Turning Points, Part 2
Public/private art/life in 1962/1969
In last week’s post I started speculating about the shift in my father’s art career in the early 1960s. What drove him to give up exhibiting his work? Was it a specific negative review from his last New York City show in 1962? Was it some change in his style or approach to art? I also considered the role of turning points in life stories and their uses as a hinge to demonstrate change. This week I’ll offer some different readings of the evidence, timed to honor Pride Month and the June 28th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in New York City.
When my parents separated in 1970 my father claimed that he wanted to focus on his art, after devoting a decade to his family. But many years later, when he came out to me and my sisters as gay, this was revealed as something of a cover story. In other words, there was a public version and a private version of the turning points that shaped his life. Last week’s post about his reception in the art world was part of a public version. I grew up with the story that my father was a gifted artist who had been unappreciated by the art world, which he had in turn rejected.
But there was also another (private) story unspooling along parallel lines. In the early 1960s, when my father was actively engaged in the New York City art world, he was also immersed in psychotherapy, a field dedicated at the time to “converting” homosexuals. My mother reports that he was in analysis five days a week when he met her in the fall of 1961. By the following June Earle was writing his parents about his “sweet fiancée,“ a “very unselfish and a very helpful girl in her ways of assisting me in my work etc…. I know you will love her too!!” They married on July 30th, 1962 at a church on the Upper East Side, held their reception at Tavern on the Green, and honeymooned in Europe. When they returned to New York City my father started the full-time job with Kulicke Frames that he would hold, more or less, until 1979. My mother told me that they briefly joined a couples therapy group with my father’s former psychologist, then “we finally were discharged with a champagne toast and had very little contact with them after that except for the occasional call about the bill that was never paid.”1
After his marriage, Earle exhibited one painting, “Fisherman,” at the annual National Arts Club exhibition in 1964.2 He continued to make art in his spare time, but never again exhibited in New York City. What happened? Perhaps he was too thin-skinned to manage criticism, as I speculate in Part 1 of this series. Perhaps his efforts to suppress his identity led to the “superficiality” his work was accused of in some reviews I quoted there. Or perhaps he had to break entirely from his former life in order to marry and be “cured.”3 His life in the art world of 1950s New York City may have been relatively “out”— he had a lot of gay friends then whom we never heard anything about later. As he hit his mid-thirties he must have felt enormous social and psychological pressure to reinvent himself as a bourgeois family man.
If so, it only worked for a few years— and the late 1960s were another turning point. 1968 was full of public and private shocks: there were months of political assassinations, anti-Vietnam War protests, and civil unrest, and then Earle’s mother died in September. But perhaps that great loss also freed him in some way and let him reject his parents’ values. In a letter written to me decades later my Great Aunt Marie cryptically said something about my father leaving Chicago: “you’ll have to ask him why.” I never did. I took at face value his desire to “make it” in New York City. But now I wonder: did Earle and his parents have an earlier confrontation about his sexual orientation? After his mother’s death Earle wrote a series of emotional letters to his father about “seeking his own identity.” He was 42 years old and worried about them saying “you are not our son,” still defending himself as “a good boy.” Was it a coincidence that he wrote those words two weeks after the Stonewall rebellion in Greenwich Village? A year later he was moving out of our apartment and ending his marriage.
My family lived in New York City through the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s and then the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and my father never seemed outwardly to react to any of it. Among the papers he left is a daily calendar from 1969, one of those small bound hardbacks with a page for each day. The pages are full of measurements for his framing work as well as his own sketches, mostly of the geometric works he was making on Plexiglas at the time. The brief entries are filled with sales calls with clients like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pace and Martha Jackson galleries, and artists like Saul Steinberg— because my father never did leave the art world. He never stopped painting and he worked alongside it for the rest of his career. The historical events of that tumultuous year are missing from the book, though: fifty-five years ago today, when gay patrons resisted yet another police raid at the Stonewall Inn, my father sketched a grid in pencil.
In my last post, I quoted Virginia Woolf’s comment about December 1910 as a turning point, “when human character changed.” But she herself noted another, more personal turning point that had already occurred: when the then-Stephen sisters moved to Bloomsbury after the death of their father and started their close association with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. In her memoir-essay “Old Bloomsbury,” Woolf recounts that one evening in 1908 when the group of friends were lounging in her drawing room, Strachey pointed to a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress and said “Semen?” “Can one really say it?” Woolf wondered.
“With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.”4
The scene sounds like fiction, doesn’t it?— with characters, setting, and dialogue. The insistence that a word (of all things!) can change lives and history seems particularly literary; in fact, I argued in my last post that turning points are essentially a literary device. Arguably, that evening in London had a profound literary impact, as it created the core group we now know as “Bloomsbury,” with its association with modernisms of all kinds. In Woolf’s story, the word “semen” shattered a metaphorical wall like the one at the aptly-named Stonewall. Both were radical efforts to integrate public and private experiences. I’m not sure my father ever really achieved that integration in his own life, but this research has helped me better understand why.
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It seems that these therapists were sometimes paid with my father’s paintings. I wrote a post about finding some lost works my father had also bartered for services.
It suddenly occurs to me that this may be my father’s earliest known figurative work. Every work I’ve seen from the 1950s was abstract. Huh.
Cures is the title of historian Martin Duberman’s 1992 account of his own experience of psychotherapy in New York City through the 1950s and 1960s, as he too tried to conform to what Adrienne Rich would label “compulsory heterosexuality.”
“Old Bloomsbury” is not available online but this scene is quoted in Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker essay, “A House of One’s Own” (1995). (I hope the link is accessible to all.)
Your father’s story gets more and more fascinating. His life was densely textured by so many personal and artistic challenges. His biography tells us so much about his world but his inner life is still filled with mystery, such great storytelling as you unpeel the layers.