Works Cited
Re-imaging the
"Beautiful History":
Frank O'Hara and
Larry Rivers
Raphael J. Schulte
Fu Jen University
[T]he reasons for
loving a poem by Allen Ginsberg are the same
reasons for loving
a poem by John Ashbery, or by Kenneth Koch, or by
Gregory Corso, just
as the reasons for loving a painting by Franz Kline
are the same for one
by Michael Goldberg: they are all distinct,
individual responses
to distinct, individual meaningfulness--which
varies so widely in
scope, in drama, in contact, that the engaged person
is reeling at last
from contact with his own life, contact which the rest
of society tries to
teach him to back away from like a sick leopard who
doesn't know which
trainer has his best interests at heart
Frank O'Hara
"Larry Rivers: The Next to Last Confederate Soldier"
They say your walls
should look no different than your work, but that is
only a feeble prediction
of the future. We know the ego is the true
maker of history,
and if it isn't, it should be no concern of yours
Youth wants to burn
the museums. We are in them--now what?
Better destroy the
odors of the zoo. How can we paint the elephants
and hippopotamuses?
How are we to fill the large empty canvas at the
end of the large empty
loft? You do have a loft, don't you, man?
Larry Rivers and Frank O'Hara
"How to Proceed in the Arts" |
In our contemporary setting, when present day prophets proclaim that print
is dead and the image is about to predominate over the verbal, clarifying
and even replacing the verbal, I would like to look at a postmodern example
of the convergence of the verbal and the visual. I will focus on one of
the poems by Frank O'Hara in which he verbally and explicitly deals with
the visual arts. As a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
O'Hara dealt professionally with the visual arts and learned the linguistic
codes, language, and aesthetics of the visual arts. His ekphrastic poetry,
often written in a seemingly spontaneous and unrevised manner, uses the
language and imagery of the plastic arts. My purpose here, however, is
not to repeat the claims often made for ekphrastic writings. I do not attempt
to address the jovial comradeship of these two "sister arts," nor to explore
the poem as a rhetorical attempt at mimesis, verbally reproducing the painting,
nor to probe the antagonism or renegotiations that are present between
the two texts. O'Hara's goal was not to verbalize the silent painting,
as ekphrastic texts are often claimed to do, but to call into question
the historical perspectives and myths of truth. In poems such as "On Looking
at La Grande Jatte, the Czar Wept Anew," "About Courbet," and "On
seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crosses the Delaware at the Museum
of Modern Art," O'Hara deconstructs the iconography and myths of history,
only to reinvent and re-image them by juxtaposing them with constructions
of his own identity. Because of our limited time, I will focus on the poem
"On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crosses the Delaware at the
Museum of Modern Art" in which O'Hara participates in the visual distortions
of the iconic figure George Washington that are present in Rivers' painting.
My purpose is to see how both texts redefine inherited history in order
to disrupt the current status quo--in other words, to see how they confront
our understanding of the present by questioning, to borrow the words of
the poem, the "beautiful history."
To do this, we must first situate both O'Hara and Rivers within their aesthetic
and socio-political contexts. O'Hara and a loosely knit group of other
poets including John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch are often
referred to as the New York School of Poets, and, as a group, their writings
were less influenced by poetry than the visual arts, first the work of
the Abstract Expressionists and later the Pop Artists. As these poets gravitated
to the vibrant urban environment of New York City in the late forties,
they encountered a group of established abstract painters including Willem
de Kooning, Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell who were
rebelling against the aesthetic standards established by their European
and American predecessors. Besides nurturing an aesthetic rebellion, as
Dore Ashton points out, these painters fostered the political implications
of their work. They challenged the cultural and ideological values that
were gaining predominance after World War II, during the tranquilized presidency
of Eisenhower, and they also expressed their own sense of fear and hopelessness
in the emerging cold-war culture (44-51). These poets and painters lived
in New York in the early 1950s, during the red scare when Senator Joseph
McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee were witch-hunting
for communists and attempting to purge art of politics. The writers and
artists "interpreted the act of making art during troubled times as a political
gesture, [and] their embracing of the values represented by Existentialism
and Surrealism also signaled a defiant attitude toward American social
mores" (Auslander 10). O'Hara's ekphrastic poetry foregrounds the lyric
as a confluence of aesthetic and political concerns, since--for O'Hara,
like the abstract expressionists--the aesthetic is always political and
the political is always intensely personal.
The Abstract Expressionists emphasized the surface of their paintings.
Their non-referential or non-representational paintings refused to point
to an external physical environment outside of the paintings themselves.
Instead, their focus was on the surface of the paintings, where the qualities
of the paint and the canvas resided and their own gestural strokes were
recorded. The paintings, even as they refused to establish a one-to-one
correspondence with external elements, foregrounded their own polyreferential
surfaces. O'Hara and the New York Poets were similarly "self-conscious"
in their poetry. They too focussed on the relationship between the surface
of their writings and their own artistic involvement and processes during
the writing of poems. The surface images reflect and express a concern
for subjectivity, and the poems--like the abstract paintings--are capable
of containing a variety of references simultaneously. O'Hara in notes to
his poem "Second Avenue" states,
... the verbal elements [of the
poem] are not too interesting to discuss although they are intended consciously
to keep the surface of the poem high and dry, not wet, reflective and self-conscious.
Perhaps the obscurity comes in here, in the relationship between the surface
and the meaning, but I like it that way since the one is the other (you
have to use words) and I hope the poem to be the subject, not just
about it. (40)
In her study of O'Hara's poetry in relationship
to painting, Marjorie Perloff has noted how O'Hara's use of shifting pronouns
and enjambment in his poems contribute to their multiple references and
even contradictory meanings (135). The polyreferentiality of O'Hara's ekphrastic
poetry, including "On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crosses the Delaware
at the Museum of Modern Art," serves to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct
versions of history while pointing to the presence of the speaking voice
and--by implication--the readers.
Besides the Abstract Expressionists, O'Hara and the New York School poets
were also influenced by emerging Pop Artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert
Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. The appeal of the
Pop Artists was, at least in part, because their work was not abstract
but representational. They often used images from popular culture for ironic
and humorous purposes, thus suggesting the value of those images for cultural
critique by insisting on their referentiality even as those everyday images
were given non-referential characteristics by being lifted out of their
original context and recontextualized. As Philip Auslander points out,
O'Hara and the New York poets began writing during "a moment of transition:
the moment when the sensibility of the New York School [of painters such
as Pollack, de Kooning, Kline, and others] as a cultural conjuncture was
shifting from the high seriousness and commitment to emotional expression
through abstraction characteristic of Abstract Expressionism to the playfulness,
ironic stance, and interest in mass culture and the language of representation
characteristic of Pop Art" (32). O'Hara's poems, especially his ekphrastic
writings, are a confluence of the abstract and the figurative in which
multiple and even contradictory perspectives and figurations are suggested.
In the 1954 essay entitled "Nature and New Painting," O'Hara discusses
the work of artists Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, and Larry Rivers,
among others, commenting on the need to understand and define "nature"
and "painting" within their historical context. O'Hara believed that postmodern
experiences were particularly internalized, giving them a new emotional
intensity. This personalized experience, made inevitable by the pressures
of urban life, broke down the barriers between abstraction and representation,
between the artist and his or her art work: "In past times there was nature
and there was human nature; because of the ferocity of modern life, man
and nature have become one. A scientist can be an earthquake. A poet can
be a plague" (42). Among the many comments about Hartigan's work in the
essay, O'Hara points to the presence of the artist in her own work: "the
artist is of necessity present as narrator, in much the same way that Franz
Kline is present in his work as the medium of its violence" (44). As we
shall see, the presence and identity of the artist and the audience are
integral issues to O'Hara and his poetics in "On Seeing Larry Rivers'
Washington
Crosses the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art," particularly as
O'Hara perceived the identity of individuals to be under threat: he draws
attention, for example, to the "tragic [painting by Hartigan called]
Masquerade
where the individual identities are being destroyed by costumes which imprison
them" (45).
Both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art influenced Rivers, like O'Hara.
Besides being friends with many of the same poets and painters that O'Hara
knew, Rivers did portraits of both Freilicher and Hartigan and numerous
portraits of O'Hara. O'Hara and Rivers, furthermore, collaborated on a
series of twelve lithographs, called Stones, that were done from
1957-58, shortly after O'Hara completely his poem about Rivers' painting
Washington Crosses the Delaware. Rivers' epic painting (approximately
7 feet by 9 feet) completed in 1953, in the midst of the McCarthy era,
is itself part pastiche and part recuperation of Emmanuel Leutze's famous
painting of 1851, also called Washington Crosses the Delaware. Sam
Hunter refers to the theatricality of Leutze's painting and its "classicizing,
Napoleonic poses and beneficent beams of sunlight breaking through heavy
clouds overhead, their forbidding nature echoed in the churning, icy river
below" (16). Done in the tradition of the great history paintings, River's
painting was groundbreaking in the fifties because it presents Rivers'
rejection of abstractions and pioneering insistence on returning to figuration.
Rivers' painting, with its fracturing, distortions, blurring, and repetition
of images, resists the one dimensional narrativity of the earlier painting
and insists on fragmenting and redefining the historical moment that Leutze
depicts, suggesting multiple perspectives on that inherited myth and even
constructing new and multiple narratives whose meanings move well beyond
Washington's military feat in the 1770's and into the present. As Rivers'
himself says in an interview with O'Hara,
...I was energetic and egomaniacal
and what is even more: important, cocky, and angry enough to want to do
something no one in the New York art world could doubt was
disgusting,
dead, and absurd. So, what could be dopier than a painting dedicated
to a national clich--Washington Crossing the Delaware. The last painting
that dealt with George and the rebels is hanging in the Met and was painted
by a coarse German nineteenth century academician named Leutze who really
loved Napoleon more than anyone and thought crossing a river on a late
December afternoon was just another excuse for a general to assume a heroic,
slightly tragic pose. He practically put you in the rowboat with George.
What could have inspired him I'll never know. What I saw in the
crossing was quite different. I saw the moment as nerve-racking and uncomfortable.
I couldn't picture anyone getting into a chilly river around Christmas
time with anything resembling hand-on-chest heroics. (O'Hara "Larry Rivers"
112)
Rivers, then, saw his painting as a
confrontation with established aesthetic codes: it was a response to both
Leutze and the epic painterly tradition, as well as a response to the contemporary
aesthetic preference for abstract expressionist works. Rivers, though,
was also aware of the painting as a comment on the current political situation.
Hunter quotes Rivers as saying about the painting, "And I did it in the
year Joe McCarthy was at his height. I even have some letters somewhere
saying that Joe McCarthy would take me as a patriot. I mean, the absurdity
of history is that I might be seen as a kind of loyal, patriotic person
although I took drugs and engaged in homosexual activities. In other words,
what I was saying is that America as you know it wasn't true" (18). Though
we may disagree with his view of what constitutes America, Rivers saw his
painting as an intervention in political and aesthetic debates and as an
attempt to reformulate the view of America and the aesthetic process.
Rivers, however, went even further. According to his own concept of the
painting, he was trying to revise and challenge views of nationality and
personal identity:
I wanted to make a work of art
that included some aspect of national life, and so I chose Washington Crossing
the Delaware...The only thing was that Washington Crossing the Delaware
was always the dopiest, funniest thing in American life. Year after year,
as a kid in school, you see these amateurish plays are completely absurd
but you know they represent patriotism--love of country, so here I am choosing
something that everybody has this funny duality about. It was also a way
for me to stick out my thumb at other people. I suddenly carved out a little
corner for myself. It seems to be something in my nature--I seem to fall
on things that have a double edge... (59)
Rivers' painting can be formally analyzed
with the double edge of his political and aesthetic goals in mind. The
painting with its disparate and blurry groups of figures "floating" on
the surface of the canvas with no clear relationship set up between the
various groups creates a sense of movement and insubstantiality, as if
the partially completed, sketched characters were more dreamlike than real.
They seem to move in and out of the river, sometimes being distinct and
at other times sinking beneath the surface of the murky water. The blurred
faces lack a sense of individuality; the central figure of Washington,
for example, has a head divided into two planes, the water-gray forehead
and the sunset-orange, rusty face. His left leg is covered up to the knee
with a boot while his right leg appears to be bootless. Similarly, his
arms are not presented as icons of power: the outline of his right arm
and hand are suggested by a few tentative strokes, while the left arm is
unseen because of the bulk of his coat. Even more, the right hand seems
to have the third finger extended in an obscene gesture, unbecoming of
the "historical" Washington, and the general's genitals are both exposed
and hidden as they are lightly sketched in beneath his white pants. Moreover,
the angle of his boat suggests a movement downward, as if sinking. This
painting as a political commentary, suggests a history based on restless,
disjointed, and unstable social constructions that yearn for purpose but
express none. Hunter states "Despite the emphasis placed on Rivers' visual
sources for Washington Crosses the Delaware, however, its deeper
significance lay with such formal matters as paint application, arrangement
of figures on the fields and the blurring of various body parts and characters....
The overall effect is of strange, pulsating motion achieved by the interplay
of forms and colors that keep the eye sweeping over the surface of the
canvas, restlessly seeking a focal point and forever frustrated in that
anticipated, irresistible effort" (18). It is that frustration and restlessness
in response to the "historical cliché" that leads to the revision
of history, "exposure" of Washington, and the gradual "sinking" of the
"Washington" icon. Helen Harrison observes, "As Rivers depicts the crossing,
the characters are isolated individuals fearfully making their way through
a hostile, treacherous landscape. The commander in chief himself, in no
way recalling a posturing figurehead in a Cecil B. DeMille vignette, stands
alone in the boat, tense with anxiety" (35).
O'Hara's ekphrastic
poem about the painting about the earlier painting moves beyond Rivers'
"bringing together of historical--or established--painting and personal
innovation" (Hunter 18) by depicting the interrelationship between the
historical and the personal, by exploring how the subjective and the immediate
define the historical, and how the past is continuously being socially
constructed. The poem supports Michael Davidson's view that the meaning
and understanding of history as it is expressed in poetry changed during
the movement from the modern to the postmodern eras, from "a concept of
history as atemporal, cyclic and tradition-bound to a concept of history
as reflective and personal" (71). O'Hara's poem reads as follows:
Now that our hero has come back
to us
in his white pants and we know his
nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and
intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you
smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding
on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the
abstract,
the robot? they're smoke, billows
above
the physical event. They have burned
up.
See how free we are! as a nation
of persons.
Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to
be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare
of crossing by water in winter to
a shore
other than that the bridge reaches
for.
Don't shoot until, the white of
freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the
general fear. |
Now that our hero has come back
to us
in his white pants and we know his
nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history. |
The second and third stanzas of the poem, appropriately enough, do not
focus on Washington and his military maneuver. Instead, they examine "our
forces" and fears, exploring the desires and ambitions of the first person
plural speaker and the readers. The poem focuses on our need to revise
and rewrite history, our need to be iconoclastic: "To be more revolutionary
than a nun / is our desire." O'Hara, though, points to the fact that this
personal construction of history, though masking itself in spiritual terms
("a nun") is quite "secular," consisting--in part--of "the jealous spiritualities
of the abstract," and is based upon destruction, the tearing down of other
views. O'Hara does this through an ambiguous use of pronouns: he states
that our desires to be--or at least to present the illusion of being--revolutionary,
secular, and intimate are based on action: "as, when sighting a redcoat,
you smile / and pull the trigger." Who is this "you"? Is it General Washington?
Or is it one individual among the general population, one person among
the "nation of persons"--the "we"? The very presence of both possibilities
simultaneously creates the temporal confusion that is at the center of
the poem. In the later view, "our forces" that shape history must also
destroy, "pull the trigger." Our forces that support the "beautiful history"
are themselves supported by destruction that can at times be directed at
self: "Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting / on your gun barrel,
you see the general fear." Even more, this destruction is based upon "Anxieties
/ and animosities, flaming and feeding // on theoretical considerations
and / the jealous spiritualities of the abstract." These struggles and
worries supported by insubstantial abstractions and theories dehumanize
us ("the robot"), and as they burn themselves out, the speaker ironically
asserts our illusions of freedom: "See how free we are!" On these burnt
fields of destruction, we are free to use "our forces" to reconstruct and
revision history and ourselves. The final couplet of the poem, however,
with its ambiguous use of the word "general," also suggests that freedom
may direct the destruction onto us. The fragmentation of the sentences
and the heavy enjambment between lines and stanzas serve to isolate phrases
and clauses, making them initially seem independent, only to later reveal
them as being related. This fragmentation and enjambment mirror the relationship
of freedom and dependence between the individual and community, "a nation
of persons," even as they lead to a blurring of the icon. In the conclusion
of another of his poems, "In Memory of my Feelings," O'Hara points to a
similar relationship between aesthetics, history, destruction, and multiple
selves:
And yet
I have forgotten my loves, and chiefly
that one, the cancerous
statue which my body could no longer
contain,
against my will
against my love
become art,
I could not change it into history
and so remember it,
and I have lost what is always and everywhere
present, the scene of my selves,
the occasion of these ruses,
which I myself and singly must now
kill
and save the serpent in their midst. |
O'Hara's interest in this ekphrastic
poem is not in the historical narratives as they have been mythologized
but in the ways in which those mythologies interact with present lived
experiences: "here are your bones crossed / on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
/ a pirate's flag." This poem, as well as many of O'Hara's other ekphrastic
poems, is notable for the ways in which the historical story of the originary
painting is distorted, fragmented, and often abruptly discarded as it is
juxtaposed piecemeal with and into the equally fragmented reconstructions
of the speaker's own present self. The beauty of history, for O'Hara, lies
not in the old stories we tell and retell, but in the ways in which he
can manipulate those stories to construct (and disrupt) his own subjectivity
and identity. Through the medium of his ekphrastic poems, O'Hara rejects
invented History, only to reinvent history and then destroy it again and
again as he continues to re-image himself.
Works Cited
Ashton, Dore.
The New York School:
A Cultural Reckoning. Berkeley: U of California P,
1992.
Auslander, Philip.
The New York
School Poets as Playwrights. New York: Peter Lang,
1989.
Bond, George C. and Angela Gilliam,
eds. Social Construction of the Past:
Representation as Power. London: Routledge, 1994.
Davidson, Michael. "Ekphrasis and
the Postmodern Painter Poem." Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1983): 69-79.
Doty, Robert, ed.
Jane Freilicher
Paintings. New York: Currier Gallery of Art, 1986.
Gooch, Brad.
City Poet: The Life
and Times of Frank O'Hara. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Harrison, Helen A.
Larry Rivers.
New York: Harper, 1984.
Hunter, Sam.
Larry Rivers.
New York: Rizzoli, 1989.
Koch, Kenneth.
George Washington
Crossing the Delaware. A Change of Hearts: Plays,
Films, and Other Dramatic Works. New York: Random, 1973. 63-86.
Longenbach, James.
Wallace Stevens:
The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford
UP, 1991.
O'Hara, Frank.
Art Chronicles
1954-1966. New York: Braziller, 1975.
---.
The Collected Poems.
Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
---.
The General Returns from
One Place to Another. Amorous Nightmares of Delay:
Selected Plays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. 187-217.
---.
"Larry Rivers: The
Next To Last Confederate Soldier." O'Hara,
Standing Still and
Walking 95-6.
---.
"Larry Rivers: ‘Why
I Paint As I do.'" O'Hara, Art Chronicles 106-20.
---. "Nature and New Painting."
O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking 41-51.
---. "Notes on
Second Avenue."
O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking 37-40.
---. Poems Retrieved. Ed. Donald
Allen. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Grey Fox P, 1996.
---.
Standing Still and Walking
in New York. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey
Fox P, 1983.
Mattison, Robert Saltsonstall.
Grace
Hartigan: A Painter's World. New York: Hudson
Hills, 1990.
Parker, Alice C.
The Exploration
of the Secret Smile: The Language of Art and of
Homosexuality in Frank O'Hara's Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Perloff, Marjorie.
Frank O'Hara:
Poet Among Painters. New York: Braziller, 1977.
Rivers, Larry and Frank O'Hara.
"How to Proceed in the Arts: A Detailed study of the
Creative Act." Rivers and Brightman, Drawings and Digressions
81.
Rivers, Larry with Carol Brightman.
Drawings and Digressions. New York: Clarkson
Potter, 1979.
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