In 1907, Parisians suffered debilitating fears of deadly sexual diseases, which frequently made the rounds in the whorehouses. Pablo Picasso, a notorious philanderer and libertine (whose last words were reportedly "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more…") was well aware of the dangers posed by the fairer sex. Although in that year he lived with one Fernande Olivier (not to mention frequently referring to Georges Braque as ma femme, or "my wife") he maintained a steady stream of mistresses—and it's no wonder too. Although beautiful, Fernande was once described by Gertrude Stein as unable to talk of anything but hats. To hear Stein tell of it, as she did in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her own autobiography disguised as the memoirs of her lesbian lover—who later became notorious for publishing a recipe for pot brownies in her actual memoir The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), Picasso's life in Montmartre was a whirlwind of scandal. For instance in 1911, he was suspected of being Guillaume Apollinaire's accomplice in the theft of the Mona Lisa, for which the latter was arrested. They were eventually cleared of charges when it was discovered that an overly nationalistic Italian immigrant had stolen the painting, in the hopes of returning it to its country of origin.
The art world is no stranger to such political machinations. Less than twenty-five years later, in 1933, Barnett Newman ran for the mayoralty of New York City, on the anarchist ticket—a stance that he later influenced Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still to adopt. It is not known how many votes he received. Newman's platform was built on his manifesto On the Need for Political Activity by Men of Culture, which called for "more extensive education, a greater emphasis upon the arts and crafts, and the fostering of cultural living conditions." Ironically, Newman's successful mayoral rival Fiorello LaGuardia founded The High School of Music and Art (now called simply "LaGuardia") just three years later. It is doubly ironic considering that Newman failed the certification test required to teach art not once but three separate times.
Newman's sometime friend and supporter Clement Greenberg was no stranger to failure either. When the popular favorite of the American art world transitioned to Pop Art from Abstract Expressionism, which he had championed, Greenberg left the country and was caught in the grip of heavy drinking. As a teacher at Courtauld Institute of Art, he frequently set meetings with students at 11 am at the Dorchester Bar—his students have reported that his favorite drink was triple vodka on the rocks. Jackson Pollock (who was, incidentally, a womanizer on par with Picasso) was also a notorious drunk, and was known for picking fights with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at a downtown club in New York called the Cedar Tavern. Art historian Irving Sandler has postulated that he persisted in these fights because he was bigger than either of the other men. Once, when Greenberg was drunk at a party, David Hockney tried to explain plans for a volume of what he called "collected thoughts." Greenberg, having none of it, screamed, "Get away from me you cripple!" Evidently he believed Hockney to be intellectually handicapped.
In 1993 Yves-Alain Bois described his (in his own words) intellectual blackmail by Hans Haacke, who had found Greenberg's stance on the Vietnam War to be "discreditable." Haacke himself has been the subject of attempted discredit: he has had several shows cancelled by their host institutions in the eleventh hour. The first and most famous of these was at the Guggenheim in 1971: the curator of the cancelled show, Edward Fry, was fired, but went on to formulate a theory by which Barnett Newman's paintings could be deciphered using numerical analysis and an application of the rule of the golden mean. Haacke was born in 1936 in Cologne, a city whose coat of arms includes 11 tears, representing the massacre of 11,000 virgins at the hands of a king of the Huns. Also in 1936, poet Paul Eluard introduced Picasso to Dora Maar (his future mistress) at the Café Les Deux Magots. Picasso had become interested to meet her after seeing Maar stab herself in the hand.
Two years later Robert Smithson was born. His childhood health was safeguarded by his pediatrician, poet William Carlos Williams, who during that time was questioned by the FBI after Ezra Pound said "Old Doc Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey will know what I mean," in an Italian radio broadcast criticizing American governance. Smithson entered the Art Students League in 1953, exactly thirty years after Barnett Newman himself enrolled, and the same year Newman failed the certification test to teach English in addition to the requisite test to teach art. Smithson has said that he wanted to attend the ASL because a public school teacher had told him that "the only people who become artists are cripples and women."
Apparently, though, that teacher was wrong: stateless refuges can become artists as well. In 1957, Bulgarian-born Christo escaped Communist Czechoslovakia by hiding in the back of a truck headed for Austria. Christo was stateless until marrying Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon in 1962, two years after the birth of their son—whom she had carried to term through her engagement and short marriage to another man. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were both born on the June 13, 1935. Jeanne-Claude's mother was a fighter in the French Resistance, and Christo's early life was filled with marked poverty until he discovered that he was the disenfranchised heir to a secret ball bearing fortune. In 1991, two people were killed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude's artwork. In 1973, Robert Smithson was killed in a plane crash. In 1956, Jackson Pollack was killed in a drunk driving accident. In 1816, over 130 people died in the wreck of the French frigate The Medusa, most from murder. Many were subsequently cannibalized.
The rescue of the few crewman who survived the catastrophe was depicted in one of only three paintings Théodore Géricault exhibited in his lifetime. Géricault, who died young from complications following a riding accident, was a strapping gentleman known for overriding stallions for pleasure. Upon his death, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal, "he was not precisely my friend." The painting, entitled Raft of The Medusa, is currently held in the Louvre, from which the Mona Lisa was stolen, and to which it was eventually returned.
It is thought that Modern art can find its beginnings in 1907, on the day when Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographic in the Palais du Trocadero and saw African sculpture for the first time. As he once explained to André Malraux, Picasso felt that the figures in his La Demoiselles d'Avignon, all whores, needed protection from the venereal disease running rampant through Paris—which the masks (emblems of protection for the tribes who made them) provided. The thinking goes that he painted from the masks in the Trocadero. But the thinking is wrong. While his inspiration may have found its locus there, the masks were actually painted from Iberian primitives stolen from the Louvre by Belgian drifter Géry Pieret, and sold to Picasso in that very year.
Sometimes, as they say, the truth is stranger than fiction. But rarely is the truth stranger than Bruce High Quality.
A Condensed Philosophy of the Use of the Mask in The Bachelors of Avignon
[ Note: This essay will appear in a chapter discussing the BHQF projects Stalking Haacke, The Bachelors of Avignon, Raft of the Medusa, History of the New York School as Food, and The Gate ]
