Days On My Own - Part 2
Metropolitan Museum - Broken
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| Larry Wolf, Broken Met Museum (2021) |
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| Larry Wolf, Broken Met Museum (2021) |
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Futility of Effort 1930 (2021) |
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel (2021)
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel (2021) |
Interview
NIGHT: How would you describe yourself?
ALICE: I am a morbid person.
NIGHT: Did you ever participate in an unrequited love?
ALICE: No. I ruined more mens' illusions than anyone living.
NIGHT: Do you feel that the Earth is safe?
ALICE: We are sitting on a tornado. Man is not fit to have nuclear energy.
NIGHT: Have you always been fascinated with death?
ALICE: All my life I have wanted to commit suicide. I never look out a window without wanting to jump.
NIGHT: What were you thinking moments before you attempted suicide in 1930?
ALICE: I heard voices. I thought I heard my parents talking. I was at the point of a nervous breakdown. I thought that I had gone mad. I went downstairs and put my head in the oven and turned on the gas.
NIGHT: A comment on men and women:
ALICE: Men are like otters. They like to have fun. Women are the beavers. They keep the home fires burning.
NIGHT: What do you think about the quality and type of art being produced in the 1970's?
ALICE: This was the deadpan decade. The corporation decade.
NIGHT: Do you attempt something new everytime you paint?
ALICE: No. I don't give a damn.
NIGHT: Can you appreciate bad art?
ALICE: I am an intellectual. I am sick of trash.
NIGHT: What authors do you like?
ALICE: Thomas Mann, Hesse, Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald [he liked money too much], Hemingway [for what he was], Tennessee Williams and Auden.
NIGHT: What do you think of the beautiful people?
ALICE: I would hate to be one of the beautiful people. You have to smile all the time.
NIGHT: What is the most reckless thing you do?
ALICE: My paintings.
NIGHT: Through the years how has your work developed?
ALICE: I don't think it has changed.
NIGHT: Describe your seizures:
ALICE: Blackness comes from the sides of my head, I perspire and feel faint. I think they come from my subconscious. I have to take three phenobarbitals a day to prevent them.
NIGHT: What is death?
ALICE: Oblivion.
NIGHT: What is life?
ALICE: Life is a sentence of days and nights. There is no joy in ife. There are only a few minutes of happiness in any life.
Poem (Written in New York, Winter 1929)
Oh, the men, the men
they put all their troubles
into beautiful verses
But the women, poor fools
They grumbled and complained
and watched their breasts
grow flatter and more wrinkled
grey hair over a grey dishcloth
and no one loves their grumbling
Sad, sour, dry with red and shiny knuckles
Oh, for the words
separate from reality
Something to read, stretched out
In a little green book
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Synthesis of New York The Great Depression 1933 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Ninth Avenue El 1935 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Kenneth Fearing 1935 (2021)
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Nazis Murder Jews 1936 (2021) |
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Save Willie McGee 1950 (2021) |
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Christopher Lazare 1932 (2021)
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jose 1936 (2021) |
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - A Spanish Boy 1955 (2021) |
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Black Draftee James Hunter 1965 (2021) |
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - James Farmer 1964 (2021)
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| Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jackie Curtis and Ritta Redd 1970 (2021) |
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Jackie Curtis as a Boy 1972 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Peggy 1945 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Kenneth Doolittle 1932 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - John Perreault 1972 (2021
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Margaret Evans Pregnant 1978 (2021)
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Larry Wolf, Alice Neel - Self Portrait 1980 (2021)
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Metropolitan Museum - Open Space
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Larry Wolf - Open Space Met Museum (2021)
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A Statement 1960
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Larry Wolf,
Alice Neel - A Statement 1960
(2021) |
Being born I looked around and the world and its people terrified and fascinated me. I was attracted by the morbid and excessive and everything connected with death had a dark power over me. I was early taken to Sunday School where the tale of Christ nailed to the cross would send me into violent weeping and I'd have to be taken home. Also I remember a film they showed at the church of the horrors of delirium tremens that quite unnerved me and prevented my sleeping for many nights.
I decided to paint a human comedy - such as Balzac had done in literature. In the 30's I painted the beat of those days - Joe Gould, Sam Putnam, Ken Fearing, etc. I have painted "El Barrio" in Puerto Rican Harlem. I painted the neurotic, the mad and the miserable. Also I painted the others, including some squares. I once, many light years ago married a Cuban and lived in Havana where I had my first show. Then that all dissolved and in the thirties I was on the W.P.A. turning in a painting every six weeks. I had a show at the Pinacotheca Gallery during the war and later two shows at the A.C.A. Gallery. I never knew how to push myself and still don't know how. Like Chichikor I am a collector of souls. Now some of my subjects are beginning to die and they have an historic nostalgia: everyone somehow seems better and more important when they are dead. If I could I would make the world happy, the wretched faces in the subway sad and full of troubles worry me. I also hate the conformity of today - everything put into its box -
When I go to a show today of modern work I feel that my world has been swept away - and yet I do not think it can be so that the human creature will be forever verboten. Thou shalt make no graven images...
Alice Neel 1960
The Hasty Papers - A One-Shot Review
The New Colossus
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Larry Wolf,
Bartholdi - Original Statue of Liberty
[bronze cast from plaster] (2021) |
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus 1883
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