by Ira Glass
There were several other letters in the file as well, and Akumal beamed as I read them. “It’s all quite fantastic, isn’t it?” he said. “So, don’t you think you should come to the opening?”
I told him that I might try to make it to London for the opening, which was two months away. We left it at that.
Then he asked me if I would mind writing a letter, just to say that I, too, had now seen the slides, and that I might be coming to the opening.
I told him I’d try to remember to.
He said it was okay; he could wait—he had a few minutes before he had to go catch the airport bus.
So far, I really hadn’t had a chance to talk with Shapinsky, or, for that matter, to get a good look at his work, but now that the traveling documentary show had hit the road and quiet had returned to East Seventieth Street I went over for a chat the next day. Actually, several such visits were necessary: Shapinsky turned out to be as reserved and measured and withdrawn as Akumal was voluble and extravagant and outgoing. He was always gentle and polite, but he was subdued; indeed, at times his restraint verged on the spooky. He answered questions in a flat, becalmed voice with simple sentences often consisting of just one or two words (“Yes, marvelous,” “Truly gratifying”). Though his answers eventually got longer, they often seemed preset—not that he was being evasive or had adopted some sort of party line but, rather, that his life seemed to hold little curiosity for him, few fresh surprises, no new vantages. His accounts had none of the free-associative, scattershot unpredictability that characterized Akumal’s. I could see what Akumal had meant when he spoke of Shapinsky’s serenity, but it seemed clearly a serenity that had a cost—there seemed to be a certain exhaustion behind the equanimity.
I was struck on each new visit to the Shapinskys by the extraordinary spareness of their circumstances. One day, there happened to be three dirty cups in the kitchen sink, and there were not enough clean ones to go around until Kate had washed one of them. Another time, I took along a couple of friends, and there were not enough chairs in the apartment for all of us to sit on until Shapinsky lifted an ancient stereo off a rickety stool, set the stereo on the floor, and brought the stool over to the table. At night, I learned, they pulled a rolled-up thin mattress out of the closet and spread it across the floor to sleep on. During my visits, Kate would occasionally sit with us in the kitchen, knitting (she was always more spry and animated than he); other times, she would repair to the little foyer, on the other side of the thin wall, and operate her sewing machine, using the single bed as a layout table, while tossing anecdotes and amplifications back into the kitchen.
Harold Shapinsky was born in Brooklyn in 1925, which is to say that, contrary to Akumal’s telescoped version, he was a good fifteen years younger than most of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists. (For that matter, he was younger than many of the second-generation New York School painters as well.) His parents were first-generation Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his father worked as a designer in the garment industry. Harold was the third of four boys. Music was highly prized in the family—one of his older brothers became a classical cellist, and the other played double bass—but the visual arts were encouraged hardly at all. Indeed, as Harold’s precocious drawing talent started garnering notice it began to be actively discouraged. A musician, after all, could always gain employment somewhere, but what possible livelihood could there be for a painter?
Nevertheless, from an early age Shapinsky inhabited a highly visual universe. As a small boy, he was always attracted to the museums—especially the Brooklyn Museum, where he was particularly taken with ancient figurines, Egyptian friezes, and Coptic reliefs. But he also found visual stimulation in contexts other than the formally artistic. For example, he was fascinated by the patterns chalked out across the swatches of fabric his father brought home from his work in the garment industry—“the complex jumble of shapes,” he recalls, “and especially the spaces in between.” He also spent hours poring over weather maps in the newspaper, his imagination stirred by what he calls “the compression of distances and scale, the layering, the sense of pressures building and spilling into winds, the gracefully sweeping front lines, the three-dimensional density expressed through the simplest of abstract graphic means.” He says that the fabric swatches and the maps influenced his later work.
When Shapinsky was in his early teens, his parents divorced, and his home life, which he seldom discusses directly, appears to have become quite strained and unhappy. His mother would find his paintings and throw them out; even more distressing, his stepfather—after she remarried—would find his paintings and paint right over them, in an act of not even thinly veiled jealousy. Shapinsky persevered. He became fascinated by modern European painting—especially Cézanne and Picasso—and he says that by the age of fifteen, in 1940, he had resolved to become a painter. By that time, he had been out of school a year—he had been forced to drop out of junior high to help support his family. He worked at a succession of jobs, and continued to draw and paint in the evenings. His early portraits were highly influenced by the neoclassical Picasso. In 1945, he received some sort of scholarship to the Art Students League, where he studied with Harry Sternberg and Cameron Booth. (I derive this fact from a photostat of a handwritten two-page “résumé,” the only documentation the Shapinskys were able to muster when James Mayor requested a curriculum vitae to be used in preparing the show.) That year, at twenty, Shapinsky moved to Manhattan—to an unheated three-room, five-flight walk-up on the lower East Side, for which he paid twelve dollars and fifty cents a month. (Forty years later, he and his wife share a space almost as small in a similar walk-up, although it’s in a somewhat nicer neighborhood and costs a lot more.)
These were to be the high good times of Shapinsky’s life—in many ways, its only good times, at least up until October of 1984. He got a job in a ceramics factory and gradually rose to become head of its decorating department. But that was just part-time. All the rest of his time, his energy, and whatever little money he was able to save were poured into his painting. “It was a wonderful period,” he recalls. “There was a tremendous camaraderie among the artists. We were putting our all into painting, into the activity of painting itself. We’d get together at the old Waldorf Cafeteria at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and we’d talk about the mission of painting. Nobody gave a thought to money, or to exhibiting, or even to selling the work. It was a pure scene.”
The first-generation Abstract Expressionists were just making their breakthroughs—one-two-three, one after the other, like that! And Shapinsky watched as it was happening all about him. “I saw my first Gorky show at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1946, right around the time I was myself turning decidedly toward abstraction,” he says. “Although I never met him, Gorky was a great encouragement: he had a beautiful touch—such a warm feeling to him. I met and became friends with Franz Kline around 1947. I saw my first Jackson Pollock show in 1948, at Betty Parsons. Although I saw de Kooning himself a good deal on the street and about town, I didn’t see my first de Kooning painting till 1950 or so. But the point is, everybody was painting. We weren’t Abstract Expressionists—that designation would only come later. We were just painters.”
Shapinsky met Kate Peters at an all-night New Year’s Eve party as 1947 became 1948. She was, she says, “a dancer and a shiksa.” She was the renegade bohemian offshoot of an established New England family. Her father was an architect and had a bit of the artist in him. But her parents, too, had divorced. Her mother had remarried, and her stepfather was Hugh Lofting, the author of the Doctor Dolittle stories, though he didn’t seem to like children very much, or at any rate had little use for her. Her insistence on becoming a dancer received little support from her family, but she kept at it, studying with Doris Humphrey and José Limón, among others. Like many dancers, she hung around the artists. She had met Gorky, baby-sitting for his children not long before his suicide. “He’d walk me home afterward to the Sixteenth Street Y,” she
says. “He was angry at the world. He had a great big dog. His little girls called his paintings ‘broken toys.‘” At that party, Kate says, she was immediately attracted to Harold—“He was so thin and gaunt, he had a face like El Greco’s Jesus Christ”—but she didn’t think she had a chance, because of her New England background. She was wrong. (“She had marvelous form,” Shapinsky recalls of his first impression.)
A few weeks later, he tracked her down: she was nude, modeling on a dais at the Art Students League. He borrowed a large drawing pad, scrawled in big letters Meet Me in the Cafeteria, and held the pad up before her. The class broke into applause. And after class she did meet him in the cafeteria. They went off to a pizza joint (“No,” she corrects him, “it was a health-food place”), and the dinner cost two dollars, cleaning him out completely. “It was worth it, worth every penny,” he says now, smiling over at her fondly. Their courtship was gradual, proceeding by fits and starts, and, like many affairs among artists of the period, it took a long time to formalize. They weren’t officially married until 1955, and David, their only child, didn’t arrive until 1960.
Shapinsky continued to scramble, hoarding whatever time he could for his painting, though he never seemed to have enough. A great break came when he happened to hear, in the fall of 1948, that a school named Subjects of the Artist was being established on Eighth Street by the painters William Baziotes, David Hare, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. (They were subsequently joined by Barnett Newman.) After work one evening, he went over to see about the possibility of a scholarship—he certainly couldn’t afford the tuition. Baziotes happened to be there, and they had a long talk before class. “Finally,” Shapinsky recalls, “Bill said to me, ‘Well, let’s see what you can do.’ So I ran downstairs, found a paint shop, bought some black and white enamel and a board, hauled the things back up, squatted on the floor, and set to work. A while later, Bill came over, and he liked it and said he thought I had a good chance. A few minutes later, Motherwell came over and started watching. Something went wrong, though, and I became dissatisfied and began scraping the paint away, gouging it and starting over. Motherwell liked how I treated the painting as a process. So they offered me a tuition scholarship on the spot. It was worth thousands—or anyway, it was worth thousands to me at that time. I began hanging out there morning, noon, and night. There weren’t very many students, actually—maybe about a dozen—and my work received a lot of attention, caused a lot of talk. David Smith liked it. Bradley Tomlin liked it. Sometimes I would draw with chalk directly on the wall—I liked its hardness, the challenge of opening up a space. One time, Mark Rothko, who was terribly nearsighted, was talking to the class, and he began to speak appreciatively about one of my wall drawings as an example. He reached up to get a better look and tried to pull it off the wall—only, it was the wall. It was very embarrassing. Baziotes meant the most to me as a teacher, although they all had an impact. He was warm and enthusiastic—the others were more intellectual—and he helped encourage me to continue dealing with issues in my painting that were just beginning to be formulated. That sense of painting as a process. There were Friday-night lectures—Jean Arp came and spoke, Adolph Gottlieb, others.”
The school closed toward the end of the winter of 1949. Shapinsky dragged his stuff back to his cramped cold-water flat and continued working. He was pouring all his money into paint and brushes and boards. He was literally living on peanuts, consuming a packet a day. Finally, it all became too much. “I collapsed,” Shapinsky recalls. “One day, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I couldn’t move. It was terrible. If my brother hadn’t come a few days later to see what had become of me, I don’t know, I might have . . . Anyway, he came, he saw my condition and bundled me up and brought me back out to Long Island for the summer, where they pampered me, fattened me up, let me lie out on the beach, and I slowly recovered.”
His brother, however, forgot to pay the rent on the cold-water flat—the twelve dollars and fifty cents a month. It may be that it didn’t even occur to him. In the first of a series of terrible setbacks for Shapinsky, the landlord simply came up and cleared out the apartment, tossing several years’ worth of work into the garbage. Although almost everything was lost, including all the large paintings, a few smaller pieces were salvaged at the last minute. (Some of them would eventually be slated for inclusion in the Mayor show.) Shapinsky was devastated by the news.
Had Akumal been with us the afternoon that Shapinsky related this sad incident, he might (good student of karma that he is) have noted the date—the summer of 1949. Karma metes out mysterious compensations, uncanny reincarnations: somewhere on the other side of the globe, Akumal Ramachander was being born.
Shapinsky returned to the city around Christmastime of 1949 to take a job as extra help at the post office. Around New Year’s, he learned that Motherwell had founded a school in his own studio, on Fourth Avenue, as a sort of follow-up to Subjects of the Artist, and Shapinsky began attending the sessions. He returned to full strength, poured himself into the work once again. At the end of the year, Motherwell selected one of Shapinsky’s paintings for an invitational show at the Kootz Gallery.
Samuel Kootz had five artists in his stable and eight slots on his annual calendar, so he was always having to come up with creative ways to fill the extra spaces while not unduly favoring any one or three particular artists. That December of 1950, he invited the five artists themselves—Baziotes, Hare, Hans Hofmann, Gottlieb, and Motherwell—to select three artists each for a “Fifteen Unknowns” show. During one of my visits, Shapinsky foraged from deep within a kitchen drawer a flyer for the show. Most of the unknowns have returned to oblivion, but there are some surprises. Hofmann selected John Grillo. Gottlieb included Clement Greenberg, in his sometime role as a painter, and Helen Frankenthaler—a year before her first one-woman show, at Tibor de Nagy. The Kootz invitational received some good notices, and Shapinsky was among those singled out. In the Times, for example, Stuart Preston cited his “deft profiling of creamy shapes, waving like flames in a crossbreeze.”
As second-generation Abstract Expressionists go, Shapinsky had staked his claim early. Indeed, in a sense he could have been conceived of as a transitional figure, too young for the first generation but so thoroughly identified with it in terms of ambitions and conceptions of the activity of painting as to be more of a precursor than a simple member of the second generation. But all this speculation soon proved moot. A few months before the opening of the Kootz show came the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, and Shapinsky was drafted. He got a night’s leave to attend the opening but had to be back in barracks the next morning. He wasn’t sent abroad—in fact, he logged most of his hitch in Fort Dix, New Jersey—but he was effectively sequestered from the scene just as it was beginning to catch fire, or, rather, at the very moment that the torch was being passed from the first generation to the second. Thus, he missed the celebrated Ninth Street Exhibition, in 1951, in which several charter members of the Artists Club invited sixty-one artists to install one work each in an empty storefront in the Village. According to Irving Sandler, one of the period’s premier chroniclers, in his book The New York School, the show included at least thirteen of the younger artists—Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, and Milton Resnick among them. It is not inconceivable that Shapinsky would have been included had he been around. He might, at any rate, have been able to capitalize on his Kootz exposure, to insure that he would be part of the transition.
Instead, he was discharged, in the summer of 1952, into what he experienced as a radically altered environment. “The whole spirit had changed,” he says, with something between a shudder and a sigh. “Money was beginning to flow in, and it was ruining everything. Politics was setting in. Everything was breaking apart. It was all becoming who you know, cliques, kowtowing, bootlicking. There was a mad scramble for galleries. It just got worse and worse.” And Shapinsky began to fall inexorably away. “I couldn’t stand
all those cocktail parties,” he recalls. He and Kate became more and more reclusive. “I tried to do my own work as quietly as possible, enjoy my family, my friends, visit the museums, study the masters, return to my studio, paint.” He’d show once in a long while—a single painting or two in an obscure exhibition at some out-of-the-way gallery. But these shows were marginal, peripheral, in a scene, on an island, where centrality was everything. He looked on, aghast, as the art scene was transmogrified. “Painting became a business,” he says. “The painters became like factories. Their product was the new—something new for each season. Most of it nowadays is like newspaper headlines. That’s what the galleries seem to want—it creates a big splash, but then it doesn’t mean anything. The work can be quite competent technically, but it’s dead. You don’t feel the artist’s hand. It’s all superficial. It’s launching bandwagons and chasing after them. Nobody is concerned about feeling anymore, about the journey.”
One day, he finally took me into his little bedroom studio to show me some paintings. “Look,” he said. “Feeling is everything.” One after another, he pulled out works from 1946, 1958, 1963, 1982, 1970, 1948. . . . It was amazing: isolated, utterly alone, working for no one but himself, unconcerned about wider acceptance, not kowtowing to any gallery or potential moneyed patrons, Shapinsky had almost managed to make time stand still. The paintings were quite lovely. The ones he showed me (like all those slated for the Mayor Gallery show) were small, and many of them were on paper. Shapinsky explained that he would have loved to work on large canvases, but he could never afford the canvas or the paint; he never had the room to stretch any large canvases, or the space to store the resultant paintings. So he condensed his art, working in what the Abstract Expressionists would have considered a miniature format—eighteen by twenty-four inches. Remarkably, however, he seemed able to compress a great deal of energy into those limited spaces, so that there is occasionally an almost epic quality to the small images—or, rather, they start out lyric and seem to hover, to modulate toward the epic.