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ESSAY
In 1965,
after Earl Kerkam’s death at age 74, de Kooning, Rothko and
Philip Guston, among others, petitioned the Museum of Modern Art
to show his work: “Kerkam in our eyes is one of the finest
painters to come out of America….(W)e could afford the stimulation
such an exhibition would provide us and the younger generation who
have not had the opportunity to study his work.”
Who was Earl Kerkam? Colleague of Andre Derain (who talked Kerkam
into exhibiting with him in Paris); close friend of Franz Kline
(whom he called “a drunker Mondrian”); idol of Jackson
Pollock (who bragged aloud when Kerkam declared Pollock’s
first Paris show “not bad”); and all the while a figurative
artist, from the time he joined The Ten in 1936 to his death.
Kerkam fit the image of the eccentric artist. “He gave up
$20,000 a year for near-starvation – and art,” read
the headline in Salute Magazine in 1948; “His story is incredible
– but true.” Well, judge for yourself.
Awarded a prize for drawing when he was 8, Kerkam studied art and,
by 1915, was a success, doing movie signs and posters. 4-F in World
War I (“they decided my pen was mightier than my sword”),
he was a cartoonist for the army. After the war, he became “king
of the movie artist, earning over $20,000 a year, a snappy dresser
who hobnobbed with the bid people of show business…[wore]
spats and had a driver for his Studebaker Sedan.” (Gerald
Nordland, introducing Kerkam’s Memorial Exhibition at the
Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1966).
But he forsook family and comfort for his art. “An artist
must get rid of all encumbrances,” he told a friend. His apartment
was “so sparsely furnished,” wrote Louis Finkelstein
in Art News, “that it did not look furnished at all….There
was a broken-down cot with a slab of foam rubber…[and] a bucket
for washing his clothes (which he sometimes let burn on the stove
while he was painting)….The walls were a dingy grey green
which created a wonderful chiaroscuro. (In another studio he had
splashed a quart of ink on the wall to provide the right tonality.)”
Once, a Seattle heiress arrived with $1,000 to have Kerkam paint
her picture. He opened his door a crack, gave her the once-over
and said: “You’re too pretty. Go away.”
In “Kerkam Paints a Picture” (Art News), Elaine de Kooning
wrote: “For his female figures, he invariably hires a model.
‘Friends are no good,’ he asserts, ‘they don’t
hold still.’…(H)e prefers to use two or three models
for one picture. Interested in an ‘impersonal image of the
human figure,’ he looks at his subject in terms of position,
bulk and patterns of light and dark, ignoring what is exceptional,
particular or detailed….(T)hese paintings of solitary people
present, in modest and eloquent terms, the barest actuality of human
substance”.
Kerkam’s admirers were eminent and varied. The painter Max
Weber said, “He has more art in a stroke than most men get
in a whole painting.” His Matisse-like drawings show “a
sense of fleshiness and elegant informality of line that swing their
lift into high art” (The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1967). Lawrence
Campbell summed up for Art News in 1968: “Earl Kerkam was
one of the best painters in America.” Despite a New York museum
retrospective in 1994, however, Kerkam remains a connoisseur’s
taste.
“Where are the people?” a friend asked at the opening
of a 1963 show, unpublicized because of a newspaper strike. “They’ll
come when I die,” Kerkam replied. “I’m not a fashionable
man.”
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