Fine February/March 2011 www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com Vol. 13 No. 3 New York Arts GALLERY STUDIO Announces the release of Robert Cenedella’s serigraph & “HEINZ 57” 35”x24” , 2011 A DAUMIER OF THE ROTOGRAVURE Hand screened on acid-free stock, signed and numbered by the artist Denys Wortman at the Museum of the City of New York (Certificate of authenticity is available upon request)

STUDIO 57 currently represents: Calder Picasso Dali Cenedella Miro Hirschfeld Levine Grosz Gropper Cadmus Benton Pissaro Bellows Renoir Duchamp Landeck Agam Chagal Sloan Wa rh o l

“HEINZ 57” by Robert Cenedella 35”x24” TO COME DOWN ON YOUR PRICES. TO COME DOWN BUY THEM, YOU’LL HAVE IF I HAVE August 30, 1948 Grease pencil, graphite and ink Courtesy of The Center For Cartoon VIII Studies and Denys Wortman plus Sleeping with my Uncle: Coming of Age on the Lower East Side in the '50s studio 57 Fine Arts Custom Framing 211 West 57th street new York, nY 10013 212–956–9395 from Ed McCormack’s memoir in progress HOODLUM HEART page 8 Beverly A. Smith Tip Toe Marsh - oil on canvas 24"wide X 36" high Toe Tip March 1st – 19th, 2011 Reception: Friday, March 5th 3-6 PM © Susannah Virginia Griffin - The Warrior 48” x 36” New Century Artist Gallery 530 West 25th, New York Hours: Tues - Sat 10 AM - 6 PM www.beverlyasmith.com Artist seeks gallery representation – [email protected]

Wally Gilbert “Geometric Series: Singular SenSationS Squares, Triangles, and Lines” Masoud Abedi Jorge Berlato Susannah Virginia Griffin Jenny Medved morPHing into milieu Francisco Chediak René Foster Maria José Royuela Maricela Sanchez

March 1 - March 22, 2011 Reception: Thursday, March 3, 2011 6-8 pm "Triangles # 2-10," image is 38" x 40" on 44" 36" luster paper. "Triangles March 1 to March 19, 2011 Reception: Saturday, March 5th, 4 - 7 PM 530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 VIRIDIAN ARTISTS, INC. www.Agora-Gallery.com 530 West 25th Street, NYC 10001 212-414-4040 Tues.-Sat. 12-6 [email protected] [email protected] www.viridianartistists.com

GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 JESSICA FROMM DRAWING

January 18 - February 12, 2011

NOHO GALLERY 530 West 25th Street 4th floor New York, NY 10001 212.367.7063 Tues - Sat 11-6

Untitled #15 19" x 12" Paul M. Cote, G&S pg. 28 Highlights

On the Cover: Denys Wortman, a master draftsman who worked in the popular press, finally gets his museum moment. page 16

Cover your ears: The latest excerpt of Hoodlum Heart takes us back to the pre-gentrified Lower East Side in the 1950s, before anybody ever heard of political correctness. page 8

Deborah Sudran, pg. 21

Norman Perlmutter, pg. 5

Bob Cenedella, pg. 24 Stephen Hall, pg. 27 Beverly A. Smith, pg. 23

Subscribe to GALLERY&STUDIO GALLERY&STUDIO An International Art Journal $25 Subscription $20 for additional Gift Subscription $47 International $5 Back Issues PUBLISHED BY Mail check or Money Order to: ©EYE LEVEL, LTD. 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 217 East 85th St., PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 Phone: 212-861-6814 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 (212) 861-6814 E-mail: [email protected] Name EDITOR AND PUBLISHER Jeannie McCormack MANAGING EDITOR Ed McCormack Address SPECIAL EDITORIAL ADVISOR Margot Palmer-Poroner DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Karen Mullen CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Maureen Flynn City www.galleryandstudiomagazine.com State/Zip

2 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Chamberlain and Leslie at Allan Stone: Small works by Big Guns his show of collages by John collages as tiny as postage stamps which TChamberlain (whose only possible had the impact of billboards, due to his rival for the heavy metal crown of Greatest unique apportionment of space, flawless Abstract Expressionist Sculptor was David sense of scale, and characteristic bright Smith) and Alfred Leslie, one of the boldest stripes of color. second-generation New York School painters, Allan Stone put it best in his catalog was your proverbial “match made in heaven.” essay for a solo show of Leslie’s work Both men usually worked on a large scale, from 1951 to 1965, when he wrote, and Leslie, the younger and lesser known of “Alfred Leslie may have been not the two, was probably especially impatient so much in touch with as actually with anything small, being ambitious and embodying the zeitgeist of that time.” eager to make his mark. But if the staples he Chamberlain’s collages and mixed used in his collages in lieu of glue started media drawings, on the other hand, out in haste, they ended up becoming an have a speedy gestural violence expressive element of his compositions, suggesting the demolition derby mood emphasizing the raw vitality of his process- of his sculptures Even when he restricts oriented style. They look so great, like the himself to the usually light and lyrical stitches on the Frankenstein monster’s scars, medium of watercolor in one untitled holding together the raw materials of works drawing from 1958, he chooses a single that are at once as sumptuous as a strawberry red hue that gives the visceral effect of John Chamberlain, Untitled, 1961 sundae and funky as a junkyard dog. blood-soaked gauze. But there is also Chamberlain also eschewed glue for staples an innate elegance to Chamberlain’s in at least one untitled piece, created with draftsmanship, very much like that of de torn fragments of sketchbook pages (some Kooning, as seen to special advantage with the spiral holes showing) and bits of in an untitled drawing from the same colored paper. And he didn’t bother with year, where his graphite line glides over titles either, even in a 1961 mixed media the paper with a figure skater’s grace, relief as complexly convoluted as one of his evoking bulky contours with paradoxical famous crushed car sculptures in miniature. delicacy. Used to thinking big, neither artist Then again, Chamberlain has always bothered to title any of these smaller pieces, been the poet of fender bending, probably little realizing how highly posterity his work possessed of an exquisite would someday regard things they might refinement of his own making, despite have considered chotchkas, that fell from the banged up scrap metal with which them as casually as leaves from a tree. he epitomizes Yeats’ lovely phrase “ a Big, after all, was in back then. But in fact terrible beauty.” And it seemed a stroke nothing in this show actually looked small, of genius on the part of Claudia Stone, even when it was little more than a half foot Allan’s heir, to pair him here with the square, like Leslie’s “Untitled, 1960,” which relative upstart Alfred Leslie, perhaps Alfred Leslie, Untitled, 1960 actually comes across as huge, given the the only figure of the second generation smack-you-in-the-eye brilliance of its succulent whose transpositions of scale would not Alfred Leslie and John Chamberlain chunks of blue and red set off by a single thick have been dwarfed by the rugged seen recently at Allan Stone Gallery, black Zen brushstroke. In fact, although they massiveness of his vision. 113 East 90th Street were not on view here, Leslie made some –– Ed McCormack

Memories Linger On A Photography Exhibit Catharine Lorillard Wolfe January 26 - February 13, 2011 Art Club, Inc. Curated by Janice Wood Wetzel and Deena Weintraub Opening reception: Saturday, January 29, 2011, 2:30-5:30 PM Annual Members’ Exhibition 2011 Closing reception: Sunday, February 13, 2011, 2:30-5:30 PM The Salmagundi Art Club Calvin Eagle • Dan Gelb • Jonathan Morrison • Barry Pinchefsky 47 Fifth Ave, NYC Jean Prytyskacz • Carolyn Reus • Amy Rosenfeld • David Ruskin Deena Weintraub • Janice Wood Wetzel • Ellen Zaroff March 20 - April 1, 2011 Hours: Mon.-Fri. 1-6 pm; Sat.& Sun. 1-5 pm Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Reception & Awards: Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm Friday, March 25th, 6-8 pm [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 3

Norman Perlmutter: Homage to the Box “ ith my art I endeavor to create a stripes, arranged flatly on the picture plane in Perlmutter, who was trained in architecture Wconsciousness of the ordinary,” states a manner that calls one’s attention primarily and graphic arts, also constructs modular Norman Perlmutter, a New Jersey artist to the chromatic frisson set off by the slight wall reliefs, such as “Gift Boxes,” in which who has defied the contemporary tendency variations in value between the different eight separate panels are irregularly stacked to put the cart before the horse, showing rectangles, is so innately formal, so abstract in the manner of a shaped canvas. Here, sporadically, mostly in regional group and that one might almost mistake the painting the different colored stripes of the painted juried shows, while perfecting his paintings for a Rothko. On learning the title of the “wrapping paper” not only provoke a in relative obscurity for several years. Thus composition, however, the viewer realizes trompe-l’oeil effect but also create a lively Perlmutter’s recent New York City solo that what he or she is looking at is actually sense of optical disjunction, as in some of debut presented an occasion Sean Scully’s “bar” to contemplate the wisdom paintings on joined of honing one’s oeuvre in panels. private, before entering the Among highly competitive fray of Perlmutter’s most the Manhattan art scene. dynamic paintings, For here is a painter whose however, are the work overall is characterized large acrylics on by an exquisite restraint that canvas, “Stack of has paid off in paintings Boxes” and “Pile possessed of impressive of Boxes.” Both integrity and authentic compositions presence. feature cubic shapes Perlmutter takes the in kandy-kolored simple packing crate and hot pinks, pastel gift box as his sole subject. purples, baby blues, In purely formal terms, one sherbet greens, could compare his strategy and other blatantly to Josef Albers’ selection of artificial hues such the simple rectangle as the as those found focus of his “Homage to the in manufactured Square” series. And indeed, products rather than like Albers, Perlmutter is in nature. Painted, as a consummate –– if more their respective titles intuitive, less theoretical indicate, either in –– colorist. However, Albers stately arrangements began his famous series in or ostensibly 1950, when the sanctity of random (but actually the two-dimensional picture skillfully organized) plane was still at the center of configurations, modernist aesthetic doctrine, they project a and along with his chromatic simultaneous sense inquiry, was concerned with of occupying deep the question of “how do “Open Box” space with an almost we see the third dimension contradictory emblematic presence. when created as an illusion by the artist in a quite literal representation of three gaily Along with their very formidable formal terms of lines, flat shapes and colors on a two- colored gift boxes with contrasting lids that attributes, Norman Perlmutter’s paintings dimensional field?” read as the “stripes.” possess a visual wit akin to Pop art. However, As a postmodern painter, however, Even more adamantly abstract-appearing while the aesthetic virtues in the paintings of Perlmutter obviously doesn’t feel obliged are paintings such as “Window Boxes” and artists such as the late Roy Lichtenstein are to engage with this well-worn aesthetic “Square Boxes,” both of which consist of often camouflaged by irony, they take center issue. Nor, at this late date, must he justify same-size rectangles arranged in overall grids stage even in Perlmutter’s more fanciful embracing illusory perspective with terms in the manner of certain paintings by Paul compositions, such as “Open Box,” wherein, such as “spatial conundrums,” as Al Held Klee during his Bauhaus period, while at the like an elephant given wings, an ordinary did in the ’60s, when he jeopardized other end of the spectrum are paintings such brown cardboard shipping crate takes surreal his reputation as a respected hard-edge as “Moving Boxes.” flight against a pink and white grid. geometric abstractionist by defying the The latter work overtly depicts the interior –– Ed McCormack dictum of flatness. Thus Perlmutter is at of an art gallery, with hard-edge abstractions liberty not only to employ flat or deep on the walls and stacked boxes on the floor, space as he sees fit, but to move freely, from as if awaiting transport to a different location. canvas to canvas, between varying degrees of The content of the painting is quite detailed, abstraction and representation. with checkerboard tiles on the floor that add On one end of the spectrum is a painting to the illusion of perspective. Yet rendered such as “Red Boxes,” an acrylic on canvas in Perlmutter’s hard-edge geometric style, in a tall narrow format consisting of three in flat areas of bright pastel acrylic hues, the same-size stacked rectangles, separated by composition can be simultaneously abstract, Norman Perlmutter, seen recently three subtly more orange-inflected stripes. projecting an intriguing sense of spatial at Gallery 2/20, 220 West 16th Street, The effect of these simple rectangles and ambiguity. www.normanperlmutterart.com

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 5 Clive Rowe: Possible Prophet of a “Terrible Beauty” ven an artist engaged with state-of-the- This is no easy task too many are all too willing Eart new media must be beholden to a in the postmodern era, to claim that its potential may tradition, in order to sustain a sophisticated given the glut of pluralistic have exhausted itself. and consciously avant garde aesthetic approaches now extant One of Rowe’s most practice. Or so Clive Rowe, a lifelong and the difficulty of notable contributions is in photographer presently experimenting with any particular mode of projecting a sense of kinetic manipulating his own images by means of expression distinguishing energy that brings his prints computer technology, seems to imply, in a itself in a manner that alive in new and exciting lengthy artist statement that sheds light on makes a meaningful ways distinctly different from his recent work. connection with the art of those of painting. For even Rowe’s artistic heritage includes his great past centuries. However, as they signal new directions aunt Marjorie Hilda Richardson, a painter Rowe’s prints, all of which for abstraction, these and Prix de Rome recipient who married are untitled (presumably to compositions simultaneously Paul Tietjens, a composer; as well his great avoid burdening his images reflect the shifts and flux uncle Samuel V. Rowe, a textile designer with preconceptions that of contemporary reality in whose work is featured in several prestigious may hinder the viewers’ regard to the air conditioned English museum collections. However, the imaginative freedom), nightmare of the science artistic tradition to which Rowe himself succeed splendidly in his “Untitled 2871002004” fiction malls and other proudly belongs is that of Man Ray and stated desire: “to challenge artificial environments that other early 20th century photographers who the conventional and the obvious” in order we presently inhabit, and which show every expanded the horizons of their medium to “overturn the banal and to enliven the sign of remaining our dominant domain for beyond the merely representational function ordinary.” They do so by virtue of the some time to come. to which champions of painting alone might artist’s skill in creating compositions which Perhaps this is the brave new world have been happy to relegate it. juxtapose dynamic geometric forms that not that the poet and naturalist Gary Snyder For Rowe picks up where “Rayographs” only bend, contort, and morph in various dismisses as the realm of “No Nature.” If and other twentieth century photographic fascinating ways, but veer back and forth so, it is a world of our own making, one we modernist innovations left off, employing from the two-dimensional picture plane into must learn to live with. In which case, Clive the digital print to, as he puts it, explore deep space, with radiant colors composed of Rowe may well be in the vanguard of those “ideas, aesthetics, philosophies that are pure light. artists who will ultimately reveal to us its better expressed not through sharp images Indeed, Rowe’s compositions exploit own peculiar beauty. –– Peter Wiley but through forms, shapes and colours the possibilities of digital manipulation in a which are more atmospheric and maybe manner that not only advances the cause of Clive Rowe, Agora Gallery, able to hold the viewers’ attention and to his medium but reinforces the case for abstract 530 West 25th Street, March 25 - April 15 communicate with them.” art as an ongoing endeavor in an era when all Reception: Thursday, March 31, 6-8 PM New Approaches to Postmodern Photography urated by Jennifer Holst “Open hand to brush back her hair in the middle in a desert, not a soul in sight, the lights C2010,” a photography exhibition by of the midtown madness. An opposite of its awning eerily blazing at dusk. members of the West Side Arts Coalition mood, more elegiac than hectic, was Just as surreal in another manner was included several diverse visions. Jonathan captured in Eagle’s print of a man walking Taylor’s tour de force of double-exposure, Morrison’s images of Central Park, hand in hand with his little boy past the “Chatham Nature Room,” where an which transformed a familiar locale into stained, crumbling, and defaced facade of elegant parlor appears in the throes of a panoramic fairy tale realm, where the New Utrecht Avenue Station in Brooklyn. being overrun by verdant foliage. spires of the surrounding skyscrapers, Bob Merritt’s most engaging pictures Then there was Jean Prytyskacz, whose rising over the foliage beyond the rowboat focused on the almost oxymoronic color photographs were especially notable lake, suggested a magical kingdom. By combination of awkwardness and grace for their funky, ruggedly beautiful take contrast, Morrison also gave us a close-up possessed by those avian urban scavengers on urban walls adorned with torn and image of gnarled tree trunks as formidable called seagulls. One bird in particular, shredded graffiti that emphasized the as an elephant’s foot which evoked the turning its head in profile as if consciously tactile quality of their ancient worn brick sense of an enchanted forest. posing for a portrait, was especially facades. Here, as in other pictures one Don Sichler, on the other hand, amusing. Then again Merritt managed has seen by her over the years, Prytyskacz took a more abstract approach in digital to give a portrait-like presence to his imbued images of urban blight and prints where scrawled graffiti, shadowy strikingly colorful images of tulips as well. detritus with a peculiar beauty. All told, pedestrians reflected in the sides of glass By contrast, Archie Hamilton’s artfully this exhibition demonstrated how each buildings and other ordinary sights were blurred floral images seemed to speak individual carries a unique private world given poetic new life. One was especially eloquently of mortality, their petals within. However, it takes talent and taken with Sichler’s picture in which the collapsed like ballet dancers in pink tutus vision to make that inner realm manifest shadow of the metal scrollwork on a stoop impersonating dying swans. At once lyrical externally, as these seven gifted photo railing suggested a vertiginous visual roller and visceral, Hamilton’s pictures also came artists did here. coaster ride. across as surprisingly sensual in an odd –– Joan Spencer Crimmons Cal Eagle captured the hubbub of sort of way. “Times Square” in a color print of Thom Taylor evoked a dreamlike clustered crowds, yellow cabs, and neon surrealism akin to de Chirico’s desolate “Open 2010,” seen recently at signs made especially poignant by the plazas, in his picture “Omaha Union Broadway Mall Community Center, weary expression of one woman lifting a Station” looking like an Art Deco mirage 96th Street and Broadway (center isle) 6 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 “Together,” Disparate Styles Find Common Ground he Polish visual artist Agnieszka Three separate sculptors answer in the receiver wired to itself. In other pieces, TSzyfter might be classified as a “post- affirmative, each in her own distinctive such as her “Just Married” series, the feminist” in a different medium but a style: In Ofra Friedman’s relief “Energy,” artist combines common household similar manner to Madonna and Lady nude figures swirl and whirl in an utensils, such as a phallic rolling pin and Gaga, in that her art seeks to empower abandoned pagan dance, while in her pubic steel wool, with witty Neo-Dada women through glamour as opposed to mixed media sculpture, “Leaves and suggestiveness. politics. Lives,”other mesh figures morph into the While Laianna Ferruggia’s realist “In my work I present a contemporary trunk and limbs of a fruit tree bearing paintings, such as one of a large man woman, her emotions and her beauty golden disks, and in Friedman’s “Spider enfolding a petite female nude in his in order to preserve against the ravages Woman,” a lithe female nude goes muscular arms, are limned in brownish of time,” says Szyfter, and like the artist gorgeously on the crawl. grissaille reminiscent of the Old Masters, herself, her subjects are flamboyant, as Bonnie Shanas imparts to this industrial her floral subjects partake of a considerably seen in her Post-Pop Neo-Art Noveau material a classical quality, with her reliefs brighter and varied palette. Both facets of paintings such as “Girl with a Pearl featuring exquisitely formed nude male Ferruggia’s art, however, show her skill in Earring,” her update of Vermeer’s and female bodies melded in intimate defining volumes by virtue of an unerring masterpiece, but with Angelina Jolie, embrace. Just as anatomical fragments command of chiaroscuro. Another gifted rather than Scarlett Johanson, cast in the from antiquity take on eternal life, Shanas figure painter, Diane Bauer, demonstrated role. In another ornate mixed media work makes faceless torsos radiate sensuality, a talent for melding complex elements on canvas called “Elizabeth I,” while as seen in “For All We Know,” where the into satisfying compositions through the title might suggest Elizabeth Taylor, perfect bodies of the facing couple suggest subtle color harmonies. Bauer’s oil on the face afloat amid elegant arabesques the romantic urgency of the song for canvas, “Woman with Her Puppy” was bears a suspicious resemblance to Marilyn which the piece is named. especially noteworthy in this regard, Monroe. Then there is Lea Weinberg, who takes approaching Bonnard for uniting figure Szyfter is one among sixteen gifted a somewhat more abstract approach, and interior in a sublime formal synthesis. emerging artists in “Together,” an making her wire mesh figures swirl like More reminiscent of Redon, Mira exhibition curated by the artist Basha wisps of smoke, even while projecting a Satryan is a visionary whose energetic semi Maryanska, whose own acrylics on canvas paradoxical sense of palpable physicality. abstract floral compositions, with their offer sweeping, lyrical views of landscapes Weinberg is at her most impressive in vibrant yet subdued colors, have a darkly and cityscapes in luminous, gemlike hues pieces such as “Tree Tango Sculpture,” glowing beauty and mystery. Satryan’s with a chromatic subtlety one normally with its stately figures evoking the flowing forms seem to morph and change only sees in the work of the best Color distinctive rhythms of that dance, as meaning before one’s eyes, suggesting a Field painters. Especially magical among well as in another piece which suggests secret world underlying visible reality. the compositions in the present show is clustered bodies and roiling waves like The multimedia collages, tapestries, Maryanska’s landscape “Broken Cloud,” those in Gericault’s “The Raft of the and color etchings of Natalia Koren Kropf with its purple sky shimmering over what Medusa.” are possessed of their own energy and appears to be a golden wheat field, and By contrast, David Green works in mystery, albeit seemingly of an organic “Connected,” her dazzling vista of a the more traditional medium of marble, rather than visionary kind. Through phantom bridge veering through blue but creates nude feminine torsos with compositions inspired by the rings mists toward the silvery towers of a distant severely simplified forms reminiscent of within trees, Kropf conveys a sense of the city skyline. African tribal sculpture –– particularly, the repeated patterns that unify diverse facets Lively signs and symbols as brightly brown stone piece entitled “Rapture,” of nature. Then there is Lesley Labram, colored as the flat shapes in Matisse’s where the figure’s arms, wrapped around who is inspired by the rugged landscape of famous “Jazz” collages (albeit in softer its head, merge as a single mass. Another Australia to create tactile collographs and fleshy pinks, pastel blues, and other non- piece in finely-veined white marble, called other works that deal with relationships primary hues) are combined with sinuous “Awakening,” is especially sensual, its between the spiritual and the ecological, linear elements within the squares of a pearlescent surface suggesting one of suggesting effects of nature on the grid in Susan Elias’ “Diary of a Romance” Balthus’ compact nymphets stretching her human psyche. Poetic and lyrical, almost series. These semiotic elements, some nubile form. dreamlike, Labram’s imagery strikes femininely shapely, others frankly Julie Joy Saypoff, on the other hand, a deep chord in the viewers’ ancestral phallic, take on a playfully erotic quality, creates an exhilarating light-as-air memory, operating just below the level of suggesting a private language of reverie interplay between severely simplified consciousness. known only to Elias herself. stylized figures in her piece in copper wire Also including work by Beverly Smith, By contrast, in Virginia Donovan’s mounted on granite, “Close,” where the another gifted artist reviewed at length austere landscapes, primarily in somber interiors of the two forms contain leaf- elsewhere in this issue, this splendidly earthy hues, hilly land masses suggest like shapes. More baroque is Saypoff’s curated group show lived up to its title slumbering giants, set against pale areas copper piece with an intricately burnished by bringing diverse talents together and of water. The quiet power of Donovan’s surface, depicting what appears to be revealing their shared concerns. compositions emanates from the almost an antic encounter between two strange –– Maurice Taplinger, sculptural weight and presence that she personages standing atop a stack of hefty imparts to compositions in which the land volumes. itself, with its fluent contours, appears Then there is Helen Zajkowski, to ebb flow, rather than the still bodies whose assemblages ingeniously juxtapose of water, as impassive as the seemingly found and finely crafted objects, as in “Together,” New Century Gallery, limitless expanses of cloudless sky. “Friendship,” where two cups of what 530 West 25th Street, March 1-19, Opening Can wire mesh take on the supple appears to be actual coffee sprout from reception: Saturday, March 5, 3-6 PM. sensuality of naked human flesh? the opposite ends of a single telephone

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 7 Sleeping with my Uncle: Coming of age on the Lower East Side in the '50s—an excerpt from HOODLUM HEART a memoir in progress by Ed McCormack illustrated by the author I, all eyes and ears, would hang on their every word. The whiteguys called themselves the Mayrose –– a deceptively sweet name that surely had more to do with the dumb do-wop romanticism of their time than any tendency to comport themselves like Boy Scouts –– and every day it was the sameoldshit: hanging around the candy store on the corner of Henry and Scammel, eating pretzels, drinking eggcreams, and listening to the jukebox. At first it was Rosemary Clooney singing “Botcha Me” or the Crewcuts’ lame ofay cover version of “Earth Angel” –– cornyfuckinshit like that. Then some of the whiteguys discovered rhythm and blues and took to harmonizing in acoustic tenement hallways, attempting to imitate the artful acapellas of the coloredguys: Didja ever hear them jiggaboos singin up a storm in the courtyard of the Smith Projects, with the bass singin lead and the tenor doin backup in falsetto? It was sofuckinboss you’d swear you was listenin to the record! You hadda hand it to them jigs, they dressed sharp too. While the Mayrose were still walking around like cretins with their tailfin collars turned up or wearing t-shirts with a pack of smokes rolled up in the sleeve like some gross cubical tumor, the Sportsmen (whose club insignia was a top hat and cane) were already bopping around like prosperous young stockbrokers in fine ivy league vines shoplifted from Hart Schafner and Marx. Some of the more avant garde dudes were even into the Sherlock Holmes look, complete with tweed deerstalker cap, cape-shouldered raincoat, and little curved pipe. Another popular accessory was bamboo canes from lmost a lifetime ago (mine), in the lettering on most of the signs outside the Coney A1950s, nobody in their right mind bargain basements. Delancey was a dimly Island would have called the Lower East Side, glittering low-rent Broadway where Ripley that the the New York neighborhood where I grew Suits, Ratner’s Dairy restaurant, and the Sportsmen up, a fashionable address. Above Houston movie theaters were, and where the big were only Street, you had the alphabet avenues –– yawning yap of the Williamsburg Bridge too willing A, B, C, and D –– and below it, the best simultaneously swallowed and regurgitated to put known thoroughfares were Orchard and traffic to and from another slum across upside your Delancey streets. Orchard still looked the river in Brooklyn. But even those head should like a teeming newsreel of immigrant life streets, where tourists rarely ventured, were you be fool from around the turn of the century, with considered “uptown,” if you grew up even enough to pushcarts crowding the curb and Hebrew further down, around Henry Street, where mess with them. 8 GALLERY&STUDIO the older whiteguys hung out, and where The February/March 2011 thing the whiteguys and the coloredguys to torment his more Orthodox brethren agreed upon it was that the Puerto Ricans by snatching their skullcaps and yanking were undesirable aliens and had to go. their sidecurls. “At least the jiggaboos are “It’s just like in World War II when Americans ... But them freakin Ricans, we needed the jigs to help us cream the they’re foreigners, man!” Krauts and the Japs –– or even them other Naturally everybody on Henry Street fuckin’ gooks over in Korea,” explained started scattering prematurely when that the war counselor for the Mayrose, who impressive diddybop army of Sportsmen everybody called Izzy the Goy because he in stingy-brim crash helmets, turned was the only Jewish guy dumb enough to down sailor hats, and Sherlock Holmes hang out with the mostly mick, wop, and bebop caps, brandishing bamboo canes polack street gang, when it finally became and stickball bats like swagger sticks, came necessary to form an uneasy alliance with bopping up from the Alfred E. Smith whiteguys could tell you all about those their former enemies the Sportsmen. The projects all the way down on Madison bamboo canes from personal experience, way Izzy put it to his troops, this was one Street having had many bitter territorial disputes of those rare moments in history when in tight with the Sportsmen over the long hot patriotic Americans of all stripes and colors military summers of the late-’50s. Yet they had had to put aside their past differences to formation. to admit, however reluctantly, that defend their mutually contested turf against The little them jiggaboos had class. But the brash a commonly detested foe. old Jewish newcomers known as the Puerto Ricans “Look at it this way,” reasoned Izzy, ladies were something else again –– them freakin whose favorite sport was lurking outside who sat Ricans! The whiteguys (whose version of the Hebrew school on East Broadway kibitzing on the Star Spangled Banner went, “Jose can you see / Any bedbugs on me / If you do take a few / They look better on you”) could go on for hours about what animals the Puerto Ricans were: Didja ever go in one a them dumpy little grocery stores they call “bodegas” that smell like kennels and got rotten green bananas hangin from the flypaper? And what about all them stuckup PR broads with their lipstick smeared up to here and boobs on them that could choke a horse? You just know every one a them gotta be whoors! And them freakin Rican guys with their flashy orange shirts and pink pegged pants with two-tone stitching and pistol pockets –– the sonsabitches dress like stolen cars! Christ, they don’t even have real club jackets –– just these cheesy leatherette motorcycle jobs with “Dragons” painted on the back... The whiteguys would stand on the corner on Henry Street spitting between the toes of their pointy Eyetalian shoes, teasing their greasy pompadours down over their pimply foreheads with Ace pocket combs to get that sharp little Tony Curtis dip in the front, checking their reflections in the candy store window, and badmouthing ad absurdom about how they’d like to send all them spics back on the next banana boat. Mainly it was fear: Nobody had ever heard of “machismo” yet, so neither the whiteguys nor the coloredguys could fathom these fierce new invaders who came charging down Henry Street like cockamamie kamikazes, screaming their bonzai battle cry “Maricon! Maricon!” –– which both the whiteguys and the coloredguys took to be some jabbering junglebunny permutation of “American,” before learning to their mutual consternation that it actually meant “faggot." This was well before anybody had ever heard of Third World solidarity, or even the Third World, period. So if there was one

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 9 the streets all day, seemingly holding the way of the plateglass window, which had secondhand comic books, egg creams, and sagging tenements up with their bent backs, been shattered by a tossed garbage can loose cigarettes, two cents each, three for a started scurrying like roaches, scraping during a previous rumble. nickel. their folding chairs and milk crates on the The girls told them that at the height of The dour refugee couple who ran the sidewalk, fluttering hands over their hearts, the pitched battle Chinito, the flamboyant candy store got scant sympathy for their murmuring, “Oy vey, not again!” Swift leader of the Dragons –– he of the flashy stretch in one of Hitler’s camps compared young mothers sprinted with their baby Apache head-scarves and swishy walk that to local heroes like Georgie Flores, who strollers, and even the jaded stoop sitters made some of the Mayrose swear he must died in the ring, Tutti Boy Martino, who with their cheap cigars and racing forms be queer –– had sauntered casually into the came back from Korea in a box, or Buster took grumbling cover in hallways from the candy store –– their very own hangout!–– Kelly, who was built like a jukebox and rumble about to erupt. and ordered an egg cream. Chinito (so got shot in the ass by a jealous husband in As it turned out, their alarm was not named because he almost looked Chinese, Little Italy. Snotnose kids, younger brothers all that premature; for no sooner had the with his slanted eyes and shiny blueblack and sisters of the Mayrose, were constantly Mayrose and their new allies the Sportsmen hair) had even flirted casually with the appearing in the candystore doorway to palm-slappingly convened as though the girls. Clearly charmed, the girls added serenade them with a ditty that went: corner outside the candy store was Geneva, that the gallant Puerto Rican warrior had “Klebinoff had a candy store, / business, it than the Dragons –– them fearless freakin behaved like a perfect gentlemen, bowing was bad. / He asked his wife what to do, / Ricans! –– came charging up Henry Street and blowing them a farewell kiss before and this was what she said: / ’Take a little from the opposite direction, screaming. running back out to rejoin his troops like gasoline, / pour it on the floor, / take a “Maricon! Maricon!” Errol Flynn as Robin Hood dashing off to match, / Give a scratch, / no more candy The rumble itself was anticlimactic: Just a rally his Merry Men in Sherwood Forest. store!’” bunch of showboating kids skirmishing up The Klebinoffs had no choice but to put and down the block with lots of yelling and up with these petty pogroms from junior a somewhat comical minimum of hand-to- juvenile delinquents –– at least a couple of hand combat, as bamboo canes and ripped- whom were clearly Jewish themselves! –– off car aerials flailed without finding flesh until they could sell the business and leave and wildly flung bricks smashed into stoops this meshugenah place. and parked cars. And while participants Who knows what finally became of on both sides would later embellish their those poor refugees? The candystore never heroics to sound like something out of burned down; it was doubtful that they the Iliad, the casualty count amounted would even have had fire insurance if it had. to no more than a few minor bruises Instead, it was taken over by an old Italian and contusions, before the far-off wail of guy that the kids renamed “Botchagaloop” cop-sirens signaled the hasty retreat of the and called a “dumb mountain guinea” to Dragons back to their own turf on Forsyth his face, even though half of the Mayrose Street and the comradely adjournment of were greaseballs themselves. Botchagaloop the Mayrose and Sportsmen to the candy had tattoos, too, but not numbers: hula store. hula girls. And while its lyrics are lost to Five squad cars came screeching around memory, soon some gutter genius (call the corner and stopped in front of the him Kilroy or Anonymous) dreamt up a candy store. Ten of New York’s Finest new ditty with which to bust his balls. It piled out like Keystone Kops and started was only fair in a neighborhood where climbing over each other in their haste to everybody was always ranking on everybody get in the door. Some neighborhood yenta “You gotta hand it to that goddamn else’s race or religion, and poetry was born had probably panicked at the sight of all Chinito,” Izzy the Goy had to admit more often out of malice than love. those Sportsmen bopping up Henry Street with a rueful smile. “That spic got heart.” * * * and called the 7th Precinct to report that “Yeah, man,” admitted a Sportsman The Beat writers William Burroughs and the whiteguys and the coloredguys were they called Coal for the most obvious Herbert Huncke may have been among getting ready to kill each other again. But reason. “That mela mela be one b-a-a-a-d the first junkies on Henry Street when inside the candy store all the cops found motherjumper!” they shared a pad in a tenement there in was Mayrose and Sportsmen toasting each In an era when “bad” meant good; when 1945. But while the Beat Generation would other with eggcreams and slapping each no automatic lip service was paid to the later exert a powerful influence on my life other on the back all buddy-buddy, while facile pieties of political correctness; when –– perhaps saving it and ruining it at the on the thumping jukebox Louie Lymon real respect had to be either learned or same time –– like most of the kids I grew and the Teen Chords insisted, “NO, NO, earned the hard way, this was the highest up with, I was a baby back then. As far as NO, I’M NOT A JU-VEN-ILE DE-LIN- possible praise. I know from my own experience, smack QUENT!” * * * didn’t hit the neighborhood hard until It was sofuckinboss the whiteguys and Like the good Americans they prided the late fifties. It happened so suddenly it the coloredguys cracked up, remembering themselves on being, the kids who hung was as if that spooky white horse of heroin the befuddled look on the faces of them out on Henry Street booed B-movie Nazis came galloping down Henry Street while dumb bulls, before they got back in their whenever they appeared on-screen at the everyone was sleeping. prowl cars and drove back to the precinct Leows Delancey. But those posturing One morning the neighborhood woke to jerk each other off. But their euphoric villains, with their monocles and swastika up and found itself haunted by zombies. A gloating was soon cut short by some armbands, were no more real to them dubious peace descended like a pall. The deflating news from three members of the than the Evil Dr. Fu Manchu. And the sporadic gangbusting and diddybopping Mayrose Debs, the gang’s female auxiliary, numbers tattooed on the forearms of Mr. came to an abrupt halt. Those energetic who had been cowering by the jukebox and Mrs. Klebinoff only made them seem territorial disputes between white, black, near the back of the store, well out of the more foreign, as they made change for and Puerto Rican youths of just a summer

10 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 errands to the hardware store, anything or under the stairwell, sometimes with he wanted me to do. I did it because I the spike still stuck in his arm and a burnt loved spending time with him and his wife spoon lying nearby... Isabella, an artsy-looking caucasian woman Now they were far beyond the reach who stood about two heads taller than of the social workers at the Henry Street her sturdy but tiny husband and would Settlement –– those selfless souls dedicated later create the graceful ink illustrations to civilizing as many of us as possible, or at for his cook book. Their marriage seemed least imparting a few of the social graces, so harmonious and the atmosphere of before unleashing us on the city at large. their home, even in its unfinished state, so (Sadly, though, for all their good intentions tranquil, genteel, and cultural compared and lofty degrees in the social sciences and to the nonstop craziness of my family that humanities, most of the social workers never it became a model of how I wanted my had a clue; educated fools, lacking in even grownup life to be someday. the most elemental streetsmarts, they were In the meantime, I suppose I wanted to easy marks for our constant put-ons, put- feel in some way adopted by the couple and downs, and cons.) was worried that now they might not want All at once antic Katzenjammer streets me around anymore. that had throbbed with life; streets where “Jesus, Mr. Lee, I’m really sorry,” I said. everybody’s unabashed underwear flapped or two ago were remembered almost “I really didn’t mean to knock Chinese like flags from fire-escapes and clotheslines; nostalgically, as wholesome vestiges of people or anything.” where kids had fought and played stickball a more vital time, now that the former “It’s all right, Eddie,” he told me. “Now and been heroes in the fevered stadiums combatants were as gentled ghosts, united that you know it’s insulting, I’m sure you of their imaginations, had turned empty, in their mutual passivity. For the first time, won’t use that word again. Racial prejudice spooky, still. And all those stories you heard you saw former Mayrose, Sportsmen, and is just ignorance anyway.” about guys ripping off their own families to Dragons haunting the streets together, as A couple of years after I painted that get junk really were true. though posing for a slightly more drowsy One kid I knew who lived in the projects version of the Brotherhood Week poster I with his grandmother ransacked their whole was once recruited to paint in the art room apartment piece by piece. First he pawned at The Henry Street Settlement. the radio and the twelve-inch Motorola TV “The white guy will be over here, the console that the old lady was still paying for colored guy will be over there, and I figure on time; then he sold the dinette set, chair I’ll put the Puerto Rican kid and the by chair, and finally took the table right out Chinaman over here on the right side of the from under them. The last straw was when picture,” I said, showing off my preliminary he came back for the toaster. The old lady sketch, in which the figures were roughly loved her toast, so she picked up a carving blocked in but their individual ethnicity was knife and told him to leave the goddamn not yet distinguishable. toaster right where it was. And when he “You shouldn’t say that word, Eddie,” tried to shove her aside and reach for it Jim Lee, the art instructor, said in a more anyway, she stuck the blade right through severe tone than I had ever heard him use her no good grandson’s already stigmatized with me before. “‘Chinaman’ is a word that arm... Chinese people find very offensive.” More than anything else, it was heroin Having thought of myself as relatively that put an end to the tradition of honor enlightened compared to some of my among thieves which had once been a relatives, since I didn’t routinely refer to matter of pride on the Lower East Side. Chinese food as “chinks” (as in, “How Not everybody I grew up with got about we go over to Mott Street tonight strung out or ended up dead or in jail. for some chinks?”), I was taken aback. Some settled down, got married, “copped Certainly I never meant to offend Mr. Lee, a slave,” as we used to say. Maybe they of all people. A professional portrait painter Brotherhood Week Poster, it would strike shaped the docks or, through a father or and amateur chef who would eventually me as ironic how the white guys, the uncle, got a union card in the Teamsters, publish a culinary bestseller called “Jim colored guys, and the Puerto Rican guys good steady work. Others went to night Lee’s Chinese Cook Book,” he was as close were finally united in the Brotherhood of school, got their high school equivalency as I had to a mentor. He encouraged my the Needle. Neutered by the newfound diplomas, then took the Civil Service exams artistic tendencies, and I respected him so lethargy that heroin produced, you’d see for the fireman, the cops, or the sanitation much that I never joined in when some of them slapping palms (sometimes, but not department. A few even made it to City the kids would tease him by bursting into always, passing bags of H as they did), College and ended up getting desk jobs. In the art room singing the Bobbettes song nodding out on stoops together, lounging the best tradition of most humanity, they that went: “One, two, three / Look at languidly in tenement doorways. They came and went quietly, without making a Mr. Lee / Three, four, five / Look at him appeared to have turned prematurely vulgar spectacle of themselves in posterity. jive...” autumnal like those scrawny sad-ass trees Among my dead-end peers, only two Sometimes after school I would work in the Vladeck Houses courtyard that brothers named Falco distinguished with Mr. Lee at the partly gutted former bloomed only sparsely, even in the fierce themselves from the rest of us by taking matzo factory, right opposite the public heat of undershirt summer. And every other in their separate turns first infamy then swimming pool on Pitt Street, that he was week, it seemed, somebody would go down honest fame. Nobody who knew him was renovating as a townhouse. I would hand to check the mailbox and find one of them surprised when the older brother, Frankie, him hammers, sweep up sawdust, run sprawled, white-lipped, in the vestibule went out in a blaze of MAD DOG COP-

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 11 expansive, buying drinks for the circles, stopped writing for Rolling Stone, band –– even getting up on the and could do what I thought of as “daytime stand to serenade the patrons in pieces” –– stories that didn’t involve a lot of the Angel Lounge with a not- the nocturnal hanging out and dissipation bad rendition of “Sorrento” –– that had contributed to my more serious before the two plainclothes cops substance abuse problems. come in and he suddenly turns I liked this particular editor, Andy demonic: “frank leaps onto the Port, because she reminded me of those bar and goes into a squat with a streetsmart big-haired brunette chicks in gun in each hand and the cops girl singing groups like the Shangri-Las, are saying dont hurt us please and pretty much gave me free reign to write and razor screams like wild whatever I wished. Andy apparently had horses are slashing kicking in my that freedom because she presided over head exploding crazy twitching the News’ now-defunct Sunday Magazine flares and cannon rattling all supplement, which the editors on the around me frank is ticking on daily paper probably didn’t take seriously the bar two rumbling tanks in his enough to monitor closely. It was possible claws and his hair is on fire and that they didn’t even bother to look at it, his horns are whistling twisting since I had gotten away with sympathetic out and his fangs are blistered cover features on junkie squatters living in a and bubbled with phlegm shantytown on Avenue B; on former yippies screaming out of a dark tunnel Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin; on Allen GET UNDRESSED GET Ginsberg (the latter illustrated with a big UNDRESSED...” color photo of him and William Burroughs Apparently to humiliate them, holding hands –– dig that with your bagel Two-Gun Frankie made the cops and cream cheese, baby!), among other get naked, a characteristically subjects that were pretty radical for that perverse touch, before shooting publication. Andy and I liked to joke that them dead. we had a little hippie pothead conspiracy * * * going to subvert that right wing rag. So A lot of neighborhood people when I proposed the Falco brothers piece, Image courtesy: PeriodPaper.com would have laid odds that she said, “It sounds fabulous –– do it!” KILLER headlines on the front page of the Frankie’s kid brother, Louie, The first thing I learned when I walked New York Daily News, gunned down in a who was born in 1943, the same year into the loft in Chelsea where Louie, now shoot-out with a vengeful police posse in a as me, and was to die of AIDs in 1993, sporting a mane of ringlets to put Roger sleazy Times Square hotel, after he and an the same year as my son Holden, would Daltry, lead singer of The Who, to shame, accomplice named Tommy Trantino coldly have followed in his footsteps. Instead, was rehearsing his company, was that executed two plainclothesmen in a bar out Louie enrolled in the same class as my first no matter how pretty they may look, a in Jersey called the Angel Lounge. serious girlfriend, Helen Aronson, at the studio full of hard working dancers stinks Trantino, unlike Falco, punked out and Henry Street Settlement, a social agency like a huge hamper full of dirty laundry. turned himself in after seeing his WANTED that endeavored to keep us off the streets, The second thing was that the New York picture on the TV news, strolling into turning the same ferocious energy to the art Times critic Clive Barnes had been right the precinct house with a lawyer and a of modern dance. on the money when he called Falco “a crowd of reporters in tow to make sure I don’t know what eventually became choreographer of energy rather than the cops didn’t kill him on the spot. Years of Helen, a baby beatnik sexual prodigy grace.” While a rock and roll score blared, later, he started writing in prison. Unlike with a black-leotarded crotch full of free the longhaired girl and and boy dancers, Jack Henry Abbott, Tommy didn’t have love, after we broke up. But by the time he all decked out in ragamuffin deshabille, a literary champion with real clout like was 17, Louie was dancing with the Jose flung themselves around like hoody kids Norman Mailer to get him sprung –– only Limon Company. Later, he choreographed jiving and shucking back in the day on the an obscure East Village poet named Irving the film version of “Fame,” created ballets basketball court down at the end of Henry Stettner. But Irving, whom I’d get to know for Alvin Ailey, and was one of the featured Street. in the early ’70s, after I started writing in performers in “Nureyev and Friends” on After the rehearsal, Louie and I sat lieu of making an honest living (“Some of Broadway. By the late ’60s, when we all over beers in a booth in a nearby Blarney us don’t write, we work,” said my uncle became hippies, he had already made the Stone bar, reminiscing about the old Georgie, calling my bluff at my father’s Louis Falco Dance Company famous in the neighborhood and some of the characters wake), published some of Trantino’s prison U.S. and Europe for raucous performances we had known in common. The more we writings in his little magazine Stroker. that the New York Times called “the talked, the more sure I was that he would Tommy became something of a cause ultimate in disheveled chic.” be amenable to the kind of story I wanted celebre among the downtown literati, word * * * to write. got around, and in 1973, Knopf brought A decade later, when I was still somewhat “I’m still influenced by the streets where out his book “Lock the Lock.” Writing in shakily trying to moderate my habits we grew up ... Like if anybody in here unpunctuated beatnik lower-case, run-on and make things right again with my wife started something,” he said, casting a hard prose that veers crazily between naturalistic Jeannie after a years-long lost weekend of glance over his shoulder at the handful of description and surrealism, in one story alcohol and drugs, I pitched the story of the harmless old rummies hugging the bar, called “The Angel,” Trantino gives a Falco brothers as “a real-life John Garfield before letting the thought trail off... graphic account of the cop-killing. Falco movie” to an editor at The Daily News. I Although he had never talked specifically comes off as the perfect Joe Pesci character: started freelancing for the News because about Frankie in print, Louie had been a maniacal hood who starts out jovial and I had burned a lot of bridges in hipper quoted saying, “Everything I am,

12 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 everything I create comes from what my reciting my poem “Red-Haired Angie,” “The arms of who, Eddie?” they’d family was and where I was born. I don’t eulogizing a neighborhood girl who took chorus, pounding the table so hard they’d think there’s any getting away from your on all comers on rooftops before being almost spill their beers. heritage.” He had also said, “I think my killed by a hit and run driver. I must have been present when the works are gutsy. It comes from growing up For their lisping, mincing imitation of puzzling picture was taken because my on the Lower East Side. I don’t have the Percy Dovetails, a grotesque poet parody younger sister Maureen and I were usually same taboos as other people. I don’t censor. on the Ernie Kovacs TV show, made me allowed to stay up late when the grownups I have a certain freedom that others don’t.” aware that art can be an offense of which partied, since we would have been kept up Since I came from the same place and one remains guilty even after being cleared by the noise anyway. But I would have been felt the same way (I even had a couple of of all other charges. too young to wonder if cross-dressing had younger cousins who were constantly going * * * had anything to do with the breakup of my in and out of Rikers, Rahway, and Attica They fuck you up, your mum and dad. uncle’s marriage, or if this antic drag act was for armed robbery and other serious shit), They may not mean to, but they do. just another wacky whim amid the usual I was sure Louie would see me as the right They fill you with the faults they had family madness. guy to tell his story with compassion and And add some extra, just for you. * * * sensitivity. So I was taken aback when he –– Philip Larkin To me Charlie, who had blown his went silent and his cherubic face tightened big toe off in a foxhole to get sent home at the first mention of his brother’s name. My uncle Charlie was my best buddy early from Korea and marry the girl of his All he would say about Frankie was that and my bed-mate. Psychology being as dreams, was just an overgrown kid whose one day, when they were kids and he almost foreign as dentistry to Irish drinkingclass idea of wit was to let out a big blasting drowned at Pitt Street Pool, his big brother families like ours –– tough titty if you lost beer-fart in bed, then pull the covers over had reached down into the water and pulled all your teeth, went crazy ! –– nobody my head to almost asphyxiate me with the him out like a whelp by the hair. thought twice about assigning a grown stink as he laughed his way to the grave. When I persisted, arguing like the man to bunk with his nine-year-old nephew Still, I loved him unconditionally. For it was con-man that every journalist becomes in after Charlie’s wife, Dolly, kicked him out Charlie –– not my distant, bedeviled father, pursuit of a juicy story that I thought it and he moved into our cramped tenement hounded by the bookies and shylocks down was important to shed light on how his walkup on Henry Street. Fortunately for on the docks, who were always threatening background had influenced his creative me, Charlie was no child molester, although to break his kneecaps over gambling debts direction, he cut me off with, “Look, Ed, he might have had transvestite tendencies, that my mother finally had to cover with I’ll talk about anything else you want me judging from a snapshot I remember seeing high interest loans from Household Finance to, but I definitely don’t want to talk about of him at one of the weekend beer parties in Company –– who was always there for Frankie in print. There’s just no way I’m our family kitchen. me. When my bullying elementary school gonna exploit my brother’s memory for My uncle Georgie, Charlie’s older gym teacher humiliated me in front of publicity.” brother, and my aunt Delores, who lived the class by sarcastically cracking that my What could I say? I had to respect him upstairs like Ed Norton and his wife Trixie chronic cough sounded like TB, it was for upholding the code of silence we had in “The Honeymooners,” are also in the Charlie who stormed up to P.S. 147 and both grown up with, even though he, like picture, probably taken by my mother with threatened to throw him out of a window me, had come a long way from Henry her Kodak Brownie box camera. Charlie if he ever got smart with his nephew again. Street. Because, to be perfectly honest, (whose resemblance to the toughguy It was Charlie who took me to John Wayne more than once over the years, I have actor Mickey Rouarke I would become and Audie Murphy movies at the Leow’s reverted to acts of random criminality. But aware of many years later, after his real-life Canal on Saturday nights, and afterward only, I always told myself at the time, for counterpart was long gone) is wearing to the cavernous Garden Cafeteria for rice the sake of art or in the name of love. lipstick, one of my mother’s pillbox hats, pudding. (Neither of us would have known In fact, the first and harshest critics and a bra and panties –– presumably or cared back then that the Garden was a of my writing turned out to be a couple belonging to Mama as well. One of his hub of intellectual life on the Lower East of drunken plainclothes cops who once balls is hanging out of a leg-hole in the Side and that one of the shabby-looking old detained me and a friend I was with on panties, as he rests one foot on the edge of Jewish guys among whom we huddled like suspicion of burglary back in my teenage my fathers’ chair and leans over to playfully a couple of goyische hoods planning a heist beatnik phase. Among the boxes of muss his hair. could have been Isaac Bashevis Singer, who admittedly pilfered but not technically My father has lipstick smears on one wrote for the Yiddish language newspaper burgled stationery supplies (since we had cheek and is holding the other and rolling The Daily Forward, right down the block borrowed a key from a friend whose father his eyes heavenward, like the comedian on East Broadway.) worked in the office, rather than breaking Red Buttons singing his TV theme song It was Charlie, too, who taught me in) with which we bumbled right into the “Strange Things Are Happening.” His that Vaseline Hair Tonic was better than arms of the two bulls when they stepped elbow resting on the table, he looks Brylcream for holding a pompadour, and out of a bookie bar across the street from annoyed, as he often did with my mother’s when I got a little older, showed me the the precinct house, was a limited edition brothers, whom he referred to behind Sheik prophylactic he carried in his wallet pamphlet of my poems that we had their backs as “crude deze, doze, and dems and advised me that it was time for me to mimeographed that very day. characters, real Lower East Side goons.” start doing the same, just in case. And most Being Jewish, the friend who got picked (Apparently, even Hell’s Kitchen, where my likely it was Charlie –– who I never called up with me had to answer to the epithet father grew up, was considered classier.) “uncle,” unless he made me say it when we “Cut-Cock.” But I, as the perpetrator of As for my uncles, they were always play-wrestled and he got me in a headlock, the poems, bore the brunt of the abuse amused by the hoity-toity airs my father put because he was not at all avuncular, more for “disgracing a good Irish name with on, and would crack up when, at the end like a needling older brother –– who gave this perverted crap.” While I cringed in a of a night’s drinking, their brother-in-law me a complex about my skinny arms and holding cage in the squad room, the two would announce, “Well, if you gentlemen legs. I didn’t mind the nickname “Eddie law enforcement louts guzzled Ballantine will excuse me, I’m going into the arms of Spaghetti,” which could have sounded like Ale from coffee mugs and took turns morpheus.” a wiry Mafia guy, as much as when he called

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 13 malady of art. of him going over the training schedule “How’d with three unidentified ball players, labeled you make in his own florid handwriting, “Havana, out?” my Cuba, Spring 1941.” Others showed him mother asked, leading the entire team through calisthenics wiping her out in the practice field, where he claimed hands on a that a young law student named Fidel dishtowel, Castro had once tried out as a pitcher. In when I got my mother’s favorite picture, he looked like home that a movie star in a white linen suit that set off evening. his deep tan, as he posed, cigarette in hand, My father at a table outside the Hotel Nationale, the and my uncle team’s Cuban headquarters during Spring Georgie, who Training. were drinking Among the yellowed newspaper clippings and bitching that my mother also saved was one from about a dock Hearst’s New York tabloid, the Daily strike that Mirror, dated April 3, 1939, which began, seemed like “When trainer Doc Knowles, of the Giants, it was never attempted to make the players step through me “Mahatma Gandhi,” which in our going to end, didn’t bother to look at me conditioning maneuvers in their 1928 Hot backward neighborhood evoked not a great until I started fishing crumpled bills out of Springs, Ark., training camp, he had tough Indian leader but a bandy-legged comic my pockets and dropping them onto the sledding making them cooperate. But strip snake charmer. table. A year later, when I looked a little when Eddie McCormack put the Dodgers But even though he teased me older and the prodigy novelty had worn through the strangest calisthenic gyrations mercilessly, I always knew that Charlie, like off, I wouldn’t do nearly as well, would get ever seen in a training camp this Spring, his big sister Mabel, my doting mother, was discouraged, and would call it quits. But they were so taken by his personality that always in my corner. And unlike my father, that first year I averaged about fifty bucks even the most skeptical veterans did every he never sneered at my ambition to become a day on weekends, not bad money for a trick he ordered and would have jumped a syndicated comic strip artist when I grew twelve year old kid. through hoops if he had requested.” up. My mother beamed, but my father That our father possessed a personality “You’ll be lucky to get hired on the and uncle just gave me the fisheye, then would have been news to my younger docks like everybody else,” said my old resumed their conversation. sister Maureen and me. He certainly never man, the son of Irish immigrants from “I’m telling you Georgie, if the union wasted it on his family. To us he seemed County Cork, drinking beer at the kitchen doesn’t make a deal soon and put an end the silent, solitary rebuttal to the belief table with my uncle Georgie. this goddamn thing,” my father said, “we’ll that no man was an island, as he sat on a “Don’t listen to Mr. Sour Grapes there,” have to get guns and go stick up a bank.” bench in the Vladeck projects courtyard, my mother said from the sink, alluding to “I’ve got a better idea, Eddie,” said my right down the block from our tenement my father’s eternal bitterness about drinking uncle. “You know that big crack in the on Henry Street, casting his long shadow his way out of a great job as a trainer for ceiling out in the hall? Why don’t we take a on the pavement and nursing a quart the Brooklyn Dodgers and ending up an broomstick, knock some chunks of plaster bottle of Rheingold cloaked in the brown ordinary longshoreman. “With your talent, down, and put the plaster dust all over you? paper bag of Propriety. Exiled from the you can become anything you want.” Then you lay down on the floor, start yellin’ idyllic Irish beer gardens of his beloved We’ve probably all heard those your fuckin’ head off, and get everybody in Woodside, Queens, when my clannish psychological theories about offspring the building out there for witnesses. Maybe mother moved us back to Manhattan to who subconsciously stop themselves from that hebe landlord will settle out of court.” keep her recently widowed father company succeeding, so as not to surpass their Before we knew it, my father was rolling when I was six and Maureen was three, he parents. But I doubt that they ever applied around on our kitchen floor, barechested referred to the Lower East Side forever after to me, since I never remember wishing to and grimacing, with a pile of wooden as “this Godforsaken neighborhood,” and emulate my father in any way –– least of all clothes hangers under his back, while my remained aloof from the lively society of the in the defeatism he seemed all too willing uncle Georgie cheered him on: “That’s it, surrounding sidewalks and stoops. to make my legacy. In fact, I think it was Eddie, just keep it up. As soon as your back It would have amazed us to hear our partly to make him eat his discouraging looks banged up enough, you can put your tightlipped old man wax so loquacious as words that, one saturday a couple of years shirt on and we’ll go out in the hall and he does in an interview in another of my later, encumbered with two folding chairs, a put our plan into action. It just has to look mother’s clippings, telling an Associated thick drawing pad, some felt-tip pens, and a bad on the outside. They say a lot of back Press sportswriter named Frank Eck, portfolio full of sample sketches, I took the injuries don’t even show up on an x-ray “Physical conditioning helped the Brooklyn subway to West 4th Street to sell caricatures anyway.” Dodgers win the National League pennant to the tourists who flocked to the Village My mother looked at me and shook her in 1941, when I had 40 players under for the Washington Square Outdoor Art head. “Thank God you won’t end up like me at Havana. There’ll be a lot of young Exhibition. I was too young to register them.” players in the training camps this spring and officially, but whenever the monitors chased * * * everyone knows that the youth of today is me, I’d move to another spot. My grim Whether out of spite or misplaced tense and needs loosening up.” determination comes across in a picture nostalgia for what might have been, my That our father, whose standard someone took of me surrounded by some mother kept the archives of my father’s answer to any request for permission was fellow East Side kids who had stopped failure in an album filled with photos and a distracted “ask your mother,” noticed by to visit with the neighborhood artiste. press clippings from his time with the anything at all about “the youth of today” Glowering darkly among gladly grinning Brooklyn Dodgers. There was one picture would also have come as a surprise to normal boys, I already look cursed by the

14 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Maureen and me. But there was a lot we unsophisticated Lower East Side girl like By 1953 –– after apparently driving a didn’t know about the veritable stranger my mother to marry a worldly man thirteen cab for a while, judging from a hack license who, when asked about his glory days, years her senior, rather than a young guy one of my cousins recently gave me with a would invariably wave a dismissive hand and from the neighborhood. But there was mugshot of him, a little cabbie cap propped say, “Ah, that’s all water under the bridge, more trouble than romance ahead: In the on his head, looking bloated and befuddled, kid.” October 13, 1945 edition of The New York like Jackie Gleason’s character, “The Poor His steady downward trajectory is Daily News, Danton Walker reported in his Soul” –– my father had been working as a charted, however spottily, in subsequent “Broadway” column “Eddie McCormack, longshoreman for almost a decade. Yet his clippings: “It’s a boy (Edward Bruce) for who trained the Brooklyn baseball Dodgers apparent determination to keep the family the Eddie McCormacks of Woodside,” in their Havana and Florida camps, is name in boldface was such that, when I reads one from 1943. “McCormack, a bedded with a stomach ailment at French had surgery for appendicitis, schmaltzy guard at the Sperry plant in Brooklyn, was a Hospital.” Daily Mirror columnist Nick Kenny urged trainer for the Brooklyn Dodgers for three Actually, it was an attack of bleeding his readers, “Dip your pen in sunshine and years.” ulcers so severe that a surgeon had to write to shut-in Eddie McCormack, 10, Somewhere in between training the remove half my father’s stomach and to Medical Arts Hospital, New York, N.Y.” Dodgers and working as a guard in a tell him that he’d be a dead man if he ever My poor mother had high hopes for me. defense plant, my father ran an exercise touched alcohol again. To my father (who She “kvelled” just like the Jewish ladies in program for female employees of a had apparently reacted the same way when our neighborhood did when their children company where my mother worked as Dodgers manager Leo Durocher warned made them proud, after I won a scholarship an elevator operator. My mother also him that he would be canned if he kept to the High School of Music & Art. But saved snapshots of him giving boxing hitting the bottle so hard that he failed to just the other day, buying a Lotto ticket, as lessons to some of the switchboard girls show up for training sessions), this called for I do every week, religiously, I thought of and secretaries and leading them through a stiff drink. what she said after I turned my back on it, calisthenics that looked like chorus line For a time, to pay off the loan sharks only to drop out of my Blackboard Jungle moves. Mama claimed that several of them down on the docks, he moonlighted as neighborhood school, Seward Park High, were madly in love with him, and when she a waiter at the Stork Club. I can almost when I turned sixteen: “The apple don’t fall told how her head almost got stuck in the imagine him passing items to the columnists far from the tree.” elevator doors the first time he asked her along with their checks. By that time, out on a date, it sounded like a scene out of however, his chances of a comeback were as * * * some 1940s romantic comedy. slim as winning the Irish Sweepstakes, his He had to have bowled her over, since other futile strategy for being rescued from it would not have been common for an the practical circumstances of his life.

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 15 Denys Wortman: A Daumier of the he concurrence of upon this newspaper Tthe Edward Hopper cartoonist as a peer. exhibition at the Whitney Reginald Marsh, and the retrospective who was similarly of drawings by Denys smitten with Wortman at The Museum bustling street of the City of New York scenes, said, “Denys seems serendipitous. Wortman has long For while the two artists been a special were in no way aesthetic admiration of mine. or personal adversaries, His drawings are Wortman strikes me as the brilliant, and what is anti-Hopper, in that he equally important, favored the raucous visual they have great cacophony of the city over humor.” But Guy its solitary moments and Pène du Bois paid scenes of melancholy. him the highest Not that I had ever tribute of all when heard of Hopper as a very he said, “Denys young aspiring cartoonist Wortman’s work in the early 1950s, when I should be treated as first discovered Wortman’s seriously in America single-panel feature as that of men “Metropolitan Movies,” like Daumier and in the World-Telegram Forain in France, and Sun. Nor did I have and Hogarth and any idea that Wortman Rowlandson in (who had actually studied England.” alongside Hopper in While the social I’M STILL WONDERING WETHER CUPID’S GONNA Robert Henri’s class at New realism of both his SMILE AT ME HERE AT HOME, AT THE BEACH, IN York School of Fine and admirers was pretty THE OFFICE OR AT THE WORLD’S FAIR. Applied Art) had started much relegated to August 31, 1939 Grease pencil, graphite and ink chronicling the life of the museum storage Courtesy of The Center For Cartoon Studies and Denys city way back in 1924 for rooms after Abstract Wortman VIII the Telegram’s predecessor, Expressionism The New York World. All I knew was that I often recognized my own neighborhood, the Lower East Side, evoked lovingly, brick by brick, in Wortman’s drawings, as well as in the captions below them, which were decidedly more down-to- earth proletarian than wittily urbane in the manner of New Yorker gag cartoons. Since I would have been only five when it originally appeared in the paper in 1948, I must have seen one of my favorites reproduced somewhere at a later date for it to have impressed itself so vividly on my memory. It’s a pigeon’s eye-view, masterly in its detail, of a woman leaning over a fire-escape and shouting down to a street where pushcarts crowd the curb: “If I have to come down to buy them, you’ll have to come down on your prices.” True to life –– and, particularly, to the survival humor of my old neighborhood –– as they were, however, it wasn’t so much the captions that captured my attention as what must have been the most supple pencil line I had ever seen up to that time. And while the literary content of Wortman’s cartoons (some of which he credited to his wife, who would tell him things she had overheard while out shopping) was not to be discounted, it was YO HO MARY! DID YOU BRING YOUR SUNTAN OIL? for his unerring draftsmanship that he was August 9, 1932 Grease pencil, graphite and ink Courtesy of most highly praised by fine artists who looked The Center For Cartoon Studies and Denys Wortman VIII

16 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Rotogravure Finally Gets His Museum Moment clay / And landscape might have been given short shrift in but a background galleries flourished in the popular press. to a torso; / All of The tenants of “Mrs. Rumpel’s Rooming Cezanne’s apples I House,” two amiable vagrants called would give away / For “Mopey Dick and the Duke,” and a one small Goya or a varied cast of other colorful characters Daumier.” peopling “Metropolitan Movies” struck Perhaps more an empathetic chord with struggling city relevant than quibbling dwellers during the Depression and World over the qualitative War II. disparities between By 1952, when Wortman depicted Wortman’s drawings one of his hard-luck partners reading a and paintings is how newspaper with a headline touting relative sympathetic a subject prosperity, while the other says, “But Duke, the human clay of if I could borrow 250 billion dollars and tenement dwellers live on it for 20 years without paying any and other low-rent of it back, I’d have prosperity too,” the urban types became rueful humor surely would have been lost in the hands of this on a naive nine-year-old like me. But I descendent of early was already able to relish the artist’s way Dutch Huguenot with the shabby drapery of wry resignation settlers, born in 1887 in and all the other telling details that speak the parsonage of what much more eloquently than words to our he himself described as common humanity. ––– Ed McCormack

LOOK WHAT THE CENSORS DID TO THIS LETTER I GOT FROM JOE. I’M SURE HE SAID HE LOVED ME A COUPLA TIMES IN THERE WHERE THEY’VE BLACKED IT OUT. July 17, 1943 Grease pencil, graphite and ink Courtesy of The Center For Cartoon Studies and Denys Wortman VIII came into vogue, Wortman continued to find a ready audience in the popular press. “the beautiful Yet as a young artist he had the heady and respectable experience of exhibiting in the landmark little village of Armory Show of 1913, and that he still Saugerties-on- harbored fine art aspirations is evident in the-Hudson two canvases, “Street Scene” and “Street where my father Scene–Market,” both painted in 1948. was for many But while these paintings are years the pastor.” characteristically detailed in their depiction Although of his familiar fire escapes, pushcarts, Wortman knew gaping tenement doorways, store awnings, from an early age and laundry strung between buildings, that his only wish they lack the vitality that Wortman evoked was to become with a simple pencil line in his cartoons. Of an artist, to course, it really wouldn’t be fair to expect please his parents someone who turned out a magnificent he studied drawing on deadline six days a week to engineering produce even a handful of great paintings before becoming in the same year. But it still seems clear that a student of Wortman was a born draftsman rather than Robert Henri painter; that line was his true forte, the and Kenneth I’M DYING TO GET DOWN TO 150. THAT’S WHEN I CAN rotogravure his natural métier. Hayes Miller. CROSS MY LEGS. Well, the same might be said of Daumier If it was also as September 1, 1936 Grease pencil, graphite and ink Courtesy of The himself, whose paintings were plodding a concession to Center For Cartoon Studies and Denys Wortman VIII compared to the sublime linear depictions his conventional of the human form and visage that inspired upbringing that Denys Wortman Rediscovered: W.H. Auden to declare (even while pairing he finally chose family life and commercial Drawings for the him with a greater Spanish humanist whose outlets for his work, rather than taking World Telegram and Sun, 1930-1953 paintings and etchings breathed the same a more bohemian route, one can only Museum of the City of New York, rare air), “To me art’s subject is the human consider it fortuitous. For a talent that 1220 Fifth Avenue, through March 20

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 17 In “HeartShare” Show, Some Clients Transcend Therapy to Create Real Art

rtists with developmental disabilities (apparently left over from a variegated Aenrolled in HeartShare Human Services, underpainting now covered by strokes of “a 96-year-old non-profit organization vibrant blue) enlivening the central form. providing care and support to many of New Other artists in the show worked in styles York City’s most vulnerable individuals,” more reminiscent of folk art, as seen in were featured in the second annual “ArtShare John Wojciechowski’s painting “Nells Glow for HeartShare Exhibition.” It might have Guernsey Cow,” with its simplified bovine been sufficient to merely acknowledge the figure set flatly against a blue background and show’s curator, Barbara Nowak-Cuthel, for bordered top and bottom by areas of white, her humanitarian effort in donating time and creating the effect of a long, rectangular sign funds to organize and underwrite the show, on a quaint country store. if not for the genuine artistic pleasures it Just as bold in its own way is “Tulips,” by Tammy Price afforded the viewer. Jonathan Young, a work in acrylic on paper acrylic on paper, “Blue Moon.” Here, acrylic With so many contributions from in which two flowers with red crowns and is employed in the manner of watercolor, among the program’s intellectually and thick green stems take on the blunt quality lending translucent vibrancy to a palette developmentally disabled clients on view, it of adjoining fire-hydrants. Presented on the dominated by blues and greens to evoke would be impossible to do justice to them two-dimensional picture plane with three what appears to be a nocturnal seascape with all. One can only focus on a few whose work almost identical clouds lined up overhead, shadowy gray hills bordering a dark body best exemplified the spirit and diversity of the this unique floral vision has a decorative of water. Washington also employs palette event as a whole. directness that sets Young’s knives and mixes sand into his pigments in The colored marker work apart. And equally some works where he builds up more textural drawings of Walter Gregory charming in another manner is areas that he later dilutes with water to give have reportedly evolved “I Got a Boo-Boo,” an acrylic his work subtle tactile qualities that augment over the past seven years face mask by Jennifer Enny, his intuitive sense of color. from villains representing which has a linear economy Collage is also explored with interesting his personal hardships to almost like some of the results by some participants in this show. superheroes suggesting his faces that Picasso painted on Lucinda Caponi combines a magazine newfound sense of creative ceramic plates, particularly its photo of a woman in a bathing suit, a full empowerment. Gregory’s stylized with decorative lashes. moon, and other imagery in her mixed colorful cartoon characters, Also quite inventive is Enny’s media collage, “A Day at the Beach,” while such as “Swat Cat,” are use of what appears to be Richard Quilter juxtaposes couture models possessed of impressive black pipe-cleaners to create with more scattered found objects in his visual wit. the mask’s curlicues of hair. wittily named piece, “Fashion Disaster.” Tammy Price displays Only the red “boo-boo” on Very much in tune with the contemporary an aesthetic sophistication the forehead adds a slightly trend of including fragments of text in visual Jennifer Enny one cannot help comparing disquieting note to the works, Anthony Rodriguez creates a kind of to that of the British abstract painter otherwise cheery face. concrete poetry in acrylic paintings such as Howard Hodgkin, in her acrylic on canvas, Brandon Collins is a highly imaginative his “Batman Begins,” where mysterious yet “Dancing,” with its colorful dots floating and versatile artist who creates complex evocative words and phrases such as “Street like confetti over bold, blocky areas of red, scenarios in a variety of media ranging from Grindin” and “The Shreredder” suggest a blue, yellow and green. Several others as well watercolors and pastels to colored pencils and personal semiotics. Here, set within irregular showed a formal mastery that transcended markers. His subjects range from snow scenes areas of white on a strident yellow ground, the “outsider” category: Vincent Kim’s and still lifes to detailed images of city streets Rodriguez’s boldly printed capital letters take “Color Squares I & II” revealed a skillful way in a style reminiscent of the art brut Paris on a dynamic impact all their own. with color areas that create a subtle chromatic scenes of Jean Dubuffet. Especially engaging What the work of at least some of the dialogue. Although its dominant deep blue, is his mixed media work on paper depicting artists in this exhibition seemed to suggest brown, and white color scheme may seem the hectic activity in a busy neighborhood is that it may eventually become necessary incongruous in relation to its title, Donald pizza store. Much simpler in conception, to do away altogether with terms such as Graham’s acrylic painting on canvas board, yet filled with their own blithe energy, the “primitive,” “unschooled,” and “outsider’ “Rainbow,” displays a gestural vigor that calligraphic acrylic paintings of Jose Colon art. After all, artists have always been unique would do any abstract expressionist proud. feature mostly vertical strokes of luminous individuals and more than a few who have Christopher Defray, on the other hand, primary hues, set against the pure white- achieved great works have had to overcome showed a work in watercolor and pen called primed ground of the canvas, that appear to handicaps or disabilities –– not to mention “Camel Cigarettes’ that combined elements literally jump for joy. Another kind of joy, glaring eccentricities –– of their own. And of Pop and abstraction. Defray employed the freedom of flight, comes across in “Red a surprising number of those featured here considerable command of the difficult Birds,” an acrylic painting by Valerie Dolvin, could hold their own handsomely in any watercolor medium to make the partly in which the avians of the title sail against a so-called mainstream exhibition. camouflaged silhouette of a camel emerge field of pale blue strokes that make the sky from within an intricately configured maze of as palpable an entity as their feathery forms. –– Maureen Flynn abstract shapes. Dolvin’s lyrical style appears auspiciously Then there is Lamar Jones, whose “X suited to her subject. HeartShare, recently seen at Marks the Spot” is especially notable for Khalid Akeem Washington creates New Century Gallery his use of pentimento, particularly in the semiabstract landscapes with poetic 530 West 25th Street luminous deep pink and ocher colors atmospheres, as seen in his composition in

18 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Maria José Royuela: The Art of Reflection “ atience” is a word one rarely hears in timeworn cracks and crevices, as fine use of earth tones, of pale ochers and muted Pthe hectic, ambitious art world of today, as graphite lines; to the sere shades of reds, colors that, as Wyeth himself said of his where everyone appears to be in a hurry to dehydrated vegetation; the mortal hues of own palette, have “almost a lonely feeling.” succeed, and where the work is often hurried sun-starved flowers and grasses; the substance In an interview, when asked what was in execution, serving as a mere accessory to of common soil; to colors that she calls “not the hardest part of her artistic journey, that quest for success. For this reason it Royuela answered, “I feel like I’m is refreshing to hear the Spanish painter going upstream.” This, of course, is a Maria José Royuela say, “My work is natural feeling for an artist who eschews the fruit of patience. Mine, my patience, the kind of sensationalism that is likely which leads me to paint from quiet to get instant attention in today’s art observation of my surroundings and scene in favor of what she refers to as from listening to my interior.” “authenticity” and “reflection.” Indeed, the quietude and stillness of Rooted in the soil of her childhood Royuela’s paintings in the venerable, in La Rioja, Spain, the paintings of Maria patient medium of oils on canvas is José Royuela, with their muted colors and what strikes one immediately upon simple forms, transport us to a timeless encountering them. From a distance one place of stillness and serenity. Here, could easily mistake her canvases for the the receptive viewer may escape what subtlest of color field abstractions, given Royuela refers to as the “materialistic and the delicacy of her forms, the subtlety of superficial” concerns of urban culture, her tonalities. Up close, however, one “Sin Titulo” and find a space for reflection. For even in discovers in the intimacy of Royuela’s “Sin frivolous but honest.” nature, her work seems to tell us, one must Titulo” series tangible visual evidence of the And yet there is a sensuality to her beware of the showy and superficial, and truth of John Calvin’s belief that “There is treatment of landscape subjects that makes dig deeper to discover the greater mysteries not one blade of grass, there is no color in one think, oddly enough, of Andrew Wyeth hidden within the firmament. Such work has this world that is not intended to make us –– not only his wintry country scenes, but become a rarity in recent art and is something rejoice.” also of the pale flesh tones of the nudes in the to be treasured. –– Maurice Taplinger The lush, verdant colors of summer “Helga” series. Perhaps this can be attributed are not what attract Royuela’s eye, mind, to the almost sentient feeling that Royuela Maria José Royuela, Agora Gallery, heart. Rather, she is drawn to the bone- brings out in nature, the sense of it being like 530 West 25th Street, March 1-22, 2011 dry whiteness of winter rocks, with their a feeling entity, that she captures through her Reception: Thursday, March 3, 6-8 PM Resolution: A Resounding Group Survey n “Resolution,” curated by Sonia Barnett forms that zoom dynamically between the forms awash in soft yet luminous hues. Ifor the West Side Arts Coalition, the Afro- two-dimensional picture plane and deep Winged skeletons flitting like dragonflies American artist William Hunt once again illusionistic perspective. Carlson’s playful over streaked and dripping areas of brilliant displayed the prodigious draftsmanly talents eclectic sensibility partakes of postmodern yellow, purple, and blue came across as that make him the natural heir to the late freedom from overriding aesthetic dogma in theatrical rather than macabre in Elizabeth social realist Charles White. Hunt showed his refreshing new ways. K. Hill’s acrylic painting “Aire and Angels.” unique graphic inventiveness particularly in By contrast, the artist known as Yukako A pleasing fantasia hovering between the his large charcoal drawing on paper “Cherish, showed two paintings, entitled “Winter abstract and the representational, Hill’s Them” where the luxuriant dreadlocks of two Brightness” and “Winter Garden,” both painting possessed a benign yet otherworldly proudly smiling, loving parents on both sides vibrant overall compositions created with appeal. of the composition join to form a hammock thick, feathery strokes of red, yellow, blue, By contrast, the paintings of Nate Ladson for a sleeping child. green and pink acrylic pigment. The addition are subtle and elusive, as in a luminous Good drawing is also the armature of of bits of gold metallic pigment added to the untitled oil and acrylic abstraction of fiery red Anne Rudder’s visionary poem-paintings in effect of shimmering rainbow-hued energy and moody blue hues. Especially intriguing watercolor. Rudder’s “Poem/Prayer” centers fields. here, however, was Ladson’s mixed media on a benevolent amazon with outstretched Nancy Johnson also made an impression piece “Images,” in which a phantom figure arms and the outline of a dove within a with her intimate watercolor “I Will moved through a shower of light like a sunburst symbol on her flowing garment Remember Dad,” an affectionate portrait phantom shadow, reminding one of the looming over a lively cityscape. Another of an elderly man in a short sleeved shirt protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s great novel hybrid work by Rudder titled “Forever,” and blue slacks seated in an easy chair “Invisible Man,” hiding in plain sight in his combines a Christlike figure with a poem reading a newspaper in a domestic interior. cellar amid 1369 blazing bulbs. beginning with the lines “There is no dead Johnson captures a sense of her father’s The two final artists both work on an land, / but a crystal sea / moving through mild personality with an economy and grace intimate scale and share a refreshingly light the / eternal soul...” In an age of irony, characteristic of her medium at its best. touch: Madi Lanier seems to be a kindred Rudder’s spiritual directness is brave and Sonia Barnett’s painterly vigor came across spirit of both Paul Klee and Joan Miro, in inspiring. most dynamically in “Crossing Thresholds,”a her abstract mixed media compositions of Richard Carlson employs the grid as a flowing Abstract Expressionist work in the gaily colored floating forms enlivened by format for both austere abstract compositions unusual medium of watercolor on canvas. Continued on page 26 and figurative forays such as “Diva Down In contrast to its bold and flowing strokes Under,” where a large female face with of stark primaries, Barnett displayed her “Resolution,” recently seen at catlike green eyes hovers at the top of a versatility in two smaller, more lyrical mixed Broadway Mall Community Center, vertically stacked diptych, amid rectangular media works featuring intricately interlocking 96th Street and Broadway, center island.

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 19 A Powerful Female Spirit Haunts the Art of Susannah Virginia Griffin ne of the Texas artist Susannah Virginia the avian form Susannah Virginia Griffin is OGriffin’s most affecting paintings is the at final rest, as its also a strong abstract painter, as acrylic on canvas entitled “All that Glitters.” soul rises up from seen in compositions such as “The In a vigorous flurry of gestural strokes, it it like a fiery red Marriage,” where two powerful depicts a faceless doll with long yellow hair, kite into the light. forms interlock like links in a chain, its bent, bow legs hardly suggesting those of It is an image that yet also evoke a sense of struggle, a ballerina, even as they issue from a tattered appears to express and “Resistance,” where roiling cerulean blue tutu ruffled like the feathers simultaneously gestural shapes suggest stormy of a dying swan. It is a poignantly affecting both the brevity surf. One is also impressed by the painting that at a single glance renders its of life and the vibrant colors, succulent impasto, title ironic. A diva unable to stand, one can’t eternalness of our and muscular paint handling that help seeing this tatty Raggedy Ann figure as essence. Primarily enliven other abstract acrylics a symbol of dreams deferred. As with all of through form on canvas such as “Void” and Griffin’s best paintings, the impact of “All and color, Griffin “Drenched.” That Glitters” arises out of the remarkable embodies the However, it is Griffin’s images emotional content that the artist is able to notion that while of the female figure that seem to impart to a simple image by virtue of the flesh and feather haunt one’s memory long after feeling conveyed in her brush strokes, as may be mortal, seeing them. Among these, one of well as the vibrancy of her colors and the energy never dies. “The Warrior” the most powerful is her painting eloquence of her forms. This is a concept that seems wholly in of a woman in a simple garment, almost Another painting by Griffin called “Cycle keeping with her personal philosophy and suggesting a primitive animal skin, standing of Life,” is especially notable for the former statements that she has issued concerning in a desert protectively enfolding three small two attributes. For here Griffin’s brushwork her artistic intentions, such as, “Anything children. She is slender, appearing almost is somewhat more subdued. What makes this and everything I see has life in it, and I draw physically frail, yet she seems possessed of image of a simplified bird, presumably in the what I see.” great strength. In this case, there is nothing process of making the transition from this Thus even the casual gesture of a woman ironic about the title: “The Warrior.” life to the next one, so affecting is the skill in a backless dress, seen from behind, –– Maureen Flynn, with which the artist employs an expressive apparently raising a hand to shield her eyes, line, along with a combination of somber as she stands in a crowd watching a fireworks Susannah Virginia Griffiin, Agora Gallery, blues and more luminous yellows and blues. display erupt in the night sky, takes on an 530 West 25th Street, March 1 - 22, 2011. With these expressive elements, she depicts eternal quality in her painting “Venus.” Reception: Thurs. March 3, 6 - 8pm. “Abstract Plus,” in which Less Becomes More lthough the West Side Arts Coalition black, blue, and ochre ground. By contrast, where angular architectural shapes put a vital Ahas a reputation for presenting group in Yukako’s Aurora, an overall composition new spin on cubistic structuring; to “Black exhibitions which give large numbers of of smaller, more tightly knit yellow, red, & White Series with Gold,” in which the emerging artists maximum exposure, the blue, green, yellow, and pink strokes created restricted palette enables one to focus all the year-end show, “Abstract Plus/2010, focused a chromatically shimmering surface, at more intensely on the juicy, de Kooningesque on five talents in slightly more depth. once tactile and ethereal. Yukako possesses grace of Rich’s sensual, serpentinely twisting Anne Rudder’s “Transition” series was a furiously upbeat energy that can recall strokes. Her unerring sense of space, shape, occasioned by a recent health crisis. Although Pollock in his “Blue Poles” period. and –– above all –– gesture invariably makes Rudder has often been compared to William Joseph Boss’ compositions in acrylic and for an exhilarating viewing experience. Blake for her manner of combining figurative mixed media can only be termed baroque for Richard Carlson, on the other hand, is imagery with hand written poetry, this series the vitality of his forms and scrumptiousness an abstract classicist. His precise (but not of mixed media works seemed more in the of his colors. The wittily named and playful exactly hard-edge) compositions are notable spirit of Buddhist painter / poets and haiku “Motley Exteriors” consists of variously for their stately formal austerity, combined artists for its merger of concise phrases colored orbs with spiral strokes within, with an exquisitely restrained expressiveness. with simpler abstract forms. In “Transition: suggesting spinning wheels, set against a Here he was represented by three mixed Expression,” the big, boldly written phrase patchy color field. By contrast, in “Untitled” media paintings from his “White Tunnel” “Sorrow Tears” appeared to literally dissolve intricate, closely-packed shapes and daubs of series. Close-valued geometric color areas in a torrent of tears. In “Transition: Feeling,” vibrant color float like windblown confetti are enlivened by faint palimpsests and bits the words “Anger” and “Grief” bled into and fill the canvas to bursting with a lively of pentimento that suggest phantom forms visceral areas of red. In “Transition: Rest,” sense of kinetic movement. Then there is the beneath Carlson’s main ones. Although the however, a more spiritual mood was evoked delightful surprise of “Oh Life,” in which clarity of his compositions captures one’s with the text “Turn away from pain / Turn Boss merges Fauvist painted figures with attention from all the way across the room, away from pain / and come to my / Healing areas of photographic collage imagery, such these underlying elements, as well as the Love,” written out in a manner that made the as a cat’s head, the pretty face of a magazine piquant variations of tone and touch at the calligraphy, now more elegantly shapely, and model, and a pair of female legs culminating edges where the colors meet, provide subtle the luminous yellow and blue hues project an in patent leather maryjane pumps with straps sensual pleasures at close range. actual sense of healing light and energy. across the instep, creating a particularly lively Patience Prescott Sundaresan, the show’s The acrylic paintings of Yukako Ishida are visual melange. Continued on page 26 buoyant, driven by an irrepressible gestural As always, the postmodern abstract energy. In Yukako’s “Cosmos” cursive red expressionist Emily Rich conjures up a “Abstract Plus” recently seen at swirls, intermingled with one yellow area, vigorous, muscular mixture of elements in Broadway Mall Community Center, rose up like soap bubbles against a variegated acrylics on canvas ranging from “Bold City,” Broadway and 96th Street (center isle)

20 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Deborah Sudran is That Rare Postmodern Painter Brave Enough to Embrace Beauty orman Mailer once said that the them like baby-blue bonnets, combine allusiveness of the thick stemmed, pink None identity he found “absolutely the labial sensuality of spiraling rose petals bulbed plant at the center composition, insupportable” for himself was that of the with the boingy presence of sunflowers. as well as the mask-like qualities of the “nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.” The These dynamic juxtapositions come small botanical form to its left and the visual artist Deborah Sudran admittedly about in no small part because Sudran resemblance of the two red flowers feels much the same way speckled with yellow dots on its about the possibility of right to stylized strawberries. being regarded as a “flower The emblematic quality of painter.” But neither Mailer Sudran’s gouaches helps make nor Sudran could ever be in even more clear to the viewer danger of being misconstrued that the subject matter of her so simplistically by any person paintings in both mediums sophisticated enough to is not only an occasion for understand their work or be abstraction but is also open to worthy of its concerns. imaginative interpretation. By In Sudran’s case, to trivialize contrast, in her oils, it is the her paintings in such a manner almost hallucinatory intricacy would be as ludicrous as of her compositions, which are calling Cezanne a “landscape often as overall in organization painter,” Modigliani a “people as Pollock’s drips and swirls, painter” or Morandi “a bottle that warns one against taking painter.” For while flowers and anything in them too literally. plants may be their ostensible In the especially intricate oil, subjects, what Sudran’s “Fieldflowers 2,” in particular, paintings are primarily about where the dark areas between are formal relationships and the plants and stems suggest color juxtapositions. That she a nocturnal background, the chooses botanical forms as her round centers of some of creative vehicle merely enables the flowers appear uncannily her to add yet another layer of like the eyes of creatures complexity to her essentially staring out at one through abstract project. Paradoxically, dense jungle foliage. In this grounding her pictures in a regard, even without as much specific, particularly vibrant deliberate distortion on the aspect of nature enables her part of the artist, some of to transcend the sterility of a Sudran’s paintings can seem as strict formalism and engage visionary as those of Charles with the ineffable mystery Burchfield. For what Sudran of what Dylan Thomas so does best is to somehow bring eloquently termed “the force “Fieldflowers 1” out the inherent ambiguity that through green fuse drives of reality by virtue of a subtle the flower.” imageistic juxtapositioning and coloristic Indeed, to discount the importance happens to be a consummate colorist, heightening, rather than by means of of these less tangible aspects of Sudran’s something that comes across just as obvious distortions of form. work would be to trivialize it in yet strongly in her gouaches as in her oils. Returning to the New York art scene another way, since along with their formal Indeed, the matte quality of opaque after a long hiatus from exhibiting, attributes, her paintings possess a visionary watercolor in no way dims her chromatic during which she continued to paint in vividness which is very much a part of dynamism. This can be seen to special self-willed isolation, Deborah Sudran’s their power. For while she works from advantage in “Cacti and Succulents 10,” new solo exhibition will surely gain her her own photographs, culled from in her a work in that medium with an identical many new admirers. For here is an artist travels to places as far away as Guatemala name but a much different composition of mature gifts with work that should and as close to home as Central Park and than its aforementioned counterpart in come as a welcome relief for many from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, she is by oil on canvas. Here, her use of unlikely the superficial novelty all too prevalent no means a Photo-Realist painter. Rather, hues, such as greens, pinks, and purples, in many galleries today. No mere “flower she often alters her photographic sources set against a peculiar orange /ocher painter” by any means, Sudran’s paintings and adjusts colors to intensify the effect of ground not only reveals her almost are hardly pretty. Rather, they are tough nature. Fauvist coloristic intrepidness, but the and brave for being truly beautiful in an Thus in Sudran’s oil on canvas “Cacti relative flatness of the medium, which era when it can almost seem that beauty and Succulents 10,” for example, the emphasizes her use of line and clearly has become the last taboo. yellow thorns thrust forward from defined color areas (as in a Japanese print), –– Ed McCormack the dark green barrel cactus like spiky also highlights the abstract characteristics stars, and in another composition called of her compositions. By further divorcing Deborah Sudran, Viridian Artists, Inc., “Ornamental Cabbage,” the crinkly pink her imagery from naturalism, it opens up 530 West 25th Street, February 8 - 26. leaves, with areas of blue green encircling associative possibilities such as the phallic Reception: Saturday, February 12, 4 - 6 pm

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 21 Did Dontzoff Paints the Human Image in the Raw orn in Paris of Russian, Jewish, and sculpture as a possible source for their of deaf and dumb, first images, before the BGypsy origins, Did Dontzoff is a painter rugged angularity and almost unnerving sound, separate for ever, man, woman, with his own unique vernacular, which can presence. painting, painting of a fit of laughter, vida, only be described as a sophisticated variant Like Dubuffet himself, or the over-the- senora, por favor, after I beg you, do as you on Dubuffet’s “art brut,” seasoned by the top drawings that Andy Masson created may, Madame, sit down, how may I help streets in much the same to illustrate Georges you? Love, you are certain of it, so ok, I give manner as the poetry of Bataille’s novel “The Dead you blue and black, with a zest of red all that Jacques Prévert and the Man” (sans the gratuitous mixed with our ‘sauce du moment,’ and songs of Charles Azvenour. obscenity) Dontzoff’s preferably to consume every day.” For while also influenced paintings in black India One could also see Dontzoff as an by Russian native crafts, ink and acrylic are raw artistic shaman, creating starkly simplified Dontzoff’s blunt, and vigorous, partaking of human effigies that take on a monumental, expressive figures, with the directness of so-called monolithic presence, like towering their thick outlines and outsider art from a more constructions made from slabs of slate, yet totemic presences, suggest sophisticated perspective seem somehow possessed of a poignantly eternal flaneurs and informed by art historical affecting soulfulness. Indeed, one could go boulevardiers, Apache awareness. Yet they are on ad absurdom, puzzling over the strange Everymen trapped in the free of the constraints of power of Did Dontzoff’s work. But let’s net of life. “On ne Passe pas” what Dubuffet referred to simply give the last word to his kindred spirit “My paintings are as “asphyxiating culture.” and fellow Parisian, the late cafe poet and inescapable because they are made of life, For even as their compositions display an mensch of the boulevards, Jacques Prévert, which instills deep expression in the work,” undeniable cohesiveness of design, they as to what these are paintings of: “Of a the artist declares, sounding like one of make no concessions to the conventions of world sober and drunk / Of a world sad and the men that he paints, pondering his own polite taste. gay / Tender and cruel / Real and surreal predicament. “There is constant movement, Indeed, there is something of the trickster / Terrifying and funny / Nocturnal and but no answers.” in Dontzoff, of the the magician who diurnal /Usual and unusual / Handsome There is also something of Leonard dazzles his audience with sleight of hand and as hell.” Baskin’s stark, streaked graphic humanism picks one’s pocket at the same time –– at –– Byron Coleman in Dontzoff’s bold personages, with the least figuratively speaking. Just listen to his Did Dontzoff, Agora Gallery, surfaces within their bold black contours voice, as he pulls the wool over one’s eyes 530 West 25th St, March 25 - April 15, 2011. veined with lines like those in a crude in a statement issued in connection with his Reception: March 31, 6 - 8pm. woodcut. One could also cite African tribal present exhibition: “Man, woman, dialogue G&S Classifieds opportunities NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN ARTISTS, INC. (N.A.W.A.) WEST SIDE ARTS COALITION (WSAC) established 1979, welcomes new members from all A non-profit founded in 1889, is seeking membership applications from serious and professional geographic areas. There are approximately 14 exhibits per year for Fine Arts, Photography, and Craft Arts. women artists in all media. Members are provided with juried and curated exhibition opportunities Music, Poetry, Theater and Dance programs available. Contact info: Tel. 212-316-6024, in NYC and across the USA. Three areas of membership: Regular/Juried, Junior/Student and As- email- [email protected] or website- www.wsacny.org. Or send SASE to the West Side Arts Coalition, sociate. Applications are due March 15th and September 15th of each year. Download application: PO Box 527, Cathedral Station, New York, NY 10025. Visit our ground floor gallery at 96th Street & www.thenawa.org or send SASE to: N.A.W.A., 80 Fifth Ave, Suite Broadway (on the center island) New York City. Open: Wed. 6-8pm, Sat. & Sun., 12-6pm. 1405, New York, NY 10011, 212-675-1616.

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22 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Beverly A. Smith’s Happy Marriage of Nature and Transcendence t stands to reason that the art of Beverly revealing the layers of yellow hues beneath By contrast, somewhat more tumultuous IA. Smith is so brilliantly saturated the green, lending yet another luminous emotions appear to be evoked in the with sunlight, since she lives and works coloristic element to the picture. The entire painting that Smith calls “Restraint,” in Sarasota Florida. In fact, the painting painting –– but especially the cerulean blue where a whirlwind of strokes in somewhat that she calls “Sarasota” could be seen as water of the marsh –– shimmers with a uncharacteristically darker tonalities swirls her signature work, given its exuberant kind of succulence and reflectiveness that over the entire surface of the composition chromatic explosions of yellow and verdant makes one think of Monet’s water lilies, with a stormy energy. Indeed, here, Smit green strokes, which demonstrates that, fill the canvas with a unlike many abstract sun-drenched sense of painters who settle on a energy. trademark style in order Like other female to make their work more abstract painters before uniformly marketable, her –– most particularly she is not willing to Helen Frankenthaler and restrict her palette or Joan Mitchell –– Smith to endlessly repeat the presents a lush, positive, same motifs for the sake and life-affirming of achieving stylistic answer to the miasma of consistency. Rather, male angst that hangs apparently subscribing heavily over so much to the belief that “style contemporary art. A is character,” she trusts delightful effusiveness is in the authenticity of what animates Smith’s her emotions and the work in particular, with strength of her own its veritable showers of character to carry the luminous color. Indeed, work forward, trusting even though she is still that the perceptive too young for her career viewer will be able to to have begun at the discern for him or herself time that the critic and the deeper consistency Abstract Expressionist that she strives for in all advocate Harold the varied facets of her Rosenberg coined the “Acceptance” creative oeuvre. phrase “action painting,” that designation albeit laid down on canvas with looser That Smith, while working primarily seems tailor-made for her. strokes that are more expressionistic than from nature, also gives free reign to For what Smith conveys in her impressionistic. The vigorous manner of imagination as well, can only be surmised compositions, most of which are done execution of the scored and scratched from another somewhat anomalous in thick impastos of oil paint applied to grasses provides a lively contrast to the pure composition that she calls “Bedouins II.” the canvas with a palette knife rather yellow splash of sunlight that illuminates For although one always risks being misled than brushes, is the spirit and emotional the entire upper right portion of the (not to mention misleading the reader) energy of nature, rather than its outward composition so brilliantly. Indeed, that when one takes the title of any abstract manifestations. Smith adheres more to the spontaneous painting too literally, in this work the And while the sunlight that saturates energy of Expressionism, rather than the small forms, partially obscured here and her present paintings is most immediately quasi-scientific calculation of Impressionism there within an expansive vortex of pinkish that which warms her days in Sarasota, she is what imbues her paintings with their pigment, could indeed suggest the slow actually grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, emotional content. progress of desert nomads making their and only moved to Florida about three Perhaps this emotional component of way through a sand storm. years ago. Learning that she has been her work comes across most clearly in At the same time, however, to search for inspired by the marshes in Falmouth or “Acceptance,” a composition that appears too many specific meanings in the work of Edgartown, Cape God, also goes a long to mingle elements of both joy and a painter such as Beverly A. Smith is to miss way toward explaining the total effect of a melancholy in its palette of pinks, blues, the larger point of her ambitious artistic painting such as “Tip Toe Marsh,” one of and greens, laid down in vigorous strokes project. For it is the autonomous aesthetic her most exhilarating oils on canvas. For in a mostly vertical direction. This canvas attributes of paintings such as these that in this, one of her most representational could be said to be less representational provide the viewer with deeper and more canvases in its own unique way as well, than “Tip Toe Marsh,” in that there is relevant riches of enjoyment. And it is the one can clearly discern the brilliant blue not as much sense of the lay of the land manner in which the artist activates her waters and high grasses that make up such or the flow of the water as in the previous materials to recreate the experience of the wetlands, with their porous limestone painting. Rather, we are presented with visual world, rather than merely copying its bedrock and dense, moist vegetation. In a juicy configuration of forms pressing superficial aspects, that finally lends Smith’s Smith’s paintings, the tall grasses appear forward on the two-dimensional space paintings their truly transcendent appeal. as though scraped into the surface of the of the picture plane that convey a feeling –– Byron Coleman pigment with the tip of the palette knife more clearly than they suggest an image, or the handle of the brush, giving an an experiential –– and therefore emotional Beverly A. Smith, extra tactile dimension, as well as greater –– impression that resonates and hints as to New Century Artists Gallery, chromatic subtlety, to the picture by the possible meaning of the title. 530 West 25th Street, March 1 - 19.

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 23 Robert Cenedella: The Art World’s Last Angry Man choreographed after the manner of Bruegel’s rollicking peasant festivals. Only, these characters (one of whom is a dead ringer for the late critical blowhard Clement Greenberg) are hardly as earthy or endearing as Bruegel’s, as they bloviate with pretentious gestures, preen narcissistically, and hover vulturic around the drink cart, causing the poor, besieged, red-coated waiter to roll his eyes away wearily. Naturally, nobody is even bothering to look at the art, which in this case consists of what appears to be living people suspended, as if in a torture chamber, from the walls. Could they be less trendy artists “strapped” for cash? Scathing as it is, however, “Gallery Opening” is hardly Cenedella’s most damning indictment of the contemporary art scene. That distinction belongs to “The Museum,” by far his most controversial work. Indeed, it speaks well for the integrity of The Art Students League, where Cenedella “The Gallery Opening” once studied with George Grosz, and where he now continues teaching henever I look at “Gallery degradation of city politics.” in that great German expatriate’s social Opening,” a large color serigraph by Cenedella applies those same satirical W realist tradition, that the administration Robert Cenedella that dominates its own attributes to the art scene in “Gallery didn’t give in to pressure from some wall in my wife’s home office, where I see Opening,” skewering some of the more quarters and withdraw the painting it every day, I am reminded once again obvious freeloaders and phonies who from its front windows. Nor did that why I rarely attend art receptions and have flock to such events with as little to do with art world politics as caricatures that hark back possible. Cenedella, who is fond of saying to Thomas Rowlandson that, like the great Ashcan School master and William Hogarth. Robert Henry, he would rather show his The latter artist, who work in saloons than salons, obviously was a painter as well shares my distaste for the schmoozy social as a draftsman comes aspects of the business in which we both particularly to mind, for find ourselves for different reasons. besides being a satirist, It happens that Cenedella and I both Cenedella is a fine attended the High School of Music and painter. Although his wit Art, however briefly, back in the fifties. sometimes upstages his I spent only a few days there before painterly finesse, his skill transferring back to my neighborhood as a straightforward realist high school, where I didn’t have so much comes across perhaps most competition from other talented kids and clearly in the relatively could continue being the proverbial big simple still life “Owl and fish in the small pond. But Cenedella, who Truck,” where the bird’s already had political principles and a desire downy feathers and the to stick it to the system, got expelled for chipped paint on the writing an article satirizing the school’s air surface of the old toy truck raid drills as pointless precautions against provide subtle coloristic atomic armageddon. and tactile contrasts. Obviously, Cenedella’s penchant for This somewhat atypical heckling all that he perceives as being painting, particularly, “Owl and Truck” patently absurd started long before Victor reveals the formal Navasky, Editor-in-Chief of that great command that lends cohesion to even enlightened institution bend when some liberal journal The Nation, praised him Cenedella’s most dazzlingly complex and passersby on 57th Street came in frothing in print as a “cagey outsider” and “an riotous figurative compositions. at the mouth over his right on the money original,” who employs “a fiendishly “Gallery Opening” certainly ranks antimaterialist statement featuring a comic sensibility” to “capture the brutality high among the latter, with its array of crucified Santa. of spectators at a boxing match and the figures tautly organized and gracefully In “The Museum,” we see mobs of

24 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 live intimately with the art on the walls. that time...” Surely Cenedella had to know that most “Yes Art” was one of his more rueful viewers –– even those who appreciate jokes, a parting shot at Pop, when, as his mission to “kick against the pricks,” he put it in a recent e-mail, he “said my in Pound’s memorable phrase –– would farewell to ‘Art’ by joining an ad agency probably feel much the same way about to escape the commerciality of the art this particular work. world.” By this time, Cenedella had Then again, few of us would want every reason to despair of the art world, Goya’s “Saturn Eating his Son” hanging having endured the hardships depicted over the dining room table either. And symbolically in his 1962 oil canvas, “The it is much to Cenedella’s credit that he Vision,” where a lone, mutilated artist, his does not inhibit his creative impulses in entire head swathed in bandages, staggers order to avoid giving offense, especially blindly through a landscape of infinite when one considers that some of his most rubble under a dramatic post-nuclear sky. publicized and presumably most lucrative A surreal take on the lot of the artist in commissions have been for murals in modern society, this early work still holds upscale restaurants. up as a powerful, gorgeously painted One thinks particularly of his six- statement, akin to his mentor George by-ten-foot mural for “Le Cirque,” Grosz’s great canvas “The Wanderer” or containing more than 150 portraits of Peter Blume’s “The Eternal City.” In much the same way that a musician realizes immediately in the recording studio that he or she has a hit song, Cenedella must have known that he had made an important breakthrough with this painting, since it is alternately known as “The Victor.” But he was obviously not feeling very victorious just three years later, when the kind of passionate figurative painting that Abstract “The Museum” Expressionism had all but eclipsed was clueless cultural sycophants swarming dealt yet another blow by this shiny new like hungry flies around a huge pedestal product of commercial irony called Pop. heaped high with a super-sized pile of Along with “Souperman” in his steaming, viscerally glistening excrement. blue union suit and red cape painting a Yet, here, as in all of Cenedella’s best Campbell’s can –– a double parody of work, the peripheral details are every bit Lichtenstein and Warhol –– Cenedella’s as important as the main event, depicting intended swan song, the Yes Art a gigantic art mall where Pop paintings of exhibition, offered another Andy takeoff Preparation H, a giant roll of toilet paper called “Brillo Descending the Staircase,” ala Oldenburg, and a gargantuan plunger as well as actual S&H Green Stamps to on its own pedestal can also be seen in the those who purchased real Brillo boxes background. For arguably even more repulsive than the monstrous pile of fecal matter that “The Vision” serves as the exhibition’s putrid piece de resistance, Cenedella seems to be telling that elegant eatery’s celebrity patrons and us, is a cultural institution that would staff, which got written up in the The stoop to scatology in order to compete New Yorker. Such a write-up is something with the mass media by pandering to the that, as an editor once told me when I got insatiable public appetite for vulgarity. And mentioned in Liz Smith’s column, “many Cenedella’s point is certainly well taken, people would kill for.” But Cenedella for he makes it with the good humor of is hardly a man to be chastened by a man who takes such wicked delight in favorable publicity, even when it comes human stupidity that his anger is invariably from a liberal icon like columnist Murray more bemused than ill-tempered. Kempton, who once began a piece about Yet, admittedly, as heartfelt an one of his shows with the characteristically expression of disgust with cultural Zen-like lead sentence: “Yes Art, which corruption as it is, “The Museum” is not will burst upon us all at the Fitzgerald a picture that I could live with as easily as Gallery tomorrow, is one of the most I do with “Gallery Opening.” In fact, I’m serious expressions possible to the sure that having it around would adversely aesthetic impulse, that is, a joke.” affect my appetite, since, like those of a lot “I guess I invented Conceptual Art of other New Yorkers, ours is a relatively without knowing it,” Cenedella says of small apartment, where we truly must that 1965 solo show. “So much of what I did as a joke has been done seriously since “Souperman”

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 25 with a steady stream of satirical graphics art establishment that Bob Cenedella –– “We All Live in Harrisburg,” in relentless attacks was quoted in it, having which Wyeth’s “Christina” crouches in to admit, “It’s a conceptual work of art in the grass gazing at the leaking nuclear a way. And for that particular painter, it is reactors; “Read Their Lips,” in which a an interesting idea.” prissy,purse-lipped George Bush Senior That particular painter should soon in drag stands in for one of Grant Wood’s surprise some movers and shakers in an “Daughters of the Revolution,” among even larger arena, when he unveils his others –– Cenedella painted many of his group portrait in progress of the United best known oils on canvas: States Senate. –– Ed McCormack “59th Street Station” is one of the great American Subway scenes, a raucous Robert Cenedella rush hour answer to George Tooker’s Studio 57 Fine Arts spooky vision of a subterranean hall of 212-956-9395 mirrors. “Broome Street Bar” transforms one of Cenedella’s favorite Soho watering holes into an Ensor carnival RESOLUTION of grotesque faces grimacing brilliantly Continued from page 19 amid checkerboard tablecloths, stained a dancing line. The three compositions in glass decorations, and hanging ferns. (Far her “Trio” series make for a charmingly from being offended, the establishment’s musical do re mi of a sequence. owner, Kenn Reisdorf says of the artist, Marie Robison’s small works have “Veteran” “He always puts his thoughts and a winning combination of innocence ($6.75 if folded by the artist, $5.75, if feelings out for others to respond to. I and sophistication, ranging from an airy self-folded). His disgust with the whole love the guy. He knows how to hate well. architectural study, to a painterly bouquet scene is made manifest in another work He knows how to love. He is alive.”) of bubblegum pink flowers, to windblown of the same year, a silkscreen of Robert With an antic passion reminiscent instruments for a rock combo. All have a Indiana’s famous print with the word of Ucello, “Battlefield of Energy” is a breezy grace increasingly rare in today’s “Love” replaced by “Shit.” contemporary history painting in which angst-ridden gallery scene. While some of his detractors might Cenedella depicts the oil crisis as “the oil –– Marie R. Pagano disagree, Cenedella was not cut out to companies going to war against the people WEST SIDE ARTS be a Mad Man in the Don Draper mold. while our government stands by and lets Continued from page 20 Unlike Warhol, who easily made the them.” And history painting takes on an curator, provides the “Plus” part of the transition in the opposite direction, since almost Boschian hellishness in “2001—A exhibition with her evocative photos his paintings were just as commercial Stock Odyssey,” another intricate mounted on board. Despite her different as the shoe illustrations he had done multifigure composition commemorating medium, Sundaresan’s atmospheric for Bonwit Teller, Cenedella’s take on a day that the dow topped 2,000. landscapes seem at home among paintings, advertising was too unslick and wildly When the artist announced that he given their own “painterly” attributes. For original to fly on Mad. Ave. After awhile, was selling stock in the latter painting, her vibrant pink, blue, and yellow skies and he quit the ad game, and returned to his the novel notion rated a full page write- shadowy trees, trestles, bridges, and land first love, painting, with a vengeance. up in The New York Times. But even masses give the viewer a sense of velocity Over the next four decades, along more amusing, Leo Castelli, one of akin to speeding along in an automobile at the then key players in the avant garde dusk or dawn. –– Byron Coleman

The GALLERY&STUDIO Intimations advertising deadline March 9 - 27, 2011 for the April/May issue is A Fine Arts Exhibit March 9 for color, Curators: Linda Lessner & Anne Rudder March 14 for black/white. Joseph Boss • Linda Lessner • Emily Rich Amy Rosenfeld • Anne Rudder FOR CLASSIFIED LISTINGS Et al. Call or Write: 217 East 85th Street, PMB 228, New York, NY 10028 (212) 861-6814 e-mail: [email protected] Broadway Mall Community Center Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org

26 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 Stephen Hall Evokes a Tattooed Sideshow Reality Scottish born painter who Amoved to New York in 1978 Black Renaissance 2011 and gravitated quite naturally by Feb. 16 - March 6, 2011 dint of simpatico temperament to the vital, funky East Village art A Fine Arts Exhibit scene of the early ‘80s, Stephen *Sonia Barnett • Herbert Evans • Gertude Fleming Hall puts classical figurative skills Deborah Holland • William Hunt • Nate Ladson to the service of subject matter that can only be called bizarre in Rosa Maye • Gloria Patton • *Robert N. Scott the very best sense of the term. Rosalie R. Scott • Gloria Shepherd • Carole Maria Weaver Like that of Ed Paschke, the most gifted and visionary *Curators artist to emerge from Chicago’s “Hairy Who” school in the Broadway Mall Community Center 1960s, Hall’s work immediately Broadway@96St. (NYC) Center Island Gallery Hours: Wed 6-8pm, Sat/Sun. 12-6 pm captures one’s attention with its sideshow strangeness, its [email protected] 212-316-6024 www.wsacny.org obsessively patterned surfaces, its fetishistically meticulous finish. “Whodo Guru” Indeed, such is the intensity of his vision that one might be tempted to see him as an extraordinarily gifted outsider artist along the lines Montserrat Contemporary Art of Joe Coleman, if not for the sophisticated subtlety of his personal iconography and the consummate mastery of his realist technique. Dorothy A. Culpepper Lit as though by garish neon that flashes a fluorescent blue, red, Will Brady or violet cast over their skin, the exotic subjects of Hall’s “Diverse Anaguenek Cultural Portraits” series are living embodiments of a surreal culture Annemarie Leon (Sculptor) shock: In “Beauty and the Ugly Truth,” a geisha tattooed like an Rossella Mocerino Aborigine with swirling decorative arabesques and floral patterns Cheryl A. Richey poses primly before a backdrop swarming with the shadows of pliers. Hank Rondina In “Rolex Revolutionary,” a Mexican guerilla in a huge sombrero Ramon Santacana clutches his carbine, as he stands beside a puny purple chihuahua, Peggy Zehring proudly sporting the deluxe timepiece of the title. In “Whodo Rosa Tardiu Guru,” a dubious white-whiskered, cross-legged mystic with a pair Michele Vincent of red Adidas raises a benevolent palm while clutching a human skull Willis Pyle with the other, while shadowy helicopters swarm like insects around Margo Spellman him. Bonelli In another series simply titled “Fish,” Hall’s “Swordfish” casts the 447 West 27th Street big blue meanie adrift in a blood-red sea amid multiple silhouettes 212.268.0088 of sexy spike-heeled shoes, as though quite literally navigating undercurrents of S&M eroticism. And in other paintings from the www.montserratgallery.com same series, the undersea creatures appear somehow as pregnant with potential chaos as torpedoes unleashed from a submarine, as they stream alone or in schools through the ocean depths, driven by blind instincts not unlike our own. Stephen Hall is an artist with a unique aesthetic sensibility which, as one of his aforementioned titles indicates, embraces beauty and “the ugly truth” as equal partners in the murky existential miasma that is life. His paintings confront us with complex conundrums for which THE each of many possible solutions may very well tell us as much about ourselves as about the subject at hand. In the hands of a lesser painter such themes would seem BROOME STREET impossible to bring off convincingly; however, Hall’s flawless technique enables him to imbue unlikely juxtapositions of imagery GALLERY with startling verisimilitude. Such classical mastery of a venerable Ground floor, 1,300 sq. ft. medium seems all the more remarkable in an artist who has also thrived creatively in the field of music videos, where he has worked Exhibition space rental available with Lenny Kravitz, the B52’s, and numerous other popular recording personalities. One can only surmise that his forays into 498 Broome Street, New York, NY 10013 newer media contribute to the striking contemporary immediacy that Tel: (212) 941-0130 makes Stephen Hall one of our more exciting Pop Surrealists. –Ed McCormack

Stephen Hall “Diverse Cultural Portraits and Fish,” through February 3, AGallery, 141 West 28th Street

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO 27 Paul M. Cote Journeys from Rage to Raw Beauty aul M. Cote is a postmodern artist conviction of the newly converted. So don’t in his studio shows him spreading paint on Pinspired by the great modernists –– look for traditional technical finesse in his a canvas laid out on the floor with what particularly Jackson Pollock. It could be a big, bold solo show at Caelum Gallery, but appears to be a mop!) The results are thickly coincidence that Cote signs his layered monoliths that often take on the paintings with the nom de brush heft of bas reliefs, given the combination “Cody,” and Pollock grew up of thick pigment and embedded objects in Cody, Wyoming. But like his that lend Cote’s work unique heft and great predecessor, Cote comes depth. across as an artistic cowboy, Characteristically tactile is the canvas lassoing his forms with skeins of called “Lonely Road,” where a winding flung pigment like Buffalo Bill configuration of piled-up pebbles, Cody on mammoth canvases splashed with strident yellow drips, that suggest the expansive scale swerves through and shatters a large red of the Old West. picture frame. One could read obvious At the same time –– since meanings into this work: As in “The Cote often embeds rocks, Wizard of Oz,” following the yellow sea shells, crystals, screws, brick road of art can lead to a magical nails, masks, broken glass, place. But to get there one must be old gold picture frames, and willing to spend many hours working in even whimsical 3-D figures of isolation in the studio. And it will only butterflies festooned with white be worthwhile if, at the end of the day, feathers into his thick impasto the frame of conventional constraints is surfaces –– there’s also a hint shattered and new ground is gained... of the funky 1980s East Village But to second-guess such an open- found-object funk assemblage ended abstraction so specifically, rather ala Julian Schnabel and Jean- than engaging with it primarily for its Michel Basquiat in his explosive autonomous aesthetic attributes, can compositions. Add the Post- be a risky venture. Unless, of course, Pop-Cosmic sensibility of an it is a painting such as the powerfully artist who cites “science fiction indignant “Universal Screwing by and the universe” as two of his BP,” in which Cote vents his rage major enthusiasms; the natural at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill physicality of a kid who grew by engulfing small figures of birds, up playing hockey, baseball, and symbolic scatterings of screws, and other football; the aggressive spirit objects in swirling layers of mucky black of an adult who has earned his pigment. living playing and teaching tennis By contrast, another large canvas, and has trained as competitive hung quadrilaterally, and simply titled bodybuilding –– and you may “Serenity,” draws the viewer into a get some idea of what we are luminous space where crystalline blue dealing with here. and white ripples create the sense of a Cote calls painting “The lyrical aquatic realm in a more perfect Gift,” since it came to him on “Lonely Road” world than our own. an impulse, mercifully ending –– Ed McCormack a period of his life that he now refers to as for the untrammeled passion of a natural “the uncentered years.” Thus he seems to born outsider who appears to wrestle each Paul M. Cote, seen recently at Caelum regard art as something akin to spiritual new composition into submission by sheer Gallery, 508 - 526 West 26th St., Suite 315 salvation and to embrace it with the force of will. (One picture of him at work Olga Atabalova February 8 - 22, 2011 Reception: February 11, 6 - 8pm 2/20 Gallery 220 West 16th Street New York, N.Y. 1011 Tues - Sun 2 - 7pm 212-807-8348 www.220gallery.net

Olga Atabalova was recently awarded the prestigious Saint Michael Gold Metal in Lyrical Fine Arts: Global Tide

28 GALLERY&STUDIO February/March 2011 © Yvonne Maloney - Lydia in Green 48” x

February 4 - February 25, 2011 Reception: Thursday, February 10, 2011 6-8 pm

The manifesTaTion of milieu NEW CENTURY ARTISTS GALLERY PRESENTS NEW EXPRESSIONS 2011 Thomas Ab-e Vera L.P. Cauwenberghs BARBARA CUTHEL n LINDA DUJACK n FRITZ ERISMANN Heather Everett n MARK LERER n MARILYN STEVENSON Younghee Hong n Barbara Cuthel expresses her love of nature Hyejin Kim with collages of the environment where she lives. Thanh Mai-Charles n Linda Dujack is a painter and printmaker whose Ivan Radman art is inspired by the events in her life. David Segeta n Fritz Erismann simply states: “I draw; therefore, Peter Sherman I am.” n Mark Lerer continues to bring his unique style The RhyThm of ColoR to the simple art of drawing. Adka (“Andrea Jones”) n Marilyn Stevenson: “Exploration is the word that best describes my photographic style.” V. S. Ajayan Gisa Elwazir TUESDAY, MARCH 22ND THROUGH SATURDAY, APRIL 9TH Michael Grine OPENING RECEPTIONS: Yunkap Jung SATURDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 26TH FROM 3 P.M. UNTIL 6 P.M. Yvonne Maloney THURSDAY EVENING, APRIL 7TH FROM 6 P.M. UNTIL 8 P.M. Sherry Ruden (aka Sherry Ying) New Century Artists Gallery Laurence Steenbergen 530 West 25th Street, Suite 406 New York, New York 10001 212-367-7072 530 West 25th St., Chelsea, New York 212-226-4151 Fax: 212-966-4380 Gallery Hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. www.Agora-Gallery.com For more information, visit: www.newcenturyartists.org [email protected] Or Email: [email protected]

February/March 2011 GALLERY&STUDIO Fine Arts

Announces the release of Robert Cenedella’s serigraph “HEINZ 57” 35”x24” , 2011 Hand screened on acid-free stock, signed and numbered by the artist (Certificate of authenticity is available upon request)

STUDIO 57 currently represents: Calder Picasso Dali Cenedella Miro Hirschfeld Levine Grosz Gropper Cadmus Benton Pissaro Bellows Renoir Duchamp Landeck Agam Chagal Sloan Wa rh o l

“HEINZ 57” by Robert Cenedella 35”x24”

studio 57 Fine Arts Custom Framing 211 West 57th street new York, nY 10013 212–956–9395