by Ira Glass
But the main thing about them was this sense of their being frozen in time. Perhaps, ironically, one of the functions of occasional gallery shows for an artist is to force him or her to focus and summarize and then to push forward to the next thing. Shapinsky never seemed to feel that pressure. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg was erasing his de Kooning. Color-field painting, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism—they would all now come and go, and none of them would be in any way reflected in Shapinsky’s stubborn, obliviously resolute passion. For almost forty years, Shapinsky would continue to do 1946-50 New York Abstract Expressionist painting. And Shapinsky’s words, as he now spoke about his paintings, also seemed to come barreling out of some sort of time warp. “It’s all a struggle with fluidity and spontaneity,” he told me that day. “It’s a journey—when you start, you don’t know where it will take you, how it will all come out, how you will come out.” Now he was becoming animated. “Sometimes I just start by throwing the brush at the blank surface. Then I try to respond to that mark. I enter into a dialogue with the surface. Then I try to deal with the surface tension. With enough tension, the piece comes alive, it begins to breathe, it swells, there’s a fullness. I try to puncture the surface, to go deep inside, to build up the layers. I love to listen to music as I work—Mahler, for example, Bach, jazz—and, as they say, painting becomes a sort of visual music. It’s abstract, but there’s a sense of the world in it. I love to take walks in the park, see the way the branches intersect and sway, the swooping of the birds. I love looking down on the city from rooftops—the clean verticals and horizontals, the movement of traffic. All that gets filtered in. But, above all, it’s feeling—feeling that is then carefully composed and constructed and integrated. Feeling that breaks apart and then comes together again. It’s feeling, and a human touch, an existential trace.”
Time passed. Shapinsky became a father. He held various jobs. For a while, he was an antiquarian bookseller. He taught art to children, ran an arts workshop with his dancer wife. He became a neighborhood activist, organizing the Sixth Street Block Association in the East Village. He continued to paint. And his health broke again. A back injury from his army days gave him chronic problems. He contracted a severe, lingering case of pneumonia, was bedridden literally for years during the late sixties and early seventies. He suffered from hypoglycemia. For a period, he almost went blind: much of his work from the seventies is even more miniature than usual—intricate murals on sheafs of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper. He trembled. It was thought that he might have multiple sclerosis. Perhaps it was partly a physical manifestation of his frustration and despair at having been left behind as the train pulled out of the station—that, and the perversity of somehow being condemned to continue living right there inside the station amid all the noise and bustle of the new trains as they came and left: to wait there, eternally cordoned off.
The family was poor. One evening, David Shapinsky recounted for me over the phone how for long stretches he and his parents had lived below the poverty line. “It wasn’t the lack of material comforts,” he said, “but rather, the recurrent anxiety that come the end of the month there wouldn’t be enough money to pay the rent and we might end up being thrown out on the street.”
“I learned very early that sometimes you buy things just to make yourself feel better—and they don’t,” Kate told me one day. “Things you can buy usually don’t matter.” Kate began knitting sweaters and sewing patchwork quilt vests and jackets, and selling her wares to Henri Bendel. What with one thing and another, they got by. And Shapinsky continued to paint. Time passed—everywhere but in his painting world, where it seemed to stay 1948. He’d become like one of those tribes secreted deep in the jungle by the headwaters of some lush, narrow New Guinean stream, a little cusp of the world where the Stone Age still holds sway—and then, one day, over the godforsaken, fog-enshrouded pass, in stumbled Akumal.
In the ensuing weeks, I showed a set of transparencies of the twenty-two paintings selected for the Mayor Gallery show to various dealers around New York. A consensus quickly formed among those dealers. There was no question but that Shapinsky could paint. “This is the work of a real painter,” André Emmerich, of the André Emmerich Gallery, told me. “Technically, these are very proficient, smart paintings. This one here”—he picked out the transparency of Poe, a black-and-white piece from 1949-50—“is excellent.” Other dealers singled out other paintings as “charming,” “beautiful,” or “strong.” “Really a very fine painter,” I heard over and over. But almost everyone followed up such observations with a string of misgivings. For one thing, the paintings were too small. “You simply couldn’t work this small and be a true Abstract Expressionist,” Emmerich declared. “The whole point about Abstract Expressionism was that sense of Action painting, and that required scale.” I started to point out Shapinsky’s explanation for the small size of his works—the problem of storage, for example—but Emmerich wasn’t buying that. “Canvases roll up,” he said. “I could probably store all of Morris Louis’s lifework in this little room.” (The room was little, but, in fairness, it was still larger than Shapinsky’s entire apartment.)
The most frequent recurring misgiving, however, was some variation on the theme that Shapinsky’s lifework was very close, uncannily close—indeed, uncomfortably close—to that of Willem de Kooning. “It’s funny,” Emmerich commented. “Future art historians might well have been excused if they’d accidentally attributed these works to de Kooning. That wouldn’t have surprised me at all.” Sidney Janis, of the Sidney Janis Gallery, agreed—the works seemed enormously derivative. Over and over, dealers would reach for their de Kooning catalogues and track the parallel years. “Look,” one said. “See, here de Kooning is doing that sort of thing six months before Shapinsky—and he’s doing it better.” Shapinsky faced something of a double bind with these comparisons, because on those occasions—and there were several—when it appeared that Shapinsky had anticipated de Kooning (some of his paintings from 1947, for example, displayed the loose, lazy, languid curves of the very late de Kooning; and one Shapinsky, dated 1955-56, seemed to radically simplify the complexities of prior work, indulging in wide swaths of luminous, uninterrupted color, a full year before de Kooning was doing the same thing), the dealers uniformly challenged the accuracy of Shapinsky’s dating, suggesting that he had probably got it wrong, if only accidentally. Since Shapinsky was judged derivative as his work went into the analysis, all the work had to be derivative by definition, and certain dates therefore had to be mistaken, since de Kooning, the man whom Shapinsky was ipso facto deriving everything from, hadn’t yet reached that point. Q.E.D.
Irving Blum and his partner, Joseph Helman, of the Blum Helman Gallery, were the most blunt in their evaluation of Shapinsky’s significance. “It’s just too dicey!” Blum exclaimed. “The early paintings are versions of de Kooning and the late paintings are versions of the early paintings. There were dozens of guys like this. He’s just another one of those close-but-no-cigar cases.”
“Look,” Helman said, pulling the current copy of the magazine Flash Art from a nearby shelf and flipping through the pages quickly. “Look at all these neo-Expressionist surrealists operating today. Dozens of painters with virtually identical imagery. Look, look, here, this one, this other one—a whole page of them here. Now, if one of these guys goes on and develops, if he keeps pushing, if he breaks through, if he can demonstrate his power and strength over and over again, if he can keep it up—well, then you’re talking about someone worth considering. But by itself—nothing. You can go back and look through some issues of Art News from the late forties and early fifties, and I’m sure you’d find the same sort of things—dozens of Shapinskys. De Kooning had a lot of clones—he was an enormously influential figure, an overpowering presence; he exerted a tremendous force field, warping all sorts of careers around him—but he moved on. He changed over the years across a sustained career of dazzling inventiveness. Just because somebody was painting li
ke him at one particular point in time doesn’t make him his equal, not by a long shot.”
I pointed out that they had both agreed that some of the Shapinskys were good paintings. Didn’t that count for anything?
“You can’t separate the issue of being derivative from the issue of being good,” Helman replied. “They’re deft, they’re flashy, but . . .”
What about the European museum people and art writers who had vouched for the work?
“They never understood Abstract Expressionism in the first place,” Blum said.
Helman agreed. “Most of the Europeans missed it when it was happening, and now they’re misreading it in retrospect.”
Blum asked me how much Mayor was going to be charging, and I told him I’d heard between fifteen and thirty thousand a painting, average around twenty-five.
“Look,” Blum said. “That’s big stakes. And this could all just be a bubble, hype feeding on itself. It can be smashed flatter than a pancake in an instant—and it may well be. These paintings will not bear the weight.” Blum paused for a moment, and then continued, “The scene today is enormously protected, enormously serious: too much money is at stake.”
Outside the office, as I left, the gallery walls were graced by a gorgeous selection of recent paintings by the thirty-three-year-old Donald Sultan—so recent, in fact, that you could smell some of the panels as they dried. Blum Helman had sold the show out before it had even opened, at sixty thousand dollars a pop. The whole question of art and money has become terribly vexed this past decade—we are living through a period of cultural inflation—but it seemed to me that some of these dealers were being a bit harsh. Given that a painting’s true value bears almost no relation to its financial worth, its financial worth may just be whatever the market will bear. It had yet to be seen what the market would bear in Shapinsky’s case. Hype, at any rate, is always the other gallery’s publicity. As far as Shapinsky goes, as he nears the end of his career—in many ways a noble career, which has produced certain paintings of merit, of beauty—I couldn’t see what was so terribly offensive about his finally being rewarded.
The questions of Shapinsky’s relationship to de Kooning and of his true historical place in the transition between the early generations of Abstract Expressionism in New York were interesting ones in their own right, however, completely independent of any implications they might have for the market in Shapinsky’s paintings. They were difficult questions to research, however, partly because there was virtually no history of exhibitions or critical commentary on Shapinsky’s case to refer to. And now many of the principal witnesses were dead or unavailable for comment. De Kooning, in particular, has for many years maintained a policy of refusing to be interviewed.
I did reach William Baziotes’s widow, Ethel. It turned out that she had barely met Shapinsky while Baziotes was alive, but she well recalls her husband’s talking about his young colleague during the years before his death, in 1963. “The teachers and fellow artists liked him enormously,” she recalls. “They felt his gifts were evident, so much so that Franz Kline gave him several works—and there is no higher praise a painter can give a fellow artist than that. They thought of him as a younger brother. They trusted him. They knew he would not confuse the issues or choose the easy way. Bill felt that Shapinsky had a grave mind. It had known many hells, he used to say—he seemed to need to fight alone, to be terribly singular. His dark, painful youth, Bill felt, had conditioned him to move obliquely. Bill felt that Shapinsky would take a sober course at great cost but that he would stay the course. He used to say that once in a while he had come upon a student like that, and that had made it all worthwhile.”
I then called Robert Motherwell, at his home in Connecticut. I summed up the recent developments and asked him if he remembered Shapinsky.
“Oh, yes,” he said, but hesitantly, seeming to reach far back. “Extraordinary, the way things like that return on you. Yes, yes. Harold Shapinsky: big horn glasses, very pale, thin.” He paused. “There was no question with him that the talent and the dedication were real. There were a lot of students moving through those schools, and many of them were just passing through, but Shapinsky was clearly the real McCoy. However, the main thing I remember about him was how terribly intense he was—a combination of extreme intensity and shyness. He’d tremble; he’d quiver with all that intensity. It was too bad, because whereas that sort of temperament might have worked ten years earlier—many of those first-generation people were loners, they were into profound psychological and existential self-exploration—that just wasn’t the way things were developing after 1950. By then, people were becoming looser, more optimistic, more sunny, more social.”
Our conversation turned to how Shapinsky had fallen away. I mentioned his having been drafted.
“That’s odd,” Motherwell said. “He must have been registered with some other draft board than the one in Greenwich Village. The draft board in the Village, if they heard you were an artist they assumed you must be some sort of Communist—or, at any rate, you were manifestly unreliable—and they had no use for the likes of you in their army, so it meant an almost automatic deferment.” (I subsequently asked Shapinsky about this, and it was true: he had been registered in Brooklyn, at his mother’s address.) Motherwell agreed that Shapinsky’s forced absence from the scene couldn’t have helped his career. “But he would probably have been temperamentally unsuited in any case,” he said. “He was so wound up. He couldn’t have been one of the boys; it would have been like asking Kafka to be one of the boys. That second generation, they loved to party. I can’t imagine Shapinsky enjoying a party or talking for hours at a time on the phone. I was married to one of them, Helen Frankenthaler, for twelve years, and I used to marvel at how much time she and her fellow artists spent on the phone. That first generation—there wasn’t a single phone person. No, I take that back. Barnett Newman used to love talking on the phone. But Shapinsky just never could have been made to fit into the way things developed through the fifties.”
I also visited with Irving Sandler, the chronicler of the history of the New York art scene since the war, at his apartment, in New York University faculty housing. “In my own work, I have a zillion loose threads,” he said, smiling, as I laid out the basic contours of my Shapinsky subject. “Graduate students are going to be picking them up for years.” Sandler had never heard of Shapinsky but seemed delighted at the prospect of widening his horizon. “What I love about the Shapinsky story as you’ve told it to me is that it manages to fulfill two of the most prevalent art-world fantasies of the time,” he said. “One of them we all used to talk about was the fantasy of the late discovery at the very end of a career, after years and years of unsung labor. And the other one was the fantasy of the lonely secret master, slaving away somewhere completely apart: that here all of us were, expecting Master to emerge from our midst—we were, after all, the center—but in fact he was patiently working off in some barn or up in some garret, far away from it all.” Sandler, however, was less than overwhelmed by the transparencies I now began to show him. “They’re good paintings,” he said. “Some of them are very good. But they’re de Kooning. There were a lot of artists like this, but this one is almost the most de Kooning-like of any of them.” Sandler then spoke for a little while about de Kooning’s impact on the second generation. He read me a passage from a recent monograph he had written on Al Held, about the way de Kooning had labored heroically to create a new language, one that the second generation could now take for granted, could simply pick up and start making sentences with. Shapinsky fitted in there somewhere. Sandler continued to riffle through the transparencies, marveling at the dates. “His uniqueness is that he’s still doing it. The conviction carries all the way through: the later ones are as fresh as the early ones. He still believes it.”
Weeks were passing quickly now, and the London opening was less than a month away. I went over to the Shapinskys’ apartment once again. (They had ended up not joining the fi
lm crew on its transit to Bangalore to film Akumal in situ.) I wanted to get a clearer focus on Shapinsky’s own sense of his relationship to de Kooning.
Shapinsky was in his subdued mode again, puffing on his cherry-scented tobacco. It was difficult to narrow in on the issue—or, rather, Shapinsky’s statements remained calmly consistent with his earlier claim that he had seen virtually no de Kooning work before 1950 or so. “I knew we were working in the same general terrain,” he explained. “People kept telling me so. So I guess I bent over backward not to see his work. One time, he and Noguchi came by the Subjects of the Artist, and they were walking around looking at some of the students’ work when they came upon one of my canvases—I happened to be on the other side of the room at the moment—and they spent a long time talking about it very intently with each other. That kind of thing didn’t happen very often; it was sort of embarrassing. Later, de Kooning would call down to me from the window of his studio, inviting me up, but I intentionally made excuses, because I didn’t want to be worried about the overlap.”
