Looking for work, Gruen walked into the Fifth Avenue Brentano’s, one of the very classiest bookstores in Manhattan, and instantly got a job selling art books to shoppers including Greta Garbo and Salvador Dalí. He also met the poetry anthologist Oscar Williams and his wife, the painter and poet Gene Derwood. Williams and Derwood threw parties at their apartment down in the Wall Street area, deserted and desolate at night. One night the guest of honor was Dylan Thomas. When the Gruens arrived he was on his back, snoring loudly, sleeping off the afternoon’s bender. Gruen met E. E. Cummings at one of these parties; when Gruen and Wilson moved to an apartment on West Eleventh Street—this time with a kitchen—Cummings and his third wife, Marion, would come by for dinner. Jane pursued painting, helping to found the artist-run cooperative Hansa Gallery on East Tenth Street, which launched her career and those of Allan Kaprow (organizer of Happenings), George Segal, and Ivan Karp, who went on to the Leo Castelli Gallery and then his own OK Harris. Meanwhile, offhandedly, the svelte and beautiful Jane became a fashion model. Her unusual dual career landed her in the pages of Life and Glamour and eventually led to her being a contestant on the popular CBS quiz show The $64,000 Challenge.
Gruen took a job at Grove Press, a small publishing house in the Village, which his erratic neighbor Barney Rosset had just bought. In 1962 Gruen became an art critic for the Herald-Tribune. On the side, with no formal training, he tried his hand at composing art songs, setting to music the writing of the downtown poet Frank O’Hara and others. Soon opera divas began performing his songs at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere, to rave reviews often penned by his friends and neighbors. After one concert he met Jac Holzman, who was starting an arty little record company. New Songs by John Gruen was the first LP issued by Holzman’s Elektra Records, which went on to record the Doors, Roy Orbison, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Devo, Metallica, Ween, and numerous others. Gruen also wrote music for 8 x 8, a 1957 experimental film by the German artist Hans Richter, who’d come to New York in 1940 fleeing the Nazis and taught film at the City College of New York. Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, John Cage, Josh White, and Libby Holman all worked on Richter’s films.
Anatole Broyard moved to Greenwich Village as a twenty-six-year-old vet who as an officer in occupied Tokyo had made himself a tidy little nest egg hustling on the black market. Like so many others he came to the Village to escape his past and start over. Born in New Orleans and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, he was a light-skinned, wavy-haired Creole who would pass for white from the day he set foot in the Village to his deathbed confession. He had a black wife and child across the river in Brooklyn, and that’s where he left them. His mixed-race heritage was a matter of rumor and speculation among white friends, though recognized easily by black ones, but he was evasive about it even with his second (white) wife and children—“a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it.
“The Village in 1946 was as close as it would ever come to Paris in the twenties,” Broyard enthuses. “Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to me that happiness might be cheaply had.” Like many Village vets he used the GI Bill to attend classes at the New School. “Education was chic and sexy in those days.” The faculty was still full of German refugee professors; he studied anthropology with Gregory Bateson and psychology with Erich Fromm, who browbeat his students about how joyless, fearful, and boring America had become. He tried his hand at hip commerce, using his black market profits to buy out an Italian junk dealer at 20 Cornelia Street and open a small secondhand bookshop, where he displayed his erudition in literature and his lack of skills as a businessman. He turned to writing jazz reviews and essays on hip culture for Partisan Review and many other magazines and journals. Eventually he’d be an editor at the New York Times.
Meanwhile he made the rounds of postwar Village bohemian circles. He met—or perhaps “was granted an audience with” is more accurate—Anaïs Nin. Born in France, raised in the United States, she’d gone back to France in the 1920s and ’30s, where she had her famous triangle with Henry and June Miller, then fled to the Village at the outbreak of the war. She was living on West Thirteenth Street with her husband, Hugh Guiler, a successful banker who as Ian Hugo made a few short experimental films. Very little of her writing was known yet in America beyond the self-published short story collection Under a Glass Bell, and that only because Edmund Wilson had extravagantly praised it in The New Yorker, not once but twice, hoping to get into bed with her. Evidently it worked, though she characteristically complained that he’d completely failed to grasp her genius. Her diaries wouldn’t be published until the 1960s, her erotica in the 1970s. She was not yet a feminist hero and yet, in her mid-forties, was well into the process of self-mythologizing. Broyard found her disturbingly mannered and postured, like a silent movie vamp.
Around the time Broyard met her, Nin appeared in a short film by another self-mythologizing Village art-vamp and later feminist hero, Maya Deren. She was born Eleanora Derenkowsy to wealthy Jewish parents in Kiev, where her father was a successful psychiatrist. She was a child when they escaped the pogroms, settled in Syracuse, and shortened their surname. She came to the Village after college in the mid-1930s, and in the early 1940s she toured the country as personal assistant to the formidable Katherine Dunham, founder of a very successful black dance company. As a graduate student in anthropology, Dunham had done field work in the Caribbean, exploring the African roots of Caribbean culture and becoming a Vodoun priestess in Haiti. Deren was heavily influenced by her time working for Dunham; she would go on to do her own research into Vodoun, become a priestess herself, and write the 1953 book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. While in Los Angeles with Dunham, Deren met her second husband, Alex Hammid, a Czech photographer who’d fled Nazi Europe, and they began to make short, black-and-white experimental films together. Their honeymoon project, Meshes of the Afternoon, shot in the Hollywood Hills in 1943, included among its surrealist techniques and Freudian symbols iconic footage of Deren looking like a wistful Botticelli angel, endlessly reproduced as a still. Hammid gave her a new first name, Maya—tellingly, Sanskrit for “illusion.”
Deren’s Village apartment, a small, sunny, fourth-floor walk-up on Morton Street, was an important node of downtown socializing. Over the years many cultural dignitaries would climb those stairs, from Duchamp and Dalí to Dylan Thomas and John Cage. Lithuanian-born avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who came to New York as a war refugee in the late 1940s and later founded the seminal Anthology Film Archives, remembers Deren as “very composed, very intellectual and brainy, but also wild.” Her New Year’s Eve parties on Morton Street “were very famous.” She’d lock up her “five or six cats” and invite the whole downtown arts crowd, which he says could just about squeeze into one apartment, and things got “totally wild.”
Like Meshes, Ritual in Transfigured Time was a silent, surrealist short, incorporating dance; it looks something like what might have transpired if Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau had collaborated with Dunham. It was maybe inevitable that Nin and Deren, competing self-made goddesses in the hothouse of Village mythology at a time when women artists and writers still had to work hard to be taken seriously, would pass from collaboration to feuding. When mythomaniacs collide they usually know precisely how to dismantle each other. It started with Ritual. Nin’s ego was bruised by her not terribly flattering appearance in the film as a vulnerable older-woman figure, the opposite of the carefully preserved image she projected at Broyard. It did not escape her notice that Deren shot her in harsh light while always bathing herself in gauzy soft focus. She complained about Deren’s “power to uglify.” Deren shrugged and told her, “You will get over it.” She never did.
Deren was forty-four when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1961. Her completed film output totaled six shorts amounting to just over an hour. (Divine Horsemen, her abandoned documentary, was released posthumously.) Even so her legacy in film culture was
extensive. The year Broyard met Nin, Deren began screening her films at the Provincetown Playhouse, the first time films had ever been shown there. In the audience was a young film fan who’d fled Nazified Vienna named Amos Vogel. Deren’s films and lectures inspired him and his wife, Marcia, to start Cinema 16, a European-style film club that had a profound impact on New York’s film culture into the early 1960s. One of Cinema 16’s early programs was an October 1953 symposium on the topic “Poetry and the Film,” where the speakers included Vogel, Deren, and Dylan Thomas. It turned out to be one of Thomas’s last public appearances. Cinema 16 also distributed art films around the country, a business Vogel would sell to Barney Rosset and Grove Press.
These are more than anecdotes about small-world connections. They speak to an arts scene in which a small cadre of artists in all disciplines collided and fused like subatomic particles in an accelerator, unleashing an explosion of creativity. Village artists advanced the avant-garde on several fronts simultaneously in these years. Abstract Expressionism was to art as bebop was to jazz, as the Beats and the New York School poets were to literature, as Off- and Off-Off-Broadway were to theater, as John Cage was to modern composing, as Grove Press was to book publishing. The intense activity in and around the Village in the postwar years helped make New York City the arts powerhouse it would become by 1960.
17
The “New York School”
ARTISTS GET AWAY WITH MORE HUMAN NATURE THAN ANYBODY ELSE.
—Dawn Powell
THE COVER STORY OF THE AUGUST 9, 1949, LIFE WAS ON FAIRFIELD County, Connecticut, “Country Home of Smart New Yorkers.” The ads crowding the pages enticed readers to a postwar bounty of consumer luxuries: Jeris Antiseptic Hair Tonic and Chiffon Pure White Soap Flakes and Prince Albert’s “P.A.” (Pipe Appeal) and Dr. Hand’s Teething Lotion and Stopette spray deodorant and Embassy cigarettes and Milk-Bone and Cheez-It and Kotex and the new wonder of the world Birds Eye frozen cod fillets, “Out of the package—Into the stove—On to the table!” One full-page ad intoned, “In this home-loving land of ours . . . in this America of kindliness, of friendship, of good-humored tolerance . . . perhaps no beverages are more ‘at home’ on more occasions than good American beer and ale.” The cover story describes how Fairfield County in rural central Connecticut was becoming the commuter getaway of choice for Manhattan’s wealthy, its artists and “idea people.” The painter Arshile Gorky had been one of the pioneers. Life had done a small photo essay on his converted Fairfield farmhouse in February 1948. In July of that year, sick and depressed, he hanged himself in a shed there. Nevertheless, the farms and fields of Fairfield would soon be thick with the likes of Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark, William Styron, Alexander Calder, John Cheever, Van Wyck Brooks, Martha Clarke, Malcolm Cowley, and Louis Untermeyer. Anatole Broyard, a successful and respected New York Times editor by the early 1960s, would move there as well. As would Maurice Sendak, who’d started out in Brooklyn and moved to the Village in the 1950s.
In the midst of Life’s here-come-the-fifties prattle, pointedly juxtaposed with the numerous photos of smart and successful New Yorkers on their vast Connecticut lawns outside their dazzling white country homes, was a photo of a balding man looking studiously louche and grubby in a paint-spattered denim jacket and jeans, cigarette dangling from grimly pursed lips, arms folded, legs crossed, scowling at the camera. He looks, as a friend commented at the time, more like a gas station attendant than a famous artist. Behind him is a horizontal banner of canvas spattered and scrawled with black, yellow, and red.
The subhead of the two-and-a-half-page photo essay asks, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” Jackson Pollock’s stony expression replies, “Who wants to know?” “Recently,” the short article begins, “a formidably high-brow New York critic hailed the brooding, puzzled-looking man shown above as a major artist of our time . . . Others believe that Jackson Pollock produces nothing more than interesting, if inexplicable, decorations. Still others condemn his pictures as degenerate and find them as unpalatable as yesterday’s macaroni.” It goes on to describe the way he paints as “brooding and doodling,” makes some sport of the fact that no one can tell what his work “means,” and explains, in a tone of wonder, that the magnificent Number Nine, in front of which he posed, is eighteen feet long “and sells for $1,800, or $100 a foot.” A 1949 dollar was worth roughly ten of today’s.
It was not the first time Life had weighed in on Pollock. In its October 11, 1948, issue, the magazine had run a huge “Round Table on Modern Art: Fifteen Distinguished Critics and Connoisseurs Undertake to Clarify the Strange Art of Today.” Aldous Huxley was the guest star and the critic Clement Greenberg was the only man (they were all men) at the table (they literally sat around a long table) with any close knowledge of the contemporary New York art scene. The rest were academics and museum curators, who spent the bulk of the sixteen-page article talking about such “art of today” as works by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Matisse. When the discussion got around to “Young American Extremists”—one painting each by Pollock, Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Theodoros Stamos—Huxley dismissed Pollock’s Cathedral as “wallpaper,” another said it’d make a nice silk tie, and another said he was suspicious of “any picture I think I could have made myself.”
That year, Pollock had had his first solo show of the “drip” paintings at the small Betty Parsons Gallery in midtown Manhattan. The price tags were less impressive, as low as a hundred and fifty dollars for a smaller painting, and yet only one had sold. Pollock traded another for a sculpture and used a third to cover a sixty-dollar grocery bill. (The grocer’s friends laughed at him for taking the painting; a decade later he sold it for seventeen thousand.) But that was all changing in 1949. Pollock’s second solo show at Parsons also got mixed reviews from the critics—one wrote that his work looked like “a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out”—but this time nine of the paintings sold. MoMA bought one for two hundred and fifty dollars, and the wealthy artist and collector Alfonso Ossorio bought another for fifteen hundred dollars, equivalent to fifteen thousand today. Other collectors and museums fell in line as the year progressed. Pollock stopped having to give away paintings to cover his grocery bills. When Life, with a national circulation of five million, ran its feature on him that August, the painter whom Time had sniffed was “the darling of a highbrow cult” a few months earlier became a household name. The first of the Abstract Expressionists to experience celebrity, Pollock from now on was the one your Average Joe—and numerous comics and satirists—cited when scratching his head at the doings of those crazy New York artists and their “inexplicable” paintings.
NEW YORK WAS ON THE WAY TO SUPPLANTING PARIS AS THE ART capital of the Western world but most of the world hadn’t noticed yet. The New Yorker art critic Robert Coates first applied the term “Abstract Expressionism” to Pollock’s scene in 1946; it was also called the New York School. Neither was very accurate. “It is disastrous to name ourselves,” Willem de Kooning declared. Although they did have a sense of being a community of artists they shared no one “school” of aesthetics or style. Their work ranged from pure abstraction to abstracted figures and landscapes, from “action painting” like Pollock’s (a term he never liked) to color field to found-art assemblages to performances and Happenings to, eventually, Pop, Op, and Minimalism. They constantly argued about and sometimes punched each other over their aesthetic differences; Barnett Newman, shaking his head over all that discourse, once remarked, “Esthetics is for me like ornithology must be for the birds.”
They came together less out of a shared aesthetic than out of the traditional bohemian artist’s need for cheap rents. They congregated below Fourteenth Street, in Greenwich Village and in today’s East Village. Spaces in Greenwich Village tended to be too small for them to work in, since paintings grew huge in this period, so they rented open lofts and empty storefronts mostly east of
Broadway. But they studied and taught art in the Village, had important artists’ clubs there, staged a seminal group show there, and ate, drank, hung out, and discussed the work there. Living, working, and playing in a relatively confined area, the artists on the scene developed a sense of belonging to a group. They encouraged and influenced one another, collaborated and feuded, partied and drank too much together, visited one another’s studios, organized shows together, formed and broke romances and marriages among themselves. The lofts were perfect sites for parties and they threw lots of them: rent parties, jazz parties, dance parties, pot parties. When it was time to party no one cared what kind of art you made or how well you made it, only how well you danced and kissed and held your liquor.
Marxism was on its way out. Younger artists still heard some Trotskyist rhetoric from the older ones, but it was increasingly just that. Downtown’s arty bohemians still dressed and tried to drink like workingmen—a lasting legacy of the old American idea that only girly men would want to be artists—but for the most part they gave up trying to make art for them, or for the middle class, or for anyone else. “When those of us who were in the service came out of it, we were greeted with a world which we thought looked like the epitome of a kind of moral squalor,” the painter Alfred Leslie has explained. “Everyone felt betrayed. Everyone felt this essential corruption of the politicians. As the rest of the world was picking up stones and sweeping up their cities, we had to, in a sense, sweep out our souls. We had to make a new art. We had to find a way to make an art that was consequential, and be outsiders and risk failure and believe that doubt was a positive thing and not make an art that would service the middle class.”
The Village Page 27