The Poet’s Palette

New York’s Abstract Expressionist movement in the ‘50s left such a massive imprint on the American consciousness that even today its mythology remains intractable. As a result, the heroic art of the hard-drinking abstractionists is rarely shown alongside the refined realism of figurative artists who were painting during the same years, going to the same parties and sharing friends and lovers. Even rarer is the exhibition that includes both those cliques in the company of the witty younger artists who came to be associated with Pop in the ‘60s. Even today, the lock-step canon of conventional art history tends to separate these various players into tidy movements, as though they had nothing in common. What they had in common, it turns out, is Frank O’Hara.

O’Hara, a rare combination of curator, critic, poet and playwright, both Ivy League insider and gay outsider, was a broad-minded individual who embraced diversity in his friends and in the art they made. One of the New York School poets, along with Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest, he wrote according to the spontaneous rhythms of abstract art, yet also included in his work the language of pop culture.

“In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art,” which opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., presents 100 works by 26 artists, representing O’Hara’s influence on the artists of his era and their influence on his poetry between 1950 and 1966. Organized by Russell Ferguson, who was the museum’s editor before assuming his current position as associate curator two years ago, it reflects his interest in the “relationship between the arts, especially poetry and the visual arts.”

Although this exhibition, Ferguson’s first full-scale show, concerns a writer rather than an artist, he uses the ubiquitous O’Hara as a magnifying glass to analyze more closely the relationships between first-generation abstract painters such as Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell; the so-called second generation, including Alfred Leslie and Michael Goldberg; determinedly figurative painters like Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz; oft-neglected women of the era such as Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Alice Neel and Jane Freilicher; and the eccentric, proto-Pop artists like Joe Brainard, Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns.

Such disparate characters are linked by the work they created in collaboration with or in homage to O’Hara, including various portraits of him. In addition, the show includes paintings that inspired O’Hara’s poetry, such as “Why I Am Not a Painter”:

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

A painter, but I am not. Well,

For instance, Mike Goldberg

Is starting a painting. I drop in.

“Sit down and have a drink” he

Says. I drink; we drink. I look

Up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

This excerpt refers to Goldberg’s fragile painting “Sardines” (no longer featuring any reference to the salty fish), which is included in the exhibition along with the poet and painter’s collaborations--combining O’Hara’s poetry with the artist’s gestural markings, for example, in “Ode on Necrophilia.”

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Who exactly was Frank O’Hara? Described by critic Paul Carroll as “the first and the best of the poets of the impure,” O’Hara was raised in Grafton, Mass., and trained as a classical pianist until 1944, when he served for two years in the Navy on a destroyer in the South Pacific. After World War II, he enrolled at Harvard University, where his roommate was illustrator Edward Gorey. He gave up music to study English, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1950, having published his first poems in the Harvard Advocate.

While attending graduate school at the University of Michigan, he longed for the lively atmosphere of New York. He moved to Manhattan in 1951, where he worked as a clerk at the information and sales desk of the Museum of Modern Art so he would be able to pay daily visits to its paintings by Henri Matisse.

Gravitating toward the dynamic art world of that time, he was the first of the young poets to write about art, and Thomas Hess hired him onto the editorial staff at Art News magazine from 1953 to 1955. He wrote the first monograph on Jackson Pollock, in 1959, and was close to De Kooning, praising his painting in the poem “Radio”:

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning

To aspire to. I think it has an orange

Bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

Said to have had an incredible “eye,” he returned to MOMA in 1955, not as a clerk but as assistant curator, and later was promoted to associate curator, despite a lack of formal training. While there, he organized exhibitions by Robert Motherwell, Reuben Nakian and David Smith.

A man of irrepressible energy and charisma, he seems to have bobbed like a cork above the turbulence of museum and art world affiliations, managing his professional life during the day while typing his poetry at the Olivetti showroom during his lunch hour. In 1966, he was struck and killed by a taxi while vacationing on Fire Island. His gravestone bears the first line of his poem “In Memory of My Feelings”:

Grace

to be born and live as variously as possible . . .

At his funeral, artist Larry Rivers said, “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.”

His poetry, once derided as too “personal,” is now considered a precursor of a sensibility that embraces the raucous tones of popular culture. Marjorie Perloff, author of “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters,” says, “O’Hara turned to art because the literary scene was so dead at the time. He disliked Robert Lowell, who was the prominent poet then but had no interest in the art of his day--especially not Jackson Pollock. Nor did [Lowell’s] contemporaries. O’Hara opened that up. When I wrote my book in 1976, saying that he was a notable poet of the period, people said it was ridiculous. Now there is enormous interest. The variety, good humor and charm in his work are tremendous.”

Perloff cites O’Hara’s delightful inability to take himself or anyone else too seriously. Of his friend Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 reading of Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl” in New York, she recalls: “It’s a very serious poem. O’Hara sat in the front row. Allen began, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.’ O’Hara turned to the person next to him and quipped, ‘I wonder who he means?’ ”

Another time, en route to a reading, O’Hara and Lowell rode together on the Staten Island Ferry. During the short trip, inspired by a tabloid headline, O’Hara penned “Poem (Lana Turner Collapsed).”

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgracefully

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

After O’Hara read this brief ode, Lowell took the podium and sniffed, “I don’t read poems I write coming over on ferries.”

O’Hara felt kinship with the artists because he and other New York School poets received so little support from their peers. O’Hara once said, “The literary establishment cared about as much for our work as the Frick cared for Pollock and De Kooning.”

By all accounts immensely learned, O’Hara wrote his poems hastily, at lunch or in coffee shops, stuffing them into pants pockets. He did not seek publication and often considered it too much effort to try to find the works when contacted by editors. When his collected poems were published five years after his death, the quantity and quality surprised even his closest friends.

“Personism” is what he called his philosophy. His friends’ names and his experiences with them are peppered throughout his poems, and he spent much of his time hanging around their studios. Acknowledging his lack of talent as a painter, he was eager to collaborate with artists. O’Hara and Rivers worked together on the first lithography project of Tatyana Grossman’s print studio, Universal Limited Art Editions, and the MOCA show includes the initial run hand-colored by the painter.

At Norman Bluhm’s studio, the second-generation Abstract Expressionist made a gesture of paint on paper, and O’Hara answered by painting a line of text. Excited by the spontaneity and unpredictability of their dual effort, they went on to produce an entire series.

On another occasion, painter Alfred Leslie made a film called “The Last Clean Shirt,” a stock shot of a young couple riding in a car, the woman talking Finnish gibberish, the man listening. Leslie asked O’Hara to write oblique subtitles like, “I have the other idea about guilt. It’s not in us, it’s in the situation. You don’t say that the victim is responsible for a concentration camp or a Mack truck.”

Today, Leslie remembers O’Hara as uniquely capable of writing such effective, unpremeditated responses. “He was able to do collaborations because he was the kind of artist who knew what the moment was, how to be in it and how to recognize it, which is not something you can say about a lot of people.”

When the film premiered at the 1964 Lincoln Center Film Festival, the audience clapped, booed, whistled and threw things at the screen for the entire 47 minutes. “Frank was thrilled, I was thrilled. It was exactly what we wanted to happen,” Leslie says. He made another film with O’Hara, “Birth of a Nation, 1965,” but it was largely destroyed in a fire in Leslie’s studio one month after O’Hara died. A few years ago, he combined scraps of the film and O’Hara’s writings that he had saved to make a short version of the film, now available on video.

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The exhibition features portraits of O’Hara that often seem to reveal as much about the artists who made them as they do about their subject. Genteel Realist Fairfield Porter portrayed him as tidy and colorful; Rivers painted him in the 19th century salon manner, though completely naked except for a pair of unlaced boots. Alice Neel saw him two ways--once in a conventional profile, capturing his broken nose; in a second, he is heavily freckled, with nicotine-stained teeth.

Katz portrayed him as a suave, cutout figure and, in the MOCA catalog, is quoted as saying, “Even on his sixth martini, second pack of cigarettes and while calling a friend ‘a bag of [expletive],’ and roaring off into the night, Frank’s business was being an active intellectual. He was out to improve our world whether we liked it or not.”

Although O’Hara did not relate to the ironic distance of most Pop art, especially that of Andy Warhol, he was enthusiastic about eccentric Joe Brainard, writing texts for his comic book collages, though these fey appropriations demonstrate more sweetness than generally is attributed to Pop.

Johns borrowed the title of O’Hara’s poem “In Memory of My Feelings” for his seminal, hinged two-panel gray painting with a spoon and fork wrapped together and hung by wire. When O’Hara visited Johns in South Carolina, Johns made a plaster cast of O’Hara’s left foot. After the poet’s death, Johns laid the cast atop a sculpture of three wooden drawers and titled the work “Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara).”

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Explaining this wide-ranging exhibition, Ferguson offers, “I thought it would be interesting for people today, especially artists, to see this material from a time when there was such a productive back-and-forth between artists and writers.”

Certainly, the decision was furthered by Ferguson’s own early studies in American literature; he wrote his thesis on Mark Twain, at Stirling University in Scotland. A native of Glasgow, the 43-year-old Ferguson has lived in this country since 1980. He earned his graduate degree in modern art history at Hunter College in New York, and worked at the Frick Collection and in the publications department of the New Museum of Contemporary Art before coming to MOCA in 1991.

Ferguson felt that his revisionist approach would allow the public to see the artists as O’Hara did, free from preconceptions and labels.

“For many years, the label of ‘second-generation Abstract Expressionist’ prevented their work from being recognized for its own merits. Figurative artists were excluded from the traditional art historical narrative of that period, as Ab Ex trampled everything in its path, he adds. “I thought that through the exhibition, I could look at the mythology of the period and, through the figure of O’Hara, look at a lot of people who were in the same milieu but not conventionally seen together in collections or exhibitions.

“It’s not about O’Hara,” Ferguson says. “It’s about a group whose paths crossed repeatedly even though they worked in different styles, to complicate the way we think about that period of American art. O’Hara said ‘the best part of me, my poetry, is open.’ I want this exhibition to feel open. I hope people can wander around and find pieces that speak to them personally.”

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“In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Opens today. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Ends Nov. 14. $6 for adults, $4 for students and senior citizens, free for MOCA members and children under 12; free admission on Thursdays, 5-8 p.m. (213) 626-6222.