A Complicated Marriage (19 page)

Barney actually had a reputation for being witty. But invariably I found myself waiting in vain for a spontaneous moment of lightness, of humor. Oh, he could come up with a witticism now and again, but I felt that even they were hard come by and were delivered more as well-polished aphorisms. Two, in particular, would seep into Newman's lore: “I paint so that I'll have something to look at” and “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” As much as Barney enjoyed discoursing on the subject of humor, for me, he succeeded only in de-humorizing it. In this respect, he joined the crowd. By and large, I had always thought of artists as humorless. I saw it this way. Drunks aren't funny, artists drunk aren't funny. Impoverished, fearful, driven artists aren't funny. And that pretty much covered the artists I knew.

Clem was another one. He rarely laughed—a full-out
ha-ha
laugh—except when someone told a good joke. He despaired that he had no gift as a raconteur and admired inordinately those who could pull it off. He loved wit, bitchiness, and gossip, especially when packaged in the repartee of his gay friends. Most of all, he loved Jewish humor and nightclub comedians. As for me, I was a deplorable joke teller, though I was thought to have some wit and a good overall sense of humor. Somehow, I don't think of myself as having done much laughing in those early years. But a lot of the situations were funny. Not to mention the entire square-peg-round-hole predicament my marriage had landed me in.

One scorching summer weekend, Barney, Clem, and I took a long bus ride to Camp Tamiment in the Poconos. Barney sat in the seat in front of Clem, his head swiveled around as he talked ceaselessly, cigars and cigarettes going, the windows open, hot air gusting against my closed eyes. The “issues” were as heavy as the heat: politics and the murder of socialism. And why not? Tamiment was founded in the twenties by labor unions and the radical Left as a getaway for their members and families. Like any camp, it was on a lake in the mountains and had a plethora of Jewish comedians passing through. But this was no Catskill pleasure
dome, like Grossinger's. Tamiment, true to its socialist roots, was plain pipe rack. And what really set it apart was that it believed in serving up culture along with its light entertainment. It took both very seriously.

So it was that later that night the sparkling duo of Greenberg and Newman performed as the warm-up act for a Sid Caesar wannabe. In that environment it turned out not to be as lopsided as one might have thought. Culture drew a hefty crowd, even without the laughs. And Barney and Clem played off each other like old pros. They were enjoying themselves; Barney the Ponderous revealed astonishing comedic timing, and Clem, as he never had and never would again, actually played to the audience. They were rewarded with a roar of applause, and both were rather pleased with themselves.

The next morning passed rather uneventfully; the “stars” were corralled into various impromptu confabs to debate art vis-à-vis politics, as I lay on the raft in the sun, listening to the screams of euphoric children. I thought about this strange place that had transformed Clem and Barney into adorable boys. A Jewish place, where Yiddish and English merged and the food tasted different. On the ride back, I relinquished my wifely seat to Barney and listened contentedly to the murmur of their polemics as we returned to a more familiar world.

Despite his dazzling duet at Tamiment, Barney stood alone, a hard-nosed hard-liner. There was only one right way, and that was his way. Yes, that could be said of most artists, but Barney . . . I see him astride the battlements of a fortress, wielding lightning bolts of ego. Inevitably, Barney's oldest friendships had faltered along the way—notably, those with Rothko, Reinhardt, and Still, with all of whom he had once shared many of the same views about art and the art scene. Temperamentally, Barney came close to being like Still, the iconoclast of all iconoclasts, with his grudges and righteousness. But, thankfully, Barney stopped short of Still's extreme posturing. He had been blessed with humanity and an appetite for the world. And when I could cut through the oratory I could even glimpse a sweetness and a bad-boy charm, but rarely enough for me to hang on to through those long hours in those dark restaurants.

Clem's relationship with Barney began to fray after he curated Barney's first retrospective at Bennington in 1958. But what pushed it to the
limit was when Clem became an advisor at French & Company's new contemporary gallery and arranged for Barney to have the opening show. Barney's demands and micromanaging knew no bounds. I watched him on Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street, orchestrating the crane as it hoisted his eighteen-foot pictures to the penthouse gallery. Barney was in his element. And the icing: The
Times
ran a picture of the traffic-stopping “event.”

Clem would say that the beauty of the show in no way made up for the strain of being forced into running interference between Barney, with his high-handed demands and threats, and the gallery directors, who were used to dealing with dead artists. It was all more than Clem had signed on for. And even though the artists that followed—Gottlieb, Smith, Louis, Noland, Olitski, among others—were a breeze in comparison, Clem's heart wasn't in it. He had soured on the project, which had originally seemed like a fine idea, and after the inaugural season, he quit and never did curate another show.

The one time we went to the Newmans' apartment, I saw a photograph of Annalee and Barney posed against the New York skyline. They were newlyweds, she camera coy, a vivid brightness about her, he cocky and proud. How winsome and pretty she was as a young woman with her dashing Barney. In the camera's eye, they were complete, joyously ready for an unordinary life together.

There was no doubt in my mind that if Barney and I had met when we were young and starting out, we would both have run screaming in opposite directions. But after I saw that picture of Annalee, I felt that we would have connected. At least we would have stood a chance. I was sure that rather than being swathed in her usual black, she would have worn the colors of new love and adventure to match her glowing face. And I was sure she hadn't been a hummer when she was young. When I say “hummer,” I don't mean just now and then; I mean a lot, and loud enough to be heard, loud enough for me to know that there would be no conversation because she was someplace else.

But there was rarely conversation between any of the artists' wives and me. That was part of their earnestness, the wary listening to every word that passed between their husbands and Clem, the deciphering of codes,
the reading of glances, and the committing of it all to memory, perhaps in order to play it back later. How could there be space for casual girl talk between us? After all, the wives were hardly a frivolous, frolicking bunch. And if there were close friendships among the wives themselves, I saw little sign of that. At least among the wives who, like Annalee, had full-time jobs as well as the full-time nurturing of needy husbands.

Then, too, as the stakes grew higher in the late fifties, perhaps there was too much competition and volatility in the air. Over time I became accustomed to the lack of give-and-take, although I still yearned for it. I had always enjoyed the company of women and, for the most part, found them more interesting than men to talk to. As for Annalee and me, the might-have-been connection never happened.

I would have to read Annalee's obituary to learn that she went to graduate school at Columbia and the University of Nancy, where she earned a degree in French; that she was an expert in shorthand and taught high-school secretarial studies; and that she was a lecturer at the Baruch School of City College. I wish you had told me about all that, Annalee; at least it would have been a starting point. But that humming. Was she as bored as I was? Was it simply an occupational hazard of her many years as a schoolteacher? Or maybe it had started decades earlier during the long evenings with her Barney, who talked enough for two. Whatever, my mind still resonates with that talk and that humming. Just as I can still hear Annalee saying
Barney
. She sang it with a wide-open
a
, held two full notes, with a lilt between the syllables, rather like
Swa-a-a-nee
. (The rest of that song's lyrics would work just fine, too.)

The devotion was mutual, but I always thought the weight of it was on Annalee and her financial and emotional caretaking of Barney's art, aspirations, and convictions—no small undertaking with that dogged warrior as he carved out his place in art history. A friend, the painter Yvonne Thomas, once told me a story that, as I saw it, epitomized Annalee's dedication to Barney. Many years before, she had run into Annalee, who was on her way to work. In the course of things Yvonne had asked, “And what's Barney up to these days?” “He's thinking,” Annalee had replied, not missing a beat. On that occasion my friend had noticed a loose button on the front of her coat. “That wasn't so strange,” she
continued, “but when I saw her a year or so later the button was still loose, now hanging by a thread.” My friend and I laughed and agreed that Annalee had taken spousal selflessness to a new level.

Not to suggest that Annalee was put upon or passive. I thought of her more as a sergeant at arms, happy and comfortable with her chosen path. When Barney had a heart attack in 1957, I saw in her the combination of palpable fear and street fighter as she hovered by his hospital bed. What a terrible shock it was for her, for all of us. He was only fifty-two. No mute wife then. How fierce she was in her concern lest Clem would get him stirred up with art talk. But even in the hospital, flat on his back, on oxygen, monitors beeping, Barney would do his own stirring up. After all, there were always far-flung “issues” to expound on, even if his voice was weak. And when Annalee left the room for a moment, there was talk on a different issue, one that really got my attention. With his usual deadpan delivery, he launched into an analysis of the nurses and their perfect breasts, and did Clem have any theories on why, on average, nurses had better breasts than other women? One thought led to another and eventually he was satisfied to conclude that their breasts must simply be a gift from God, because at the rate he was having erections, he knew he wasn't going to die anytime soon. The admixture of Barney, sex, and his over-the-top narcissism had me bursting with laughter. But this was no joke to Barney, who silenced the flibbertigibbet with the lift of one eyebrow.

True to his prediction in the hospital, Barney didn't die at fifty-two. He lived another thirteen years and died in 1970. Annalee would survive her soul mate by thirty years. I liked thinking of her as being the tiger she had been by his hospital bed. I was reassured when, in 1987, Annalee refused permission to the Albright-Knox Museum to include Newman in its show of geometric painters. Barney had long battled the inclination of curators and critics to label him as geometric. He had characteristically refused to be labeled as anything, which left his work up for grabs, and it wasn't long before the minimalists tried to claim him as one of their own. A closer match. To the end of his life, Barney had continued to enjoy swatting away at the “issue” brushfires, and it was nice to know that Annalee was still bearing the standard.

I was also happy to hear that in her later years Annalee moved to the posh River House, to an apartment with a marble entrance hall. How grand. The last time our paths almost crossed was in 1992 at the Museum of Modern Art, on a special viewing day of the Matisse retrospective. Across several adjoining galleries, I espied her standing in profile in the middle of a room, alone, gazing fixedly at a picture out of my view. Even at that distance, she was unmistakable, still dressed in head-to-toe black, her bearing unchanged, though she had a cane. I moved forward, eager to greet her after so many years, but by the time I reached the gallery she was gone.

WE FIRST MET Jack and Mabel in 1957, when a group of painters in Toronto, known as Painters Eleven, banded together to invite Clem up for a week to look at their work, one-on-one. Because the decision had not been unanimous, for this visit the group would be, in fact, Painters Nine. Canadian artists seemed to have had a predilection for numbering their like-minded posses; besides Painters Eleven, others included the Group of Seven and the Regina Five.

That was my first trip to Canada—in fact, to any “foreign” country, and over the years Clem and I would return often. On this occasion, the Bushes had been designated as our hosts. Jack, in his tweeds, looking for all the world like a British country gentleman, picked us up at the train station. Our overnight trip from New York had taken fourteen hours. Since our “honeymoon” trip to Minneapolis, I was still afraid to fly, and would be until 1963.

To my surprise, Jack pulled up in front of a white colonial in the suburban rim of Toronto. As surprised as I had been upon first seeing the Hofmanns' Provincetown house, I couldn't believe this could be an artist's house. Toronto, being a large city, had made me envision some sort of loft. Instead, I walked into the house I had always wanted to live in as a kid. Nothing grand or over the top, it was done up in a cozy, chintzy way. And there was a big backyard that showed years of loving care, where we had drinks and mountains of fancy hors d'oeuvres that first evening.

Mabel was a tall, pretty brunette, so welcoming and warm. She wore a summery pastel dress with a very full skirt and a wide white patent-leather belt that showed off her figure, and I wondered if I had brought
something nice I could change into, though I knew I hadn't. In any case, what would have been the use? I despaired of ever developing a waist. At twenty-four, I was getting a bit long in the tooth to ascribe the problem to “baby fat,” as Clem fondly called it. To me it was the hex put on me those many Christmases ago by my snarling Nazi uncle: “Isn't it time she lost her baby fat?” But while I waited for the day that would never come, belts were for the Mabels of the world.