My father’s own European tour was on a Fulbright to Paris, in 1959, where he studied at the Grand Chaumière. That, following a bachelor’s degree begun at the Kansas City Art Institute and completed at Columbia, and a master’s, also at Columbia. I own a student painting from that time, not an “original” Lethem but rather a tricky quotation canvas, done to accompany his undergraduate thesis on De Chirico. In it my father, painting in De Chirico’s style, has replaced the Italian’s vacated piazzas and marble busts with Midwestern American iconography: a warehouse, some farm machinery, a kernel of candy corn. And a bare blue lightbulb dangles from a socket, harkening forward to Guston.
My father would soon make much both of this surrealist-pictorial impulse, pointing from De Chirico to Guston, and of his eagerness to paint farm machinery and other tools. But, as a young painter at the end of the fifties, he first had to add his hurried contribution to the waning stream of abstract expressionism. De Kooning was his prime hero. Kline and Gorky not far behind. The first ambitious paintings (meaning, in that era, the first large paintings) of his life were warm, dappled abstractions, painted with a dripping brush, evocative of landscapes. They were good. They were shown. They made no huge dent in the world, as new abstract paintings mostly didn’t in 1960, and before I was born he was done making them.
My maternal grandfather, whom I would never meet, fled his wife and New York when my mother was three, to repatriate in East Germany. The improbable gesture likely speaks to how much more German than Jewish he felt—and how Communist, as well. My grandmother was another secular Jew and defiant leftist, but also a born New Yorker, irascible as Thelma Ritter, buddy to cops and cabdrivers, lover of pizza and egg creams. She worked as an accountant in a pickle factory in Sunnyside, Queens, and raised her single child to share her secular passion for Abraham Lincoln, for books, arguments, and causes.
My mother dropped out of Queens College in 1962, drawn to Greenwich Village thrills. There she pierced ears, with a pin and ice cube, at a jewelry shop on MacDougal Street, and palled around with folksingers: Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs. In 1963 she met my father, the bearded painter. By the time I was born, in early 1964, they lived in an illegal loft on West Broadway. In that loft, in that year, high on love, sex, and procreation, and on the cultural possibilities in the air (in my firm opinion), high on William Blake (by his own testimony), and likely sometimes high on pot (my mother, like John Lennon, loved to turn you on), Richard Lethem changed his painting style entirely.
In what became, from 1963 to 1968, a first major phase in his art, my father started painting stuff. The De Chirico influence realized now, the pictures featured functional objects charged with a mysterious significance, and raised to the level of the iconographic: basketball hoops, vises, stereopticons, and salesman’s or traveler’s trunks. My father also painted a series of struck matches, beheld from one side, their sizzled black heads surrounded by a penumbra of sensationally colorful flame. The presentation in the paintings of this period, though hard-edged, never bore even a trace of pop chill; his brushwork held to expressionist drama, his palette to earthly, or fleshly, warmth.
That work, beginning the year of my birth, became an explosion of canvases in 1966 and 1967, in his studio in Kansas City, Missouri. There, my father had taken a teaching job at the Art Institute. He’d converted the barefoot Jewish folksinger girl into a campus wife, was on track for tenure, and was jubilantly painting in an individual and highly recognizable style—as I said, my father’s trajectory was, at one point, just about perfect for a serious painter of his moment, and for a serious bohemian. A dashing professor with a beard and, as yet, no dangerous affiliations.
Five years ago I wrote: “In my father’s earlier ‘symbolist/surrealist’ phase, the work, though physical in its voracious painterliness, speaks of the human presence mostly by implication and absence. The empty trunks and lonely vises and stereopticons of this period have a Magritte-like conceptual/literary authority, but their owners and makers have flown the coop.” My father himself has written: “I see those images of trunks, vises, and basketball hoops as enchanted erotic objects which came from a period of great personal fulfillment and love.”
What I want to admit now is that as a child I always preferred the paintings from 1964 to 1967 to the work I witnessed my father making in Brooklyn, in the 1970s. I fetishized the clarity of that depopulated world of fetish objects. The paintings seemed clean to me. I likely associated them with the emotional reality of an infant who has his parents all to himself; in Kansas City we lived in a vast stone house on campus, surrounded by a sculpture garden. It made a citadel for the triad of mother, father, and child. It was the perfect opposite of a neighborhood.
The “Fort Hood Three” were U.S. Army privates who declined to be returned to Vietnam. The war, they explained, never officially declared, was “illegal and immoral.” Court-martialed in July of 1966, their lawyers tried to call Robert McNamara to the stand. The judge made it simple: “This is a case against the United States, and the United States has not consented to be sued.” The soldiers got three-to-five. When the Three were shifted to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, in January of 1967, a small group of peace marchers showed up too. These ninety-odd peaceniks were greeted with snowballs and jeers from other citizens, who’d come to rain contempt on the dissident soldiers. The marchers sang “We Shall Overcome.” A blare of Sousa, played from a truck, drowned them out.
My parents were among those ninety, even partly responsible for the march. My father, who stood at the microphone at the scuttled rally, had become faculty adviser for a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, while my mother had begun draft counseling (“It’s better to run to Toronto”) draft-eligible art students. That same spring, my father organized an all-day Saturday teach-in on campus. That Saturday the institute’s president, inflamed by phone calls from trustees concerned about his grip on the faculty, arrived in person and got into a comical shoving match with my father, in a stairwell.
C’est la tenure. My parents, though, had already decided to throw over Kansas City, and my father to throw over teaching. As Dylan would say, “I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.” For my mother, who didn’t drive a car (cast-iron New Yorker, she never learned), the Midwest isolation was suffocating. And my father? He explained later, “I wanted to reject the Establishment institutions that were going along with the war. And I found the strident voices of opposition in my head were making it hard to listen to students.”
I retain discontinuous memories of Kansas City: I recall the sculpture garden, for instance, but no protest marches. I remember petting a dog, and riding on my grandfather’s tractor, but no hippies. The hippies I got to know later. Yet I’ve rehearsed my father’s break with his teaching at Kansas City because it seems a key to my father’s painting (or, sometimes, lack of painting) in the fifteen years that followed.
The key to more than that, really. In my parents’ “rejection” of “Establishment institutions” I sense the parameters within which my personality grew; the parameters that, like those of any childhood (apart from the most exalted or depraved), I both bloomed within, like the windows of a greenhouse, and rattled against, like the jaws of a trap. The place our family delivered itself to—a debilitated but gorgeous row house in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Gowanus, or Boerum Hill—was to be the stage for it all: painting, family, childhood.
Once in Brooklyn my parents’ lives were not just overtly political. They became countercultural, as opposed to merely hip. Baby Jonathan’s eerie little modernist world was soon filling up with siblings, neighbors, commune-housemates (for our home became a commune, of sorts), and the terrifying richness of a neighborhood full of race and class juxtapositions. My parents also opened their marriage, and my world had to make room for the inkling, later the certainty, that some of their friends were lovers. My father’s canvases, when he resumed painting in the early seventies, were loaded with huma
n figures, many unclothed, all of them embodying in different ways the forms of human chaos, the daily politics, that our lives had become.
I don’t think I was autistic, but like an autistic child I wanted the human volume turned down. Though consciously thrilled by the adult lives around me, and the odd but definite privileges my communion with their variety had bestowed, I was unconsciously seeking hiding places. I developed a craving, not only in my father’s work but generally, for remote, depopulated art, for images of sublime alienation. I held out hope of cultivating a discrete and unaffiliated, even solipsistic persona. No wonder I wanted De Chirico back, or pined for Stanley Kubrick. My own early writing was the pure product of this taste, emulating Clarke, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Graham Greene, Stanislaw Lem, and Borges.
We lived in the house while my father renovated it by hand, teaching himself the carpentry skills, the laborer’s trade, that would become his livelihood for the next twenty years. Our home was soon a stopping-off point for former colleagues and students of my father’s who’d arrived in New York and needed a place to stay, as well as for old friends from Greenwich Village, recontacted after the Kansas City interlude. My mother’s instincts as a host and raconteur made our kitchen table a site of meetings, transformations, flirtations, arguments.
We found comrades in the neighborhood. Alongside shabby rooming houses, alongside black and Puerto Rican families entrenched in a neighborhood that had been mostly abandoned by New York’s white-immigrant middle classes many decades earlier, and alongside the new white renovators who’d launched an unsystematic gentrification a stone’s throw from a jail and two housing projects, Boerum Hill was home to communes. At least five or six of the cheaply rented row houses within the immediate blocks had been colonized by groups of radicals, singles, and couples just out of college, and making their home in an affordable quarter. These houses had flavors: one might be firmly Marxist, another druggy, another more familial, given an anchor, say, by a divorced mom raising a kid or two.
Ours was a quasi-commune, one with a family at its center and a painter’s studio on the top floor. My parents extended their commitment to causes along every open path: my father taught home repair to teenagers at a settlement house, and art workshops to prisoners in the Brooklyn House of Detention. They both went on protesting the war until the war ran out, and marched in favor of day care centers, and against proposed Robert Moses freeways and nuclear power. Each time my mother went to the supermarket she shifted heads of iceberg lettuce and bunches of grapes picked by exploited migrant workers into the ice-cream section of the supermarket, to be destroyed by freezing. She had that streak of yippie in her, and was also once ticketed by a transit cop for using a slug in place of a subway token—her protest, I suppose, against fare increases.
The neighborhood was a laboratory, a zone of mixing, never defined by one ethnicity or class. Mongrel by deep nature, the place absorbed the first scattering of hippies, homosexuals, and painters pretty ungrudgingly. But with signs of a real-estate boom, and a broad displacement of the existing population, the changes were politicized. Our family was drawn into the discomfiting issue of gentrification. We were against it, ideologically. Yet my mother’s native-outerborough gregariousness was a force in the making of a new community; by helping knit the white families to the existing neighborhood, she encouraged pioneers, I think. And my father’s trade was a paradox. Having fled ivory tower for blue-collar solidarity, he soon became a highly sought renovation specialist, a cabinetmaker and sash-and-jamb restorer with an artist’s touch. So he was engaged on a daily basis in rehabbing the brownstones of Boerum Hill for their new owners, gentrifying with his hands.
Sure, we felt the risk of involuntary complicity. We were white families in a minority neighborhood, no way out of that. Symbolic alliances were therefore everything, and neighbors could become rather paranoid. Those who shared our devotions monitored others for insensitivities or worse. New homeowners galvanizing themselves against a rash of burglaries, or urging the sprucing up of a vacant lot, might be guilty of collusion with Establishment institutions, and those, we knew, led straight to Nixon, and the war.
I don’t mean to be flippant. Boerum Hill, like any zone “revived” by white homeownership, was prey to cynical speculation. And, as many an enemies list or secret memo has shown, the paranoids were right. The idealisms of that hour actually now impress me as a gossamer lost world, Proustian in its delicacy. Those shades in the spectrum between radical and guilty liberal, parsed with such intensity at the time, strike me as poignant from this vantage. Even the uptightest adults I knew as a child nonetheless regarded Watergate and Vietnam as proof our leaders were corrupt, and probably sexually hung up as well. And my parents’ reluctance to be seen as gentrifiers was largely an instinctive pleasure in the neighborhood as they found it.
My father’s art also became communized. His studio was opened to family and friends and to other artists, as well as to a stream of nude models. For a few years he merely drew, dodging, for a time, the ambition and expense of oil on canvas. Or were canvas and oil also suspect, for a time, of being in collusion with Establishment institutions? Instead he drew portraits and nudes, in oil crayon and pencil and sometimes with a wash of brushwork, on sheets of vinyl. The portraits collected our friends and neighbors, of all colors, frequently with their lips parted in mid-conversation. The nudes, of both sexes, were delicate, and sometimes explicit.
At the center of my father’s art practice, at the start of the seventies, was “drawing group.” This was a weekly gathering—sometimes in his studio, but most regularly in the Brooklyn loft of a couple of friends, Bob and Cynthia—of artists who wished to work from a model in the nude. Taking turns arranging for a model, they’d then each chip in the five or six bucks it took to pay the fee. On nights when a model didn’t show up, a few members of the group might take turns shedding clothes to serve in their place. These artists, a shifting cast of seven or eight regulars, were younger than my dad, and none as trained. Yet there was no question that they gathered as other than peers. The drawing group wasn’t set apart from the life of our neighborhood, but rather included people I knew from communes, from my mother’s table. Cynthia ran a local children’s bookstore. Bob was one of my father’s carpentry partners. The group also included one of my family’s own housemates, Nancy. And, for a while, me.
When my father began painting again in the seventies he made the drawing group his subject. The new canvases featured nude models, often, but not always, female. Many also presented some figure of a painter, or watcher, always male. In one sense, this “artists-and-models” subject was highly traditional. (My father, in a dismissive moment, called these paintings “European.”) The work nudged Courbet, Manet, Picasso, calling up an old self-validating drama of the male spectator, recessed in the shadows or glimpsed at one side, in the self-portraitist’s mirror. Here was the painter as an implicit figure of authority, a step apart from life, and for the viewer a flattering surrogate: Apollonian, noncommittal, masterful.
Yet these pictures also undermined or teased that authority. Just as he’d thrown over teaching, and now worked in the company of those who could have been his students, by making the group his subject my father abjured the privilege of an artist’s exclusive sensibility. Drawing Group #1 is an example: while the male artist considers a model stretched prone, limbs flung for a gaze-banquet, in the foreground a female artist refines a sketch from an earlier pose. On her pad the nude sits, elbow on knee, an asexual crouch. The disagreement gently mocks erotic wish fulfillment: the pose we’re shown in the painting is just one among many, hardly inevitable. The painter making use of the model hasn’t disregarded the group who’ll chip in to cover the cost (each, we hope, having gotten at least five bucks’ worth of poses they liked too).
Or take Turning, finished in 1979. This scene, which began as a simple life study, evolved into a self-conscious drama of mortality, inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. A heroic and vulnerabl
e male nude glances backward at Death the Watcher, who takes the form of an artist standing dispassionately at a drawing table, in deep shadows. But leavening the scene is, again, a series of confessions of a painter’s studio shared with other bodies, with other agendas. A sketcher’s pad intrudes from the lower right. A hand pokes in, to pat the head of a wolfish dog. The model’s robe hangs on a peg, alongside a claw hammer. Robe and hammer forecast the future of the players in this allegory: one will don the robe (it’s chilly in this studio), then his street clothes. The other, resume his labors as a carpenter. There are kids to feed. The dog too.
Variations in degrees of “realism” confound these paintings. So do weird conflations of planar space—shades, again, of De Chirico. In my father’s own thinking, recaptured for me in a recent letter, he’d framed a couple of questions: “How to capture the psychic energy and urgency implied in realism without the dead end of imitation. Not being satisfied to reduce things to generalities—instead wanting the unpurified, tangible quality of experience to come through.” And: “How to eliminate the narrow confines of modernist style without falling into sentimentality.”
My father had seemingly disabled the symbolic and conceptual levels in his painting (all the stuff I pined for, as a child, in preferring the sixties work). In truth, though, his “realist” paintings were full of gestures of grotesquerie and invention. Imagined figures crept onto the canvases, and cartoonish expressions of lust, impatience, or childlike reverie crept over the faces of the artists and models. At the same time, backdrops are strewn with the prosaic: books, workmen’s boots or gloves, coffee mugs, playing cards, documentary touches to decant any psychosexual theatrics. And that shaggy gray dog, mooning at the feet of the models. The dog’s name is Blue. He must have been lonely when we kids were off at school.
The Disappointment Artist Page 10