Art
MARCH 1995

BRIGHTNESS VISIBLE

Ross Bleckner collects friends the way art lovers collect Ross Bleckner. This month, the most serious social painter since Degas gets a major retrospective at the Guggenheim.
BY EDMOND WHITE

    When Dolly Patron and Sandy Gallin, her manager and longtime New York flatmate, wanted some new paintings for the recently enlarged Manhattan apartment they share. Gallin suggested they go to visit the Tribeca studio of Ross Bleckner, one of his closest friends. Parton was delighted at the opportunity to see Bleckner’s work and his studio, but Bleckner went into a panic. “She’s going to hate it. I tell you, she’s absolutely going to hate it,” he moaned.
His fears proved unfounded. Parton wasn’t used to talking to painters about their work, and scarcely knew what to say, but as usual spoke from her heart. “Your paintings are all about light. When I blink, I see angels faces.” Bleckner was very moved, since he had once declared of his paintings, “They manufacture light,” and angels in fact haunt his imagination (one series of paintings is called “The Sex of Angels”), When he spoke at the memorial service for his friend and inspiration. Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann, he said, “I know we’re not supposed to believe in angels, but he keeps appearing in my thoughts… I still and will always feel that he is guarding me and loving. If that isn’t an angel, what is?”

    Parton and Bleckner quickly became friends, and something about this fairly atypical encounter seems emblematic of Ross Bleckner, the compact, strident painter who is the subject of a major retrospective which begins this month at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Bleckner is the first serious painter since Degas to be all at once so social, so relentlessly frivolous, and so gifted. The New York Times can declare he is the “Bachelor of Arts” and subtitle an article about him with this comment: “Ross Bleckner, gay power broker and ubiquitous partygoer, is looking for love.” But the contradiction is that this guy isn’t playing with the media or with celebrity in his art, or wearing down the division between high and commercial art, as Andy Warhol did; he’s not even inserting his highly piquant presence into his oeuvre, the way performance artists such as Gilbert and George do. No, he’s an easel painter in the grand tradition. Recently the austere international art magazine Parkett (published in both German and English) devoted an issue to him. Dealers all over the world are selling him.

    The contradictions are not only in the reception of his work and in his shifting public image, but also in the man himself. He’s a master of the wisecrack. When I asked him why he got into painting, he shot back, “Someone told me the money was good." When I asked him if he lived in an all-male world, he replied, “Most of my dealers are women, and most of those who aren’t want to be.” At the same time, this smart aleck from Hewlett Harbor (one of Long Island’s insulated, prosperous, very suburban, and predominantly Jewish Five Towns) quotes Roland Barthes and speaks like a German metaphysician about this work.

    And he has become the great memorialst of our day, the primary painter to bear witness to the constant losses occasioned by AIDS. He has done a big black painting with the first names of dead artists scrawled on it. One of his breakthrough paintings, 8,122+ as of January 1986, a reference to the mounting number of AIDS deaths back then, presents the view with phosphorescent trophies, symbols of funeral urns, and white dots that might be stand-ins for Kaposi’s-sarcoma lesions. Even his paintings of flowers and hummingbirds recall the evanescence of life during these plague years.

    Bleckner, however, is quick to disavow his role as the great AIDS memorialist. “AIDS isn’t a theme in my work,” he points out. “Mortality and commemoration are themes. Insofar as I’m a gay man, my sense of mortality has been defined by AIDS.” Bleckner’s paintings are like monuments. A trophy pinging such as Light and Dark World (1989) poses a silver award, the sort of trophy handed out as a high-school athletic prize, against a background of longitudinal and latitudinal lines. This scientific and geographical reference is contrasted in turn with a passage that resembles a citation from Monet’s water lilies - an abstract versus a sensuous discourse.

    But if Bleckner is impersonal, he is also ardent. He may avoid anecdotal references to specific individuals, but his imagery is never dry or cerebral. He may not draw the picture of a particular heart, but his deeply felt canvases do give, as he puts it, a very clear “idea about just throbbing.”

    Bleckner’s current status as a star is remote from his solitude as a kid. The son of a wealthy precision-parts manufacturer, Ross knew nothing about the contemporary art scene when he was in high school in Hewlett Harbor. Manhattan might just as well have been 5,000 miles away. “I remember,” he remarks, “that I made a decision to be an artist only at age 20. Before that, of course, I was always making art, but I didn’t know it could be a real profession.”
As an undergraduate at New York University, he realized for the first time that art was not just something in a museum. A teacher said to the class. “Did you know that only a few blocks away living artists are showing their work?” The idea “blew my mind,” Bleckner confesses. Although that was the era of color-field painting, big abstractions in the manner of Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski, the first art Bleckner actually responded to was the much earlier Abstract Expressionist works by Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffmann.

     At New York University he studied with the pioneer conceptualist Sol Le-Witt and the photo-realist Chuck Close, but neither left much of a mark on his subsequent style, any more than did his years at CalArts, where he was enrolled later. What counted far more for him were his early friendships with painters David Salle and Julian Schnabel, both of whom Bleckner introduced to his New York dealer, Mary Boone. Salle and Schnabel became two superstars who quickly eclipsed Bleckner, even though he’d been the one to recognize them first in print, in an article he wrote for Artforum in 1979. Now, of course, the tortoise is outrunning those hares he championed and once envied. And Bleckner’s big paintings are selling for a hefty $100,000 each.

    Bleckner’s studio has always been in the six-story loft building on White Street that his parents bought for him in 1974. He floundered with his first shows, in the mid-1970s, perhaps because he’d perversely decided to recycle Op art, of all things, that mid-1960s movement which had never been particularly vital and which at that time hadn’t been dead long enough to seem quaint.

    Bleckner felt that he’d been forgotten before he was remembered. Perhaps because he had a bit of money he was sometimes regarded as a gentleman painter. Then, in 1981, came one of the most decisive encounters in his life, his meeting with Thomas Ammann, the Zurich art dealer who became an important collector of (and confidant to) a whole host of such painting luminaries as Francesco Clemente, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Eric Fischl, Philip Taaffe, and Ross Bleckner. Since Ammann dealt in art from an earlier period (ending with early Warhol) and collected younger artists strictly for his own delight, his relationship with these painters was unclouded by anything grubby or speculative. Ammann not only became a tireless champion of Bleckner’s work but also provided an entrée into his world of movie stars such as Tatum O’Neal and Richard Gere as well as of socialites such as Pat Buckley and Patty Cisneros and the golden-glove all-star media champ, Bianca Jagger. Through Thomas Ammann, Bleckner became involved with AIDS activism. In 1987 he helped Ammann and Pat Buckley stage a big art auction that raised $1.9 million for an AIDS-care program at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. With his odd combination of scientific curiosity, organizational genius, and social flair, Bleckner went on to become the highly successful president of the board of the Community Research Initiative on AIDS (CRIA), a nonprofit AIDS-research center dedicated to the study of new treatments for H.I.V.-related diseases. Soon after he bought Truman Capote’s old property in Sagaponack, Long Island, in 1993, he hosted a party to rival one of Capote’s own, though this time Calvin Klein, Bianca Jagger, and Larry Kramer were there to support CRIA: early in 1994, Bleckner topped that triumph with another fund-raiser, held on the Chinese New Year and featuring Chinese acrobats. Jagger says about Bleckner, “I think that Ross is a true Renaissance man, because he will probably be seen not only as one of the greatest artists of his time but also as someone with great social and political commitment. He is our conscience vis-à-vis the AIDS crisis.”

     One troubling aspect of Bleckner’s oeuvre is that he works in so many different styles at once. In his recent Paris show, for instance, in addition to the flowers and hummingbirds, there were canvases of abstract star maps (“Architecture of the Sky” as he calls them), and still others that suggest bursts of colored light seen through fog, which Bleckner sees as hands and faces. I told him that when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s such versatility would have been interpreted as a sure sign of superficiality.

    Bleckner is quick to say that for him art is the working out of all the contradictory ideas one has about what constitutes an artist. He wants to dramatize all his inner tensions in his work. And he is not troubled by the supposed conflict between his social and aesthetic sides.

    “If I were straight, I’d be more successful,” Bleckner says. “I’d be going to more barbecues with my wife and the critics would know how to relate to me. Anyway, my theory about all this is just act as though you don’t give a shit. I think the social stuff I do is a good smoke screen, a way to get people off my scent; I’m convinced that the purity of my work, the sense of awe in my work, if anybody actually registered it, would seem a great deal less acceptable than my reputation as a host.”

    What everyone who knows Ross Bleckner can attest to is his love of paint, even the physicality of applying pigment to canvas. His busy schedule, however, sometimes means that he’s a bit frantic. Some of the paintings in his show in Paris last fall were still wet when he put them in the packing cases. He pushed himself to finish the new canvases for the Guggenheim show, which will subsequently travel to Europe.

    Bleckner works in intense spurts. “I’ll work all day every day, seven days a week, for a period of four or five months, “ he tells me. “Then I’ll take off for a month and do nothing, but I become bored quickly - maybe because I don’t have any hobbies and don’t like to travel.” Over the past Christmas and New Year’s holiday, when all his friends were out of town, Bleckner painted almost nonstop. “I’d be in my studio from nine to six; then I’d take a long nap and work again until two in the morning. My assistant would bring me take-out food, but otherwise even he wasn’t around. I was completely alone, and I loved it.”

    The photographer and writer David Seidner admires Bleckner’s love of paint. “He’s a real sensualist, and he uses conventional painting techniques in startling new ways. He’s always burning, scraping, bleaching paint.” Louise Neri, the U.S. editor of Parkett, concurs: “Ross is very traditional - he’s virtually the last person around who knows how to paint a beautiful painting. I get the impression when he’s at work that he’s burnishing a shield. His canvases can become very archaeological the longer he works on them, as he plays with glazes, lets pigments pool, sands everything down - it’s as if he were trying to trap light.”

    A mystical socialite, a combination of Borscht Belt comic and William Blake, a cutup with a social consciousness, a shy guy who is one of the first really out gay celebrity artists, a brilliant mimic who has nevertheless never traded in his Five Towns brassiness for a mid-Atlantic accent, Ross Bleckner thrives on his contradictions. When we run out of a very serious, Austrian-owned gallery in Paris, he goes into a fit of paranoia: “Do you think they’re saying, ‘Oh, that creep Bleckner was just in there shooting off his mouth’?”

    “Well,” I reply, “people do expect artists to be anguished.”

    “Anguished!” Bleckner shouts. “But I am anguished - I just hide it better.”

    Bleckner once told an interviewer that when he was a child he wanted to be the obituary writer for The New York Times. As he put it, “Only because I thought that’s the ultimate criticism.” His art, of course, has become a criticism of life, at least of how we live now. The meaning of lives cut short by death has been on Bleckner’s mind for a decade. His butterflies and hummingbirds are tributes to the ephemeral nature of beauty. His star maps, his gift-wrapped packages, his trophies are all bathed in an eerie luminescence, since for Bleckner, as for Dante, the ultimate vision dwells in a braiding of brightness.