Reviewing Words & Drawings, Barry Schwabsky Paints a Portrait of Frank O'Hara & Mario Schifano’s Collaboration

At New York Review of Books, Barry Schwabsky examines and contextualizes the recent publication of Words & Drawings, a collaboration between artist Mario Schifano and Frank O'Hara. The document is a rare look into New York of the 1960s and '70s, and a fresh take on Schifano, who left Rome for New York in 1963, and his collaborator. "What might have made Schifano’s art look a bit behind the times to many New Yorkers," Schwabsky writes, "its focus on landscape and the figure, however removed from naturalism, and the primacy it gave to drawing—would have been just what endeared it to O’Hara, who was unhappy with how the New York scene was evolving. He had not entirely facetiously dubbed his own style of poetry 'personism,' but the new art was suddenly going all cool and impersonal." From there: 

He couldn’t abide Pop art, for instance; nor, later, would he take a shine to Minimalism. When Andy Warhol approached O’Hara about posing for a portrait, the poet turned him down flat. “But you pose for Larry Rivers,” Warhol objected. “You’re not Larry Rivers,” was O’Hara’s comeback. Rivers’s high-spirited pastiches of old-fashioned history painting still looked fresh to O’Hara—an art spared from “theoretical considerations and / the jealous spiritualities of the abstract,” as he’d once written. A similar compromise between rebellion and tradition is evident in Schifano’s work of this period, particularly in his collaboration with O’Hara. The affinity between Schifano’s work and Rivers’s was clear enough to the young Donald Judd, still better known as a critic than as an artist, in his dismissive review of Schifano’s 1964 show at the New York branch of Rome’s Odyssia Gallery, for which O’Hara’s “Poem—for Mario Schifano” served as catalogue text.

O’Hara, immersed in his work as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, was writing hardly any poetry at the time he met Schifano, so the very fact that he undertook the collaboration, which was exhibited later the same year in Rome and then disappeared into a private collection, suggests that the Italian artist inspired in him some special impetus. And yet, he begins the text with what sounds like an attempt to hide some trepidation about the collaboration behind a tone of campy melodrama: “When you invited me on this motoring trip, you didn’t tell me I would end up screaming: help! help!” But by midway through the text, it has become impossible to tell whether O’Hara is speaking for himself or ventriloquizing for his painter friend: “When I remember the skies of Italy / in New York / the quatrefoil mess of testicular eyes / which are not stars / no place seems ever / to have existed.” As Rubinstein suggests, “the quatrefoil mess” would be the stained-glass window of Grace Church, across the street from the studio in which O’Hara and Schifano were working. But death haunts the text—that of the recently assassinated President Kennedy, certainly, and more broadly, in the lines “this end that no one wants and no one will reclaim.”

Read more at New York Review of Books.