Art for dirt's sake, page 2

there's nothing wrong, of course, with curiosity about the origins of any artist's inspiration, and seeking hard information is the biographer's primary task. But that said, Jill Johnston's "Jasper Johns: Privileged Information" and Richard Meryman's "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life" — seem more prurient and oddly curdled than most. Johnston rakes through John's life and work on what is ostensibly a scholarly mission to uncover a "secret" figure in many of his paintings, and along the way she crudely and almost maliciously spills the details of John's relationships with Robert Rauschenberg and with one of his friend Merce Cunningham's male dancers. Meryman tries so hard to rough up Andrew Wyeth's burnished image (he lingers around the woozy attraction Wyeth felt for a female teenage model, as well as the possibility he had a sexual relationship with Helga Testorf, the subject of the famous "Helga" paintings) that his generally amiable authorized biography often feels like it's straining for effect. Both of these books pale, however, beside Anthony Haden-Guest's rollicking "True Colors," which relates what Haden-Guest calls the "wild history" of the last several decades in the art world almost entirely through inside gossip and madcap innuendo. And what gossip it is! Watch as Robert Hughes, Time magazine's art critic, stalks into the SoHo night, firing his shotgun, after his motorcycle is stolen. Or as minimalist Brice Marden tries to publicly punch out an egomaniacal Julian Schnabel. Or as David Salle and gallery owner Mary Boone invest in plastic surgery, or as Salle soaks up most of his important early artistic impulses while working at Stag magazine. Or as Tony Shafrazi attacks Picasso's "Guernica" with a can of spray paint in order to create his "own" artwork, is imprisoned, then returns to New York as a successful dealer in graffiti art. Haden-Guest artfully piles anecdote upon anecdote, turbulent show upon turbulent show, somehow stringing them all together into something that's far more than merely a book-length New York Observer article. The funny (and sad) thing about "True Colors" is that you finish it feeling that Haden-Guest has indeed captured the frazzled and fractured tenor of the art world over the last several decades. Gruesomely readable, "True Colors" evokes what feel like the final spasms of a dying universe. You pore over it — as you do each of these very different books — searching for clues about how and when American art, its critics and its audience each began to run off on separate rails. If you believe Anthony Haden-Guest, there are exactly three kinds of art writers in the world today— "the scholar-poets of the art press, the heavy guns of the 'quality' press, [and] the jokers in the tabloids." What he doesn't say is that, more and more often, art writers are a bit of all three. Take the critic and memoirist Jill Johnston, author of the new book "Jasper Johns: Privileged Information." Johnston is an accomplished scholar who never once hides her admiration for the man who may well be America's most revered living artist. Now in his late 70s, Johns is currently the subject of a major career retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and his paintings have consistently sold for spectacular sums — more money than those of any of his contemporaries. Johnston's book is heavy on Deep Think scholarship. In fact, she reads Johns' paintings so carefully and so ardently that she works herself into a lather over the autobiographical clues that Johns, a famously reclusive man, has allegedly "hidden" in them — most notably a dark, recurring figure from a 16th-century painting, an image she links to Johns' premonitions about death or AIDS. In Johnston's view, such clues are left like a popcorn trail for any critic sensitive enough to see them; they're Johns' fey method of crying for attention. When confronted with Johnston's theories, of course, Johns clams up. "I'm not going to tell you anything," he says, before denying her the right to reprint his work in the book (a severe blow), and forbidding his family members to talk to her. This isn't just shyness on Johns' part. "I'm interested in things which suggest the world rather than suggest the personality," he has said, alluding to his remote and non-personal artwork. He wants his paintings to be judged outside of any amateur psychologizing, or any sentimentalizing. For Johnston, of course, Johns' reluctance to participate in her project is a spur to action, and before you know it she's after her subject like Ahab stalking the White Whale. And stalking is the only word for it. Johnston becomes what she calls an "art PI," digging into Johns' troubled childhood (his parents divorced young, and he grew up largely with relatives), his early career, and his sexual life among a group of other accomplished gay men that included Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. She also knowingly traces Johns' career from his early neoclassical flags and targets and beer cans (work that prefigured Pop art) to his later, more abstract, paintings. But before you know it, "Jasper Johns: Privileged Information" starts to get awfully wiggy. Johnston begins to badger Johns at airports, at conferences and at dinners, slipping things in his pockets and passing "meaningful" stares. By the book's close, it'd be hard to blame Johns if he'd begun wondering whether Johnston wasn't about to become his personal Valerie "I Shot Andy Warhol" Solanas. Here's a typical passage, aquiver with both Johnston's own fragile ego (she's angry that her successful friends avoid her) and a sense of weird foreboding, about one gallery opening: "Now more practiced in the art of alienated behavior required of meeting artists of long personal acquaintance, even friendship, in public settings where the object is lionization, I made no move at the d'Offay, as I had before, to advance on my quarry [Johns], or to provoke a mutual greeting. I stole glances in his direction and kept a steady disinterested look. Then when he swept by within feet of me to talk to some princess or collector or someone, I reached over and deposited a pin in his jacket pocket. It was an image of the Mona Lisa designed in puzzle pieces I had just bought at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. As he looked down at his trespassed pocket, then up at me, I brandished a rueful, one might even say heroic, smile." This is a critic on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sadly, much of "Jasper Johns: Privileged Information" breaks down, too. Johnston isn't a skilled biographer: The scanty information about Johns' life she does include here feels either secondhand or scurrilous, and she does a haphazard job of linking it to Johns' work. That 16th-century figure, for all the import she puts into it, remains a mysterious blob. For all of Johnston's straining, unfortunately, so does Jasper Johns. Richard Meryman, the author of "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret History," is more of what Haden-Guest might call a heavy gun than a genuine scholar. A former editor at Life magazine, he met Wyeth while on assignment in 1964 and they've been close ever since. Wyeth eventually accepted Meryman as his authorized biographer, with two stipulations: that Meryman write a "tough" and honest book, as pitiless as the painter's best portraits, and that the artwork produced therein not be treated reverentially but bleed roughly across pages. Wyeth was right about the artwork. This is a lovely, hefty book, full of color plates, sketches, and drawings, that will be impressive even to readers who aren't convinced that Wyeth is anything more than a somewhat sentimental regional painter. And he was right, too, to insist on a no-holds-barred portrait. Yet you read "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life" wondering if Meryman took him too much at his word. Because while there was plenty of darkness in Wyeth's life, you finish Meryman's book feeling that he insists on that darkness a little too much. To be fair, Meryman does a strong job of laying out the details of Wyeth's life in New England and the influences that led him to become among the most stubbornly "unmodern" of contemporary artists — a realist whose career has been almost entirely at odds with an art world that's lurched toward abstraction. Meryman is particularly good at evoking the bustle of the Wyeth family's life during Andrew's childhood. He and his multiple siblings were ruled over with both love and an iron fist by their omnipresent and larger-than-life father, the blustery painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth. Alternately sheltered, bullied, tutored and encouraged by his domineering father, it is Meryman's contention that Wyeth began to "hate" him — although the two would remain very close until the elder Wyeth's tragic death (his car was hit by a train). While Meryman would be remiss not to pick up on the strong Oedipal competition between father and son, "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life" somewhat overplays this friction, with relatively thin evidence. There are so many quotes like this one, from one art conservator — "[T]hese are very savage paintings, scraped and beaten. I see the anger under there" — that you begin to feel like Meryman is straining to make his book live up to its suggestive title. You're not surprised that the impulses behind Wyeth's best art may have been darker and less placid than they can sometimes seem; you're just not sure you want to be brow-beaten about it. Something similar happens in the sections about Wyeth's nude models. Meryman is generally even-toned in his writing about Wyeth's often affectionate relationships with the local women he came to paint, and there is a good deal of touching writing about the artist's long (and secret, even from his wife) association with Helga Testorf, his neighbor and the subject of his controversial "Helga" paintings. Meryman seems fair-minded, too, about the possibility that Wyeth slept with Testorf — and that he may have had sexual relations of some vague sort, years earlier, with a teenage model. But the biographer seems unwilling to plunge very deeply into the artist's sexual obsessions, instead offering a series of fuzzy and unsettling quotes from the artist ("I'm a very queer man"; "I'm not physical ... I'm dangerous in the mind"). These nudge-nudge hints actually do Wyeth, and his biographer, less of a service than a more vigorous exploration of the painter's impulses might have. Meryman wants to make the case that Wyeth's art is more complex, tortured, and unusual — perhaps even more sexually charged — than most people think. But his book lacks the courage (and often the evidence) of his convictions. "Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life" does something that Wyeth's own work never does: it promises more than it delivers, and leaves an odd taste in your mouth. Andrew Wyeth was lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you feel about his work — to have his artistic vision defined from a very young age. His work didn't drastically change as he matured. The New York art world described in Anthony Haden-Guest's "True Colors," on the other hand, has contorted wildly over the last quarter of the 20th century — contortions brought on largely by the fact that (unlike Wyeth) nobody really knows what art is anymore. The prevailing winds change every five minutes. An impressionistic and anecdotal look back at the art scene over the past several decades, "True Colors" has a ground-zero immediacy that's enormously compelling. Haden-Guest has not only been a long-time art writer, snooping around galleries and lofts for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and other magazines, but he's a legendary drinker and partier — remember his unwitting participation in Spy magazine's "ironman" nightlife decathlon? — who managed to stay up late enough, and take enough notes the next morning, to compile what genuinely feels like an alternative history of New York's art world. Haden-Guest's achievement here is more than merely his deft blending of gossip, tall tales, and shrewd anecdote. It's his realization that, now that the art world is increasingly fractured and driven by personality and ego, the grab-bag method may be the only real way to tell its story. He explains his aims thus: "The writer Orville Schell has noted that during dynastic times, Chinese scholars divided historical writings into two genres. There were zhengshi, the authoritative, official histories, and yeshi, literally, 'wild histories.' Schell describes these as 'derived from the eyewitness accounts, personal remembrances, popular lore, rumor' etcetera. Official histories are written by the winners to record — and, sometimes, update or revise — their victories. Wild histories are more fluid, catching life on the wing." And indeed, "True Colors" has fluidity to burn. Even more impressive is the way Haden-Guest combines this "wild history" with a firm grasp on both art theory and history, and on the economics of the current art world. Haden-Guest can occasionally come off in the media as a boozy naif, but his book is more rigorous than you might think. There are sturdy analyses of the changing gallery and auction house worlds, and of the hurdy-gurdy development of ever-more conceptual art. Yet "True Colors" never gets bogged down in theory or economic analysis; it reads like vigorous and informed dinner-table conversation. Haden-Guest seemed to be wherever the action was, and he strews details as he skims along — Julian Schnabel trying to woo potential patrons while he (and David Salle) were both chefs at Manhattan's Ocean Club, for example, or a poor and then unknown Jean-Michel Basquiat crashing in a friend's house in 1983 with his similarly unknown girlfriend, Madonna (they threw off "vibes of ambition, like heat from a stove"). He's acerbic on the way that good auctions are "usually triggered by the three D's — death, divorce, and disaster," and provides examples of each. Even better, his social proximity to the era's major players leads them to cough up things they wouldn't tell anyone else. And when Haden-Guest can't find the killer quote himself, he's not shy about borrowing it from another source. Here's gallery owner Mary Boone, for example, on her blunt strategy for dealing with slow-working artists: "Get them into debt. What you always want to do as an art dealer is to get the artist to have expensive tastes. Get them to buy lots of houses, get them to have expensive habits and girlfriends, and expensive wines. That's what I love. I really encourage it. That's what really drives them to produce." Yikes. For his part, Haden-Guest seems both horrified and bemused as he walks us through this chronicle. Certainly he's aware that his is ultimately a very sad book. It's not just that so many of the artists written about here (Basquiat, Haring, Warhol) are dead. It's also that, with galleries closing because of the economy and with The Gap and other retailers taking over SoHo, much of the excitement has fled the art scene. Haden-Guest is hard-put to come up with many new artists he's excited about, either. Yet you're left recalling the way Haden-Guest has argued earlier in the book, while talking about his admiration for the sculptor Donald Judd's work, that "certain artists require faith, belief." The great thing about Haden-Guest — even amidst the insanity that compromises so much of the current art scene— is that he remains a believer, and he makes one out of you, too. Of the three books discussed here, his book may be in many respects the least serious and most flighty. But strangely enough, "True Colors" is the book that leaves you scanning the horizon, not for the Next Big Thing, but simply for a painting or a sculpture that's potent enough to remind you why you cared about art in the first place.