My Dinner with David

Brad Morrow, the editor of Conjunctions and a budding novelist, and I were completing a tour of our art collection, which included work by several artists in The “bad painting” Show, when we reached the third floor of our three storey home, recently renovated into my office and adorned with Pat Siler drawings, relegated there by my wife, Joanne, so she would not have to look at them, with his Café I from that inaugural exhibition in 1979 of the New Museum in New York City, curated by Marcia Tucker, the museum’s Founder and Director and former staff member of the Whitney Art Museum Biennial Committee, a thrilling display, which transformed kitsch (cartoons, advertising, snapshots, painting on velvet, illustrations in children’s books) into satire, as opposed to “Pop” with its concern for form, when David von Schlegell, the Director of the Sculpture Department of the Yale Art School and a sculptor of some note, represented by the highly regarded Pace-Wildenstein Gallery in New York City, arrived for a dinner party, who passed by the Chaz Garabedian resin piece of a prisoner in a cell and the Judith Linhares painting of autos in San Francisco and entered the living room with the Dick-and-Jane paintings by Jim Albertson, who was told by his high school guidance counselor he could be anything he wanted to be and by his art teacher he could never be a painter and who became a painter to see which one was right, and the painting of his former pregnant wife by Eduardo Carrillo, one of whose paintings was once mistaken for an El Greco, and a large painting of bathers on the beach, also from said show, by Joan Brown, a protégé of Richard Diebenkorn.

David: “Where’s Bill?”

Joanne: “On the third floor showing Brad the ‘bad paintings’.”

David: “Holy shit; he has worse stuff upstairs.”

When I gave David the same tour, he was noncommittal about everything except my beautiful, mahogany roll-top desk, which he praised. I was told his US Air Force plane in WWII was shot down over the Mediterranean, and somehow wood saved his life. As a result wood had a special place in his heart. A friend of mine, when I recounted this episode, told me to trade the desk to him for a piece of sculpture. I replied that my feeling for his work and his feeling for our art collection was mutual. Actually, today, I could not give my desk away even for fire wood. Nor, for that matter, could I give away the beautiful Kerman Oriental rug onto which he spilled his dinner.

 

William H. H. Rees

October 10, 2014