A Complicated Marriage

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A Complicated Marriage Page 13

by Janice Van Horne


  Despite his dazzling duet at Tamiment, Barney stood alone, a hard-nosed hard-liner. There was only one right way, and that was his way. Yes, that could be said of most artists, but Barney . . . I see him astride the battlements of a fortress, wielding lightning bolts of ego. Inevitably, Barney’s oldest friendships had faltered along the way—notably, those with Rothko, Reinhardt, and Still, with all of whom he had once shared many of the same views about art and the art scene. Temperamentally, Barney came close to being like Still, the iconoclast of all iconoclasts, with his grudges and righteousness. But, thankfully, Barney stopped short of Still’s extreme posturing. He had been blessed with humanity and an appetite for the world. And when I could cut through the oratory I could even glimpse a sweetness and a bad-boy charm, but rarely enough for me to hang on to through those long hours in those dark restaurants.

  Clem’s relationship with Barney began to fray after he curated Barney’s first retrospective at Bennington in 1958. But what pushed it to the limit was when Clem became an advisor at French & Company’s new contemporary gallery and arranged for Barney to have the opening show. Barney’s demands and micromanaging knew no bounds. I watched him on Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, orchestrating the crane as it hoisted his eighteen-foot pictures to the penthouse gallery. Barney was in his element. And the icing: The Times ran a picture of the traffic-stopping “event.”

  Clem would say that the beauty of the show in no way made up for the strain of being forced into running interference between Barney, with his high-handed demands and threats, and the gallery directors, who were used to dealing with dead artists. It was all more than Clem had signed on for. And even though the artists that followed—Gottlieb, Smith, Louis, Noland, Olitski, among others—were a breeze in comparison, Clem’s heart wasn’t in it. He had soured on the project, which had originally seemed like a fine idea, and after the inaugural season, he quit and never did curate another show.

  The one time we went to the Newmans’ apartment, I saw a photograph of Annalee and Barney posed against the New York skyline. They were newlyweds, she camera coy, a vivid brightness about her, he cocky and proud. How winsome and pretty she was as a young woman with her dashing Barney. In the camera’s eye, they were complete, joyously ready for an unordinary life together.

  There was no doubt in my mind that if Barney and I had met when we were young and starting out, we would both have run screaming in opposite directions. But after I saw that picture of Annalee, I felt that we would have connected. At least we would have stood a chance. I was sure that rather than being swathed in her usual black, she would have worn the colors of new love and adventure to match her glowing face. And I was sure she hadn’t been a hummer when she was young. When I say “hummer,” I don’t mean just now and then; I mean a lot, and loud enough to be heard, loud enough for me to know that there would be no conversation because she was someplace else.

  But there was rarely conversation between any of the artists’ wives and me. That was part of their earnestness, the wary listening to every word that passed between their husbands and Clem, the deciphering of codes, the reading of glances, and the committing of it all to memory, perhaps in order to play it back later. How could there be space for casual girl talk between us? After all, the wives were hardly a frivolous, frolicking bunch. And if there were close friendships among the wives themselves, I saw little sign of that. At least among the wives who, like Annalee, had full-time jobs as well as the full-time nurturing of needy husbands.

  Then, too, as the stakes grew higher in the late fifties, perhaps there was too much competition and volatility in the air. Over time I became accustomed to the lack of give-and-take, although I still yearned for it. I had always enjoyed the company of women and, for the most part, found them more interesting than men to talk to. As for Annalee and me, the might-have-been connection never happened.

  I would have to read Annalee’s obituary to learn that she went to graduate school at Columbia and the University of Nancy, where she earned a degree in French; that she was an expert in shorthand and taught high-school secretarial studies; and that she was a lecturer at the Baruch School of City College. I wish you had told me about all that, Annalee; at least it would have been a starting point. But that humming. Was she as bored as I was? Was it simply an occupational hazard of her many years as a schoolteacher? Or maybe it had started decades earlier during the long evenings with her Barney, who talked enough for two. Whatever, my mind still resonates with that talk and that humming. Just as I can still hear Annalee saying Barney. She sang it with a wide-open a, held two full notes, with a lilt between the syllables, rather like Swa-a-a-nee. (The rest of that song’s lyrics would work just fine, too.)

  The devotion was mutual, but I always thought the weight of it was on Annalee and her financial and emotional caretaking of Barney’s art, aspirations, and convictions—no small undertaking with that dogged warrior as he carved out his place in art history. A friend, the painter Yvonne Thomas, once told me a story that, as I saw it, epitomized Annalee’s dedication to Barney. Many years before, she had run into Annalee, who was on her way to work. In the course of things Yvonne had asked, “And what’s Barney up to these days?” “He’s thinking,” Annalee had replied, not missing a beat. On that occasion my friend had noticed a loose button on the front of her coat. “That wasn’t so strange,” she continued, “but when I saw her a year or so later the button was still loose, now hanging by a thread.” My friend and I laughed and agreed that Annalee had taken spousal selflessness to a new level.

  Not to suggest that Annalee was put upon or passive. I thought of her more as a sergeant at arms, happy and comfortable with her chosen path. When Barney had a heart attack in 1957, I saw in her the combination of palpable fear and street fighter as she hovered by his hospital bed. What a terrible shock it was for her, for all of us. He was only fifty-two. No mute wife then. How fierce she was in her concern lest Clem would get him stirred up with art talk. But even in the hospital, flat on his back, on oxygen, monitors beeping, Barney would do his own stirring up. After all, there were always far-flung “issues” to expound on, even if his voice was weak. And when Annalee left the room for a moment, there was talk on a different issue, one that really got my attention. With his usual deadpan delivery, he launched into an analysis of the nurses and their perfect breasts, and did Clem have any theories on why, on average, nurses had better breasts than other women? One thought led to another and eventually he was satisfied to conclude that their breasts must simply be a gift from God, because at the rate he was having erections, he knew he wasn’t going to die anytime soon. The admixture of Barney, sex, and his over-the-top narcissism had me bursting with laughter. But this was no joke to Barney, who silenced the flibbertigibbet with the lift of one eyebrow.

  True to his prediction in the hospital, Barney didn’t die at fifty-two. He lived another thirteen years and died in 1970. Annalee would survive her soul mate by thirty years. I liked thinking of her as being the tiger she had been by his hospital bed. I was reassured when, in 1987, Annalee refused permission to the Albright-Knox Museum to include Newman in its show of geometric painters. Barney had long battled the inclination of curators and critics to label him as geometric. He had characteristically refused to be labeled as anything, which left his work up for grabs, and it wasn’t long before the minimalists tried to claim him as one of their own. A closer match. To the end of his life, Barney had continued to enjoy swatting away at the “issue” brushfires, and it was nice to know that Annalee was still bearing the standard.

  I was also happy to hear that in her later years Annalee moved to the posh River House, to an apartment with a marble entrance hall. How grand. The last time our paths almost crossed was in 1992 at the Museum of Modern Art, on a special viewing day of the Matisse retrospective. Across several adjoining galleries, I espied her standing in profile in the middle of a room, alone, gazing fixedly at a picture out of my view. Even at that distance, she was unmistakabl
e, still dressed in head-to-toe black, her bearing unchanged, though she had a cane. I moved forward, eager to greet her after so many years, but by the time I reached the gallery she was gone.

  JACK AND MABEL BUSH

  WE FIRST MET Jack and Mabel in 1957, when a group of painters in Toronto, known as Painters Eleven, banded together to invite Clem up for a week to look at their work, one-on-one. Because the decision had not been unanimous, for this visit the group would be, in fact, Painters Nine. Canadian artists seemed to have had a predilection for numbering their like-minded posses; besides Painters Eleven, others included the Group of Seven and the Regina Five.

  That was my first trip to Canada—in fact, to any “foreign” country, and over the years Clem and I would return often. On this occasion, the Bushes had been designated as our hosts. Jack, in his tweeds, looking for all the world like a British country gentleman, picked us up at the train station. Our overnight trip from New York had taken fourteen hours. Since our “honeymoon” trip to Minneapolis, I was still afraid to fly, and would be until 1963.

  To my surprise, Jack pulled up in front of a white colonial in the suburban rim of Toronto. As surprised as I had been upon first seeing the Hofmanns’ Provincetown house, I couldn’t believe this could be an artist’s house. Toronto, being a large city, had made me envision some sort of loft. Instead, I walked into the house I had always wanted to live in as a kid. Nothing grand or over the top, it was done up in a cozy, chintzy way. And there was a big backyard that showed years of loving care, where we had drinks and mountains of fancy hors d’oeuvres that first evening.

  Mabel was a tall, pretty brunette, so welcoming and warm. She wore a summery pastel dress with a very full skirt and a wide white patent-leather belt that showed off her figure, and I wondered if I had brought something nice I could change into, though I knew I hadn’t. In any case, what would have been the use? I despaired of ever developing a waist. At twenty-four, I was getting a bit long in the tooth to ascribe the problem to “baby fat,” as Clem fondly called it. To me it was the hex put on me those many Christmases ago by my snarling Nazi uncle: “Isn’t it time she lost her baby fat?” But while I waited for the day that would never come, belts were for the Mabels of the world.

  As the sun set, the Bushes talked about their three boys with love and pride. Though their sons were nearly grown, Mabel and Jack would always refer to them as “boys.” Jack talked about the art in Toronto, the feelings of provincialism there, and his concerns about the future. Mabel appeared to me to be the perfect wife and mother. I thought in those terms. I was still looking for role models, my own family having left me at a loss in so many ways.

  After dinner Jack and their two younger sons, Terry and Rob, played music—Jack proficient on the piano, the boys equally so on drums and guitar. Jack was mad for jazz, but Clem was equally mad for dancing and, as usual, protested that you couldn’t dance to jazz. With some reluctance he made a concession in honor of the visitors, and that night, as Mabel, Clem, and I threw ourselves around, the beat of Buddy Holly and Elvis shook the small room. The Bushes and the Greenbergs had clicked.

  During the next few days, as Jack became more and more excited by all the art talk and hearing about what was happening in New York, Mabel retreated. I could tell that the talk made her anxious. Even then, years before Jack’s art career ignited, I glimpsed their fears about what lay ahead. They were in their late forties, Jack an established commercial artist in advertising, Mabel a homemaker. By the time our visit was over, it had become clear that Jack yearned to break the mold of his life. At the same time, he was fearful that his talent as a painter might not be sufficient to justify making the leap from secure, well-paid work to the precarious future of a full-time artist. On her part, Mabel wanted to shine and polish their life as it was, keep it safe. She had sought out, found, and fallen in love with the traditional man of her dreams. That he happened to like to paint had no doubt just added a bit of zest. Her fear was that maybe he would take that leap and she would be left behind and the boat would sink. She knew how to be an executive’s wife and a mother and hostess. How did one “be” an artist’s wife?

  I empathized with Mabel. I hadn’t begun to figure out what my role was in Clem’s world. I dog-paddled my way around in a pool of artists’ wives who seemed to me to be accomplished, happy campers. Although it was still early days for me, somehow I already suspected that I would never get the hang of it. At least Mabel had the domestic, wifely role down pat; she not only owned it, but gloried in it. To my mind, I was striking out on both counts. As ungrounded as I felt in the art world, I was also unclear about how to “be” a wife. Oh, I did what I called “nesting” and I puttered, but I certainly never gloried in it, nor felt accomplished at it. Sometimes I thought it wasn’t in my nature, that I must be missing a link. Other times I hoped maybe in time . . . And every day I managed as best I could. And I watched the art wives and hoped that what they seemed to do so well might rub off on me.

  After our visit, the Bushes came often to New York. They would burst in like a gust of fresh air at the end of the afternoon, sinking gratefully into our big couch, elated after a day of galleries interspersed with shopping sprees. For them it was as if every adventure were like Christmas morning. Infectious. Clem would shake up the martinis—he was not a stirrer—and I would produce my far-from-fancy best effort at nibbles, invariably chopped liver from Barney Greengrass on Amsterdam Avenue, saltines, and a dish of canned ripe olives. Jack would effervesce to Clem about this artist, that picture, tentatively venturing his “takes” and why he thought this worked and that didn’t. Mabel would gush to me about the stores they had gone to and what they had bought for themselves and for the boys, and where they had had lunch and how she had asked for the recipes for this or that dish. It was a rare dip into girl talk with my pipeline into “real” married life. More than a pipeline, Mabel was my first artist’s-wife friend.

  Sometimes she and I would talk fondly about Jack and Clem, so alike in the fundamental ways: same age, same height, both smoked Camels, a lot, both drank, a lot—though we agreed that Clem could handle it better—both had strong ethical and moral standards and were sticklers for good manners, and both could talk about art until hell froze over. And they had both had emotional breakdowns—Jack when he was thirty-eight, Clem at forty-six. Their conversations about life and relationships were filtered through their experiences and fascination with the process of analysis.

  As for differences, they were mostly a matter of appearance. Jack, with his shining pink complexion, neatly trimmed mustache, thick mane of slicked-back graying hair, and snappy clothes, always looked as if he had just stepped out of GQ. Clem, three-quarters bald, his skin a pale white, was a “comfort first, to hell with appearance” kind of dresser, a “take me as I am” sort of guy.

  As for the give-and-take about art between Jack and Clem, it was not always fifty-fifty. That would develop only as their rapport deepened. Jack, by nature a sweet guy, found it difficult to be tough even when it came to his opinions about art. It was as if he were still playing catch-up and was unsure of his footing. Clem would sometimes get impatient and push him to disagree with him, to look harder, more critically, at what he saw. I was used to the hammer-on-the-nail precision of Clem’s opinions about art and people. And I was used to it from others; for most people in the art world, judgments were their daily bread. But Jack. Sometimes even I wanted to shake him, shake him until all the dregs of anger and revolt, that underbelly of feelings that I was sure was in everyone, spilled out. Jack was certainly the only artist who ever made me wonder if someone could be too nice. Without that critical edge, would he ever be able to make it as a painter? But voicing strong opinions in our living room about his likes and dislikes of artists and their work, especially if there were other people around, which was often the case, well, it never happened.

  The martinis drunk, the chopped liver eaten, and the olive pits piled on the plate, we would then set off on the town. Wi
th the Bushes that always meant jazz and Max’s. And sometimes, if we “girls” held sway, we would head for a nightclub, somewhere fancy where Mabel could sport her new clothes and we could watch a show and the music would be divinely danceable.

  How little I understood during those early visits about Jack’s process as a painter. I, with my burgeoning list of absolute opinions about this and that. Opinions, of course, that were rarely voiced among the big talkers that filled the airspace; at least I had learned that much from the wives.

  But by the time we next went to Toronto and saw Jack’s new work, I got what he was about. Jack’s way was to sop it all up, everything he saw and heard in New York, and then, once he had internalized it, he would sort through what he liked and didn’t like. I could look at his pictures and see how he worked. He painted his insides out. And in that he was like all the other good painters. His pictures said everything his reticence kept him from expressing in our living room. His pictures were an open book, an honest book. He felt deeply and painted deeply. Lord knows, he didn’t need me or anybody else to shake the sludge out.

  Gradually over the next years, Jack did take the life-altering leap and the boat did not sink—far from it—but in some ways Mabel was left behind. Not that she didn’t support and even encourage his decisions—after all, she loved Jack—but there were also those deer-in-the-headlights moments, when I could see how uncomfortable she was in Jack’s new world. Mabel could not have possibly foreseen that, far from being a Sunday painter, Jack would become internationally heralded as one of the preeminent contemporary artists to come out of Canada. When the time came for her to march forward into Jack’s new world, I could see that their redirected life was too much for her to take on. As he joyfully threw open the door to his art and took over more and more of the house for his painting, she, in effect, closed her door with a resentful click.

 

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