The River's Edge

In search of my father's paintings, part 5

Earle Olsen, The River’s Edge (1957). Collection of the Rose Museum, Brandeis University. Photo by author.

This post is part of a series I’m writing about searching for my father’s paintings. I’ve written about one I found and lost again, one I never knew about, one I loved and haven’t (yet) re-found, and two I found against all odds.

This painting was easy to find: my father’s resume mentioned a work in the collection of The Rose Museum at Brandeis University.¹ I emailed the museum and they promptly sent me a reproduction of an early abstraction called “The River’s Edge.” In September 2021 I tried to make an appointment to see it, but the curators told me I didn’t need one: it was on display at the library. So I took a ferry from Cape Cod to Boston to search for it. It was Rosh Hashanah and the campus was nearly empty. I found the right building and walked the perimeter of each floor, through the deserted stacks, ascending and descending concrete stairwells, until I rounded a corner and there it was! In full color and three dimensions. Blocky shapes of trees dominate the right side with earth tones; on the left a blue swathe suggests water. Compositionally, it resembles Seurat’s A Sunday on la Grande Jatte (1884), without the people, doesn’t it? My father knew that painting well from visits to the Art Institute of Chicago.

My father painted “Rivers Edge” in 1957 and exhibited it at one of his early shows in New York City. It was bought by the collector Milton Lowenthal and ended up as part of the art he and his wife donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then passed along to the Rose Museum. Brandeis was a new university in the 1950s and only opened its museum in 1961. In 2021 my father had been gone ten years so my pilgrimage was something of a yahrzeit, a ritual gesture of remembrance on the Jewish holiday of renewal. My family wasn’t Jewish and we had no particular rituals of our own, unless you counted my father’s delight in making spaghetti carbonara for dinner and crepes for breakfast. He was a bon vivant who took pleasure in ballet and antiques, Mozart and Hitchcock movies. Recovering from a brain tumor at the end of his life, he kept asking his hospital nurses for a glass of red wine. “They say they like my smile, so I smile!” he’d tell me and my sisters later.

view of River’s Edge on wall of Farber Library, Brandeis University. Photo by author.

Earle told us little about his early art career and I had never seen most of his paintings from the 1950s. Where did he paint this? Which river was it? He grew up south of the Chicago River and spent most of his life on one side or the other of the Hudson and East Rivers—in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and then upstate in a big old Victorian house where you could hear the trains whistle past on the other shore. I stood before this painting and thought of my father’s square-tipped fingers leaving these traces here and now.

I grew up at a river’s edge, on Riverside Drive, in an apartment my father found in a pre-war building, then moved out of almost immediately. He and my mother sat us down in their bedroom high above the water and told us they didn’t love each other any more. “River’s Edge” is a glimpse of a prelapsarian Eden—before marriage, before divorce, before me. History is everywhere visible in Boston, and its tourism is another kind of search for the presence of the past. For me, though, the trip evoked literary associations. I used to teach James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” about his own father’s death, and marveled at this masterful last line:

“Now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.”

With those conditional verbs, Baldwin perfectly expresses the balancing act of facing backwards and forwards at the same time, of being both present and absent. My father too is “irrecoverable,” but I can search for his art, if not his face.

The missing face, the dead hand. My return ferry crossing, at dusk, channeled another literary evocation of loss, beyond boundaries. As the sun set behind me, I thought of the last lines of Alfred Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” (1889):

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

Those capital letters suggest that Tennyson is thinking of a less earthly Father than mine or Baldwin’s, but he too insists on the importance of seeing in person, “face to face.” In these examples, art is about emotional absence, but it is also a concrete response to its painful abstraction. That is why I go looking for my father’s paintings. My father is dispersed now, but still present and visible in his surviving art works, wherever they are. When he died, my sisters and I followed his wishes and sprinkled his ashes over the Hudson River.

view from ferry back to Provincetown, September 2021

Thank you for reading these! And a sincere welcome to new subscribers! There is at least one more of these stories in store for you— another “find.” In the meantime, feel free to share or like or comment on these posts and I will respond.

1. Not all of the references in my father’s resume panned out though. He also mentioned a work in the collection of the City Museum of St. Louis and that museum had no record of it.