Artists and Dealers

Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World.
by John Bernard Myers.
Random House. 285 pp. $17.95.

It is only now, after almost forty years, that we are beginning to look with fresh eyes at that period in American cultural life when the Parisian Surrealists, practically en masse—Matta, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, André Breton—were in New York. It was a pivotal moment: when the Surrealists arrived they found (to quote one of them) that “the Americans Were painting Post Office murals out of books.” When they left, Surrealism’s intuitive methods had contributed to Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism, and the way was prepared for New York to take over and dominate the art world and the world art market for the next several decades.

Perhaps the first important remembrance of the period (but one which received scant notice) was the art dealer Julien Levy’s Memoir of an Art Gallery, which appeared in 1977. Levy, who as a young man had known most of the artists and writers of the French avant-garde in the 20’s (and all of the Surrealists later) opened a gallery in New York in 1930; he was the first to organize an exhibition of Surrealism in America and was, along with Pierre Matisse, a leading supporter of the movement. When Levy closed his gallery in 1948, it marked the end to that wild and exciting exchange between the Parisians in self-exile and the American painters on whom they had a crucial impact—Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, and many others.

Now a second memoir of that period has appeared, by the dealer John Bernard Myers who came to New York from Buffalo in 1944 to work on the avant-garde magazine View and who ended up becoming an art-world “personality.” He was the creative force behind the Tibor de Nagy gallery which opened shortly after Julien Levy closed his doors and which became the center for the young painters of second-generation Abstract Expressionism; later he ran a gallery of his own, becoming a kind of éminence grise in the art world.

Coming soon will be a third memoir of the period, written by the critic Lionel Abel. To judge from its working title, The Intellectual Follies: 1929—1979, and from the excerpts that have so far appeared,¹ Abel’s book will cover the full period encompassed by both Julien Levy and John Bernard Myers.

Lionel Abel is a professional critic, and Julien Levy published a book on Surrealism and one on Breton before writing his memoirs. John Bernard Myers, in this his first book, is the compleat amateur: Tracking the Marvelous contains as many syntactical faults as it does anecdotes. Moreover, while some of Myers’s stories are recounted at first hand, others seem to have been harvested by the handful at dinner parties. Myers did go everywhere and he did know everyone, but as a narrator he is, as Gertrude Stein might have said, dependable if you have corroboration, but if not, not.

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Here, for example, is the account given in Tracking the Marvelous of the painter Matta’s reaction to his first experience of fatherhood:

Journal, March 1946

If anyone were to ask me which painter in New York is most talked about I would say it is Matta. . . . The incident that caused the most gossip is the fact (and it is true) that when he heard his wife had given birth to identical male twins, Matta instantly developed two black eyes and looked as if he had been socked in a boxing match. He was so “struck” by this experience that he packed his bag and abandoned-his family. Edouard Roditi says it is the first case of an authentic stigmata since the blessed Saint Teresa of Lisieux (“a bourgeois saint, my dear”) received hers.

And here is the same incident as told by Julien Levy in Memoir of an Art Gallery:

I went out to Southampton for the inauguration of Caresse’s [Crosby] venture, and found Matta there as a sort of artist-in-residence. He had a black patch over one eye; the other eye was inflamed, too, and seemed infected. . . . He was separating from Parquarito because she was subjecting him to the indignity of becoming a father. “I take it as a form of castration,” he said, “I consider fatherhood an indignity to my testicles, and that is why I am losing one of my eyes, because I have displaced from the lower balls to the eyeballs.”

“Why is your second eye also infected?” I asked.

“Sympathetic,” he answered.

It soon turned out that Parquarito gave birth to twins—two unidentical boys.

Julien Levy’s account, strange as it sounds, makes perfect sense in terms of Matta’s surrealist “morphological” logic. The story as related by Myers is obviously something he is just repeating, inaccurate in every detail, including the point about whether the twins were identical or not.

Still, there are plenty of charming anecdotes in Tracking the Marvelous. If one is of a certain turn of mind one will enjoy hearing how Charles Henri Ford, the editor of View, wrote a poem entitled “Flag of Ecstasy” in homage to Duchamp, who was living in New York above a beauty parlor, and ended it with the now almost lost pun, “. . . Marcel, wave. . . .” Or how Myers one day asked Duchamp how many people he thought were actually interested in avant-garde art, to which Duchamp answered promptly, “Maybe ten in New York and one or two in New Jersey.” André Breton comes off as a “snob and anti-homosexual” who would not learn to speak English for fear it would corrupt the perfection of his written French. And so on and so forth. The book also includes some sincerely remembered experiences, such as a visit to Joseph Cornell in the house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, described in sweetly unadorned prose.

Art dealer, professional puppeteer, publisher, entrepreneur, Myers believes that an art community must be interactive, and during his career there was scarcely a moment when he was not out there cross-pollinating the avant-garde. He himself, in truth, is a strange mix of naiveté and shrewdness, and there is a streak of disingenuousness that runs through this book. One wonders, for example, about the chapters tacked on at the end that deal with Mark Rothko’s suicide and the bitter court battle which followed when the executors of his estate and the Marlborough gallery were sued by his children for reaping excessive profits from the sale of Rothko’s paintings. When these chapters first appeared separately in the New Criterion they were widely discussed in the New York art world where it was assumed they were central to the book. Now that the book is here, however, they prove to be a kind of coda, and they seem—to this reader at least—a kind of soft-sell apologia for persons who were tried and found guilty under due process of law. (The executors were removed and damages in the millions were assessed against them and the Marlborough gallery.) Although Myers telegraphs his “disinterestedness,” one questions why these chapters are here at all.

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Books of memoirs, no matter how sloppily written, have an intrinsic value: they supply bits and pieces of the larger puzzle and help us to refine our overall judgment of a period. Two of the important figures in this particular story were Matta and Arshile Gorky, and much still remains to be clarified about the roles they played. Gorky, who had cancer, had had his neck broken in a car accident in which Julien Levy was driving and as a further result of the accident, Gorky’s painting arm became numb; a fire had damaged his studio and important work had been lost; his wife Magooch, who could no longer handle Gorky’s periods of deep depression and drinking, had involved herself with Matta.

Of Gorky’s subsequent suicide Myers writes, “The horror of the suicide was heightened because he [Gorky] made telephone call after telephone call asking many fellow artists to come and talk with him. They all claimed to be busy because they had become bored with Gorky’s cries of pain.” In fact, there was a communal sense of guilt about that suicide. Many people in the New York art world walked away from it, while others, looking for a scapegoat, found one conveniently outside their community, in the Surrealist Matta. Julien Levy, who knew Gorky well, understood that the causes of the tragedy were many and complex: “Gorky died of many disappointments,” he wrote.

Possibly this sense of guilt within the New York art community is one reason why it has taken so long for memoirs of the period to begin to be published. Now that John Bernard Myers’s Tracking the Marvelous has appeared, perhaps others (in addition to Lionel Abel) will come forward as well.

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¹ See especially “The Surrealists in New York,” COMMENTARY, October 1981 and “Scenes from the Cedar Bar,” COMMENTARY, December 1982.