It’s no secret that I love Tom
Wolfe and loved Richard Merkin. Well, actually, I still love Richard Merkin.
There’s enough of Richard on my walls and in my sartorial literature files for
me to consider him still here.
I love Tom Wolfe’s dandified
cocksurety – his Southern lilted verbal aplomb when gracefully responding to
such charges as his novels aren't really novels and indictments that cry "for
God’s sake man, get a better f_cking editor." I won’t characterize Wolfe’s posture and
conversation as self-deprecating because it isn't Here’s my take—Wolfe has an
ivory, tight-twist gabardine swathed, steely, courteous elegance. With a scant
lisp.
And then we have Wolfe’s great personal friend, Merkin. If I was ever limited to one depiction of Merkin, it would be Alan Flusser’s take on the
multifaceted flâneur…and I paraphrase loosely here because I’m too lazy to walk
across the room and pull the reference. But Alan said that “coming upon Merkin
on the street is like walking through a Bazaar in Marrakesh. You don’t know what
to look at first!” Bam. I mean really. Merkin was Brooklyn and Coney Island to
Wolfe’s Richmond and Yes Ma’am No Ma’am.
Both may be assigned to the
Sartorial Dandy Pantheon but their nomination dossiers, while equal in content,
would be thematically opposite. The case for Wolfe’s membership would be firmly
affixed to an unwavering, off-white, monochromatic gaggle of forensics.
Merkin’s
on the other hand, wouldn’t be firmly affixed to a damn thing – At least not
one singularly thematic thing. His bipolar variance in color, texture, epoch
and melody made my fuzzy-ass closet look like a storage rack of identical burgundy choir robes. I’d reckon
that Merkin’s folder would surely contain his own words when he posited that
his sartorial style was “somewhere between the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of
Ellington.”
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| Photo from Rose Callahan's Dandy Portraits |
And I just think it’s cool
as hell to have friends—true friends—those anything but Facebook defined
friends—you know—the ones who would come get you at three in the morning. Well
that was Merkin and Wolfe. I borrowed from Rose Callahan, this photo of Merkin, Wolfe and their other great friend, lawyer Eddie Hayes.
I’m always on the lookout for
Merkin ephemera...having all of his GQ columns that he wrote over twenty years
ago and of course, the treasures that his widow, Heather, sent me after
Merkin died. And recently I came across a few
exhibition catalogues from Merkin's gallery shows back in the early 1990’s. And
much to my delight, Tom Wolfe wrote the introduction to the Helander Galleries’
1992 Merkin show, Better Days. Unlike you high-minded, copy
editors-in-another-life, critics of Wolfe’s words,I, the verbose lexiconical
rambler my-damn-self, would read Wolfe’s grocery lists if they were availed to
me. So reading his Helander-Merkin treatise was great fun. Shut the ___ up.
So this morning, with reverence
but without permission from Bruce Helander or others who might have copy rights
and prefer that I not transcribe Wolfe’s essay, I typed from the exhibition
catalogue, one friend’s erudite commentary on contemporary art in general, in
tandem with his more specific efforts to convey and characterize the other
friend’s art. For those who, like me,
love art and Wolfe and Merkin, I hope you enjoy reading it.
“The
paintings and pastels of Richard Merkin are part of a strain of Modernism that
is well established in England, the home of his natural brethren, R.B. Kitaj, FrancisBacon, Peter Blake Lucien Freud, Ronald Searle, Henry Lamb, Michael Andrews, StanleySpencer, and David Hockney. They are what might be called the Modernist Wits. This
creates a problem – even for Bacon – since within the art world, and especially
the American art world, Modernism and Wit are a contradiction in terms.
Merkin
like his confreres, uses various stylistic devices of Modernism; in his case,
two-dimensional pictures, solid blocks of color, abstracted shapes,
conventional contours, unshaded forms, and so-called all-over design, in which
no part of a picture has any greater weight than any other, All that is on the credit
side of the ledger up in Art Heaven, of course. But Merkin, like the other
wits, presents subject matter that violates one Modernist taboo after another.
As tout le monde, or tout lemonade d’art, knows, a picture is not supposed to
tell a little story, suggest an anecdote, be funny, make you cry or get angry,
tune up the sentimental side of your nature, illustrate the world around you, dwell
upon historical details for their journalistic or historic value, or present
likenesses for their own sake. Alas, these are sins that Wits wallow in.
The art world
will allow exceptions from time to time, the most notable being Picasso’s large
cartoon comment on the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, painting at a moment when
anti-Fascist feeling and Left sentiment had reached their apogee among European
and American intellectuals. Guernica was expressly designed to make the viewer
weep and get angry over Francisco Franco’s bombing of civilians(and will
probably be viewed by art students in the 21st century, with their
damnable detachments from the problems of our epoch, as a howler, one of the
most ludicrous pictures ever taken seriously by well-educated people). It is
worth noting that Picasso never attempted such pictorial comment again, returning
forever after to the safe and fashionable imagery of classical mythology.
Pop Art
wasn’t even an exception. The Pop artists never illustrated the world around
them or even created their own images from it. Pop was a studio game played
within a tight set of Modernist rules, eventually codified by the Pop
Apollinaire, Lawrence Alloway. The Pop artists took their images not from life
but from art created by anonymous graphic artists and industrial designers
including flags and numbers and letters found in commercial printing fonts. Some,
such as Warhol, never did anything other than lift images directly from existing
commercial art or photographs, altering only the size and coloring, if that much.
Others did near-copies. The game, said Alloway, consisted of producing pictures
that were neither abstract nor realistic but rather had to do with “sign
systems.” There is not a single painting within the canon of Pop in which an
artist attempts his own depiction of life in the extraordinary decade in which
Pop grew up, the 1960’s.
Underlying
the Modernist stance, whether one is talking about style, content or theory, is
the belief that the great artist is a holy beast , a natural who receives
flashes, known as inspiration, straight from the godhead which is known as
Creativity. A holy beast is not a rational, calculating, analytical, and
intellectually detached person. In fact, in the Modernist view, rationality,
calculation, analysis, and detachment are detritus, impediments to creativity.
The Modernist artist is supposed to be like the Gnostic Christian, who sought
to get rid of the detritus of civilization in order to reveal the light of God
that exists at the apex of every human soul. Draftsmanship, true rendering,
perspective, and shading are all analytical undertakings. So are wit, satire
and commentary. In the Modern view these are all pieces of age-old junk that must
be thrown out.
In England
the art world – which consists of about five hundred dealers, curators,
professors, critics and artists in London, Oxford and Cambridge who determine
all matters of taste – has never been completely dominated by orthodox
Modernism. There has remained some room in which the mavericks such as Kitaj
and Bacon could cut up. But in the American art world, which consists of about
300 similar souls (some 300 of whom do not live in the New York City area)
orthodoxy is a far more solemn business.
Merkin’s
very picture titles, Van Lingle Mungo’s
Havana, Our First Detective of the Broken Heart are a gob of spit in the
face of Modernist taste, since they actually describe the pictures, which are
loaded with specific historic references, and are shamelessly entertaining.
Stylistically, Merkin has been as Modern as any of the Wits. Particularly in
his Van Lingle Mungo period, the mid-1970’s, his work was rigorously
two-dimensional, his contours were highly conventionalized, his canvases were
covered edge to edge and corner to corner, with solid color shapes of equal
density, field and figure were given equal emphasis, no matter how amusing the
figures – and the figures tended, like Mungo, a one-time pitcher for theBrooklyn Dodgers, to be long gone down Funny Street. The typical Merkin picture
takes legendary American images – from baseball, the movies, fashion, Society,
tabloid crime and scandal – and mixes them with his own autobiography, often
with dream-style juxtapositions. Merkin himself is always recognizable as the
toff with the Cold Stream Guards mustache, popping up amid the romp.
In the
past he has been as much a colorist and all over designer as, say, Matisse or, to bring the matter closer
to home, Malcolm Morley, an Australian now living in the United States (who
could perhaps be included in the ranks of Modernist Wits). In his most recent
work, however, Merkin has begun to violate even the stylistic taboos. In 1990,
in paintings such as Re: Joe Stern #2,
he began to use a draftsmanship more sophisticated, more in the vein of 1920s
European satirical art, than anything allowed in the Modernist canon. In the current
show, he gives us graphic focal points such as the white figure in pith helmet
against a swath of black in Our First
Detective of the Broken Heart. The focus is re-emphasized by the use of
lines of perspective in the roof above. This is not the Modernist way.
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The
truth may well be the Merkin is impossible to characterize even with a grouping
such as the Modernist Wits. The fascinating thing, in the last analysis, is not
that he is in some way like Kitaj or Bacon or Searle or Spencer of Hockney or
that the whole crowd has swum upstream – but, rather that he, like them, his
kinfolk, has managed in an age of High Orthodoxy to become that rarest of
creatures, the artist who is sui generis.”
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