Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov

Author:Alexander Nemerov [Nemerov, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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With the art market growing stronger, Helen was not content to watch and wait. She wanted to make things happen in her favor. She may have had something to do with the Life feature, planting the idea for it behind the scenes. She may also have campaigned for another story that ran in July of that year, an article in Esquire about the New York art scene—specifically the wealthy patrons and the hip artists they admired, including Helen and Hartigan. In photographs taken by Burt Glinn, the article shows moneyed intelligentsia at urbane cocktail parties and late-night jazz clubs, where they talk intensely with poets and painters at crowded tables over highballs amid the plucking of cello strings. Three of Glinn’s photographs of Helen in her studio also appear. The pretty young painter absorbed in her work, her hair over her eyes, perfectly flatters an Esquire reader about his “Upper Bohemian” tastes. So does another photograph of gallery-goers at Helen’s most recent Tibor de Nagy show, with Venus and the Mirror in the background. She did not mind becoming a token in a tug-of-war then developing between Esquire and Playboy, its neophyte competitor, as the older magazine sought to match the upstart publication’s celebration of the cultured bachelor as a ne plus ultra of modern life. The cover of the July 1957 Esquire shows the trophy wall of a man-about-town: two tickets to the theater, a carte de visite of Shakespeare, tubes of paint, a paintbrush, a glass of white wine, a cutout color photograph of a woman’s shapely legs, a trumpet, a woman’s ponytail hung like a scalp, and the announcement for Helen’s Tibor de Nagy show. She had hit a kind of big time: the cover of a national magazine, her art a symbol of a bachelor’s swinging lifestyle. When the issue came out, Hartigan wrote to Helen with the air of someone who had a say in its creation: “I am looking at the Esquire cover with Frank [O’Hara] . . . I think the article is good, and amusing to see everyone.”

Gaining this recognition inspired jealousy. “Helen’s all over the place in Esquire. And wherever Helen isn’t, Grace is,” Joan Mitchell groused to O’Hara, who promptly told Hartigan, who relayed the news to Helen. The dispute was of a small order—it was already clear that Mitchell despised Helen, whose stain technique she dismissed as the work of “that Kotex painter”—but the envy signaled that Helen needed to be especially tough in the emerging era of publicity and sales. Thank goodness that she shared a genuine bond with Hartigan—a “little provincial sorority of the spirit,” as Friedman critically described it, observing the two of them gossiping together in February 1957. The alliance helped amid the jealousies of fame and money.

But there were other battles, other resentments, that required greater fortitude to rebuke. Barnett Newman, the dapper grandee of the New York art world, was litigious and unpredictable, and when he saw Esquire’s layout in galleys back in February and discovered a photograph of himself in it, he was furious.

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