Part 3: Posterity Be Damned
Third in a six-part series
It’s hard to know for certain, but the perceived judgmental gaze of his disapproving father may have been part of the reason for Louis’s lifelong diffidence about exhibiting his work. He sold some pieces, usually to friends and acquaintances, but never had a solo show or expressed much interest in pursuing one.
On its face, this is a surprising attitude for such a productive artist, and it’s easy to imagine that the shadow of Adolph, even from the grave, dimmed Louis’s aspirations for commercial success in the art world. But Louis also realized how notoriously fickle that world was, and I think he made art primarily for the enormous satisfaction it gave him. He quickly grew frustrated or bored whenever the subject of promoting his work came up. He seemed to view this as a secondary and far less rewarding endeavor than the act of creating it.
Untitled, painted cardboard and cheesecloth, mid-1980s.
Without question, though, some of this reticence came from a place of fear. According to Michael McKee, Louis was “incapable of dealing with rejection, and if anyone didn’t like his work, it would destroy him.” At the same time, Michael said, “he was fundamentally less interested in the work once it was finished. He was always sort of onto the next project.” In the end, fear of rejection and Adolph’s ghost aside, Louis simply may not have wanted to spend time and energy that he otherwise could channel more creatively – the public and posterity be damned.
Nor was he particularly interested in making money, beyond what he needed to survive. By the time we met, he had already experienced the workaday world and found it lacking. In his twenties and thirties, Louis was a full-time staff designer at NBC television, creating graphics and intertitles for the Tonight show and other programs. He was laid off in 1972, when Tonight moved from New York to Los Angeles. Beyond a couple of subsequent temporary stints at the network, he never looked back. He turned to freelancing as a graphic artist, which left plenty of time for fine art. After he and Michael became a couple, they pooled their income and lived comfortably, if not lavishly.
Early on in our friendship, we ended up collaborating on several projects as fellow freelancers and realized that we worked well together. By the mid-1980s, we had formed our publishing partnership and even managed to rent a one-room office – for two hundred fifty dollars a month – in a Union Square building then tenanted mostly by artists.
Having cast aside a conventional career, Louis was a caustic observer of the absurdities of corporate striving. In fact (and here, too, Adolph’s bullying must have had an impact), he had no mercy for autocrats of any stripe, be they officious bosses, greedy landlords or windbag politicians. Michael recalled the time he and Louis saw Ed Koch working a crowd at Radio City Music Hall before a screening of the Abel Gance silent film, “Napoleon.” As they made their way down the aisle, Louis loudly called Koch a fascist in response to some recent provocation by the mayor, whom he considered a sell-out and a closet case. For once, hizzoner was at least momentarily speechless, even as audience members clucked their tongues in disapproval at Louis’s audacity.
Louis didn’t suffer lesser fools gladly, either. Among those unfortunates were some of our more difficult or demanding clients. His withering glances and terse responses in their presence weren’t very good for business, but they were of a piece with the mercurial aspect of his personality. As his cousin Kathy said, “Louis could be rigid in his own way, and he had a very dark side. I rarely saw his dark side, but he did have one. He was very set in his ways and his beliefs.”
Between those intermittent ice storms, working with Louis was an eye-opener. He brought a sense of play to designing the publications, posters and flyers we produced on a shoestring, mostly for community activists, unions and other left-leaning organizations. And he took the same spontaneous tack in his artwork, notably in a series of constructions inspired by Greco-Roman and African masks.
During downtime in the office, I would watch Louis cutting and assembling the mask elements — corrugated cardboard, gauze, toothpicks and other found materials — like pieces in some free-associated, three-dimensional puzzle, which he would then paint with acrylics. With this puzzle, though, the result was not predetermined. I got the feeling that Louis was often as surprised by the finished product as I was.
I envied that looseness. As a writer, I’d never had the sentences and paragraphs fall into place with such apparent ease. But as Louis was fond of pointing out, echoing a similar remark attributed to Picasso, even a piece that took him twenty minutes to create was informed by twenty years of experience. This felt like an abstract concept to me then. It was one of the rare instances when our age difference posed a barrier to understanding. I had to live a while longer and gain more of my own experience to get it. By the time I did, he was gone.
