Line of Vision
Robert Andrew Parker at the National Art Club
I had planned a post on art studios this week, but I’ll postpone that to process an exhibit I saw yesterday at the National Arts Club in New York City. The show honors the Vision and Art Project, which supports artists diagnosed with macular degeneration, and I knew that two of my father’s old friends from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) were exhibiting there. One, Lennart Anderson, had passed away before I started this project, but I met with his youngest daughter, who has been shepherding her father’s work and legacy. The other, Robert Andrew Parker, I interviewed in his home one fall day in 2019. It was a memorable visit and I loved meeting him and his wife Judith Mellecker, a writer and editor. At the time Bob was 92 years old, still painting with his limited vision, and had a local gig playing jazz drums once a week. I always meant to return to Connecticut to hear him play.
Lennart Anderson had some lovely soft portraits in the show, labeled “post-macular.” Bob Parker had several landscapes and portraits of monkeys— that were on loan from his estate, which is how I learned that he passed away in December. I hadn’t seen the obituary in The New York Times. I had written his wife at New Year’s and gotten no response, which had worried me; the obituary revealed that she predeceased him last year.
I’m so saddened by these losses, which were unexpected (to me). I left the gallery wondering what I had expected, what kind of magical thinking had kicked in. Somehow, I had a childish notion that the people I met would stay in limbo, preserved in amber, wherever I left them.
In honor of Bob and his wife and their lovely art-filled home and their long creative careers I’ll share this excerpt about that visit from my memoir about my father’s art career.
As I researched alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1947-51, when my father attended, and read oral histories with contemporaneous artists I made lists of artists who were still alive and worth contacting to see if they remembered Earle. One was Robert Andrew Parker, an illustrator who visited my father and fellow alum James Harvey in their New York City apartment on the Upper East Side in the early 1950s. Harvey had died in 1965 but when I started my investigation into my father’s art career Bob was 92 and living in Connecticut so I sent a shot-in-the-dark note to an email address I found online: “was there any chance you remember my father from sixty years ago?” The next day he called me.
“I was so sorry to see that beautiful house empty. I knew something happened to him.”
Wait, what? My father moved to that house in the 1980s. “You kept up with him all along?”
“My wife drove me over there after my eyesight failed. And he came here to see me.”
My mind was spinning. We never met this man in all those decades; my father never even mentioned his name.
“You’re his daughter? How many children did he have?”
Was the ignorance mutual then? Did Bob know nothing of my father’s life either? It seemed so. On the phone he recalled that my father was witty, that Jim Harvey was very serious. Parker had been teaching at Skowhegan in Maine back then and stayed with Earle and Jim when he came through New York City. He never liked living in the city and raised his family in Connecticut. Five sons! I listened to him talk, occasionally butting in to clarify a point or date. Finally I burst out, “my father came out to me and my sisters in the 1990s. Did you know he was gay?” “Oh sure!” Bob laughed. “Not that we talked about it.”
And with that one comment a certain story, an unspoken assumption, died. My father didn’t “figure out” that he was gay in the 1990s, in his sixties, after it became speakable for him. That’s what he had implied when he shared his secret and told me and my sisters not to tell. He knew all along. Obviously. Why did I think otherwise? Why did I not even connect the dots when I found out that my mother also knew? My assumptions continued to defy logic, common sense, and everything else I knew about human nature. In a word, they were childish.
Months later, when I met Bob at his studio in Connecticut, he reminisced that he sold a painting from his first show to the Museum of Modern Art: “I thought it was that easy!” Bob’s first break was being cast as the artist’s hands for the 1955 film Lust for Life. He spent a summer filming in France, stepping in to paint something as Vincent Van Gogh whenever Kirk Douglas was off screen. In 1956 he was included with Andy Warhol in a group show at MoMA of “Recent Drawings U.S.A.” We talked about SAIC and the art world of the 1950s. We toured his backyard studio and as we walked between buildings, Bob told me that my father had visited him there. He paused to wave toward the driveway and said something like, “Earle only visited here once. He didn’t stay long but stood here and said, well, I have to go!” Bob shrugged, like he didn’t know why. I could imagine my father not wanting to stay long, either feeling competitive or uncomfortable or worried about driving before it got dark.
When I got home I would find the name Bob Parker in my father’s address book, a familiar paisley-printed hardback he probably bought in the gift shop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art fifty years ago, though I hadn’t known at the time to notify Bob of my father’s death.
I too have had trouble with my vision, both metaphorically and literally. A few months ago I started seeing double, though tests confirmed it was only a weakened eye muscle that failed to pull one eye into focus. I still get dizzy whenever I have to shift focus quickly. Leaving the gallery yesterday I watched my steps carefully. But my metaphorical vision has been unreliable too. I was astonished by what I hadn’t wanted to see: that Bob and Judy hadn’t responded to my email because they had not received it. I could have called them— but then knowing would have disrupted the comfort of not-knowing. Instead, I let myself swim in the same currents of my childhood— when I didn’t understand what was right in front of me.
Looking back at these sections, “childish” seems a key word, but I’ve made it sound pejorative. What I’m calling “childish” is a particular kind of simultaneous knowing-and-not-knowing, a belief that is actively protected from counter-evidence. Growing up, for example, my friends seem to have known that my father was gay when I didn’t notice or ever think to ask him. My father fit a certain stereotype of “bachelor artist” that others may have read as gay, but for me my father was only ever in the category of himself. Until I started this memoir project in 2017, I simply didn’t look any further.
What else would I have asked Bob, if I could have? As I try to make a list here I realize I did ask those questions, but there were no answers, really. He didn’t remember by then or I didn’t leave enough time for answers to re-surface. Anyway, as I’ve learned over and over, there’s a limit to what you can know about the past.
Please share or like or comment below. There’s no writing exercise for this post, but next week I’ll write more about artist’s studios because Bob Parker’s was especially memorable— with model airplanes hanging from the ceiling and the accumulations of a productive career on every surface. This photo is a glimpse inside. The memory is indeed a blessing.
Resources:
The National Art Club exhibit, What Was Once Familiar, which celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Vision & Art Project of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, is on display until April 26th if any of you are in New York City this month. My mother has macular degeneration too, with almost no vision in one eye. Lennart Anderson made a video for the project that explains what painting with vision loss was like for him. You can find more of Anderson’s work on his website.
I also only recently learned of the death of another of my father’s SAIC friends and colleagues— Thomas Kapsalis. I’ll write about visiting him and his artist wife Stella in another post. Having the chance to talk to my father’s peers about their lives and work was an extraordinary gift to me and to this project. I feel tremendously lucky to have found and met both of them. There are many other important people I didn’t reach in time.
For those of us working on research projects from the mid-twentieth century our main sources are passing away before our eyes. That was a poignant theme in a wonderful talk I went to this week at the Women Writing Women’s Lives seminar at CUNY.
and Alec Pollak spoke about their work reclaiming the legacies of women writers Lucia Berlin and Joanna Russ, respectively. These projects of reclamation feel both moving and urgent.Finally, thanks again to my Cape Cod writer’s group for feedback on this essay! And especially
for its title—
This is an exceptionally fine post. It tells so much about your resistance to "Knowing," while at the same time going deeper for us (the readers) into learning about who your father was and wasn't among his peers. Many surprising moments in it.
I'm only sorry to learn that I too missed, "knowing" that Bob Parker had died.
So beautiful, Victoria. Thank you for sharing.