The Renaissance Weldon Kees

fr! THE RENAISSANCE OF WELDON KEES more romantic figure is the poet Weldon Kees, who represents an anomaly in the tradition, for he had a hand that "held chalk," and brushes, as well. A member of the avant-garde of the forties and fifties, Kees was one of the By james Reidel " lrascibles," through he does not appear in their 1951 Life group portrait. It is not as if he The figure of the poet before a work of art had been air-brushed out of art history; his abandoned on an approach ramp to the is a less meddlesome interruption of the spec- neglect is the product of his own disengage- Golden Gate Bridge. Every indication that he tator's view than a welcome presence, for the ment from what we normally expect of an art- had jumped to his death was present except poet, as one of its more adept interpreters, has ist's career. for his body. The rumor that he had disap- had a longstanding relationship to visual art. Weldon Kees was born in the small, peared to Mexico started with him, but Although a tradition reaches further back than agricultural and industrial city of Beatrice, everyone who heard it heard the other option " Ode On A Grecian Urn," those of us who Nebraska, in 1914, a time of the birth of an of suicide, too. felt that it was enough to follow Keats as he important generation of American poets who Kees's sculpture, which his letters indicate made his circumspection will understand the would inherit the legacy of The Waste Land. was made up of "found" objects, has not sur- " figure of the poet" not as a teaching assis- During his brief but productive literary career, vived. What is left of oeuvre-the paintings tant running a slide projector, but rather as Kees wrote three books of verse and a number and the collages, dispersed by the poet's a companion of our imaginations. of short stories. He also wrote copy for Para- father, a retired hardware manufacturer who Today poetry "suggested" by trips to mount's newsreel service and turned out gave his son's pictures away as mementos- galleries has become a genre, in spite of the cultural essays for Time, The Nation, Partisan exists in a few institutions and private collec- academicism of the forties and fifties that Review, and other magazines. In 1951, he tions; nonethless, Kees was the kind of artist made poems based on Renaissance paintings worked as a behavioral science researcher whose life suggests an importance that needs quaint anachronisms-usefu l as exercises for under Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch. neither a large body of work nor a sizable writing students. However, in 1974, John With the latter he co-authored Nonverbal Com- reputation to sustain it. Ashbery 's "Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror" munication, for which Kees contributed Kees arrived at painting out of a sense that used Parmigianino's painting not as rrwrely a photographs and an essay on schizophrenic delimiting himself as a writer was to fall into fo cal point but as a range of foci that function- art. an existential trap he saw as an indication of ed as a mirror. To some degree, Ashbery's It was on July 18, 1955, following a long, a sick culture. His attitude may have been ap- most important poem is didactic, for it in- traumatic separation from his wife, that The propriated from T.S. Eliot's essay, "Notes structs us to see the significance of a work of New Republic printed a review by Kees entit- Toward A Definition Of Culture," in which art by reducin g all criteria to the "whole" of led "How To Be Happy: Installment 1053, " in Eliot argued that the "artistic sensibility is im- the spectator: "The hand [that] holds no which he described "our present atmosphere poverished by its separation from the religious chalk and th e work that "cannot know it of mistrust, violence, and irrationality, with sensibility, the religious by its separation from knew, except/Here and there, in cold so many human beings murdering the artistic." Kees, like other poets who ad- pockedts/Of ,rememberance. " This is what themselves-either literally or symbolically. mired Eliot while disregarding his Anglo- Carolyn Porche hascalled " the entropy of in- ." That same day, Kees's car, with his Catholicism as a tergiversation from the terpretation"-the revelation that all exegesis Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute lab coat Waste-Land-ethos, seems to have adapted this is reduced to the self at the moment it con- neatly folded on the front seat, was found argument by replacing religion with other arts. sum es a vvo rk of art. Another indication of Kees 's motives for tak- Poets hav e also been , of course, critics of ing up painting can be found, conincidental- art ; Ashbery, again, comes to mind, but a far ly, in the same issue of Partisan Review w here 68 Provincetown Ar :s Sum mer 1987 enlisted Kees to devise his first piece of art criticism: the note for a printed announcement of a Byron Browne exhibition indicates a mature criterion, one that not only valued the image, but the act of painting, an act that translated, for Kees, into the pleasure of see- ing the operation of an origional imagination. And it seems that Kees could not resist know- ing this pleasure in a manner few critics ever know it. One of his friends, the artist Romare Beardon, reported: "On one visit to Weldon's I noticed a painting above the sofa. I asked him who had done it. He knew so many painters, I assumed it was a gift; so I was sur- prised when he told me that he indeed was the artist." By 1948, Kees had left Paramount so that he could devote more time to painting and writing. Some of his pictures were certainly done in Provincetown, where he summered with Hans Hofmann's entourage. Although Kees was not a student of Hofmann's, he must have benefited from his contact with the German-born artist who was such a crucial in- fluence in the making of an American avant- garde. Kees, in fact, assisted Hofmann in the English-language versions of statements on his teaching and aesthetics. Later in the same year, Kees had his first Eliot's piece appears. In an omnibus review one-man exhibition at the Peridot Gallery, one and transitional figures lik e Arshile Gorky. of little magazines, Kees betrays the feeling of the important outlets, along with the Kootz There is some debt or Miro, fr om whom Kees common among his generation's writers-that Gallery and Betty Parsons, of Abstract Expres- adapted delicate, rather sculptural forms; they did not measure up to their predecessors: sionist art. Subsequently, Kees's work would many of Kees's paintings from the New ''There is a good deal to be said against the be represented in the Whitney annuals for York period impress the viewer with this intellectual product of the twenties; yet those 1949 and 1950. And his work appeared in the aspect of sculpture, for they seem like balanc- writers who established themselves in that smaller, more provocative group exhibitions ing acts whose curvilinear shapes suggest period, and who still exist, reminding us oc- that often signaled a new trend. For example, Calder's. Last, we find the presence of Klee casionally of creatures from another age- Kees was included in the "Black Or White" in Kees's figurative images. Given his in- cummings, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, etc.- show put on by the Kootz Gallery. His name sightful app.raisal of Robert Motherwell in remain our most gifted avant-garde con- on the exhibition's printed announcement Magazine Of Art, Kees may have thought the tributors. The competition from those who makes it possible to associate him with de " image" of the materials was a higher followed is a sporadic affair only. If that was Kooning, Motherwell, Mondrian, and Dubuf- criterion: " In Motherwell ... a new kind of a Wasteland [sic] and they were the Lost fet. Such documentation, like an apocryphal subject matter becomes manifest. It is paint Generation, then what is this moldy milieu in relic, makes it doubly perplexing that Kees's itself. The paintings are quite simply 'about' which we find ourselves; and what are we?" name has been omitted from this group since paint." (lt should not be lost that Kees is one If Kees posed a problem for himself, then its 1950. And what could be stranger than theap- of the few critics who understood the praxis solution seems to have Jain outside of an ex- pearance of his obscure American poet among of what he was writing about.) clusively literary career. And when he wrote figures from the international art elite except Kees did not, however, sterili ze the content this in 1944, there was a milieu beginning to that during this period Kees assumed The Na- of his pictures of human concerns or of social form-artists and their advocates, the new tion's art column that his friend, Clement commentary. In contrast to the works of his gallery-owners, and critics who saw Greenberg, had given up. friend, William Baziotes, the one "science" themselves as the new wave of an American Although very few of Kees's works are ex- painting attributed to Kees is not a celebration art. tant (their repositories range from the Univer- of flora and fauna preserved at the Museum Whether Kees began to write about painting sity of Nebraska's small fine-arts museum to of Natural History.

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