced that I had played the villain. She told me she had enjoyed my performance. I told her I wanted to go to New York and be an actor. She leapt up and shouted: “No! No! You silly boy! Don’t do that!” I did go to New York in the spring of 1959 and the first play I saw on Broadway was Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth starring Geraldine Page and Paul Newman ...out of respect to my good friends Tom and Gerry.

In his cups or sober Tennessee Williams was always a gentleman, never rude. While he was reputed to be testy at times, I never saw it. He was always quiet, respectful of others, and somewhat compassionate. He was not a verbal person. I never saw him in conversation nor could I imagine him in a conversation. Writing, as the exhibition tells us, was his refuge.

But writing is a solitary pursuit. It requires isolation and solitude. The theater, and film, are considered collaborative endeavors. Only the playwright works without the others. When they begin to work on a piece, he is everyday more removed from the process. (Only playwrights like Moliere and Shakespeare, who were also actors, have an ongoing place in the company.) Plawrighting can engender feelings of alienation.

And I learned subsequent to having known him that this had been a low period for Tennessee Williams. I believe he felt that Kazan was contributing too much to his work ...Cat was, I think, the beginning of their end. And although he had begun by writing poetic plays Miss Wood successfully guided him into the Broadway heavens. I think he disliked that, I think he began to dislike her for it. I think he began to dislike himself for feasting on it. Here he refers to this time as “the catastrophe of success”. But he did take the money and he lived well on it.

The exhibition focuses on the years of his beginnings up to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Those are the plays for which he is well known. But he wrote a great many other plays after those...many many plays ...about which few of us know anything ...even though many of them were performed in New York City. Eventually he turned his back on Broadway ...or it turned its back on him, and in celebrity crazed America without that imprimatur as a playwright he was no one, nothing. Considered a poet, it’s sad that we only remember him for his commercial success and a fame he detested. And even sadder that in a vitrine featuring his published works, we can see that they were offered to the public in cheap, poorly made editions ...so unlike the hand-sewn leather covered works in the ersatz medieval library across the hall.

Peter Hujar. Speed of Life. At The Morgan Library and Museum

I met Peter Hujar on two occasions. My acquaintance with him is one of the most unusual in my thirty years in New York. Many, many, many others came and went but Peter, at least in name, lodged in my mind.

While living on East 82^nd Street in 1960 I met a man in his fifties who was an artist and who made his living working for Esquire Magazine as a mechanical artist. He asked me to pose for him for a portrait and while doing so he asked if I knew the name, Peter Hujar. I did not. He said that I looked like Peter...we were both Tony Perkins clones at that age ...and from photographs in this catalog I can see that we did look much alike. Later he thought that Peter and I could benefit from knowing one another and he invited the two of us for a Sunday brunch at his apartment. On his arrival I could see immediately that Peter had no interest in me. He was a young person starting his career, he was visibly ambitious, and he was only interested, I suspected, in knowing people who could further his progress. As a green young thing just out of Kansas, I was hardly what he had hoped to find across the breakfast table.

I think I recall that he had a rolleiflex on a cord around his neck and that some of the conversation had to do with the qualities of that camera. Our host, Luke, had a rollei as well. I knew noting about cameras and so I could only listen politely to something I did not understand. After a visit of an acceptable length of time, Peter thanked his host and left.

For the next several years that I knew him my friend Luke continued to keep me informed of Peter’s progress. On excursions into the East Village he would point out the building on 12^th and Second Avenue where Peter lived. He would send me out to buy magazines and newspapers when Peter’s work was featured. While this man knew many people in the arts through his work ...at all levels of success ...his fascination with Peter was really unusual and I wondered if there might not be more to it, psychologically or sexually, than just an interest in a talented young man’s career progress.

In 1970 or 71 I fell into conversation with a somewhat familiar looking man in Madison Square Park who while talking began to look me over in an unusual way. Eventually he asked if he could photograph me and when I asked him when he wanted to do it he said right now. So we went across 23^rd Street to his studio. As we entered I saw the name Peter Hujar on the door and I asked if he was Peter. He said that he was. I reminded him of our meeting some ten years earlier. He said that he remembered the man from Esquire magazine but that he did not remember the brunch. He apologized for that with much sincerity. But he did ask how I was able to remember it for ten years and I told him that Luke followed his career and never missed an opportunity to keep me informed and to remind me of our meeting. The revelation that he was memorable or famous to an unknown public seemed to disquiet him.

There was a floor to ceiling mirror on the wall of this otherwise empty room and as he shuffled about arranging equipment he looked me over both in the flesh and in the mirror as if I were an object to be placed in a composition or something that could be used to realize a concept. I had the strongest sense that he did not see me as a person. After much consideration he apologized for taking my time and said that he was not going to take any pictures. I was uncertain if it was because of an equipment failure or if I had failed to pass muster. “That’s fine.” I said. And I left. He did not ask me to “keep in touch”.

Over the years, as I saw Peter’s name here and there I would smile and chide myself that I was one of the few persons in this world for whom Peter had no interest at all.

I always insist that anyone wanting to know a photographer’s work must go to a gallery or a museum or wherever he can to see the artist’s prints. In this exhibition a handsome catalog has been published, by Aperture, with the prints measuring generally 8 inches square. I think it would be impossible to complain about anything in this book. However: when face to face with the artist's prints, about 14 ¾ by 14 ¾ inches on 16 by 20 sheets, and flawlessly made, one can only then realize what exquisite prints they are and what a great photographer Peter Hujar was. What appears to be so casual and effortless in a book or on the internet can be seen to be the result of talent, education, hard work, and artistry in the gallery. This comes from the fact that there are dichotomies in his life and work which need to be understood in order to understand his work.

The story told is that Peter lived in the East Village during its counter cultural heyday and that he was not an outsider but an intimate, that he had had a troubled childhood and had been shunted from parents to grandparents, and that all of this had left him angry and disturbed. Yes, Peter lived on lower Second Avenue and he frequented the neighborhood places. But when I met him he was adept at entering into an uptown social event, of deporting himself in the manner required, and in taking his leave comfortably and with respect to all present. He was definitely not an antisocial barbarian or sociopath. And as we study the full range of his achievement in this exhibition we see that for all the experimentation in his life and his world ...sex, art, drugs ... in his photography there was an acceptance of a technique and skill that is consistently the same from first to last. It is never casual. It is never experimental. It never pushed the envelope into “new” territory. It is always familiar and it always achieves excellence.

The key to this, I believe, is to be found in Plate 97, 1977, which presents us with a portrait of Rose and Ed Murphy. Rose was Peter’s mother and Ed his step father. They lived on East 32 Street and Second Avenue across from what is now Kips Bay Plaza and even then that section of Manhattan was a middle class enclave. Although Peter lived with his grandmother and aunt and uncle in New Jersey for a time after his birth, his father disappeared before he was born, upon the death of his grandmother he moved back with his mother and lived there on 32^nd Street through middle school and high school.

In the photograph Rose and Ed Murphy appear to be middle class New Yorkers. They have dressed for the occasion. He wears a polyester leisure suit, she wears tailored slacks and a blouse. He is well groomed. Her hair has been done. She wears jewelry but nothing ostentatious. She appears to be the stronger of the two; he seems to be a man with a personality deficit, someone who can be used to fill out a crowd. They look as if they might spend part of the winter in Florida. They are proud, quiet people who know their place, who respect their place, and who have all the confidence in the world that their company is acceptable in any civilized social situation. They know how to behave and how to blend into a crowd. (We often encounter characters like these in the works of John Cheever.) I am certain that when he lived with them Peter was expected to behave himself like a gentleman, to do his school work without complaint, to know his place, to respect his place, and to be an asset in any social engagement.

In 1945, at the age of eleven, Peter made his first photographs using his mother’s camera, an Argus C3. The C 3 was a state of the art 35mm camera. When I bought one for ten dollars in a pawn shop in 1962 ...on 26^th Street and 3^rd Avenue ... professional photographers I knew told me that in the day it had been the work horse of the industry. It was not a piece of equipment an east side housewife would go out and buy on a whim ...in current dollars it cost about six hundred dollars, there was nothing automatic about it, it required that the exposure and the focus be set for each shot. Was Peter’s mother a photographer? Did she introduce him to photography? I am willing to bet that it was she who bequeathed to him his very strong work ethic: with setting up a shot, organizing the elements, shooting, developing, printing, soliciting other work, assaying the work for exhibitions, the life of a freelance photographer is a busy and a hard life. Without a puritan work ethic one gets no where. All play and no work leaves Jack along the roadside.

Apparently things did not go well for Peter at home. It doesn’t for most adolescents. He moved out when he was 16 and lived on his own the last year of high school. Later his mother disapproved of his overt homosexuality and his solution to that was to no longer see her. And so he slipped into the gay world, the East Village world, the art scene. But breeding will tell and like Tennessee Williams I suspect that Peter was always a gentleman.

The photograph of Rose and Ed Murphy is dated 1977. Was this printed in 1977 or was it created in that year? If so this is 25 years after Peter moved out ...approximately 1952-53. That hardly verifies the myth that his break with his mother was early and final. Rather it must have been a long and drawn out difficult relationship ... not unlike others I could name, many others!

It also tell us a lot about Peter Hujar the photographer. This looks to have been made in his studio. The wall and floor behind them can be seen in other photographs of a similar date. It is not spontaneous. It is not a psychological study. It has been composed. The composition begins at the bottom with a knife-like thin triangle of floor. The lighting has not been used for modeling but to create a range of tonal values, almost a mosaic of white and mid range grays. And it is very reminiscent, (was this intended?) of his 1969 photograph, Sheep, Pennsylvania, Plate 46. which is also a composition of tonal values, mid range grays moving into black and also lacking any psychological insight. In fact the number of photographs he made with two persons and sometimes animals is remarkable.(An obvious reference to Diane Arbus’ Twins, among other similarities to her work.) In many of his twins photographs the two persons are named but it is not indicated if that is to be read from left to right or right to left. Two names. Two persons. But which is which? I think to Peter it did not matter: each was merely a component of a single composition.

Composition is vital to his work. There is abundant evidence of a strong commitment to his aesthetic and that he hews to it rigidly. His compositions are always made from the tonal values, as if he had been drilled and drilled in Arthur Dow’s book, Composition, with its emphasis on notan, the harmony of light/dark. Apparently he never worked with color film.

One of the talking points in the photography magazines in the 60’s and 70’s was the question: Does one compose to the format or does one crop the composition from within the format after shooting from the hip? From the contact sheets we can see that Peter composed to the format. In Plate 122, Group Photograph, we can see Peter reflected in a mirror and that he is using at that time, 1966, a Hasselblad camera which, like the rollei, used 120 film with a square format. I suspect that he generally printed the whole of the negative; almost all of his photographs are square. We can see that he did not fire off shot after shot after shot but took his time, created his composition, and released the shutter when he saw, in living color, the composition as it would be on paper in black and white. Let me repeat that: “...he saw , in living color, the composition as it would be on paper in black and white.” And that is Peter’s remarkable talent: he was a master of composing with values he knew to be there but could not see until the film was developed and printed. Road, West Virginia, 1969, Plate 20, is a supreme illustration of this mastery as is Plate 159, Blanket on the famous chair, 1983, or Water tank and tower, 1974.

For a person who had only a high school education, he majored in photography for three years at the New York City Commercial Trades High School and later worked as a studio assistant to a professional photographer, he had a remarkable grasp of the craft of photography. But it was an education in greater depth than that of Yosef Karsh who had only been trained as a studio assistant. And Harry Callahan, America’s greatest photographer, had no formal education in photography or studio apprenticeship at all. This might well indicate that great photographers are born not made.

Peter’s dark room work is extraordinary. As I have said, these are flawless prints. (Unfortunately the museum has chosen to show them with really inferior, glaring lighting. Shame on them!) And there are many instances where it can be seen how he had complete mastery over the printing process. Plate 18, Public Garden, Taormina, 1959 has a wonderful cascade of blending from top to bottom of light to dark, as does Plate 5. Horse in West Virginia,1969, and the witty Washing on a Clothes Line, 1978., Plate 105. in which the blend (was this set up?) reads from left to right, or perhaps right to left. Dinner for Don Nice, Plate 78 is an all over design of tonal values much like an abstract expressionist painting. (There are many references to abstract expressionist paintings here.) And in Rockefeller Center, Plate 98, the architectural logic is so askew that it took me a long time to realize that it was a collage rephotographed and passed off as a street view. (Another example of his wit?) I find all of his architectural photographs of New York City somehow strange; were these editorial assignments? Was he seeking editorial assignments? There’s a reference to Berenice Abbott and Harry Callahan, but beyond that they are very common for the day: I took a lot of photographs like these and I would hardly call myself a photographer.

I am also somewhat mystified by his portraits. Almost none of them are psychological studies. Having put the models in place, he seems to have waited until their attention wandered before making the shot. (Irving Penn did a similar series of portraits.) Thus we have a world populated by persons living in a half life. I knew several of these people. I did not know any of them in this way. And I am a long way away from having read Against Interpretation, Peter’s friend Susan Sontag’s very seminal 1960’s essay. Perhaps therein lies the explanation.

There is a far wider range of subject matter here than I have been aware of. To my knowledge Peter is best known as the chronicler of the East Village arts scene, the gay liberation movement, the shadowy nights of the deserted west side Manhattan streets, the abandoned piers. If you google Peter those are the images that come up. This exhibition consists of 100 works from the collection, a recent gift to the Morgan, and an additional 60 prints. The choices here make us aware that Peter often “referenced’ or as they now say… “quoted” other photographers, perhaps his favorite photographers. There is at the opening the Peter Jumping photograph a la Richard Avedon's Jump Book. There are references to Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, perhaps Aaron Siskin. I wish this had been discussed in the catalog.

Many of Peter’s more well know works have attained the stature of icons. Seeing those works beside the work I did not know about ...the animals, the architecture, the fascination with the surface of a large body of water ...the rather editorial portraits... compels us to approach his iconic works with new eyes, for instance Candy Darling on her death bed. Plate 32, 1973.

Peter’s work for the most part is straight on, upright and rigid. Occasionally it is relieved by a composition on the diagonal. Such is Candy Darling. She and the bed are on the diagonal. And we see the diagonal of her body repeated and emphasized in her forearm resting atop her head. It is one of the whitest areas of the photograph. Her face is white, her eyes and mouth almost black with make up ...as she often was in “real” life. And then we notice her dark gown, nestled between the very white sheets On a table behind her, standing out against the black of the wall there is a bouquet of white chrysanthemums. That bouquet is echoed, rhymed, on the left with the black silhouette of a bouquet of roses. A black silhouette of a long stemmed rose has been placed on the bed beside her. A hospital bed table pushed in just enough on the right identifies the location for us.

Whereas in the past I approached this with reverence and respect, because of the title, because I had enjoyed her street theater, I see now that I cannot do that. This is not a found photograph in the sense of an Ansel Adams found photograph. Despite the title Candy looks the picture of her usual good health. This is a composition. It is manufactured, just as Candy Darling was manufactured. The person Candy Darling never existed. She was a celebrity, a made up personality like Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, or Harpo Marx. She brought a little bit of west coast glamour to the gritty streets of the lower east side. This manufactured image, her last, is a glorification, an homage in gratitude to the pleasure she brought into the world. It was made for her. It was publicity for her exit from the stage of life. (“Out, out brief candle…”). Peter was her George Hurrell. It is camp. Today it is the iconic image of her: most people only know her as someone who died.

Should the others of Peter’s compositions be read in this same way? Are any of these images found photographs? Are all of them or only some of them conceptualized and composed by the artist? I believe there is a mixture of both but that it requires long looking to ascertain which is which. Would knowing that help us to understand why he quoted and referenced so often.

Peter Hujar on his death bed is the photograph of a person at his moment of death. It was planned; a camera was at the ready. But unlike Candy who played a role, he was real. I can attest to that from first hand experience. His work is real. It exists on the wall in front of us. It is filled with silence. But like the sound and fury of another time it too signifies nothing. It is a visual experience. It is immediate. It is alive. And it is blemish free.

Thanks to The Morgan for keeping it going.

Marsden Hartley’s Maine

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Colby College Museum of Art

The first Marsden Hartley work that resonated with me was a preliminary charcoal drawing of Manawaska at an exhibition of drawings from the collection at the Morgan Library in the mid to late 1980’s. At the time I was studying figure drawing with an artist in New York and when I came face to face with the Hartley I was overwhelmed by the strength of its execution, its force, and its ability to use the human figure in a work of modern art. And I was somewhat amused that the figure did not stand straight but that the axis was tipped to one side as in the work of Cezanne. I was studying the work of Cezanne at that time as well. I decided to become better acquainted with Hartley’s work.

Some twenty years later I came face to face with that painting, Manawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy at the Chicago Art Institute. (In this exhibition plate 118,) Again I was overwhelmed. It is one of those paintings in which the composition, the color, and the execution create an iconic image. While many torso works crop the figure just above the pubic area, Hartley cropped this one just below the genitals, which are then hidden in a black posing strap. We have simultaneously the strength and power of the figure as well as its vulnerability and weakness. We have the modesty of the man ...he is human. It is a very dynamic and at the same time charming painting.

At that time I was making a tour of American cities, seeing museums that I had always wanted to see but had never seen and over the course of three months I was happy to find in many museums some really fine Hartley works.

In Portland , Oregon I first encountered the Maine paintings; After the Hurricane, (Plate 83). And in Tucson three lovely Hartley’s both from Maine and from his time in Aix en Provence.

In Kansas City, I was delighted to find at the Nelson Atkins Museum one of his early German works, a portrait of his German officer friend. And a few blocks down the street at the Kemperer Museum one of his late Maine paintings. It was wonderful to see works almost side by side in which a person who had begun his career with the exuberance of discovering his medium could conclude it with some of the most poetic, lyrical, paintings.

Following that trip I began to buy books, exhibition catalogs, biographies for my Hartley studies.

It is especially in the late Maine landscape paintings that I sense a poetic expression. I sensed a real similarity in his work to that of Eugene O’Neill, both being poets of tremendous compassion and feeling. In almost all of them we see a foreground cluttered with obstacles ...rocks or logs spilled without order ...beyond that a body of water, beyond that a line of standing trees, a forest, and beyond that often a dark brooding mountain. It is almost a literal statement that the way forward is strewn with obstacles, that there are barriers, and that there is a forbidding task confronting a formidable object. However, in all of them there is in one corner or the other a square or rectangle or a wavy line across the top of light blue. That light blue seems to promise air, destination and escape.

From the biographies we know that Hartley had a deep longing for spiritual peace. He had been exposed to Christianity as a child but was not believed to be overly religious. In the paintings the longing is always present but it is never fulfilled. In many of his figurative works the individual is always alone, or separate from the others, or, if a group or a family, alone as a social unit. There are no Bruegel village dances in Hartley’s world, no Kermis at Hoboken.

I question whether this was a search for a spiritual life, a search for meaning...purpose, or whether he acknowledged that it was only a universal longing for same, or an ignorance of the longing as seen in some of his men on the beach preoccupied as they are with earthly things if not just themselves. In his Mellon Lectures Phillip Golding reviews the work of six modern artists and tells us about their religious antecedents and how they followed what he called The Paths to The Absolute. I thought most of us recognized that the only absolute is that there is no absolute. Camus has informed us that we have evolved in an absurd universe. There is no reason for it to be here: there is no reason for us to be here. It does not care if we are here. It was here long before our arrival and it will continue being what it is long after our departure. From others we know that eventually the sun ill exhaust its fuel and burn out and that when it does it will flare out and incinerate the entire solar system. There will be no evidence that we were ever here at all. The universe still will not care. Camus further informs us that suicide is not the answer ...living is the answer, our task being to find, as William James would have it: what makes a life significant.

Looking at these landscapes I see and feel this. And in company with his Maine men I understand that we are indeed alone. But however alone we have the very slightest experience of fellowship ...we stand on the promontory together. And we sense this through art. Art is a call to community. It is there that we feel the other. Suzanne Langer wrote that in every society man has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that desire has manifest itself through magic and ritual, religion and art. We seek symbolic experience not spiritual attainment and it seems to me that is what Hartley has wrought. I think it has been the understanding of that call to community that led the truly great modern artists to continue to work in representational styles, abstraction being a call to only the art world initiates.

I see this in the figurative drawings much more so than their being merely a display of homo eroticism on the beach. Granted they are erotic, but they are more than either of these things as well: the catalog notes the pink shirt worn by the standing figure in Plate 87, Lobster Fishermen, suggesting that it is an example of homosexual coding. (Actually it is a red shirt with white (pink) highlighting.) But it fails to note that two of the other men are in shirts that are the red of raw meat, that the flesh of all the men looks as if it had just had blood rinsed from it; they have the stained hands of hunters and fishermen after they have dressed their kill. The whole of the painted group exudes rawness, blood, manual labor ...earth bound creatures ganged together against the sea and the sky. Separate from it. In Hartley I believe the sky is always important. I believe it is a personal symbol. It occurs from his first works to his last. Surprisingly, however, when he lets the blue dominate, as in The Church at Head Tide, Plate 149 or Birds of the Bagaduce, Plate 57, we can see very clearly that blue, as a subject, is not his color: he is a master of the earth tones: he is an artist not of the light but of the shadows.

Hartley’s career was off to a good start with the early neo impressionist painting he made of the Maine mountains, his modernist German Officer painting made in Munich, and some really good cubist work he did the summer of 1916 in Provincetown. But he fell into a mid career slump. Not much of his work of the middle period interested the public. Many in the art world thought that he had exhausted his stay. The late career Maine paintings revived interest in his work but it was the figurative paintings shown in New York in 1940 where the public and the art world acknowledged that at last he had arrived. There is a wonderful selection of those figurative works here. I am sorry however that they did not include the paintings that he made in Nova Scotia. Of his eight final years in Maine two of them were spent in Nova Scotia and include the beautiful Mason family series. (Years prior to this exhibition here had been another small exhibition: Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia.)

Oddly I don’t feel, as I would in the work of Winslow Homer, that Hartley’s seascapes continue this philosophical/poetic strain. To me they read rather as his attempt to align himself on the side of history as a latter day modernist Winslow Homer. They are good paintings. They are in your face and the impasto very visceral, a quality that is missing in Homer, where the brush work is invisible and the subtext is completely dominant: they are a picture of something.

In fact in all of the Maine paintings I believe Hartley was attempting to place himself on the time line of western painting by consciously creating museum painting. He had always had as his foremost influence the life and work of Cezanne and much of Cezanne’s late work was exactly this effort to create “museum” paintings. That explains the late portraits, The Card Players, and the bathers...tho monumental nudes.

How the Cezanne influence, that for so long seemed to threaten his career, paid off can be seen in the Mount Katahdin series. These too are among the best of his work, and although inspired by Cezanne’s Mont Sant Victoire series, they are all Hartley. I first came upon them in the National Gallery. I was not surprised that it was in the West Building, with the old masters, rather than in the East ...the Moderns.

One curious group of paintings here is Hartley’s sea side objects: shell, rocks, ropes, and ...the lobster. I have seen the lobster at the Smithsonian in the Luce Conservation Center hanging on a wall with a great many other paintings. It looked small and insignificant. Here, where it has been given prominence, it assumes a greater validity. But it is red, the color of a cooked lobster and not the earthy tones of a lobster who lives, camouflaged, on the ocean floor. What are we to make of this? Was he hungry? Was he penniless and fantasizing about food ...food so near yet so far away?

And next to it the Black Duck No. 2. Plate 53. When I first saw it I was struck by its similarity to Sargent’s “Madam X.” And as I stood looking at it two very elderly ladies crossed in front of me, leaned in to see it more closely and then stepped back with one commenting dismissively: “Huh! Madam X.” (Madam X has been in the collection of The Met since 1909. Surely he would have seen it there.) Whereas Madam looks to her left the bird looks to its right. But they are otherwise almost identical in composition, color and mood. And what are we to make of this! I began to wonder if it might not be a satirical comment on Sargent’s work. I have always felt that Sargent is famous beyond his achievement. He lived in the time of Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, et al, and yet he was the master of the academic tradition being in great demand as a society portrait artist. One should not hesitate to call him decadent. A confirmed modernist I can well image how horrified Hartley might have been by his work. And as Sargent’s work is so well represented in Boston, at the Museum of Fine Art, The Isabella Gardner Museum, and the murals in the Boston Public library Hartley would have had more than enough examples on how never to paint ...or to live one’s life.

But what do we make of this? Is it satirical? Was it meant to elicit a laugh? Did Hartley in fact have a sense of humor that we might not be reading in the others of his work? Is it camp? Or, if we are unfamiliar with Sargent’s work, was it intended to be the somber work that it can also be? Is it another modernist reworking of an American genre; a Peto or Harnett still life with dead fish and fowls?

What I miss in the exhibition is an example of Hartley’s flower paintings. He painted many of them, as well as garden tools. The last painting on his easel when he died was a bouquet of roses. Here it is all land and sea and men of the sea.

Since becoming familiar with Hartley’s work I have been perplexed as to why he is not more well known than he is. He is the Harry Callahan of modern art.

In a 1969 article devoted to Hartley and his work Hilton Kramer wrote: “The career of Marsden Hartley is one of the most interesting in the history of modern painting in America, but the very reasons that make it interesting have also made it difficult at times to keep his accomplishments clearly in focus.” He was referring to the shows that, like this one, focused on one aspect of his career. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser in the catalog preface to a 1980 Hartley exhibit that toured several American museums continued: “The smaller, focused shows made an important contribution on a single segment of Hartley’s oeuvre and helped to keep the accomplishments in focus. But they prevented the public from understanding the breadth and depth of Hartley's career as a whole”.

Obviously the exhibitions that have kept his name before the public and the art world makers and shakers have failed to create for him an iconic stature. And that was no doubt because of his working in a number of styles which resulted in his not having created an iconic personal style that summons his name. My personal choice is to see the work of an artist who has grown and broadened his achievement by working across a broad spectum of styles as Hartley did (and as Mondrian did), or in allowing his chosen style to expand and deepen though experience (as in Cezanne.).

Perhaps it is because the Hartley exhibits have played in the smaller and more regional museums, not in the homes of the blockbuster big leaguers that he has been made to seem “less important” and therefore negligible when he is known. This wonderful exhibition at the Met could have remedied the problem. Unfortunately, there were not twenty people in the galleries when I was there. And I went through the show, went out for coffee and went through it a second time. I had the elevators to myself. I had the galleries to myself. (Which is how I prefer it.) Friends who have seen this have told me that there were few others there as well. I have a strong sense that the Met has failed to promote their exhibition sufficiently as to make of this a defining moment in Hartley’s career. Had it played at The Met Fifth Avenue with a large banner out front wafting in the breeze, would it have drawn a larger audience?

Perhaps it was the representatives, the gallery owners, who failed to promote their artists into prominence. For twenty five years Hartley’s work was seen at the Stieglitz galleries. He was one of the Stieglitz six: the others being Stieglitz himself, Georgia O’Keefe (Mrs. Stieglitz), John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Paul Strand. And in this case Stieglitz might have been the problem. He was vehemently opposed to the materialism and the crass commercialism of the American culture.

Alfred Stieglitz could be a very difficult person. When visitors to his 291 Gallery would inquire about the price of an art work he would often inform them that it was not a gallery but a museum and that the works were not for sale.

There was always a floating seventh in the Stieglitz circle and quite often that floating seventh was Charles Demuth. One contemporary art historian has suggested that Stieglitz denied him a permanent place because Demuth was overtly homosexual. It was suggested that Alfred might have found this personally unappealing or that he wished to minimize his public association with that artist. Whatever the reason he did show and sell the work.

Marsden Hartley was also overtly homosexual. (I believe though that however obvious he might have been he was not “out” in the present sense.) And he too was treated differently from the others. In his case Stieglitz showed Hartley’s work, he promoted him, he offered him guidance and shepherded his development. But he made little effort to sell his work.

Hartley grew up working class poor in Maine and for a short time in Cleveland. He lived poor almost all of his adult life. he lived from hand to mouth prior to the first meeting with Stieglitz n 1909 and on until they dissolved their agreement around 1935. When he absolutely needed money to eat, to buy materials or to travel, Stieglitz would somehow come up with the cash. This relationship has the character of a mutual dependency: one depends on the other for succor, the other for confirmation of his role as savior. And so perhaps Stieglitz’s different treatments of Demuth and Hartley were just two more of his many games, as well as another indication of his pleasure in being difficult. But there is also the suggestion in both cases, if sexuality was an issue, that the artists were being punished...a darker interpretation that is best left to others to analyze.

In any event Stieglitz was not a D.H. Kahnweiler who took a chance on Picasso’s and Braque’s explorations that resulted in cubism...and through careful exploitation made them and himself famous...and rich. Nor was he a Leo Castelli who took a handful of artists in the 1960’s and ballyhooed them into prominent collections and museums. In Castelli’s era the high cost of the art work he sold validated the artist’s talent. Stieglitz would have been horrified.

But however extreme his circumstances Hartley never considered doing anything other than painting. It would seem that he had a sound understanding of his talent and that he had an absolute confidence in his eventual success. It is fortunate that other artists recognized his talent and commitment and welcomed him into the art circles he sought out wherever he traveled ...and into the social sets surrounding them as well. (The number of contemporary artists Hartley knew personally during his lifetime is remarkable.) While he was a “loner” he was never an outsider. (And I would think that he was a loner in the same sense that Cezanne was a loner.) And it is significant that in the archival material on Hartley’s social interactions with his friends and fellow artists there is little if any suggestion that he was a hanger on, a beggar, or a whining malcontent. (He was noted, however, for being cheap. This is often the case when one has no money.) He wanted to paint, to paint well. He studied, he worked hard, and despite the difficulties he painted...very, very well. His friendships apparently stimulated and sustained him.

The earliest work in this exhibition (1907) Shady Brook, Plate22, is a landscape which he gave to the Lewiston Public Library. Unlike works created by amateurs in art classes in small American towns...where the painting is simply “a picture” of something and the colors timidly brushed on with no awareness of the history or the tradition or the craft of fine art painting, Hartley’s work makes use of a motif in order to make a painting, a painting which shows an academic training, a growing mastery of the craft of painting, an understanding of color theory, a mastery of balancing tonal values, and with the daring and the ability to express his deeply felt feelings for the human experience. Hartley had a fine analytical vision and was by aptitude and temperament a natural painter. He painted this at the age of thirty. He had been studying painting in Lewiston, Cleveland, Boston, and New York, for ten years, After showing his early work to Stieglitz he was immediately accepted into his circle.

The 291 Gallery began as a pictorialist photography gallery but as time went on Stieglitz became aware of the new modern art being created in Europe, and he began to encourage artists to create an American art. It can be assumed that Emerson’s The American Scholar was an influence for him as it had been for Hartley. (His later gallery was named An American Place.) Once the Stieglitz six were established it would be seen that there was a common thread in their work: it was representational, figurative (in the way that Picasso and Matisse were representational), the color was local color, there was an awareness of European Modernism in that it had a sense of abstracting the essence of the motif without being too abstract (ambiguous or arbitrary). And it had American subjects ...persons, places, and things.

Despite the inspiration from Emerson, despite the ambitions of Mr. Stieglitz, and despite his own focus on a specific place, in this instance Maine, Hartley’s paintings are not just about making an American art: they are a concerted attempt from first to last to create a place for himself in the cannon of Western Art, to be a museum painter. His Maine is the Provence of Cezanne. (Hartley spent two years in Provence, 1925-1926, repainting many of Cezanne's motifs. It was that series of paintings that lead to his break with Stieglitz.) He was no less solitary than Cezanne and he was as well no less ambitious to achieve the highest goals. During his lifetime Hartley explored Nineteenth century French landscape, Connecticut Impressionism, and German modernism. He explored American folk art and seems almost to have modeled his itinerant lifestyle on the early American sign painters who were often called upon in their travels to do portraits and family groups. From his Paris visit in 1914 his strongest and most lasting influence was Cezanne. He also, like almost every other early twentieth century painter explored cubism. Intellectually and technically he firmly positioned himself in the cannon of modern art. But the personal style he evolved in the Maine paintings came about because he reverted to another very early influence: Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946. Just a few years later abstract expressionism was launched on its turn around the art world circus and the Stieglitz six, and the various sevens, seemed to fall into disfavor. Following the expressionists came the pop artists and the art world circus around them. The good, strong, solid painting of the Stieglitz circle faded to a lesser position, eclipsed, as they say, by history. As an artist of representational and figurative work, Hartley was passe. Now that the mid century art world smoke has lifted and the mirrors obscured with the grime of time, perhaps there will be a renaissance of these works still worthy of our attention.

And of course there is the man himself who might be the cause of his repute.

The fact that Hartley was an art world effete, an effeminate, rather foppish dandy, a sissy, (judging from the photographs) probably limited the interest that the general public might have had, if they had known anything about him at all. But it would be enough in these United States for a public to dislike someone about whom they had only “heard something”.

Before and between two world wars he was known as a very pro German enthusiast. His first trip to Europe was to Germany, just as the young Picasso had hoped to make but did not because he could only afford to go as far as Paris. Seeing sophisticated Europe for the first time in 1911, this poorly educated country boy from Maine was bedazzled by the pomp and ceremony of militaristic Germany. Going back in the early 1930, he marveled at their recovery and thought that much of the credit should go to Hitler. And he went so far as to state that he thought the Jewish solution, the ghettos, was probably for the best. All of this I believe speaks to his political naivete: in none of his other letters or notes does he make any mention of politics or government at all. As a friend of Leo and Gertrude Stein, and a frequent guest in their Rue de Fleuris apartment, I think they might have shown him the door had they suspected him of being an anti Semite.

From what I can make out in the biographies Hartley was naive, an innocent, and if his career did not soar to great heights as per his wishes, I suspect he hadn’t a clue about how to make it do so. Knowing “someone”, important people, is about as much as he understood. And if he was indeed “co-dependent” on Stieglitz, you can see he would not have gone too far.

It is always an effort well rewarded to see an exhibition of Hartley’s work, whether a career retrospective or a focused part. He is the great lyric poet of American painting and, quite simply the greatest American painter of the twentieth century. Yes, Pollack made a breakthrough with his drip paintings. But after having made a few for collectors and museums, he had nowhere else to go. Except for three paintings his earlier work is not all that interesting. His is the interesting career. He is historically important but he is not great. Hartley will outlive him. Perhaps it is the evidence of these various styles that make Hartley’s work confusing to the general public: they simply can’t get a handle on it without investing a lot of time and study, Unfortunately American audiences are not likely to do that.

I was sorry that this exhibition was placed at the Met Breuer. While it has a lovely sculptural presence on the exterior the interior is hostile, dark, and unpleasant. It feels like nothing so much as one of those dreary discount department stores that popped up on Fifth Avenue in the sixties. I am all in favor of museums decentralizing. I see no reason for everything having to be under one roof, or for unused space being converted to galleries. With so many expansions the Met Fifth Avenue is now nothing but a series of corridors creating distraction and confusion in what are still called galleries.

And of course wherever it is it should all be free to the public both domestic and foreign. The museum was intended as a gift to the people, gift meaning free to the public. It was a token of gratitude from the robber barons who profited greatly from government largess, corporate welfare. Now the Met itself has become the face of corporate greed and demands that we pay and pay and keep on paying. Enough I say. You are handsomely funded. Tighten your belt. Learn to live within your means.

Hartley’s Materials.

American museums are often described as teaching institutions and I have become very appreciative of the inclusion in exhibition catalogs chapters on the artist and his materials. The chapter in this catalog is very good indeed. But rather than telling us why Hartley used the materials he did there is too much respectful suggestion that it might have been for this or that reasons.

Although Picasso often painted on what has been described as “cardboard” ...as well as paper napkins ...most paintings are described as “oil on canvas”. In the catalog Marsden Hartley’s work is stated as being oil on canvas, academy board, or hardboard, meaning masonite. It does not specify if the canvas was linen, or if that is implied in art world parlance, or if it was cotton. Art supply catalogs offer a wide range and variety of cotton canvas. They offer linen as well. Cotton, despite its ability to expand and shrink with the changing humidity, and thereby cause crackling, seems to be the norm. At least in mail order/internet purchases. It also has a tendency to rot from the back unless treated with formaldihyde. Linen is the professionally preferred material and in the last works of Picasso where he left so much unpainted surface the character of the beautifully primed but unpainted linen adds an elegance to the whole. Hartlety was familiar with linen from his time in Europe and is on record as thinking the American equivalent was greatly inferior. Let’s hope that in the future curators will make the distinction.

It was and still is possible to buy canvas by the yard as well as the stretchers necessary to make the support. The artist either takes the time to stretch and prime the material or he has studio assistants who do that for him. Although it takes time away from painting it is not difficult to stretch, size and prime a canvas. I learned to to it well when I was just eighteen. Somewhat trained in the academic tradition I suspect Hartley also knew how to do it. (For our better understanding of his choices he curator’s should have told us what was the practice of the other Maine or Provincetown painters.) It is also possible at more professional shops to have a specific fabric stretched and primed and delivered to the studio.

If Hartley was concerned about convenience I would think that he was best served by traveling with a roll of canvas and a bundle of stretchers. Once at his destination he could devote a few hours of a few days to getting things ready for his work. If he did not stretch his own canvas and if he did not want to train the locals to do it for him he could use the ready mades. One advantage of canvas is that once the painting is dry it can be removed from the stretchers and rolled up and shipped to a dealer or a friend. Van Gogh did this while in Arles. Picasso’s Guernica has been shipped rolled so many times I have read that the surface has been seriously damaged.

As I understand it from various catalogs, Hartley sent the Maine paintings to the Hudson Walker Gallery in New York. A rolled canvas would have been much easier to ship than the other two materials. Although Hartley designed and had frames made for him and shipped up from New York, for an increased percentage the Gallery also ordered and paid for the framing.

I think one means to determine his preference would be to compare the paintings made in Europe with those made here: i.e. was there a consistent use of linen in Europe, were there any academy board painting made there, etc. (As far as I know ‘yes’ on both counts.) Did he ship all of those paintings home flat or rolled?

A latter day version of Academy Board is still available through Dick Blick Art Supplies, but it is not that cheap. In fact it is a little more than a stretched cotton canvass of the same size. And it now comes in various materials and weights including Linen. Academy board was made for student work available through catalogs for schools but was also available in many small American towns where the local paint store often had a small department of artists supplies. All of them rather cheap. As recently as 1985 art supplies were still sold at the Benjamin Moore Paint Store in Scranton Pennsylvania, since gone out of business. Hartley’s paintings on academy board appear to have held up well. The first two surviving paintings I ever made, in the 1950’s, were on academy board and still look much as they did when I made them.

I can also see in my work that they were not varnished which was a finish I did not learn about until some years after I had begun painting. Varnish gives a painting that glistening, wet-look, rich oleo- resinous character that was one of the reasons I fell in love with painting. However when Picasso and Braque made their explorations in what became known as cubism, they decided not to varnish. And if you see a varnished analytical cubist work you can see that it makes the work look airless, hermetically sealed and lifeless. The same occurs when a painting is glazed: under glass. Thus the decision to varnish is up to the artist according to the character of the individual work. Hartley was in Paris after 1914, he knew the Steins, likely Picasso, and so he would have seen this unvarnished work ...perhaps as the authority in residence Leo Stein might have pointed it out to him.

Hartley’s Maine paintings appear not to be varnished ...he was after that primitive untrained quality ...although the catalog points out that he did varnish in places ...perhaps certain colors: black and raw umber have a tendency to “sink in”. The varnish would keep them in their place and on the surface with the other colors.

Academy board would have been easier to transport on his endless travels than masonite. One catalog states that he used quarter inch masonite. That can be rather heavy. I had a four by eight foot sheet cut into 12 by 18 inch rectangles and it was all I could do to pick up the box in which they were delivered to me; I would not want to travel with a suitcase full of it.

In his book The Artist and His Materials Ralph Mayer lists masonite as an acceptable painting ground. It would likely be available in any town with a lumber yard. He warns that in sizes over 18 by 24 inches it needs to be cradled: supports glued to the back to prevent buckling and warping. Masonite with do that if it gets wet or is in a too damp environment. (As will academy board.) He also suggests that it has to be primed with gesso four or five times with a thorough sanding between coats until a flawless white finish is achieved, just as one would do when painting a decorative finish on furniture. Masonite, made of wood pulp, is very acid and without the priming there is the possibility that the ground will destroy the painted finish. Its color will also bleed onto neighboring surfaces if it is not primed and if it gets wet.

Marsden Hartley primed his masonite panels with shellac according to the catalog. I suppose that is okay. The paintings are almost one hundred years old and appear to be still holding up,. By using shellac he was able to use the warm brown color of the material as an under paint, a tinted ground, a technique he had been using since his earliest works made in Cleveland. And he was also able to use less paint ...paints are very expensive. Because the masonite surface is so smooth it lacks the necessary tooth of the canvas or academy board for his usual thick application of paint. In fact in all of the works done on those two surfaces he has lost the texture of the ground completely. On masonite his paints are thinly applied, perhaps much diluted with turpentine, and brushed out it would seem with sable brushes. Some of those paintings have the character of a shimmering mirage.

The catalog also states that bristles from his cheap brushes can be found in the finished work on canvas and academy board.. Hartley did a lot of scrumbling as a last touch on many of the Maine paintings. You need a cheap brush for that: a good brush will hold its shape through thick or thin and they are almost impossible to use for scrumbling ...a cheap brush does the job best. As an unreliable marking device it gives you a spontaneous design-by-accident finish.

When I was being trained as a set designer the instructor insisted that we always use the best materials for our renderings and presentations. He reasoned that having spent the money we would bestir ourselves to do our best work. Likely Hartley heard this as well. In these Maine paintings however he seems not to have used the best material for a specific reason: he wanted that hand made primitive, folk art finish. It emphasized that he was an “outsider” artist, a la his mentor Ryder. And at this late stage in his life, he was no longer poor. The Hudson Walker and the Macbeth Galleries sold his paintings well. At his death he had a bank account with fifteen thousand dollars in it. As it regards his choice of materials; with his training, his experience, his friends, and having the means, I suspect he knew what he was doing. He made what he considered the right choices for the work at hand.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/marsden-hartley?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=statusupdate&utm_content=20170104&utm_campaign=marsdenhartley

https://www.colby.edu/museum/exhibition/view/upcoming/

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

            This is a wonderful collection of drawings and paintings. They represent an overview of the cubist years and the various forms in which it was manifest. And the works of Picasso and Braque specifically have a wonderful quality of elegance; they can be looked at again and again not for their historical importance but for the aesthetic pleasure of being with them.

            Leo Stein, who did not like cubism, once took Picasso aside and said that he thought cubism was merely decorative and that Picasso was surrendering his talent to his desire to be famous. Despite the fact that Picasso began to give more serious thought to the work Leo Stein stopped collecting it. Photographs in the exhibition show this collection as it was installed in the Lauder Uptown residence, and in the catalog in other Upper Eastside residences, and we can see that Leo Stein had a point: this work lends itself extremely well to decorating of the most elegant kind.

            Elegance is an interesting quality. It is hard to define although one recognizes it when he sees it. Many modern architects make beautiful and handsome buildings but only a few of them make elegant buildings, Cesar Pelli foremost among them. At The Met Thomas Hoving took the old, gray, dusty storage bin and turned it into a department store. Philippe deMontebello gave the whole of it a wonderfully elegant patina, boosting it from the aura of Macy’s to that of Neiman Marcus. Elegance in this sense has to do with an attention to detail and the use of the finest materials. But it can also be seen in the slap dash finish of a Matisse painting; sometimes it’s just an attitude.

            Seeing this elegant collection in this elegant setting made me aware of the silent presence of the person who always presented himself as the picture of elegance: D.H. Kahnweiler. It is to Kanhweiler that we owe our knowledge of the history of cubism. At the age of twenty three, practically still a boy, Kahnweiler hooked up with Braque and Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck and eventually Picasso. And when Braque and Picasso began working together exchanging ideas on the making of the art of their time Kahnweiler cleverly stepped in and offered them a weekly stipend in exchange for first refusal on their week’s output. As the works were brought to him he catalogued and dated and photographed each one of them. He maintained this practice for the whole of his working life.

            Later, while sitting out WWI in Switzerland he was able to write, from memory, the story of cubism as he had known it. Braque and Picasso, who had talked at length on a daily basis during that period, 1909-1914, insisted years later that they had said things only to one another that neither of them would ever remember. Kahnweiler had not been privy to every word of this. Thus what cubism “means” is still open to discussion …as the literature so aptly demonstrates.

 Resuming his gallery in Paris after the war Kahnweiler found that his two stars had, because of economic necessity, moved on to other dealers. Later, he was able to be involved in some ways with Picasso, but never again with Braque. He also still had the company of Juan Gris and after his death in the twenties he wrote the authoritative Juan Gris monograph. He picked up as well some of the other young artists of the day, among them Fernand Leger.

            It was Kahnweiler who stated that cubism, in its purist form, was defined by the work of four artists: Braque, Picasso, Gris, and Leger. We need to remember that Kahnweiler was a businessman, a very astute businessman I understand, and that all four of these artists were represented in his gallery. Douglas Cooper used that definition as the basis for forming his collection of cubist paintings. When he died and his works were to be distributed on the market place, Leonard Lauder was one of the first persons called to select works for his own much admired collection. Now the interesting story here is that when he started collecting art in the early 1960’s, Mr. Lauder claims that he was a working man making only ten thousand dollars a year. In the late 1980’s, after selecting the works he wanted from the Cooper collection, he confesses in the catalogue that he had had to borrow twenty two million dollars to pay for it. That’s a hefty loan to which a “working man” was able to encumber himself. Having never been asked to buy into a major art collection I don’t know if my credit was ever that good. But possibly it was: I too was a working man.

            This explains why this collection is limited to the work of these four artists…from Kahnweiler to Cooper to Lauder. And if I express myself as having reservations I mean exempting specifically Juan Gris and Leger. As far as I am concerned cubism will always be only Picasso and Braque and everyone else is just an interested bystander or a hanger on or as is sometimes said, a salon cubist. I have always felt that Gris, however nice a guy he might have been, was too eager to be understood and too eager to be complimented. He was a good copyist with the ability to mimic what his betters were doing: there is a wonderful pencil drawing here of Madam Cézanne in a Red Armchair, the Boston portrait, with a slightly exaggerated geometricizing that is another good example of that ability.  In addition he had Kahnweiler to promote his career. While some of his paintings are interesting they are never as good as those of the two main players’. At his best, Still Life, Table, 1914…the collage series with blue …he is just …very good. By contrast other artists also tried the cubist vernacular …Diego Rivera, Matisse, Mondrian, Jackson Pollock …but only in order to get inside of it and find their own way out.

            In regard to Leger he illustrates Kahnweiler’s short comings. After losing Picasso and Braque to World War I, Kahnweiler never again had artists in his gallery who were world class artists the likes of that first pair. And so what one has to reluctantly admit, being deeply indebted to him for his record keeping, is that Kahnweiler was lucky at one point to be in the right place at the right time, but that he was never again quite so lucky.

            Was Leo Stein right? Is cubism merely decorative?

            There are many books on cubism and the majority of them are only concerned with its history and chronology. In them there is much polite argument as to which painting was actually painted before or after certain other paintings. Most of these books read like the contre temps of art world insiders. And what is so surprising is that many of these authors will admit somewhere in their discourse that they do not understand cubism. (There is probably no other subject about which so many writers write books claiming their ignorance.) The best book, because he had access to all the Picasso drawings at MOMA and the Picasso Museum in Paris, is by Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, 2003. (He is the author of one of the essays in this catalogue as well.) Step by step he helps us to understand what Braque and Picasso were doing, from a technical standpoint, its formal development, on an almost day to day basis. And in the final chapter of his book he gives us an intellectual history of nineteenth century perceptual psychology and nineteenth century theories of language, synecdoche, etc. While this latter part is interesting I don’t know that it is necessary for the understanding of cubism.

            Like all paintings a cubist work is a visual experience. And while the intellectual or possible intellectual underpinnings are interesting they bear the same relationship to cubism as Aristotle’s Poetic did to Greek tragedy: the art was not created as an illustration of the philosophy; the philosophy offers only a partial explanation of the art.

            Cubism is often hailed as a revolutionary moment in art. It was not; it was a transitional period. No matter the style or school of painting each painting has three plastic elements: color, line, and form, or, and I think this was an insight for Braque and Picasso …shape. In a flat painting form is represented by shape. Various devices are employed to suggest that the shape is modeled, that it is a form. Thus every painting that employs those devices creates a dual perception: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. Cézanne’s use of that dichotomy created in his works a vibration that gave his paintings the sense of being alive. Braque and Picasso followed suit.

Painting in the west has a history of over two thousand years. Through the Late Gothic period and into the Renaissance paintings were made in studios and they depicted religious or mythological or historical scenes. Over time linear perspective became more strictly adhered to. Eventually painters worked from live models and made sketches of actual places. Then in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries absolute verisimilitude, mimesis, came into vogue…just as photography rendered it obsolete. The Impressionists turned away from the well made academic painting, but they continued to be the eye that records. Cézanne, removing linear and aerial perspective from his work came to realize that with the dual perception created by a painting, a painting became other than a window with a view; the painting was an autonomous entity. In addition, to create a more visceral response to the objects depicted, he began to distort the objects…that visceral response making them feel more real than if they had been perfectly drawn and carefully painted. He displaced elements within the painting: if a chair rail ran behind a table, he might place it higher on one side of an object than on the other. This created a pictorial dynamic.

Shortly after his death the interview with Emile Bernard was published in which Cézanne advised painters to look for the cube, the sphere and the cone. Working independently Picasso and Braque began to make paintings in which the geometry of objects was emphasized. It was in response to these village landscapes with little square houses that the expression “little cubes” was first uttered. Eventually Braque and Picasso met, agreed to work together, and they became known as “The Cubists”…although soon thereafter neither of them made any more paintings like those first proto-cubist works. Thus we can understand that “Cubism” is a poor name for what followed and that it in no way describes or explains that work.

Cubism reclaimed painting as a studio activity. Taking the cue from Cézanne’s motif, the reason for making a painting, the subject was located in the here and now …no more history, religion or mythology …and was seen (deconstructed) as its three plastic elements. Making a clean break from Les Fauves, they minimized color and emphasized line and shape (form). They used all the techniques of picture making …grids, scaffolds, paysage, hatching, cross hatching, etc. and incorporated it into the finished presentation. From the ethnographic arts they used simplification, synecdoche, and scarification. There was nothing new here except the results of using the traditional in a different way. By including everything in the finished presentation they sought to be more “honest”.  

As regards the subject the parts might be subjected to displacement and distortion: a piece of it might be seen here another there if it enhanced the pictorial dynamic. Just as Cézanne wanted to see how far he could go with the modulation of color before he lost the identity of the object, so Picasso and Braque wanted to see how far they could go with distortion and displacement of the form before losing that identity. In this process, where the decisions are made by the artist as a part of his feeling or thinking self, rather than conforming to what the academy insisted one must do about that which sat in front of him, the artist reclaimed the position as the creative force.

It is often said that cubism is an art form in which multiple views of the subject are presented simultaneously. While this does happen from time to time in some of the works, it is not what cubism is about. Rudolph Arnheim wrote that if cubism was only about multiple views there would have been no reason to invent cubist sculpture. Cubist sculpture came about because Picasso wanted to see one of his drawings in three dimensions. It was a drawing in which he had “pierced the closed form” as Kahnweiler noted, showing us the outside and the inside, the scaffolding that held it up and the layers of planes from front to back and side to side.

In the period known as analytic cubism Picasso and Braque chose an arbitrary “look” and each committed himself to working in that style just as if they were attending class in an academy. Each adhered to the discipline. Hence their works look alike, just as academic nudes all look to have been made by the same hand. And thus it can be seen that the work is purely a visual experience. It does not really “mean” anything. It was, it is, play, the making of art with the plastic elements. It begins with Cézanne’s achievement, paintings that are a step away from verisimilitude, away from making a “picture” of something, and takes them another step away...to making a painting. If it works as a painting it doesn’t have to mean something.

In synthetic cubism all of the elements were treated independently …color independent of form, line independent of color, shape independent of color or line…and greatly reduced to their simplest being. A piece of wallpaper glued to the ground was simply a flat piece of paper on a flat ground: flat being the key. This has nothing to do with Hippolyte Taine, Saussure, Einstein’s Theory of relativity, X-rays, modern psychology, silent movies, etc. etc. etc: it was simply a way of showing us what art is: a flat piece of paper on a flat ground: if the drawing of a man was included it was a drawing: it was glaringly honest art rather than the deceit of mimesis. (This is not a pipe.) I suspect that the insistence on intellectual underpinnings is an effort by various writers to give cubism depth and heft because without “meaning” it could simply be …arbitrary.

In the various modes of cubism, proto-cubism, analytic, and synthetic, each of the paintings in the Lauder Collection has in common the look of being finished. That is because the artists who made them, knowing how to make paintings, knew, even though paintings like these had never existed before, knew when they were finished. In the same way Cézanne’s portrait, Madam Cézanne in the Conservatory, MMA, has a sense of being finished even though there are areas of the ground not covered with paint and areas where the paint is more thinly applied than it is in other places. There is nothing more that can be done to that painting without marring it. Following Cézanne’s example, Cubism gave artists permission to know their business and to make their own decisions.

The problem with some of the cubist art and especially the art that followed the cubist lead is that building a work out of the plastic elements too often can result in work that is indeed purely arbitrary …this could be black or it could be white, it could be blue or red …one could use the eye or the glasses or just the mustache. If there is no artist’s passion in the art making, and in all of Picasso and Braque there is much passion for making art, the felt arbitrariness of the presentation engenders a sense of indifference in the viewer…art is no longer a shared experience, a call for community, it is just something to pass the time that results in …decoration.

Many if not all of these paintings have been seen before …almost all of them have been used to illustrate the various books on cubism and have been seen in cubist exhibitions. This raises the question: are these good paintings or just familiar paintings? Perhaps we won’t know until after they have stood the test of time…if even then.

In later years Kahnweiler described cubism as lyrical painting in that it is the lyricism of form …or perhaps he meant …Shape. Certainly we can see that that is true in the work that Georges Braque made after World War I and for the rest of his life. For Picasso there is the lyrical as well, but there was always something “darker” in his cubism, as if, as The Creator, he sat at the well spring of the creative moment. Whereas Braque had an aptitude for the decorative flourish, Picasso was always pure primitive. And thus, eventually, the two of them, just those two, working from different places came to a parting of the ways. And the cubist era was at an end.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/cubism-leonard-a-lauder-collection