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This Painting Is Not John Perreault
"And
I'm going to be represented by a painting I did 40 years ago? John, you have to put a new painting in…And its going to
be you."
By John Perreault
How can I, the subject, distance myself enough from Alice Neel's painting of me
to be objective about its artistic value? I am a masterpiece. More important, even though it is thought to be one of Neel's
best paintings, is it really me? Friends tell me it is a good likeness, even after 28 years. Aside from the long-debunked,
but possibly still existent, spirit inside the machine, you are who others think you are. You are the composite of how you
are seen. Or as Gertrude Stein, who became the person Picasso painted, once stated: I know who I am because my dog knows me.
Well,
yes and no.
The relaxed pose is mine—left knee up and legs spread open, left heel resting on back of right shin
to form a loopy triangle. At the beach or watching TV: You’re in your Alice Neel pose! Excuse me, I’m in my John
Perreault pose. Alice Neel (1900-1984) just happened to paint it in 1972. You already know, since it is a famous painting,
owned by the Whitney and now on view as part of the new Neel survey (through Sept. 17), that I am depicted, captured, displayed
stark naked and just about as frontal as a man can be.
This is how it happened. This is my version of the story.
Everyone knew she was always trying to get people to take off their clothes. It was a late-'60s, early-'70s thing. Nudity
meant you were free. Woodstock, streaking on Johnny Carson (or even at a Whitney Biennial by a middle-aged Lila Katzen and
her dealer), Kusama painting dots on nudes on Wall Street, Hair, Ann Halprin’s dancers, Burt Reynolds in Cosmopolitan.
You get the picture.
I had met Neel on assignment as a novice reviewer for Art News. In those days you usually
had to go to the artist’s studio to write an Art News review that would come out when the exhibition was on view: eight
to 10 very short reviews at $4 each. By 1972, my first stint as a curator was coming down the pike. It was for the School
of Visual Arts Gallery--I was teaching a few classes at that august institution--and it was "The Male Nude," a freebee with
no budget.
I wanted Neel's painting of the legendary Joe Gould: naked, multi-organed, painted in 1933 but never shown
in public.
She pulled the Gould portrait out of her painting racks just off her gloomy kitchen. Who else is going to
be in the show? Philip Pearlstein, Sylvia Sleigh, Lowell Nesbitt, and John Button. She suddenly turned on me with her piercing
blue eyes: And when was the Pearlstein painted? Only two years ago? And I'm going to be represented by a painting I did 40
years ago? John, you have to put a new painting in…And its going to be you.
Neel guided me into the living room
that was her studio during the day and right there and then placed me on the couch: That's it. Just stay right there. I’ve
always wanted to paint you. You look like a faun or a satyr or like Pan.
She usually did not make classical allusions.
And she traced my pose on the sofa with chalk, as if I were a corpse on a curb. I don't recall the white sheet, but there
it is in the painting with classical folds and wrinkles, adding a Greco-Roman touch. Neel knew her art history, but more about
that later. And more later too about her artistic ambition.
The painting took an unprecedented (for her) 17 sessions.
It didn't dawn on me until I saw the results that she was up to something special that had very little to do with me. I would
arrive around noon. And Neel would feed me cheese and crackers and then I would take off my clothes in the living room. The
first session was wasted because my body sort of drifted out of the rectangle of the bare white canvas, the way she had sketched
it with her loaded brush. So the next time she started all over again and got the position right.
Unlike Hilton Kramer,
who is still attacking Neel--see his truly haphazard, blind-eyed piece in a recent New York Observer--I admire Neel's work.
He writes that she once accused him of hating her paintings because he hated his mother. Not so, he says.
Like Mr.
Kramer, I was fond of my mother. Nevertheless, I thought of Neel as my ideal grandmother. Surely, as we believed in childhood,
we must create our own ancestors and relatives. I have many more fathers and mothers than I was born to. And although brothers
and sisters form a very small group, the aunts and uncles are legion. In terms of self-chosen grandmother, Neel is for me
the one and only. It was mischief at first sight.
When she painted me, she was Alice Neel, the icon. She was 72 and
looked like a Norman Rockwell grandmother, but with a wicked twinkle in her eye and a fiery tongue. How could I have denied
a request by my grandmother? Pose nude? Sure. How could I deny someone who had already been played by Elsa Lanchester in the
film version of her friend Kenneth Fearing's mystery, "The Big Clock"? Someone who had appeared on the screen herself in the
underground classic "Pull My Daisy" (1959) along with Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso?
Someday, a great Hollywood
movie will be made of Neel's life. She was an insider of the outsiders, the quintessential bohemian, the radical single-mom
artist who finally makes good at the age of 74 with a retrospective at the Whitney.
She was a talker. Male artists
I have posed for played music. Neel talked. You can imagine the surrealism of it. There I was, one long afternoon a week,
stark naked on a sofa in broad daylight, talking about Marxism and absorbing art-world gossip from the '30s. (My great-uncle
had been a Wobbly organizer and at least once was tarred-and-feathered and thrown out of a certain New England town.)
Part
of me was terrified; Neel's portraits are not exactly flattering. The term "merciless" comes to mind. After all, she was a
latter-day expressionist and, although she thought of herself as a soul-catcher, she was really after sociological truth more
than personality or even likeness.
As I said in my recent New York magazine interview--not accompanied by a reproduction
of the painting (cowards!)—Neel left the genital area until last. I was quoted as saying that my penis came out much
larger in the painting, but what I remember saying was that she hadn’t made my penis large enough. This was meant to
be funny, since obviously my penis looks just fine. I was referring to and making fun of any male's fears. Jerry Saltz, the
critic on board at The Voice, picked up the erroneous quote and used it as evidence that Neel could flatter when she wanted
to or needed to, something that was absolutely not true. She would get quite angry about the commissions she never got and
the paintings done on speculation that were never purchased. Yet anyone who knew her knows it was not in her nature to please.
So much for trying to be ironic. It is irony, not crime, that does not pay.
In any case, my painting was counted a
success. In the fall of '73, the photo editor at The Voice, where I was then the art critic, snuck in a photo of the painting
without my knowledge to illustrate my mini-essay/review of her show at the Graham Gallery: "She has painted poor people, rich
people, radicals and bohemians. She has painted her family, her neighbors, celebrities and strangers. She has painted Henry
Geldzahler, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, and she has even painted me."
But the story about this painting goes on. In
1985, upon the occasion of Neel's exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Inquirer art critic
Edward J. Sozanski wrote:
"I longed to pose for her as art critic John Perreault had---frontally nude on a bed, like
a hirsute version of Manet's 'Olympia.' I can't speak for the accuracy of Perreault's likeness, but I can state unequivocally
that never before in Western art have I seen maleness portrayed with such uncompromising candor and sensitivity.
"I
had never felt the urge to pose for anyone. Yet in the instant of seeing Perreault's portrait, I was prepared, like Max Lerner
before me, to shed all my inhibitions, not in the hope the I would end up in the Whitney Museum, as Perreault had, but simply
because I sensed that Neel would tell the truth. We all can stand a dose of that occasionally, especially about ourselves."
Now
the painting is again in The Voice, to illustrate Saltz's review. It was also in the society page of The Times, although the
target-zone (I don’t mean my face) is artfully blocked by the silhouette of one of Neel's sons. I have been interviewed
by WNYC radio and National Public Radio. I gave a gallery talk at the Whitney with Nancy Neel, Alice's assistant and daughter-in-law.
I am famous again. But this time around the Warholian 15 minutes has shrunk to 5. Since the '70s, everyone has been putting
his or her clothes back on. Myself included. The naked body is just another suit of clothes. As post-Warholians know, fame
is always content, but it is also sometimes form.
In the '60s, I announced that every time I was recognized in the
street by someone I did not know was a streetwork---i.e., an artwork. Should I now say, for this week, that anytime I am recognized
by someone I don’t know in the locker room of my gym is a work of sculpture?
The weirdness lingers. Is this what
I am going to be remembered for? My once scrawny, hairy body? And not my poems, my art criticism, my paintings? Neel, however,
was seeking her art-historical place. Even if she hadn't grown up near Philadelphia, she would have known of the Pennsylvania
Academy of Art scandal: Thomas Eakins, one of America's best painters, was fired from his teaching job for allowing female
students to paint fully naked male models. She also knew that the nude has a central place in Western representational art.
As a realist and an expressionist, she was out to dismantle the ideal, wherever found. Most men have hair on their bodies,
but never before in art.
But I have many more stories to tell.
Recently, I was at a dinner party in Houston,
and a middle-aged woman turned and confronted me: "You are circumcised!" she proclaimed for everyone to hear, as if I had
exposed myself to her under the tablecloth. "I knew it was you! I used to teach art, and you made it possible for me to look
at men's bodies." I corrected her that it was Alice Neel and not her humble model, but she wouldn't keep quiet.
The
Whitney gallery talk was even more revealing. When we came to the John Perreault painting, I said that this was now the moment
I had been worried about. Should I have let my hair grow long? Leave my glasses home? I told the audience that I really had
thought of taking off my clothes (nervous laughter, as I pretended to start unbuttoning my shirt). And then I said that when
people ask me how long ago that famous painting of me was made, I reply that it was 40 pounds ago (more laughter). There were
a few more jokes.
I said that in the old days, whenever I attacked an exhibition at the Whitney, they would get their
revenge by dragging out my painting. And then there was the one about the friend who was taken totally by surprise when she
came upon the painting; she was so startled she started to giggle. A stately lady standing nearby reprimanded her: Young woman,
modern art is not funny!
I told the group that Pamela Allara in her book "Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American
Portrait Gallery" calls the John Perreault painting the apotheosis of the liberated gay male. Although I assumed that Neel
knew I was gay, I do'’t remember ever discussing my sexuality with her. We talked about her lovers, not mine. I heard
all about Kenneth Doolittle, who in 1934 burned three hundred of her drawings and watercolors and slashed more than fifty
oil paintings.
Although I am flattered, I still think it strange that Alara ends this particular chapter called 'A
Gallery of Players' with: "A contemporary Adonis, Neel's John Perreault rides the crest of the wave made by feminism and
gay liberation, openly celebrating at last modern art's debt to the gay community."
Standing in front of the painting,
I also referred to Richard Flood's commentary in the exhibition catalogue: "Perreault's face, surrounded by bacchic curls,
is curiously noncommittal albeit alert. He seems to be locked into direct eye contact with the painter, and whether it is
a stare-down or a transmission of energy is unclear. Whatever the dynamic, the result is definitely more than a nude: it is
a nude of John Perreault."
Yes, that "John Perreault" is a portrait nude is one of the things shocking about it. But
Flood's implication of hypnosis is odd. Who was hypnotizing whom? I always thought my eyes were more James Dean than Svengali
or Mesmer. My lover of 23 years, himself an art critic, says she got the spiritual look in my eyes. When I look at my eyes
in a mirror, I see these two, dull, grayish-blue eyes and not much else. Was it my energy behind all those brushstrokes depicting
my body hairs? Should I, as an artist, claim the painting as a collaboration?
When I look at my body, I think: could I
ever be a gym-boy? I would hate shaving my body. I long ago stopped shaving my face. Even if I worked out twice a day, I know
in my heart of hearts that I am not the muscle type. Jung had a word for it: ectomorph.
During our joint gallery talk,
Nancy Neel mentioned the Art News piece by poet Ted Berrigan ("The Portrait and Its Double," 1966), which pointed out that
Neel sometimes countered a formal portrait with a wilder, more expressionist one done from memory. There are two Frank O’Hara
portraits, and there were probably two of art dealer Ellie Poindexter.
The question came up: Did Neel paint two paintings
of me? And if so, is the one on display the formal one or the wild one? Is there a wild, expressionist one hidden away (as
in Wilde’s "Portrait of Dorian Grey"), a painting that captures the real John Perreault?
Postscript: Yesterday
Jeff called me from Philadelphia and said that Elizabeth had called him from New York and told him with glee that the Whitney
was now selling postcards of the John Perreault nude painting. We decide to visit the Whitney on Saturday to buy a few, but
will they be allowed through the mail? Should I autograph them? Should I buy them all up? (But maybe they’ll be all sold
out.) Is the Whitney punishing me for something I haven’t yet written?
©John Perreault 2000
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"In the '60s, I announced that every time
I was recognized in the street by someone I did not know was a streetwork---i.e., an artwork. Should I now say, for this week,
that anytime I am recognized by someone I don’t know in the locker room of my gym is a work of sculpture?"
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