Milton asked if I would like to have a go at chess. I demurred, saying I barely knew how the pieces moved—not quite true—all the while kicking myself for the timidity that kept me from sharing a few moments with that kind, gentle man whom I wished I could know better. I, who adored games of all kinds, had early on backed off chess as being beyond me. After all, it was a man’s game and therefore veiled in arcane practices and complexities inaccessible to females. And Milton smiled and said, “Perhaps another time.”
And I think of Adolph Gottlieb, his skin so dark and weathered from sailing. Who would’ve thought? An artist who routinely won racing trophies against the pros. A sportsman, not the suit-and-tie artist we hung out with in the city. Either way, I particularly liked Adolph and Esther, he soft-spoken and thoughtful, she more forthcoming and interested in what I called “real” conversation than most artists’ wives. We would now and then have dinner at their place in the East Village or they would come to eat with us, usually ending the evening by heading a few blocks south to the White Horse, where, crushed in the back room over drinks, Adolph and Clem would dig deep into art talk and I would try to listen over the din. Eventually my mind would glaze and I would sit back and let myself drift, thinking of how young all the kids seemed who jammed the tables sloshing their beers, even younger than I was, and that if Dylan Thomas were slouched over the bar maybe he would remember me as the girl who had recently sat at his feet after his reading at Bennington—that is, if he weren’t already dead. Later I would lay my head on my pillow and smell the cigarette smoke and beer on my hair and think, I must be in the real world now, all the while wondering why it wasn’t more fun. In Provincetown we all smelled of the ocean.
On our last day, my mother drove up from her place in Falmouth at the other end of the Cape to pick us up. She had recently taken up painting and was studying with an ex-student of Hofmann’s, John Grillo. In her swishy print dress, white pumps, and sun hat she was gussied up and at her coquettish best that day. As I had since I was a child, I cringed at her enactment of the coy temptress, to my eyes so blatantly affected. Hans, however, seemed to be taken with her, judging from his smiles and the way he leaned into her. And, needing no signal from Miz, he put in his hearing aids.
After an alfresco lunch, Hans led her to a bench farther from the porch and I could hear the murmuring of German through the kitchen window as I helped Miz with the dishes. I wondered what they were conspiring about in that dreaded language of whispers and secrets. But that day the sun was shining, I had a cool vodka and tonic near at hand, and I stopped cringing. I saw the sweetness of the scene, and another side of Hans.
Clem and I would return to the Hofmanns’ in 1958 and again in 1960. By 1961 our life had assumed a stepped-up momentum of its own. The spontaneous days and nights were over. We continued to exchange visits in the city, and Clem would visit Hans at his studio. And we invariably saw them at the small dinners Sam and Jane Kootz would give for the “boys,” as Sam called the artists in his gallery. Too formal by far, the Kootzes lived high; they always employed a “couple” and lived on Park or Fifth Avenue in their cutting-edge world of Henry Miller and Georg Jensen. I would put on my fanciest dress and dangly rhinestones. I don’t know why, but with the Kootzes one just did dress up, even the artists, even Clem.
After an elaborately endless dinner, conversation tautly anchored by our hosts, we would adjourn to the living room for Napoleon brandy and liqueurs, demitasse, and cigars while Jane and Sam reclined in their matching white Eames chairs. The overall effect was chrome and crystal, chill and leather. I, in a low-slung Mies chair, my dress too tight, my head muzzy with too much booze, waited for the first hammer blows of a Kootz headache. No matter who was there on any given evening, I never got to know anyone better, no hair was ever let down, nothing personal was exchanged. I always felt the artists were there as hostages. Heaven knows why we were there, except that in those days all too often we simply went where we were invited.
When I next looked around, or so it seemed, I was at Miz’s funeral in 1963. And by 1966 Hans, too, was gone. My affinity for the Hofmanns was connected primarily to my times with them in Provincetown. It was there that I had endowed them with so much. I wonder what they would have thought if they had known that they were the German family I wished I’d had. That feeling no doubt accounted for the strong sense of loss I felt when they were gone. And it also contributed to the pleasure I got from the superb “slab” painting Hans gave us as a wedding present. As the decades passed, it became necessary to occasionally ask an art dealer to sell a painting for us. The Hofmann would be one of those. It was the only picture I truly missed.
I like to think of the Hofmann house as still being there, much as it was during their decades there. However, I am told that it has changed hands several times, and while the house and studio behind are indeed still there, they appear shabbier, the garden is untended, and a large modern house was built across the street. There would no longer be a rainbow dancing on the bedroom ceiling upstairs. Of course, the only testament to the greatness of an artist is the work he leaves behind. Their houses and sundry accoutrements are only so much fuel for the mythmakers. However, the house will always be preserved by me, not only as the place that embodies the greatness of the artist who worked and taught there, but, most important, as the place that speaks to the solidity and harmony of the two lives that lived there.
Hans’s passionate spirit touched me once again when I found these two handwritten letters he wrote to Clem four years after my first visit to Provincetown. Clem had tucked them away among the Hofmann catalogs on his bookshelf, a filing system he was partial to. I include them here, as written.
February 17, 1961
Dear Clemm—
I thank you sincerely for the enormous work you did with your book on me [Hofmann, Editions Georges Fall, 1961]. I go basi-caly almost completely with it—almost but not completely.
The reason: I never paint a bad picture.
I may not always paint a successful one. As a juror which I quite often was I always resented to function in the roll as a critic. I resented it because whoever criticieses himself. The work criticieses back.
And as a teacher I was constantely aware that one must never be a schoolmaster by entangle oneself in enormous or academic steril problems that anihilate the vital approach to creation. The vital approach to creation is deep rooted in the faculty of the mind to sense and recognize the inherent quality of the medium of expression to bring the qualities into appropriate relation to each other for the creation of a higher, of a new and complete independant, quality which the means of expression have met in themselves but which transcent the spirit of creation.
Only this to me is Art. In following this principle it is impossible to paint a bad picture.
Most affectionate yours
Hans Hofmann
July 22, 1961.
Dear Clement—
Your book [Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961]—your great book—its arrival with dedication a great and most pleasant surprise to me—how could it be otherwise. [Hans must be referring to Clem’s personal inscription to him. The book is dedicated to Margaret Marshall, arts editor of the Nation.] It mirrors in my opinion a span of great revolutionary time in the realms of all the Arts in which we have all participated creatively in one way or the other. It analyses all events most profoundely and in greatest honesty. What I most admire is the courage of attack from a polemic point of view that will connect much of the historical blunders so far falsely build up about this events.
I congratulate you—your book will make its mark on history as it is full of wisdom—its destination will be to sustain and accelerate creation on its highest level.
I am so deepely enwraped in my work that almost nothing exsists any more for me outside my work. It is the reason for this “belated” letter. Excuse me therefor and accept please my simple “I thank you!”
Love to you both
Hans Hofmann
I ACCOMPANIED CLEM to Barney’s studio for the first time on a December afternoon in 1956. We took a subway to the southern tip of Manhattan and walked across the deserted weekend streets of the financial district to the East River. I had met Barney and Annalee before, across dinner tables or at openings or parties, but I had never seen or heard talk about his paintings.
As I walked through the studio door in that crumbling Front Street building, I was startled, disoriented, by what I saw. Pictures everywhere, some hanging, some propped up along the floor. Two of them were the biggest pictures I had ever seen—one all red, with a few ragged stripes, the other an improbable combination of a bluish-green and ochre. They were beyond my comprehension. As I moved among them, they advanced on me, surrounded me. Not that they were hospitable, or accessible. On the contrary, they offered no footing, no grounding point to hold on to, no concept, nothing I could name. Were they paintings at all? I felt threatened by the proximity of so much that couldn’t be named, defied definition.
Annalee, of course, was there—wherever Barney was, Annalee was—and also the artist Tony Smith, an old friend of Barney’s. I was the only innocent; the others had known Barney’s work for years. William Vandivert arrived later, and it was he who took a photo of Barney and me posed self-consciously as we gazed at one of his pictures. At a distance, Clem is also in the photo, looking at a different painting. I manage to appear as if I have a clue about what I’m looking at, that this is just another ho-hum day on the art circuit. Had it only been a year, or was it a century, since my first studio visit, when I had gone to Rene Bouche’s to meet Clem for our first date? No red velvet and mahogany elevator here, no vista of Central Park, no elegant guests sipping martinis. Nor, at the far end of the studio spectrum, was this Pollock’s rough-hewn, step-at-your-own-risk barn. This was like a generic space. There was little sign of the making of art or of the person who had created it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the place had been wiped clean of fingerprints. No buckets of paint—or even the faintest whiff of it—no piles of rags, no old shoes kicked into a corner. There was only the art, as if it had arrived there full-sprung.
Over time, as well as I got to know Barney, I never could imagine him knee-deep in the creation of art. Part of if was that he was a dapper man. Like an actor, he strutted and posed, always dressed to the nines with his bow ties and monocle or pince-nez. But a painter? No. He enjoyed the smoke and mirrors, challenging the expected. In that sense he and his art were one: Who am I? Are my pictures art?
Impressions aside, the fact was that Barney, in some respect, was a painter who didn’t paint. At least at times. Not long after the studio visit I learned that following his shows at Betty Parsons’s gallery in the mid-forties, Barney had refused to show his work for years. He had withdrawn “on principle,” not that anyone was clamoring. During that time, he painted only intermittently. When he did show his work again, in the late fifties, dates were fudged to close some of the more glaring gaps. Evidently, that was not an unusual maneuver for artists.
That day we sat around with his pictures for several hours. I was still in a daze from the initial impact they had had on me. I had been taken unawares. I had never dreamed that art could exert such power, such full sensory power. Barney’s pictures made me realize that the only certainty was that there were no rules. And if I learned to open my eyes wide and get my mind out of my own way, art would just happen to me. No wonder I was in a daze. I knew that what I was seeing that day would change forever the way I looked at art.
The afternoon wore on and ended, as many days do, on a more mundane note. A lot of drinks later, we all made our way through the darkness along the river to have dinner at Sweet’s across from the Fulton Fish Market, a restaurant so venerable that even I had heard of it. Only later did Clem tell me how rare that viewing was. Unlike the studios of most artists, who were more casual about opening the doors of their studios, Barney’s door was locked and sealed.
Month after month we four would meet at Bank Street and go to the usual cramped, dim restaurants, where I would listen to Barney’s relentless, droning voice, nasal, wheedling. Oh, that voice. Hours stretched to light-years as I grew wizened and gnarled, rooted to the floor, as Annalee hummed, dark in a dark room, as Barney talked on and on about “issues,” his touchstone word. The world according to Barney was comprised of issues. He had his own criteria for what an issue was; anything that didn’t fit was of no consequence.
Barney would launch into a riff slowly, drawing out the words as if he were about to reveal the secrets of the universe. “The . . . um . . . issue . . . ahh . . . is . . . ” He spoke in immense pauses punctuated by odd little snorts from somewhere between his throat and sinuses. I was always waiting for the toaster to pop. And by the time it did, I didn’t give a damn.
A polemicist, he would niggle about everything from semantics to the spelling of goulash on a menu, as his hand chopped the air, affixed to the cigarette or cigar that spewed its vapor. The same went for art talk, until I would want to lean across the table and shake him: Isn’t it enough to know something and just do it? Why must you always explain everything ? But, of course, that was exactly what he needed to do. Barney’s way of speaking might have been slow and painstaking—and why not? He was that way in his art—but, unfortunately, it was also nonstop. He talked like a teacher, which he sometimes was; like a philosopher, his major at City College; and like the socialist he was when he ran for mayor of New York as a young man. Those were the engines that propelled his art talk, because of course he talked about art most of all.
For about five years we saw the Newmans regularly for dinner. No one else was invited along to divert; no Five Spot or Cedar Bar would cap off the evening and mix up the drill. And always, Barney’s voice would trail me home and invade my dreams. Needless to say, double-dating with the Newmans was not high on my hit parade. However, as much as my heart would sink, I hadn’t yet learned how to beg off, nor had I even considered the possibility of doing such a thing. Instead, as I so often did when the onslaught of information that surged around me became too much, I retreated behind my defensive shield. Not directed at me, or of any practical use to me, that information was peripheral and it dispersed as quickly as the smoke from Barney’s cigarettes.
Barney actually had a reputation for being witty. But invariably I found myself waiting in vain for a spontaneous moment of lightness, of humor. Oh, he could come up with a witticism now and again, but I felt that even they were hard come by and were delivered more as well-polished aphorisms. Two, in particular, would seep into Newman’s lore: “I paint so that I’ll have something to look at” and “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” As much as Barney enjoyed discoursing on the subject of humor, for me, he succeeded only in de-humorizing it. In this respect, he joined the crowd. By and large, I had always thought of artists as humorless. I saw it this way. Drunks aren’t funny, artists drunk aren’t funny. Impoverished, fearful, driven artists aren’t funny. And that pretty much covered the artists I knew.
Clem was another one. He rarely laughed—a full-out ha-ha laugh—except when someone told a good joke. He despaired that he had no gift as a raconteur and admired inordinately those who could pull it off. He loved wit, bitchiness, and gossip, especially when packaged in the repartee of his gay friends. Most of all, he loved Jewish humor and nightclub comedians. As for me, I was a deplorable joke teller, though I was thought to have some wit and a good overall sense of humor. Somehow, I don’t think of myself as having done much laughing in those early years. But a lot of the situations were funny. Not to mention the entire square-peg-round-hole predicament my marriage had landed me in.
One scorching summer weekend, Barney, Clem, and I took a long bus ride to Camp Tamiment in the Poconos. Barney sat in the seat in front of Clem, his head swiveled around as he talked ceaselessly, cigars and cigarettes going, the windows open, hot air gusting against my closed eyes. The
“issues” were as heavy as the heat: politics and the murder of socialism. And why not? Tamiment was founded in the twenties by labor unions and the radical Left as a getaway for their members and families. Like any camp, it was on a lake in the mountains and had a plethora of Jewish comedians passing through. But this was no Catskill pleasure dome, like Grossinger’s. Tamiment, true to its socialist roots, was plain pipe rack. And what really set it apart was that it believed in serving up culture along with its light entertainment. It took both very seriously.
So it was that later that night the sparkling duo of Greenberg and Newman performed as the warm-up act for a Sid Caesar wannabe. In that environment it turned out not to be as lopsided as one might have thought. Culture drew a hefty crowd, even without the laughs. And Barney and Clem played off each other like old pros. They were enjoying themselves; Barney the Ponderous revealed astonishing comedic timing, and Clem, as he never had and never would again, actually played to the audience. They were rewarded with a roar of applause, and both were rather pleased with themselves.
The next morning passed rather uneventfully; the “stars” were corralled into various impromptu confabs to debate art vis-à-vis politics, as I lay on the raft in the sun, listening to the screams of euphoric children. I thought about this strange place that had transformed Clem and Barney into adorable boys. A Jewish place, where Yiddish and English merged and the food tasted different. On the ride back, I relinquished my wifely seat to Barney and listened contentedly to the murmur of their polemics as we returned to a more familiar world.
A Complicated Marriage Page 12