Artist on Fire

Conflagrations, both literal and figurative, were inflection points in Louis Fulgoni’s life and work. Here, co-curator Timothy Ledwith traces the artist’s journey through his art.

Louis Fulgoni had been making art at a breakneck pace for more than a decade by the day in 1970 when he gazed out his apartment window in Chelsea and watched most of it go up in smoke.

As fire trucks arrived, lights flashing, sirens screaming, he realized that the blaze in the building across the avenue was raging out of control. It was the same building where he had rented a small studio in which to work. Hundreds of finished paintings and other pieces were stored there. None would escape the flames.

The studio fire represents a bright line of demarcation in Louis’s three-decade run as a working artist. From his student days at the School of Visual Arts in the 1950s to a final burst of creativity before his death of complications from AIDS in 1989, two distinct phases emerge: before the fire and after the fire, pre-1970 and post-1970.

One point of distinction is simply that pre-1970 pieces are scarce; those that survive were either in Louis’s apartment at the time of the studio fire or in the homes of relatives, friends or (in a few cases) patrons. The surviving pieces reflect a period of early artistic growth during which Louis worked quickly and intensely — perhaps in an effort to outrace the nagging doubts planted by his father, Adolph, an immigrant from Emilia-Romagna, Italy, who thought art was a waste of time and suspiciously unmasculine. 

Louis’s earliest extant works revolve around his extended family in Dongan Hills, Staten Island. He and his parents moved to the outer-borough neighborhood from the then largely Italian-American enclave of East Harlem in the early 1940s, when Louis was around five years old.

In one piece from the mid-1960s, Louis’s granduncle Frank Costello sits on the wall of a Staten Island bocce court alongside two companions. The men look toward an unseen player taking his turn. All three are wearing fedoras, a sartorial signature that Louis would adopt later in life. Unlike most of his paintings — almost all of them, in fact — this one is signed. His mother Mary, to whom he gifted the work, insisted. She cherished her zio Frank and was close to Frank’s daughter Dorothy, her favorite cousin, so the painting hung in her kitchen for many years. Its visual focal point, the ball at rest beneath Frank’s dangling feet, recurred often in Louis’s mature work. Far removed from its original context, the sphere would nevertheless always carry a faint echo of the bocce court.

Another early painting depicts the view from the house on Dutchess Avenue where the Fulgonis lived when they arrived on Staten Island. A birdbath in the foreground and laundry waving in the breeze on a clothesline suggest an atmosphere of domestic tranquility. By all accounts, however, tranquility was not the Fulgoni household’s natural state, thanks to Adolph’s habitual belligerence. He was so demanding that his wife Mary called him “boss” (which made Louis cringe), and his in-laws, many of whom lived in nearby houses, generally gave him a wide berth. In 1958, the Fulgonis moved from Dutchess Avenue to a larger house a few blocks away on Wilson Terrace. Mary’s mother, who owned the house, had finally consented to sell it to Adolph after years of resistance. She apparently hated the idea and would have preferred Mary’s younger sister, Anita, and her more amenable husband to move in, but they weren’t interested.

Louis lived with his parents on Wilson Terrace for a few years after graduating from art school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in illustration. Adolph and Mary presumably wanted him to follow standard practice by leaving only when he had met and married a nice Italian girl, but that route was never in the cards. Louis had been conscious of his sexual orientation for almost as long as he could remember. He recalled being aroused at an early age by the lean, loincloth-clad Jesus on the cross during mass at Saint Sylvester’s church (“Catholicism is a hot religion,” he opined decades later), and he became sexually active — discretely, of course — as a teenager. When he finally flew the familial coop at the age of twenty-five, it was to move into an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, with his first real boyfriend, Frank, a young Irish-American. Frank is also the subject of one of Louis’s earliest surviving male nudes, a genre he would revisit consistently and imaginatively. 

After about two years, Louis amicably parted ways with Frank and moved to Chelsea, where he remained. He also started working full-time at NBC Television, producing graphics for the Today and Tonight shows, among other programs, over a tenure that spanned the terms of Presidents Johnson and Nixon. While LBJ was still in office and the Vietnam War was reaching its gory peak, Louis painted a portrait of him. Based on a news photo, it was essentially a Pop Art-influenced caricature with a crimson background that faded to pink at the president’s shoulders like a drying bloodstain.

Politics aside and thanks to his job at the network, by 1970 Louis was comfortable enough to afford the rent for both an apartment and his artist’s studio. The apartment was located above the Angry Squire, a Chelsea pub on Seventh Avenue. The studio was directly across the street. It provided a refuge from the pressures of NBC, as well as space for his true vocation — that is, until the inferno.

The fire at the studio must have been traumatic for Louis, who endured bouts of anxiety even under less stressful circumstances. And yet, in hindsight, he didn’t speak of it that way. While he never said he was glad it had happened, he professed to being at peace with the losses suffered that day. He told Michael McKee, who later became his lover and live-in partner, that the fire had liberated him from past aesthetic habits and conventions, giving him a chance to start over with a clean slate. After a brief period of grieving, that is what he intended to do, but not before a further brush with flames and smoke.

About a month after the studio was destroyed, another blaze broke out, this time in the kitchen of the Angry Squire. Although it was contained before the flames could spread to the apartments upstairs, heavy smoke forced the tenants, including Louis, to evacuate. The uncanny coincidence of a second fire breaking out in such a short time must have been a shock. He sought and found refuge with his friend May Wilson around the corner on West 23rd Street.

May was a noted collagist and sculptor who arrived in New York from Maryland after the end of a long marriage. She was over sixty at the time, but she soon became a recognizable character around Chelsea, with flowing capes and jewellery made from pop-tops, keys and other trinkets adorning her five-foot-on-tiptoes frame. (Her role as the “Grandma Moses of the Underground” was solidified in a 1969 documentary, Woo Who? May Wilson.) Louis, then in his early thirties, met May in the neighborhood and they grew close, regularly going to the theatre together. His portrait of May, based on a Village Voice photo, is lovingly rendered. That Louis went straight to her in a moment of distress is a testament to their friendship.

 At the time, May was living at the Carteret Hotel, next door to the more famous Chelsea. Louis waited there with her while firefighters extinguished the flareup at the pub. When he eventually got back into his apartment, he was devastated to find that his cat, Creedmoor, had died, apparently of smoke inhalation. Sadly, Creedmoor never made it out of the flat, instead hiding in fear in a corner where Louis had been unable to quickly find him. The much more merciful news was that the artwork Louis kept in the apartment — work that had not been lost in the studio fire — was mostly unscathed.

So it was that 1970 became the first year of the second artistic life of Louis Fulgoni. He soon moved into an illegal sublet on West 21st Street, where he set to work, his time freed up for better or worse by the loss of his job at NBC when Tonight moved to Los Angeles in 1972. Michael, a tenant organizer and activist, moved into the apartment with him in 1974, but it was Louis who charmed the landlord, an aspiring lawyer, into legalizing his rental status. He and the owner later fell out, but he and Michael stayed in the apartment (and Michael lives there still). For the rest of his life, West 21st Street was home base for Louis’s adventures, artistic and otherwise.

Of course, the 1970s were adventurous years overall, notably in and around Chelsea and Greenwich Village, Louis’s usual haunts. He partook fully in the sexual liberation and growing gay pride that marked the decade before AIDS smashed the illusion of total freedom in the early 1980s. Many of the paintings, prints and drawings from this period celebrate homoeroticism and the phallus, but the collages may offer his most direct, spirited take on these themes.

Perhaps inspired by May Wilson’s surrealist collage work, Louis went on a literal tear in the early and mid-1970s, lifting images from Architectural Digest and other high-brow publications and juxtaposing them with cutouts from hard-core gay porn. Pasted on Bristol board or sometimes assembled in shallow black boxes as three-dimensional dioramas, the collages revel in hedonism and send up the pretensions of a repressed, consumerist society.

Louis created those pieces at speed. When it came to painting, though, after 1970 he worked far more slowly and deliberately, settling largely into a pointillist style with which he had experimented in the late ’60s. It required painstaking brushwork. Although he still said that he felt his father looking over his shoulder, he was now in less of a hurry to prove that he and his work were worthy of approval.

When Adolph Fulgoni died in 1979, Louis admitted frankly to a great sense of relief. Adolph’s death amounted to another turning point for his son. It was probably the most significant event in Louis’s life since the studio fire, lightening if not entirely dispensing with the mental and emotional baggage left by the man who never acknowledged either his talent or his sexuality. On the latter issue, to be fair, Louis never explicitly came out to his father. Still, even after he and Michael had been living together for several years, Adolph would feign surprise if Michael answered the phone in their apartment. After Adolph’s departure from the scene, Louis and Michael started spending more time with Mary at the house on Wilson Terrace. She, too, seemed more at ease.

But for Louis, any newfound serenity would be temporary, cut short in 1981 by reports of a terrifying medical condition that was disproportionately killing gay men. In this case, he confronted not a literal fire but a conflagration of disease fuelled by a tinderbox of anti-gay stigma, and it soon began to engulf friends and acquaintances, one by one. Like so many others, he lived in fear that he might already be the embodiment of a ticking bomb, that sickness, wasting and almost certain death were lying in wait within. And yet, even after HIV testing became available in 1985, he never opted to check his serostatus. There was no effective preventive treatment for AIDS, Louis reasoned, so it was better not to know.

Moved, perhaps, by a resulting spike in existential uncertainty all around him, he grew even more prolific in the early and mid-1980s. Besides a slow but steady output of canvases, he took up printmaking at a new level, studying with master printer Roberto De Lamonica and creating images that often carried suggestions of the foreboding he felt. In what may have been an exercise to ease the tension, he applied his spontaneous collage technique to the production of a series of Greco-Roman-inspired masks made from cardboard, cheesecloth, toothpicks and other found materials, and painted with acrylics and oils. Although some of these constructions wore terrifying expressions, their overall effect was more playful than ominous.

A triptych Louis completed around the same time attests to a certain gallows humor that had always been part of his personality but now became a bulwark against depression. All three paintings in the series depict “Eleanor,” the name he had given (after Eleanor Roosevelt) to a skull he had acquired years before. In all three, Eleanor wears Louis’s well travelled fedora, a signal of macabre self-awareness. In the final piece in the series, Eleanor is also wearing lipstick, which Louis applied by kissing the canvas with red cadmium paint. The effect of that defiant kiss is at once poignant and crushing.

In yet another stream of inspiration, Louis worked almost obsessively on a series of monoprints inspired by a geometric design known as a yantra – an aid to meditation in the Tantric tradition. He created scores if not hundreds of artist’s proofs, leading to about thirty finished prints.

The monoprints arose from Louis’s interest in Eastern art and thought. He had dispensed with the “hot religion” of his childhood long ago, and during the AIDS crisis his rejection of the Church was affirmed by its opposition to distributing condoms and its persistent diatribes against the evils of gay sex. The yantras were an expression of spirituality detached from that kind of hypocrisy, but spirit nonetheless. They provided a space in which to feel centered and removed, for a moment, from the chaos of life.

In late July of 1987, either shortly before or possibly while he was working on the monoprints, Louis’s own private chaos reasserted itself. He came down with a severe bronchial illness that turned out to PCP pneumonia, a common affliction of people with AIDS. He was hospitalized, and doctors delivered the HIV diagnosis he had dreaded but expected.

Desperately weak and dehydrated upon admission to NYU Medical Center on Manhattan’s east side, Louis responded well to intravenous antibiotics. He went home to recover as an outpatient just a couple of weeks later. Prescribed a strict daily regimen of AZT (an early AIDS treatment that ultimately proved to be not only ineffective, but destructive), he dutifully took the drug every four hours. He also improved his diet and cut down on alcohol – and for a time, at least, marijuana – to protect his compromised immune system.

Whatever Louis was doing to boost his immunity, it seemed to be succeeding. He regained his strength and got back to work, calmly but assiduously, on painting, prints and masks. Except for the rude interruption of his hospitalization for pneumonia, in fact, he never stopped working. Month after month, he remained asymptomatic.

In October of 1988, he and Michael traveled to France, meeting up with friends to tour cathedrals and museums together for three weeks. Louis returned to New York inspired by those rarefied environs, painting a self-portrait after the style of a late Picasso he had seen in Paris. Complete with a hat reminiscent of the “Eleanor” triptych, the painting fairly vibrates with the energy of a man who could still be excited by the possibilities of the artist’s life. In the event, it was to be his final self-portrait, and one of his last finished works.

Early in 1989, Louis began feeling nauseous and losing weight. He consulted his doctor and lab tests confirmed a diagnosis of cryptosporidiosis, an intestinal parasitic infection that can be relentless for people with compromised immunity. For Louis, it led to a harrowing, months-long decline during which he remained confined to an antiseptic room — and, finally, the ICU — back at the NYU hospital. Encouraged by regular visits from friends and family, and with Michael omnipresent, for a while he held onto hope that experimental treatments would prove successful. They did not.

When Louis died in July of that year at age fifty-three, friends and loved ones ended their vigil, deeply saddened by his loss but also quietly relieved that his suffering was over. His body was sent for cremation, one final fire. In September 1990, his ashes would be scattered at Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, a spot that he and Michael cherished.

At the time of his death, Louis’s last painting was still on his easel across town on West 21st Street. The piece was finished; he had managed its final touches just before the parasites began their insidious onslaught. Michael is certain that the image was inspired by the view from the airplane window on their flight back from France, but the canvas defies literal interpretation. Its stark diagonal divide might suggest a partial view of one wing as the plane flies west, except that it is an other-worldly wing, more like part of an alien spacecraft than a commercial jetliner. Or it might be a skewed perspective on the horizon between earth and space, except that what should be land or sea below looks more like the surface of the sun. Regardless of interpretation, this work seems to be charting new territory for a restless mind. On one side, there is cool darkness and mystery; on the other, something bright and burning; and in between, a fine line.