Cache Health

Art Waves commentaries, 2004-2009: A Selection

Theft: A Love Story

Broadcast 8/31/06

In Peter Carey’s new novel, everyone is a crook. The primary narrator, a washed-up Australian painter named Michael Boone, alias Butcher Bones, steals from his patron, who has stolen Michael’s wife. The ex-wife, Michael believes, has stolen his paintings, as well as their son, in the divorce settlement. Michael, in turn, steals someone else’s wife, Marlene Liebowitz, who steals anything that isn’t nailed down–and more. Even the detective who pursues her reveals himself as a petty thief. Dealers steal from artists, collectors steal from dealers, and so it goes, right down to the New York taxi drivers who rob Butcher of his equilibrium–or at least give him someone else to blame for his agitation and clouded judgment.

Michael’s mentally retarded brother Hugh–or Slow, as his nickname has it–steals more benignly, almost by default. His is the other narrative voice, a dark, distorted echo of his brother’s. He reminds me of John Steinbeck’s Lenny in “Of Mice and Men,” large, strong and volatile, a protector and an avenger. His real crime is to witness the fraud and deception all around him, which makes him potentially even more dangerous. In a sense, you might say that he steals the truth and stores it away in his poor, addled brain. Occasionally it comes spilling out, and that’s always messy.

This larcenous tale is set in the art world of the early 1980s, when Michael’s star is most definitely on the wane. Now in his late 30s, he’s already a has-been in the insular Australian art market, where he was cock of the walk–pun intended–ten years earlier. Oh, the fickle finger of fate. We might muse that this son of a provincial butcher had a phenomenal run of luck, first to escape the family business, which his rough-hewn father was grooming him to inherit–hence his nickname. Then actually to achieve some measure of success as an artist, even if only in his homeland. But no, Michael is mordantly bitter, self-flagellating and comically hapless, a cross between Kurt Vonnegut’s Rabo Karabekian and Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimson–which made me wonder whether Peter Carey is related to the author of “The Horse’s Mouth.”

The plot hinges on the theft of a very valuable painting by Marlene’s long-dead father-in-law–a cubist ranked right up there with Picasso and Braque–and the disappearance of another of his masterpieces. It has a couple of unlikely twists, which I won’t give away, although I will say that the ending is a bit too pat for my taste. The book’s real rewards are in the reading itself, in Carey’s use of language, although it’s very hard to find a suitable passage to quote on the air. The text is heavily larded with vulgarity and profanity, which gives it an earthy tone that suits the characters perfectly. It also cleverly masks the quicksilver turns of phrase and the dead-on aperçus that give Carey’s writing its punch.

Here is Hugh reflecting on his brother’s reaction to Marlene’s promise to get him a solo show in Tokyo:

“It is a big bloody mystery to me that a man so set against Queen Elizabeth of England could get himself so rigid about the crown princess of Japan, but soon he has a great stiffy, throbbing like a sock full of grasshoppers. And who am I to understand his secret squirming brain?”

No mystery at all, Slow Bones. You got the simile just right, and you nailed your brother’s hypocracy in that about-face on royalty. Principles be damned. This is his chance for a comeback. And he’s about to grab it by the you-know-whats.

In fact, this is not so much his comeback as his payback for the enormous favor he’s about to do Marlene, who has a vested interest in, shall we say, his success. In the end, the artist is nothing more than a hired gun, producing to order what he thinks, or knows, will please his client. That he happens to be in love with his client is a minor complication. In their odyssey from Sydney to SoHo, Michael discovers the true extent of Marlene’s thievery, but along the way he accumulates a raft of insights–none of which are of any use to him, of course.

Time, the greatest thief of all, teaches him nothing.

For “In the Morning,” I’m Helen Harrison.

Art Waves commentaries, 2004-2009: A Selection

Art Czar

Broadcast 1/18/07

For this latest look at the life and career of the man widely regarded as the most influential American art critic of the 20th century, the author, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, had access to Greenberg’s papers, which were bought by the Getty a few years ago. Apparently he never threw away a single scrap of paper, and Marquis struck more than one rich vein in that particular gold mine. Two especially valuable sources are the drafts and revisions of his articles, reviews and lectures, including lots of unpublished material, and his journals, which give a day-by-day account of his social and professional life, and often of his moods as well.

art czar Another treasure trove is his correspondence with a college friend, Harold Lazarus, which were published in 2000 as “The Harold Letters.” If ever there was a case to be made for burning one’s youthful ramblings, these letters make it–and Marquis, a visiting scholar at U. Cal. San Diego, uses them extensively to prove what a creep Greenberg was, pretty much from the get-go.

This is not a long book, and I felt that there was more to the story than I was given–hell, I know there was. Both Marquis, and Greenberg’s previous biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, came to the Pollock-Krasner House to do research, since we have relevant material in the archives. He was, after all, one of Jackson Pollock’s most ardent champions, and was a frequent visitor to the house while the artist was alive. He came back for a talk to our Stony Brook graduate students in 1991, three years before his death, and that was the only time I met him. By then he was physically frail, racked by emphysema, but mentally alert, sober and still feisty–although he was better behaved than I’d expected, given his reputation as a combative and even insulting speaker, as well as a mean drunk.

Marquis wades deep into these murky waters, ascribing much of Greenberg’s arrogance and bluster to–here we go again–Jewish self-hatred. Yes, the Harold letters contain ample evidence of his disdain for his co-religionists, yet he worked as an editor of a Jewish magazine, and maintained that every word he ever wrote was a reflection of his Jewishness. He also expressed plenty of disdain for Gentiles, homosexuals, artists and women–no indication of his feelings for small furry animals, but since they have heartbeats he probably wasn’t too fond of them, either. So maybe the guy was just a neurotic screw-up with a non-denominational chip on his shoulder.

Certain aspects of Greenberg’s public life have already been thoroughly rehearsed, including his adversarial relationship with his fellow critic Harold Rosenberg, his involvement in the art market, which some people accused him of manipulating to benefit the artists he favored, and his high-handed attitude toward the sculpture in the estate of David Smith, of which he was an executor. But other, more intimate, things, like the unbalanced state of mind often revealed in his journal entries, and the insecurity illustrated by the obsessive self-criticism of his own writings and statements, haven’t been so thoroughly examined before, and they really make you wonder how the guy got to be so powerful.

On that point I have to quibble with the book’s title, “Art Czar.” Yes, it’s catchy, but it implies that Greenberg occupied an imperial position in the art world, with an army of defenders at his command. On the contrary, he was a lonely voice crying out in a philistine wilderness, even during his heyday in the 1940s and 50s, and even moreso after the advent of Pop art opened the floodgates to the sort of lowbrow kitsch he despised.

As long as I’m quibbling, there are also some careless mistakes in the book, like the wrong name for an important organization founded in 1936, the American Abstract Artists, which Marquis says continued until the 1960s but in fact still exists, and for Solomon Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting. She also gives the wrong date for the opening of his niece Peggy’s avant-garde gallery, Art of This Century.

She writes that there was only a single museum of modern art in the United States in the 1940s, inexplicably forgetting about the Phillips Collection in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, not to mention the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. She dismisses Pollock’s parents as “what we would now call trailer trash,” but they were nothing of the sort–they were hard-working property owners. And she maintains that Pollock wasn’t able to cash in on the publicity from a profile in Life magazine, but a few pages later she notes, quite correctly, that he sold a record number of works from the show he had three months after the article appeared. Sounds to me suspiciously like cashing in.

To be sure, these are minor shortcomings in a biography that’s otherwise well written and carefully researched, although the end notes aren’t as comprehensive as I would wish. Maybe the problem is more with the subject than with the author. Marquis’s Greenberg left me feeling ambivalent–wanting to know more about the world he lived in, but feeling I now know more than I want to about the kind of man I wouldn’t care to know at all.

For “In the Morning,” I’m Helen Harrison.