POPism Read Free Page A

laughing. “A
painting???”
Then Hildegarde had walked over and lifted it off the wall and poured a bottle of whiskey on it. Then she’d picked up some ether they sniff in the streets during Carnival in Brazil that she’d just broughtback from there for De and she sprayed it all over the painting. The Stella was wiped out. De kept saying to me, but it was really to himself, “What can you do? You can’t hit a woman…”
    As De finished telling me the story, I suddenly saw the ruined Stella lying in a corner. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there with my galoshes dripping a puddle on the floor. The phone rang and, coincidentally, it was Frank. De told him the whole story. I couldn’t believe it when I heard De say that the woman with Hildegarde was actually married to a sculptor—I mean, it wasn’t like some cleaning lady had seen an all-black painting and tried to scrub it clean with steel wool! De hung up the phone and said that Frank had promised to make him another one “just like it,” but he wasn’t consoled, he knew that it’s not possible to make two paintings exactly alike.
    Then the doorbell rang and it was Irwin, sheepishly holding a Motherwell. He said, “Can we give you this, and some money?” De told him to get the fuck out.
    One evening De and I were having dinner at “21.” I was always sort of starry-eyed, I guess, asking him about the artists he knew, and this night he was describing for me “the greatest art exhibit” he’d ever been to. In the mid-fifties, Jasper Johns had called De up and very formally invited him to dinner “a week from Wednesday.” De and his wife at the time—I think it was his third—were on the kind of terms with Jasper where they’d call each other up and say what’re you doing tonight? so this “week from Wednesday” business was unusual, the kind of formal thing they never did. (“Jasper was reserved,” De said, “but he wasn’t
that
reserved!”) When the day came, De and his wife went down to the building on Pearl Street where Jasper and Bob Rauschenberg lived. In those days Pearl Street was so beautiful and narrowthat if there was a car parked on it you couldn’t get by. Jasper’s loft usually had paint and materials strewn all over, De said, because he worked there, too, but this particular Wednesday it was immaculate, there wasn’t a sign of his everyday life visible, except that on the walls were
all
his early paintings—the big American Flag, the first Targets, the first Numbers. (For me, just thinking about what that must have been like was thrilling.) “I was knocked out,” De said. “You feel something like that with your insides; the words for it come later—
dryness, austerity
… And to think there were people who’d seen those pictures when they were first painted and had laughed, just like they’d laughed at Rauschenberg!”
    I’ve often wondered why people who could look at incredible new art and
laugh
at it bothered to involve themselves with art at all. And yet you’d run into so many of these types around the art scene.
    De always said that the hardest thing was to have a friend who was an artist whose work you just couldn’t respect: “You have to stop being friends with them, because it’s too hard to look at their work and think, ‘yuk.’” So everyone that De was friends with he respected. At a party of his once, I heard him answer the phone and tell someone, “Yes, I
do
mind, because I don’t like his politics.” Someone had wanted to bring Adlai Stevenson.
    As we sat at “21” (I remember I had the
National Enquirer
in my lap—I was fascinated by all the Thalidomide stories) we talked about the art around town—about Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine’s street exhibit at the Judson Gallery, about