by Philip Nel
Crockett Johnson, Pendulum Momentum (Galileo) (1966). Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
In July 1966, Krauss told Nordstrom, “Dave is a full time painter at present.” But Johnson was also a student of mathematics, and he did not fully understand the math behind his paintings. Transcendental Curve (Wallis), another 1966 painting, illustrates a principle not of John Wallis but of René Descartes. The diagram appeared in Newman’s The World of Mathematics, near some sentences about both Wallis and Descartes, and Johnson mislabeled the painting. As he admitted in a 1972 article, he found his math books “stimulating and helpful, though major portions of many of them are beyond me.” Undeterred, Johnson kept painting and learning.23
Though Johnson was spending most of his creative energy on math and paintings, Krauss persuaded him to illustrate one final children’s book. Perhaps recalling Nordstrom’s comment a decade earlier that “the Happy Egg” (published in Somebody Else’s Nut Tree) “could make a tiny little book by itself,” Krauss made a few small revisions and Johnson added pictures. The illustrations, spare even by Dave’s standards, include just one color—blue, for the egg and its occupant. Published as a Scholastic paperback early in 1967, the book received no reviews until its republication by J. Philip O’Hara in 1972, when Publishers Weekly praised its “simplicity of text and pictures” as “a happy publication.” In contrast, School Library Journal advised libraries to “sit on your order for this one; it’s insulting to the reader for its total lack of stimulation, and Crockett Johnson’s outline illustrations can’t save it.”24
In 1966, however, fans of Johnson and Krauss’s children’s books outnumbered their critics. That year, as Lena Y. de Grummond founded what would become the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, she wrote to both authors, and Johnson sent her a signed ink drawing from Harold’s Trip to the Sky, while Krauss sent a copy of the typescript for Open House for Butterflies. The National Art Education Association’s Bibliography of Children’s Art Literature listed both A Picture for Harold’s Room and A Moon or a Button among the books that would “stimulate and enrich the visual imagination of the child.” Norman Lear coproduced a new TV pilot for Barnaby, starring Sorrell Booke (who would gain fame as Boss Hogg on the Dukes of Hazzard in the 1980s) as Mr. O’Malley. No network picked it up, but Johnson was too busy painting to mind.25
Johnson and Krauss continued to speak out against the war. In January, Krauss was one of nearly twenty-three hundred people who signed the “Teachers Appeal for Peace in Vietnam,” a full-page New York Times ad decrying not only the “slaughter of innocents [and] the rapidly mounting death toll on both sides of the conflict in Vietnam” but also the suppression of civil liberties at home. In June, a statement “On Vietnam” covered three New York Times pages. The more than sixty-four hundred signatories included not only Johnson and Krauss but many of their friends and acquaintances, among them Jean Boudin, Kay Boyle, William Gropper, Jules Feiffer, Mary Elting Folsom, Franklin Folsom, Robert Lowell, Lilian Moore, Joseph North, and Ad Reinhardt.26
Ruth Krauss, illustration from This Thumbprint (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
The losses that summer of Frank O’Hara (killed at age forty in a dune buggy accident on Fire Island) and of Fred Schwed (at age sixty-four, six years after being felled by a stroke) confirmed Krauss’s decision to pursue her muse where it led. That fall, as Johnson painted and studied math, Krauss continued to experiment artistically, dipping her thumbs in ink to make illustrations for This Thumbprint. Recalling the backyard adventures of her childhood, she had “This Thumbprint standing on his hands” and another thumbprint “in the grass Alas!” Mingling ideas from her poetic mind with those from the imaginations of young people, Krauss has a thumbprint who “wants candy before supper and can’t have it,” and one “just jumping around to music,” as well as another who “is a nut.” Creating the illustrations, she discovered that black thumbprints with black doodles did not provide enough contrast, and the combination of red and black had the same problem. Following a suggestion from Johnson, she settled on purple thumbprints with black drawings, and the book was published by Harper the following year.27
Krauss also did a saucy update of her first self-illustrated book, The Little King, the Little Queen, the Little Monster, and Other Stories You Can Make Up Yourself, changing the title to The Little Woman. In the new version, after the Good Fairy grants the little girl’s wish to be a woman, the little girl becomes pregnant, and subsequent illustrations show her as the mother of quintuplets. The tale reads like a Mad magazine parody of the earlier book, with a darker edge to the humor. Krauss identified with the countercultural spirit of the day.28
Though she never published The Little Woman, Krauss’s creative work was finding its way into the counterculture. During the first two weeks of February 1967, some of Krauss’s plays were produced during “big Peace demonstrations” in New York. In March, a musical group would perform her “Song of the Melancholy Dress,” “singing and playing kazoos & combs and sitars & zithers etc.” In May, Angry Arts against the War in Vietnam performed some of Krauss’s work in Philadelphia. For his part, Johnson continued to lend his name to the Assembly of Men and Women in the Arts, Concerned with Vietnam. However, his main focus had become painting, and by March 1967, he had created more than forty works and was in the process of choosing thirty paintings for his first solo show. A little over a year after becoming a painter, he was about to make his debut as a serious artist.29
24
THEOREMS IN COLOR, POEMS ON STAGE
Modern art … non-representational forms. A development that puzzles the uninitiated.
—MR. O’MALLEY, in Jack Morley and Crockett Johnson, Barnaby, 11 March 1949
On the afternoon of 5 April 1967, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss arrived at the Glezer Gallery, 271 Fifth Avenue, New York. He wore a dark shirt, with a lighter tie and jacket. She wore a simple necklace, a light-colored, loose-fitting dress, stockings, and shoes that were formal but not entirely comfortable. At 5:00, invited guests, mathematicians, and the press began to arrive. A mere sixteen months after deciding to pursue painting, Johnson was having his first show, Abstractions of Abstractions: Schematic Paintings Deriving from Axioms and Theorems of Geometry, from Pythagoras to Apollonius of Perga, and from Desargues and Kepler to the Twentieth Century.1
If he was nervous, the photographs do not betray any anxiety. Johnson grins broadly at the camera, lights a cigarette, talks with the guests: Jackie Curtis (who took the photos), Jimmy and Dallas Ernst, Shelley and Jackie Trubowitz, illustrator Bill Hogarth, Courant Institute mathematicians George Morikawa and Howard Levi, sculptor/children’s author-illustrator Harvey Weiss, and Broadway stage designer Ralph Alswang. If Ad Reinhardt was there, the photos do not record his presence. Having suffered a heart attack in January, he may not have been feeling well enough to attend.2
Michael Benedikt was also there, representing Art News. He thought the paintings had “a certain cool insouciance” but were also “intensely personal: Johnson spaces in a lively way, converts theorem-subjects to decorative motifs, alters colors…. The painting is a kind of cool Hard-Edge, but bouncy overall.” The Bridgeport Sunday Post liked “the fanciful, often lyrical geometric abstractions which flow from Johnson’s imagery.”3
Johnson seemed uncertain about his precise professional identity. Painter? Scholar of mathematics? Cartoonist? The exhibition program points to all three. Abstractions of Abstractions is a witty title for a show, but its subtitle sounds like a doctoral dissertation. The back of the program features a quotation from the Museum of Modern Art’s director of collections, Alfred Barr, “It’s obvious today that comics are art. Just because these things are vulgar doesn’t mean they are not ar
t.” In this context, the comment alludes to the fact that royalties from children’s books and Barnaby certainly were underwriting Johnson’s new artistic career.4
Ruth Krauss at the Glezer Gallery opening, 5 April 1967. Photo by Jackie Curtis. Used by permission of Jackie Curtis.
Indicative of his bemused attitude toward his new and uncertain status as painter/math student/cartoonist, when people asked what he did for a living, he would invent a job title for himself. In the late 1960s, Johnson bought a secondhand Mercedes-Benz touring car which often needed repairs. At a party, someone who did not know him would ask, “What do you do for a living?” Johnson’s reply: “I own a Mercedes-Benz.” That answer was easier than confessing his aspirations to be taken seriously as a painter.5
Crockett Johnson at Glezer Gallery opening, 5 April 1967. Photo by Jackie Curtis. Used by permission of Jackie Curtis.
Krauss knew what she was: a poet and playwright, albeit one who continued to write for children. By the spring of 1967, she had turned in the text and artwork for This Thumbprint and had finished What a Fine Day For …, a collaboration with Remy Charlip (design and pictures) and Al Carmines (music) that is a hybrid of her books for children and her poem plays for adults. Charlip’s loopy style and Carmines’s bouncy melody sustain Krauss’s sense of fun, as the book leads us through the day’s many possibilities. “What a fine day for …,” it begins, and we turn the page to greet “a mouse and a cat / a ball and a bat.” The next page offers “a ball and a throw / a stop and a go.” Charlip gives a pair of feet to each letter and each noun, not only the mouse and cat but the ball, bat, glove, and arrows (for stop and go). These feet, queuing horizontally near the bottom of the page, reinforce the impression that they are performing on stage and that readers are the audience.6
Krauss had also created a dummy for a new book, I Write It, and was hoping to enlist Ezra Jack Keats as illustrator, but he declined. She wondered if Maurice Sendak could do it. He understood her work. He was then heading to England, where, during a BBC-TV interview, he suddenly felt ill and unable to speak. The interviewer ended the conversation and gave Sendak some whiskey. His editor, Judy Taylor of the Bodley Head, suspected something more serious and called an ambulance. A month before his thirty-ninth birthday, Sendak had suffered a heart attack. Thoughts of asking him to illustrate her book left Krauss’s mind as she worried about his health. After he returned to the United States, she came to visit him on Fire Island, where he was recuperating. Sendak was touched by her concern, but their reunion was a bit awkward: “She was restrained or constrained when she came here, as though she had to be an old friend and no longer a collaborator—it was an uneasy feeling.”7
Worried about Sendak’s recovery and feeling herself in need of a rest, Ruth and Dave took a mid-May trip to Montauk, at the eastern end of Long Island, where the weather began to impersonate England’s: cold, fog, rough seas. By mid-August, they were preparing for a return to England. To avoid another entropic homecoming, they asked Sid Landau and his new wife, Genevieve Millet, editor of Parents magazine, to spend weekends at 74 Rowayton Avenue, “patching the leaks, paying the taxes, running out on the dock & yelling at passing boats,” as Ruth put it.8
Dave and Ruth spent late August and early September on a ship crossing the North Atlantic and traveling up the west coast of Britain. After a long voyage complicated by constant rain and ill health, they reached Edinburgh, Scotland, on 19 September and spent a week there sightseeing and resting. On 25 September, they decided, as Ruth said, “to continue their journeys to the Shetland Islands, home of Big Davie’s Pa. Aye.” They boarded “a cattle boat” for a “rough & tough but great” trip to the Orkneys and Shetlands. When they arrived, Ruth was amazed that the Shetlanders “all looked like Dave” and that “everyone in the Shetlands has Dave’s last name (Leisk or Leask)…. Millions of relatives, in the woolie stores, the fishing boats, the busses, taxis, weavers, everyone.”9
Arriving in London on 5 October, Ruth and Dave visited Mischa Richter’s son, Dan, and his wife, Jill. Richter told them about his year working with Stanley Kubrick, choreographing and casting “The Dawn of Man” opening to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Richter himself starring as Moonwatcher, the leader of the gorilla tribe who in the scene’s final moments tosses the bone into the air. Ruth and Dave were impressed. Richter also showed them his paintings and talked with Ruth about the his underground poetry magazine, Residu, which had published her “There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells” in 1964. From that day on, she called him “my publisher”—which he found both flattering and amusing. After nearly two weeks in London, Dave and Ruth left for what he called “a rush through Bruges and Brussels (if this is Tuesday this must be Belgium) to Paris.” On 2 November, they boarded the Queen Elizabeth at Cherbourg, France, and they were home ten days later, happy to have hard beds and American plumbing.10
But in late August, while they were gone, their old friend Ad Reinhardt had died after suffering his second heart attack in less than year. It is not clear whether Ruth and Dave learned of his death while in Europe or when they returned three months later, but the news hit them hard. Back in the States, Ruth sent her only copy of A Good Man and His Good Wife (her first book, illustrated by Reinhardt) to his widow, Rita, and their thirteen-year-old daughter, Anna.11
The fall of 1967 and spring of 1968 brought better news, with strong reviews of What a Fine Day For …. Kirkus thought that the book of “free-swinging nonsense” was not for “routine circulation” but was nonetheless “a very original device to arouse group participation, with music (and chord indications) for an experienced pianist. Teachers from nursery school up will want to have a try.” Library Journal, too, believed this “delightful bit of nonsense” had “great possibilities for use in both language arts and music.” With this book, Krauss, Charlip, and Carmines had proved that her work for theater could be adapted for children.12
After the Glezer Gallery exhibit, Johnson was no longer content only to paint the theorems of others. As J. B. Stroud puts it, Johnson “fell in love with the three infamous unsolved compass and straightedge problems of the classical Greeks: squaring the circle, the ‘Delian’ problem of duplicating the cube (begin with a unit cube, and then construct a cube with twice its volume), and the trisection of an (arbitrary) angle.” Johnson decided that he would solve these puzzles, starting with squaring the circle, a problem that also intrigued and annoyed Lewis Carroll.13
“Squaring the circle” means constructing a square with the same area as a circle but doing so with only a straightedge and a compass. It is impossible, but Johnson was either unaware of or undeterred by this fact. He recognized the problem as related to the squaring of a lune (a figure shaped like a crescent moon) and created a trilogy of paintings on the latter theme, each one more sophisticated than the last.14
Sixteen paintings related to circle squaring followed. One, Biblical Squared Circles, was inspired by a Bible verse, 1 Kings 7:23: “Then he made the molten sea; it was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.” The resulting artwork is more a reflection of Johnson’s fascination in finding this biblical resonance and less a step in the actual problem solving. Johnson was using this phase of his life to read about many subjects that interested him, and one such topic was religion. Having enjoyed Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934) and The Greek Myths (1955), he turned to Graves’s King Jesus (1946) and The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1953) and to the Bible itself. Though his friends admired his wide range of knowledge and the seriousness with which he pursued it, they nonetheless were somewhat puzzled by the idea that a former communist was now studying up on Christianity. At the Rowayton post office, Johnson ran into journalist Andy Rooney, who asked, “Where you been?” Johnson answered, “Well, I’ve been reading the Bible.” When Rooney replied, “Oh, I’ve never known anybody who really read the Bible. How is it?,” Dave responded, “Well, there’s a lot of good stuff
in it.” After a pause, he added, “But it’s a mess overall.” He joked about his reading but continued his research, concluding that Christ probably did not exist but instead was a composite of many different people. Though skeptical of the Bible as history, he found value in its spiritual and philosophical perspective.15
Crockett Johnson and a version of his Squared Circle, ca. 1972. Photo by Jackie Curtis. Used by permission of Jackie Curtis.
Krauss’s poems continued to keep extremely hip company. Intransit: The Andy Warhol Gerard Malanga Monster Issue (1968) published four of her poems as well as work by Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Andy Warhol, John Ashbery, the late Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Charles Henri Ford, John Hollander, James Merrill, May Swenson, and Charles Bukowski. That group includes two members of the Velvet Underground (plus Nico, who appears on the band’s first album), the most prominent pop artist of the time (who designed that record’s iconic “banana” cover), two New York School poets, the leading Beat poet, a leftist folksinger, a surrealist, and five other important poets, one of whom is Krauss. By the end of the year, Something Else Press had published Krauss’s first book expressly for adults, There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells, a collection of her poems and poem plays. Remy Charlip, Dick Higgins, and George Brecht contributed ideas for staging the title poem’s first speech, “What a poet wants is a lake in the middle / of his sentence / (a lake appears).” The caliber of her collaborators indicates the regard in which she was held, and the book’s few reviews were positive. Library Journal described Krauss’s “delicate grammatical structuring” as “transform[ing] even our expectations of poetic reality.” The Nation praised Krauss as “part carefree surrealist, part sober vaudevillienne, part city pantheist.” Far from being “cutesy, kidsy and sudsy,” “a Harpo-like insolence informs most of these pieces and sometimes turns downright diabolical.”16