The Disappointment Artist (11 page)

The neighborhood was a laboratory, a zone of mixing, never defined by one ethnicity or class. Mongrel by deep nature, the place absorbed the first scattering of hippies, homosexuals, and painters pretty ungrudgingly. But with signs of a real-estate boom, and a broad displacement of the existing population, the changes were politicized. Our family was drawn into the discomfiting issue of gentrification. We were against it, ideologically. Yet my mother’s native-outerborough gregariousness was a force in the making of a new community; by helping knit the white families to the existing neighborhood, she encouraged pioneers, I think. And my father’s trade was a paradox. Having fled ivory tower for blue-collar solidarity, he soon became a highly sought renovation specialist, a cabinetmaker and sash-and-jamb restorer with an artist’s touch. So he was engaged on a daily basis in rehabbing the brownstones of Boerum Hill for their new owners, gentrifying with his hands.

Sure, we felt the risk of involuntary complicity. We were white families in a minority neighborhood, no way out of that. Symbolic alliances were therefore everything, and neighbors could become rather paranoid. Those who shared our devotions monitored others for insensitivities or worse. New homeowners galvanizing themselves against a rash of burglaries, or urging the sprucing up of a vacant lot, might be guilty of collusion with Establishment institutions, and those, we knew, led straight to Nixon, and the war.

I don’t mean to be flippant. Boerum Hill, like any zone “revived” by white homeownership, was prey to cynical speculation. And, as many an enemies list or secret memo has shown, the paranoids were right. The idealisms of that hour actually now impress me as a gossamer lost world, Proustian in its delicacy. Those shades in the spectrum between
radical
and
guilty liberal
, parsed with such intensity at the time, strike me as poignant from this vantage. Even the uptightest adults I knew as a child nonetheless regarded Watergate and Vietnam as proof our leaders were corrupt, and probably sexually hung up as well. And my parents’ reluctance to be seen as gentrifiers was largely an instinctive pleasure in the neighborhood as they found it.

My father’s art also became communized. His studio was opened to family and friends and to other artists, as well as to a stream of nude models. For a few years he merely drew, dodging, for a time, the ambition and expense of oil on canvas. Or were canvas and oil also suspect, for a time, of being in collusion with Establishment institutions? Instead he drew portraits and nudes, in oil crayon and pencil and sometimes with a wash of brushwork, on sheets of vinyl. The portraits collected our friends and neighbors, of all colors, frequently with their lips parted in mid-conversation. The nudes, of both sexes, were delicate, and sometimes explicit.

At the center of my father’s art practice, at the start of the seventies, was “drawing group.” This was a weekly gathering—sometimes in his studio, but most regularly in the Brooklyn loft of a couple of friends, Bob and Cynthia—of artists who wished to work from a model in the nude. Taking turns arranging for a model, they’d then each chip in the five or six bucks it took to pay the fee. On nights when a model didn’t show up, a few members of the group might take turns shedding clothes to serve in their place. These artists, a shifting cast of seven or eight regulars, were younger than my dad, and none as trained. Yet there was no question that they gathered as other than peers. The drawing group wasn’t set apart from the life of our neighborhood, but rather included people I knew from communes, from my mother’s table. Cynthia ran a local children’s bookstore. Bob was one of my father’s carpentry partners. The group also included one of my family’s own housemates, Nancy. And, for a while, me.

When my father began painting again in the seventies he made the drawing group his subject. The new canvases featured nude models, often, but not always, female. Many also presented some figure of a painter, or watcher, always male. In one sense, this “artists-and-models” subject was highly traditional. (My father, in a dismissive moment, called these paintings “European.”) The work nudged Courbet, Manet, Picasso, calling up an old self-validating drama of the male spectator, recessed in the shadows or glimpsed at one side, in the self-portraitist’s mirror. Here was the painter as an implicit figure of authority, a step apart from life, and for the viewer a flattering surrogate: Apollonian, noncommittal, masterful.

Yet these pictures also undermined or teased that authority. Just as he’d thrown over teaching, and now worked in the company of those who could have been his students, by making the group his subject my father abjured the privilege of an artist’s exclusive sensibility.
Drawing
Group #1
is an example: while the male artist considers a model stretched prone, limbs flung for a gaze-banquet, in the foreground a female artist refines a sketch from an earlier pose. On her pad the nude sits, elbow on knee, an asexual crouch. The disagreement gently mocks erotic wish fulfillment: the pose we’re shown in the painting is just one among many, hardly inevitable. The painter making use of the model hasn’t disregarded the group who’ll chip in to cover the cost (each, we hope, having gotten at least five bucks’ worth of poses they liked too).

Or take
Turning
, finished in 1979. This scene, which began as a simple life study, evolved into a self-conscious drama of mortality, inspired by Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus
. A heroic and vulnerable male nude glances backward at Death the Watcher, who takes the form of an artist standing dispassionately at a drawing table, in deep shadows. But leavening the scene is, again, a series of confessions of a painter’s studio shared with other bodies, with other agendas. A sketcher’s pad intrudes from the lower right. A hand pokes in, to pat the head of a wolfish dog. The model’s robe hangs on a peg, alongside a claw hammer. Robe and hammer forecast the future of the players in this allegory: one will don the robe (it’s chilly in this studio), then his street clothes. The other, resume his labors as a carpenter. There are kids to feed. The dog too.

Variations in degrees of “realism” confound these paintings. So do weird conflations of planar space—shades, again, of De Chirico. In my father’s own thinking, recaptured for me in a recent letter, he’d framed a couple of questions: “How to capture the psychic energy and urgency implied in realism without the dead end of imitation. Not being satisfied to reduce things to generalities—instead wanting the unpurified, tangible quality of experience to come through.” And: “How to eliminate the narrow confines of modernist style without falling into sentimentality.”

My father had seemingly disabled the symbolic and conceptual levels in his painting (all the stuff I pined for, as a child, in preferring the sixties work). In truth, though, his “realist” paintings were full of gestures of grotesquerie and invention. Imagined figures crept onto the canvases, and cartoonish expressions of lust, impatience, or childlike reverie crept over the faces of the artists and models. At the same time, backdrops are strewn with the prosaic: books, workmen’s boots or gloves, coffee mugs, playing cards, documentary touches to decant any psychosexual theatrics. And that shaggy gray dog, mooning at the feet of the models. The dog’s name is Blue. He must have been lonely when we kids were off at school.

As a puppy, Blue was rescued from the street. My mother found him in a state of cringing fear, and near starvation. The dog’s condition wasn’t a mystery, though. He’d been kept in the side yard of the home of a Puerto Rican family two houses away, and my parents had seen him cowering under the hand of their teenage boys’ merry violence for weeks before he’d been set loose on the street.

“The Green House Kids,” as my family called the teeming inhabitants of that ramshackle structure, were a foul bunch. Not that we allowed ourselves to say so at the time. Instead, I and my siblings fostered what now strikes me as a hysterical myth of displacement: we credited our discomfort to the dog, who, we were positive we could determine, “didn’t like Puerto Ricans,” and of course couldn’t be blamed. We got to marvel at his prejudice, guilt free. The parable of Blue’s grudge was a container for our reluctance to give a certain thing its name: we liked plenty of Puerto Ricans, but the nearest at hand, the Green House Kids, were pretty awful.

Blue bore this responsibility nobly, as he did everything. He was a beautiful member of the family.

Open marriage turned to separation in 1975. My father moved out of the house for a while, at one point into another Brooklyn commune, a neighborhood away. I’d say this was the worst thing that could have happened, except that denial has obliterated all but the curiosity I felt, to a point of exhilaration, at the expansion of my world to this new turf. Just for instance, one of the guys in the new commune was just out of NYU film school, and deep into
Star Trek
, my favorite television show after
The
Twilight Zone
. He put my brother and me into his movie, which was being shot on three adjacent rooftops of differing heights, to symbolize the class system in America. My brother and I played the middle-class kids. We got to fling garbage off our roof, onto the heads of the poor.

Anyway, the worst thing that could have happened happened next. My mother fell ill, suffering seizures first taken for epilepsy, but soon diagnosed as symptoms of a brain tumor. This drew our family into one place again, and my father’s studio back into our upper floor. My father’s intensity of purpose didn’t waver; in fact, the body of late-seventies work really begins after my mother’s diagnosis. This was with her passionate encouragement. She sat for him constantly, in her robe, and out of it. The portraits from that year record the patchwork progress of her hair’s regrowth, after being shaved for incisions on her skull, and after her follicles’ damage by radiation.

With the drawing group, and his wife, in this era my father also painted his kids (always fully clothed, though it was a reasonably nudist household). I recall sitting for a portrait with my hands folded, wearing an orange Mets wristband. Though I usually killed posing time by reading in his studio, my father didn’t want a book in this painting. He wanted to see my eyes. In the painting that resulted I sit in the crossroads, bracketed by my father’s palette table and a mirror in which he could see himself; both table and father appear in the portrait.

My father had opened the doors of his studio to the ordinary days of his house. While chasing a “European” theme, his voracious brush gobbled life into the frame. The subject, literal and sublimated, is family, community, and the counterculture, that circle of sympathetic souls into which he’d dissolved his pipe-and-elbow-patches authority. The questing, pensive, contradictory attitudes of the models and the artists, the friends and family and imagined figures arrayed in these pictures tell of the nourishing warmth but also the tenuousness, and sometimes the sexual disarray, of a life lived in the embrace of communal ideals.

In one of the most free and instinctive paintings from this period,
Loft
, the cast is reduced to painter and model (not to mention the dog). She reads, while he greets the viewer head-on, fingers full of brushes, and stripped of reserve in the simplest way—he’s naked too. The title, and the youthfulness of the bemused, tousled painter, link it to a halcyon year of discovery: 1963–64, to Richard and Judith alone in the loft on West Broadway. It’s no self-portrait. The woman doesn’t resemble my mother, or the painter my father. But the rhapsodic brushwork emphasizes the unguarded intimacy of the scene, a page torn from a dream diary in the lives of the bohemians.

Judith Lethem died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. Her death was, of course, a private passage, yet the long illness which she and we endured seemed inextricable from the battles of our family’s life in those years. The souring of utopian optimism in the mid-seventies, a historical cliché, was for us true, and personal. Even before her illness, my family’s difference ensured we could feel superior and magical, or freakish and tragic, but never ordinary. What set us apart as artists or potential artists, and as hippies, protesters, commune dwellers, Quakers, white kids but in public school, all seemed to foretell our special fate, an uncanny story destined, not justly but perhaps somehow appropriately, for an end in hospitals and jails, or an early funeral.

How personal? My mother was one of the “Capitol Steps Thirteen,” a group wrongly arrested during a Washington, D.C., protest for occupying what the ACLU would later prove, in a lawsuit on their behalf, to be public space. She was pregnant with my sister, Mara, at the time. We three kids bragged of this legacy, relishing details such as the slices of baloney the arrestees liberated from their jailhouse sandwiches and slapped up against the wall in protest of their treatment. But we also must have been haunted by the tale, by images of our mom and dad as inhabitants of a sphere of jubilant stridency (electrified by bolts of persecution mania) so beyond the usual boundaries of a family’s life.

If my mother was remarkable then it had to cut both ways. The horrendous diagnosis could only be more evidence of how remarkable she was, signal, not noise, in our interpretation of our family’s place in the world. If our sense of special artistic and political purpose was to be preserved, it would have to conform to tragic destiny as my mother fell ill, just as it would need to encompass the world’s resistance to our standards, made official a few years later by the ascendance of Reagan. The conflation was made, briefly, explicit: we, or at least I, succumbed to the temptation to blame my mother’s brain tumor on Ulano, the toxin-belching solvent factory two blocks away on Bergen Street, and tangible like a punch to the nose for many more blocks around. Here was a chance to widen the circle of chaos and catastrophe from the family, outward to the environment, the political moment.

Ulano, a squat, windowless monstrosity situated exactly between the Wyckoff Gardens housing projects and the gentrifying street I grew up on, had been listed in an EPA report as one of the nation’s ten worst urban polluters. After my mother’s death my father spearheaded the neighborhood’s organized resistance to its undiluted foulness, really the last of his and therefore my family’s sequence of great causes. In truth, if my mother’s brain cancer had an external cause it was likely a bad batch of polio vaccine, whose nightmarish delayed effects on its recipients, neatly matching my mother’s case, were only traced three decades later. The faulty vaccine was distributed in Queens and Brooklyn in the midfifties, the span when my mother would have been immunized.