Calvin Tomkins, "Artist Unknown,"

76 PROFILE ARTI5T UNKNOWN Is it possible to become a much sought-after artist in America and still maintain independence and anonymity? Albert York, who has been defying contemporary art-world conventions for three decades- even admirers of his work weren't sure if he really existed—emerges for a rare interview. BY CALVIN TOMKIN5 iERT YORK may be the most York landscapes, and he takes them Their private collection covers all the highly admired unknown artist with him, in a box he made for the pur- characteristic York themes and includes A in America. Ask any contempo- pose, when he leaves home for a few several of the strange allegorical pictures rary dealer or collector what he thinks of days. "I really need them around me, that crop up in his work from time to York's paintings, and nineteen times out somehow," he told me recently. The late time, such as the 1967 "Woman and of twenty you will get a blank stare. This Jacqueline Onassis owned six York Skeleton," which shows a nude woman is amazing when you consider that York paintings, the last of which was given to and a skeleton seated on the ground, has had twelve one-man shows in New her by her friend Maurice Tempelsman having what looks like an animated con- York over the last thirty-two years (the just a short time before she died. Ed- versation. "Woman and Skeleton" is in most recent one is at the Davis & Lang- ward Gorey, the artist and book illus- some ways the quintessential York dale Company, on East Sixtieth Street, trator, has five, and says he would buy painting. Although it obviously refers to through June 23rd), and that his work anything of York's, sight unseen, if any- the vanitas theme of earlier art—the has received very favorable and some- thing were available. (A new painting by woman holds a mirror in her left hand, times awed notices from any number of York could bring at least twenty thou- and the skeleton is shouldering a well-known critics. Reviewing York's sand dollars today, and quite possibly a scythe—the picture also manages to first show, in 1963, at the Davis Galler- lot more than that.) Klaus Kertess, the evoke Manet in the physicality of its ies on East Sixtieth Street, the Art News curator who organized this year's Whit- paint handling, while locating the viewer critic Lawrence Campbell wrote, "His ney Biennial, wanted to include York in in a murky, moonlit landscape that is small paintings of fields, trees, ponds, a the show but couldn't, because the Bi- somewhat ominous and full of ambigu- bird, a bull, a face or two, a figure in ennial is limited to work done within ity. Is the woman looking at herself in front of a wood, shine with the poetry the last two years and York has not re- the mirror, or holding it up to reflect the of a Ryder; and without looking much leased a new painting in three years. skeleton's features? Is the skeleton male like a Ryder, either." That is still a good Kertess did include York's work in a or female? The figures strain against the description of York's work, which has three-artist show of landscape paintings confines of the twelve-by-eleven-inch changed very little over three decades. at the Parrish Art Museum, in South- picture space, and are seemingly out of His colors are lighter than they used to ampton, Long Island, in 1989. He scale with a clump of trees directly be- be, and his paint handling is more seduc- worked closely with the two other art- hind them. Nothing quite fits. The tive, but the scale and the format of his ists involved, Jane Freilicher and April effect is monumental and humorous at pictures have remained the same—slightly Gornik, but he didn't meet York then the same time. less than a foot square in most cases—and and hasn't met him since, and at the It struck both the Davises as highly there has been no letup in the mysterious time neither Kertess nor anyone else at unlikely that York would agree to be tension that makes his images indelible. the museum knew for sure whether interviewed. To everyone's surprise, Those who do know about Albert York, who lives only a few miles away, in though, he did. He showed up right York tend to be fanatical in their admi- Water Mill, ever came to see the show. on time at Bobby Van's restaurant, in ration. The painter Susan Rothenberg, Leroy Davis and Cecily Langdale, Bridgehampton, where I had suggested who chose York for the 1984 "Artists York's longtime dealers, have had rela- that we meet. York turned out to be a Choose Artists" show at the CDS Gal- tively little contact with the artist in re- rather handsome man in a gray tweed lery, on the Upper East Side, has said cent years. York's rate of production de- jacket: he had white hair, greenish- that she "just fell in love with the beauty clined precipitously after the Parrish brown eyes, a square face with deep ver- and simplicity and purity of the work" Museum show, and it stopped alto- tical lines framing the mouth, and not a and also with a certain raw, awkward gether in June of 1992. The Davises trace of the hunted-animal look that his quality—a sense that "each time he (Roy Davis and Cecily Langdale are reputation had more or less led me to paints, he paints for the first time." The married) try to buy back for the gallery expect. York had a slow, rather formal sculptor Robert Grosvenor owns two any York that comes on the market. way of talking. There were moments Albert York's "Woman and Skeleton," 1967 (oppositepage). -- „. during our conversation that day and ward—they were not married—and become a Canadian citizen and served in x during a subsequent conversation when York grew up believing that his mother the Canadian Army during the First ;>he clearly felt uncomfortable, and now was dead. Since his father could not take World War. After the war, he came o~ and then he apologized for not answer- care of him, he spent the first seven years down to Detroit and found a job as a o a ing a question adequately, but to me his of his life in a nursery/boarding school metalworker in the automobile industry. 5 ganswers seemed remarkably candid, in Fenton, Michigan, a town near Flint. When York was fourteen, he was 1 thoughtful, and unself-conscious. York's father, Albert, Sr., was born in sent to live with his father's married sis- uj ofl Albert York was born in Detroit in London; his parents had emigrated to ter, in Belleville, Ontario. He graduated IIi 1928. His parents separated soon after- Canada when he was sixteen, and he had from high school there five years later, 78 and enrolled in the Ontario College of Art. He had done a lot of drawing in grade school, and in high ZII\BEL5TI\A55E school he had taken painting lessons from a local artist. The first-year She's moving out of the house now, the sticky sycamores course at the Ontario College of Art one after the other struck by lightning outside the picture window was mostly drawing—drawing from that my father struck by lightning liked to keep curtained plaster casts, still-life drawing, and before the lightning came for him a second time early one morning so forth—and the first year was as and he lost his balance, his speech, and last of all his mischief, far as he got, because after that his father decided he should come the high pines that gave the street its name chopped down home and attend the Society of Arts by the new people, only the birches left standing, and Crafts, in Detroit. York was whose thin leaves and catkins reminded me of her copper-silver hair, awarded a scholarship for his second the old woman upstairs with all her marbles and mobility year there. He used only part of it, put in a home by her Regan of a daughter, who sold the house though, because he was drafted into the Army in January of 1951. York over the heads of my parents, sitting-duck tenants, spent two years in the Army, and bourgeois gypsies, wheeled suitcases on top of fitted wardrobes, saw active duty in the Korean War. the windows where my sister's criminal boyfriends climbed in at night, Discharged in 1952, York came over the hedge the pool where the dentist's children screamed, straight to New York. While he had the old couple next door, Duzfreunde of Franz Josef Strauss, been in training with an Army Medical Corps in Seattle, he met a the patio stones with their ineradicable growths of moss, sergeant from the Bronx who had the weedy lawn where slugs set sail of an evening and met their ends attended the Art Students League, like Magellan, sliced up in the salty shallows of their own froth, and he decided that this was what he wanted to do when he got out. The Art Students League fees were too high, though, so York signed up in- third Street, was considered one of the along his paintbox and done a lot of stead for the evening painting classes best in the business.

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