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Crying at the Lock: the Journalsofjohn Hultberg SELECTION by CHRISTOPHER BUSA

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Crying at the Lock: the Journalsofjohn Hultberg SELECTION by CHRISTOPHER BUSA JOHN HULTBERG, PROVINCETOWN, 1958 Crying at the Lock: the Journalsofjohn Hultberg SELECTION BY CHRISTOPHER BUSA ohn Hultberg's distinguished career spans four likes this bohemian permissiveness as much as I yond, into the sky. Sometimes from this fasci- Jdecades and nearly 200 exhibitions in the U.S. dislike the middle-class pompousness she still nating-boring junk-heap one sees disembodied and abroad. Born in 1922 in Berkeley, CA, of Swed- respects in spite of her break from it with her art eyes returning one's unhappy gaze. I have never ish parents, he attended Fresno State College where career. But she, like so many others, sees only forgotten this image, which changed my paint- he earned a degree in literature. After' serving as the tip of the Hultberg. ing for better or worse, have held onto it in lieutenant with the Navy in the Pacific, he entered At Riker's someone had pointed across Eighth moments of doubt until its unbearable unhap- the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, Street, telling us that Alger Hiss lived there. I piness became as cathartic as a Bartok string where he studied painting with Clyfford Still, Mark said, "Is he a painter?" with Bill Sebring adding, quartet. Roth ko, and Richard Diebenkorn. He moved to New to laughs, "No, John, it would be better to say 'What gallery is he with!"' Someone else said 1958 York in 1948, enrolling at the Art Students League the rules of being a liberal were very simple: the with Morris Kantor and Will Barnet. He absorbed bigots are allowed to kill us but we cannot kill I went to Provincetown for the first time in May the urban landscape, worked as a guard at the Met- them. Kermit Lansner, the book critic of or June with Steve Joye, the director of the ropolitan Museum, and associated with Franz Kline, Newsweek said he objected to Norman Mailer's Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, to open a Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg- calling Eisenhower "an old woman." After all, branch of that gallery in a room near the en- all influences in the development of his signature the office of President deserved automatic re - trance of the movie theater near Town Hall. My style, wh ich he calls Hultbergian, but which others spect. A middle-aged woman piped up, asking paintings were shown, as well as work of some have called, va riously, apocalyptic, surreal, sci-fi, why being called an old woman should be an of the gallery artists, Karel Appel, William Scott, melodramatic, visionary, or romantic. In 1954 insult. Antoni Tapies, Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins, Hultberg moved to Paris where he was to join other I tried to buy a New York Times this morning Norman Carton, Louise Nevelson, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, John von Wicht, Barbara expatriate American artists, including Lawrence but there were none left. "Thought it was the Hepworth, Germain Richier, Claire Falkenstein, Calcagno, Joan Mitchel l, Norman Bluhm, Paul Daily News that was on strike," I told the kiosk Frank Lobdell, Bob Thompson, etc, in group Jenkins, and Sam Francis . He traveled and exhib- vendor. "Aw," he growled, "when they can't get shows. Other galleries in town that summer ited in Europe and met Martha Jackson, who in- the News they'll read anything!" Leonardo advised artists to find recognizable were Tirca Karlis, the HCE, and the Sun Gallery, vited him to join her new gallery in New York, be- a small store painted red, orange, and yellow ginning a long and successfu l association. Hultberg shapes in accidental wall-stains, etc. This is of- ten quoted by abstract expressionists as a raison that showed the work of Red Grooms, Marcia also began keeping a journal, continuing for al- d' etre for their painting, but they avoid all rec- Marcus, and Jay Milder, light-hearted humorous most 30 years and creating a vivid portrait of the ognizable connotations 'in these stains. I want things I liked. A little magazine was started called art world from the inside looking out. This summer to explore this neglected searching for semi-rec- Provincetown Review, its editors Bill Ward, Danny Hultberg has a mini-retrospective at the Staller Cen- ognizable forms in the accidents of these stains. Banko, John and Joyce Elbert, its mentor Norman ter for the Arts at Stony Brook, State University of This pain seems so tangible to me it's almost Mailer. I contributed six drawings to one issue, New York, and an exhibition of prints and graphics a three-dimensional object. I have yet to sculpt as did Henry Hensche, Tony Vevers, and other at the Portland Museum in Maine. this great thing. artists of the town. I lived in a tiny house on Bradford Street, where I installed a sleeping loft 1955 1956 and used an easel made from a screendoor frame. The younger artists, John Grillo, Jean Cohen, Martha tells me, "Paint small, and use light paint, When the avant-garde agrees, the artists die. Mary Frank, Mario Garcia, Bill Barrell, Gandy nobody wants those dark things of yours," then When they disagree, they live. Brody, Norman Cantor, Sidney Gordin, Stephen the next day says "Get all your big dark paint- Windows from the inside and outside; look- Pace, Dody Muller, AI Leslie, Michael Goldberg, ings together, that's what Michel Tapie wants ing in, I see tangled objects which must be deci- Budd Hopkins, Marcia Marcus, were very com- to show of yours." phered, with a lonely figure . (We painters are panionable and often in each other's company. Martha reprimands me for letting my chil- voyeurs.) Looking out from that window is just Martha Jackson arrived later in the summer along dren call me by my first name. But I am not a as bad, just as dark: a desolation of irrational daddy and will not pretend. M. probably dis- rubbish stretching to the horizon and even be- PROVINCETOWN ARTS 1996 Page 55 with the French art critic and gallery advisor My three-year-old son asked me when I Michel Tapie de Celeyran, of the Toulouse- seemed upset about something: 'Why don't you Lautrec family, spreading the word of his ridi- try? That's what I do." Another time he asked culed Art Autre movement and giving a lecture me, "If God is good, why did He invent volca- in the large Town Hall, his slides projected by noes?" the Baltimore Sun art critic Kenneth Sawyer. A Thomas Hardy remains my favorite poet. A cheerful and active summer. I produced quite a hard-earned, intense shorthand, bitter in the lot of work, exhibiting and selling some of it. mouth, sweet in the belly. If I could paint with But I felt Martha's makeshift gallery was not a these monochromes, these distillations! fashionable success among the cognoscenti of that brash time when abstract expressionism was 1969 about to be replaced by the jokes of pop art. Fritz Bultman, who lives in the house on the Twelve days without drinking. hill above my little studio and living shack on The great elm tree next to our house is slowly Bradford Street (he got me the place), has orga- dying: it is too near the swamp and its roots are nized a group to talk about art and literature in too wet. No one should put it out of its misery. his place: Stanley Kunitz, Jack Tworkov, Irving It must die its own death. Sandler, Tony Vevers, and myself. Tony arrived Birds crash against the house constantly. They belligerent, scoffing when Sandler, after hearing are exhausted and confused from migrating Kunitz use the word "engage," asked what it north. A hummingbird tries to get into a closed meant. Tony denounced the whole "seminar" window. as precious and a waste of time. Since then our 1970 little club has not met. One of my famous weeping dreams surfaced I tell myself though the millions of brain cells I last night, so consoling, those healing tears that killed are irreplaceable, yet the strenuous think- flow on and on, wetting my dry soul. ing I am forcing upon myself in my sobriety will stimulate billions of others still in reserve. 1960 1972 During my project to walk the coast of Manhat- tan on its very edge I saw several 10-year-old Dream: I am having a one-man show in a bad boys pulling themselves out of the East River gallery in Manhattan, above a newspaper office. after swimming from Brooklyn. As I passed Very few people are at my opening, except Sy Harlem I saw several black boys hurling them- B., my ex-close friend. I complain to him that S. selves from the East River Drive's median to the Pace, another ex-friend, is not there, and remark sidewalk through the dense speeding car stream, that all my friends have left me now that Martha egged on by companions. is dead. I have a·bottle of whiskey that I offer to We who wanted to humiliate death by ig- my few guests but nobody wants it except my- noring its obscene cat-calls, now are forced to self and the newspaper staff, who are not inter- call it sacred because of our impending martyr- ested in art. After the opening I depart alone with doms. my almost-empty bottle, full of self-pity. I have Nobody can reach Bill de Kooning in his $6.50 in my pocket. I start walking from Cali- Tenth Street studio since he disconnected his fornia, into the country, and notice a street phone.
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