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Conscious Darkness: Richard Hambleton (Part 3)

Artist Profile, Editorial /

CONSCIOUS DARKNESS

“No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

-CG Jung

Continued from Part 2

Part 2

Richard was prepared for the big time the second time around. After a few false starts, bringing major galleries to visit when he nonchalantly had nothing to show, or inviting high profile collectors when Richard did not deign to answer the doorbell. But eventually my father engineered some connections and even I assisted in bringing his painting to the world stage, where it belonged, once again. Andy Valmorbida, Vladamir Roitfeld and Giorgio Armani stepped in, both barrels blazing. In short order the Shadow Man would have international exhibits, TV and magazine appearances, beautiful and famous fans and collectors, and a great documentary based on his life story. Bright blossoms springing up after a harsh winter. My visits with Richard grew more scarce. No more phone calls to invite my model or pot dealer friends to admire his new works. But we remained dear friends. Occasionally I would visit him in his Orchard Street compound, and there, just like the famous lovers from the Triumph Of Death, I’d find Richard lazing on the daybed in front of the TV with his loyal Gigi, Puerto Rican aristocrat and partner in crime, an elegant Surrealist assistant answering the ever-ringing telephone with her mulberry velvet opera gloves, fielding inquiries from abroad in her lilting Eastern bloc accent. I’d move some paint-stained newspapers and debauched take-out containers to sit and chat. Richard opened to a fashion spread from the Sunday Times supplement, and blacked out the bodies with a magic marker. Nebulous resin landscapes from the Beautiful Series dried on the walls, Island of the Dead as viewed through the blood surging into the cloudy liquids of a junkie’s syringe.

Richard Hambleton

Horse and Rider

A “Shadow Man” by Richard Hambleton

Photo by Martha Cooper

The ravages of good times were catching up with Richard. He would show up at society functions on his squeaky folding bike, still handsome but bandaged like a fighter pilot shot down, hobbling like a man twice his age. A collector made a joke in bad taste that soon Richard would be gone, and our collections would shoot up in price. I admonished him not to be so sure; Richard had been dangling over this abyss for ages and was liable to bury us all. Alas the small bandage on his nose would be swapped for a face mask as the condition spread, and soon large portions of his face went missing like the Sphinx. It was terrible to see, especially when you cared for him, and yet his courage and joie de vivre never wavered. He took the degeneration of his physical form as a matter of course; he was evolving into the fearsome Shadow of his fantasies. Collectors began to clamor for his Eighties catalogue, but he was still churning out work to his last moments on earth, every bit as vital, in spite of mounting adversity.

Just when I thought he must be sitting pretty once again, he called to report he was being evicted from his apartment. Surely it was some ploy to hustle another five hundred bucks from me, but this time he was in earnest. All was lost. He and Gigi crashed on my couch for three days, smoking, laughing at cartoons, concocting funky delicacies with cans of tuna, Campbells soup and cartons of vitamin D milk, their every belonging spilling out of suitcases on my living room floor. Thank God pops arranged a long term hotel for the lovers in Soho and it was there he mounted his brave last stand. But before leaving me on that intolerable sojourn, so sweet in retrospect, he left a shadow man on the inside of my front door, a sentinel with the built-in peephole standing in for a single cyclops eye.

Richard Hambleton

Horse and Rider

Richard grew more and more frail, and like Philippe Petit now seemed to be averting a cataclysm with every sure step, while we all watched on helplessly. I think it was my last meeting with him that taught me most about the core character of his being, showing me how to be a man in the truest sense of the word. I was opening a café and wanted him to paint something on the wall. He told me to pick him up at the hotel, and to bring three hundred dollars so he could get “right” first. He made me wait in the stuffy bathroom while his shadowy acquaintance was summoned, and I could hear Richard fixing in the other room. After what felt like hours, he was ready, surgeon’s mask barely covering the facial anatomy lost to decay, we walked the immeasurably long block from the hotel to my café together. His powerful Rodin hand clung to my shoulder to keep him from tumbling over, each step he would stop to wheeze and catch his breath. He was dying. And by asking him this favor, I was killing him. As badly as I wanted him to paint at my café, I told him we should turn back, that I would deposit him back in bed beside his loyal Gigi, and we could paint some other day. In the throes of what must have been unspeakable agony, he refused to surrender. “No, I am going to paint!” And paint he did, as powerfully as he ever had. I enlisted two lovely girls to assist him, a docile Rastafarian sister, and a Jazz drummer’s sage daughter. They refilled his iced coca colas and urged him on as he brought the monumental head and shoulders into existence with turbulent flourishes of liquid black paint, one last Shadow Man.

Richard Hambleton

Shadow Man

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Artist Profile, Editorial

Conscious Darkness: Richard Hambleton (Part 2)

Artist Profile, Editorial /

“No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

-CG Jung

Continued from Part 1

Part 1

The only thing “street” about Hambleton was that his first works in New York City happened to have been painted on public property, the DOA series conceived directly on the sidewalks and asphalt, then the painterly shadow men that would make his bones as a living legend. Unlike the aforementioned artists who premiered in the trenches alongside the roguish graffiti demi-monde, Hambleton’s shadows painted on the wall did not need to be painted on the wall to be transformed into Art in context, and neither was there any entropy in the eventual transplanting thereof onto canvas, to hang in some white box with the grandeur of crown jewels. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of Art History could draw a line directly from Monet’s splattered Water Lilies, Picasso’s expressive contortions, Pollock’s liberated unconscious arabesques, straight through Richard Hambleton’s punk rock sprezzatura sensibilities. 

Very quickly Richard enjoyed a caliber of celebrity that elevated him above the fray, positioning him alongside Schnabel and Clemente, with his sold out shows and matinee idol good looks. When at last I identified the Shadow Man in a photograph, it was not from a mug shot. Here he was posing in a glossy magazine spread, the cultural ambassador for the jet set throwing paint like Yves Klein, and finally putting a glamorous face to the name, most incongruous to the terrifying images he left behind on rat-infested squatter tenements. 

Richard Hambleton

5 ShadowMen

Warhol died. Basquiat died. Haring died. Hambleton fell from the ivory tower. The party was over. New faces filled the magazines. Then dad came home with a crazy story. He was digging a Jazz ensemble in Tompkins Sq Park when a wild man approached on a rickety bicycle and offered to sell him a painting for fifty bucks. 

At first he had been a phantom, then a movie star, but now he was a blood and guts Bohemian, struggling with a bad habit, and just like the cowboy clinging to the reigns of a violently bucking bronco in the painting my father purchased, he was fighting for his very existence. A vulnerable human being, and a fast family friend. Little by little our house filled up with the Shadow Man’s handiwork. He was short on rent, he needed a small loan, the calls came in at odd hours. He’d emerge out of a waiting taxi, leather jacket cinched shut with a jumbo paper clip and a wild look in his eyes, and then in the living room sprung up a figure frozen in the act of leaping into the air like Nijinsky or Michael Jordan, hair standing up straight as though electrocuted. 

Richard Hambleton

Horse and Rider

Pops rented a studio for him in Astoria. Against my will I joined the visit. Richard had reams of canvas stretched across the wall and painted mobs of Shadow Men standing shoulder to shoulder in volatile confrontation, hemorrhaging energy and crazy ideas in gobs of gooey black, horses rearing up, thrashing blindly to throw their rider, at last, into the dirt, dramatic as any Tyson fight, as Richard dashed across the studio, a one-man rodeo, flinging paint-caked brushes, unrolling last night’s work painted with the vivid intensity of a fever dream. Maybe I had feared that he was taking advantage of my Dad, but now I too fell under his spell.

Which of us was not scared of the dark as a child? And how much does it mean to us when some cowboy looks evil in the eye, stands up to a fear of the unknown, that darkness that dwells in all of us we somehow never get around to confronting? It is there looming in Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, in the moody Venetians, in Rembrandt’s inky umbers, in a tonal late Rothko, heaving like the sea by night, embodying the fears and doubts we all contend with beneath the surface, that the occasional Ahab rises to the helm to reckon with in our place, and for the greater good of humanity. 

Richard Hambleton

Seascape

I found time to visit Richard on my own now. He had been living in some former auto repair garage, slept in a dentist chair, with a television jury rigged to be lowered on a chain by a lever whenever he laid down. One summer night we ventured outside and painted on the streets together with Omni and Lola Schnabel. Things we never photographed, never yearned to be seen, much less sold, but painted for the sheer joy of invention. 

Pops set up an exhibit for him in some gallery uptown off Madison. Maybe the horse and riders would not stand still for a moment, nor the rhapsodic brushwork they were comprised of, but as we installed, now I had occasion to sit with these works for a contemplative moment. My father shared the observation that Pollock had died in a failed effort to return to the figure after spearheading a nonrepresentational revolution, and it was Hambleton who rather carried this aim to its conclusion. In the most carefree way, Richard could articulate a horse’s anatomy as meticulously as George Stubbs, but that blurred streak of a rider was hardly even a human any more, obliterated by the storm-clouds and dust storms of unruly activity.

Continue to Part 3

Part 3

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Artist Profile, Editorial

Conscious Darkness: Richard Hambleton (Part 1)

Artist Profile, Editorial /

“No one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

-CG Jung

The dark men stood on slum street corners staring menacingly at each passersby. They lurked in the shadows. They had become shadows themselves. Maybe they were ghosts or spirits, and when you approached the pissy, crumbling walls to investigate, you could see that they were made up of some ethereal oozing tar, dripping like spit through soot, splattered like blood on ashes, something like… black house paint.  

Those of us who wrote on walls recognized that, in some ways at least, he was one of us. An anonymous artist who expropriated the corroded civic infrastructure of New York city as a stage for his inspiration. He didn’t sign his name. He left a trail of inspired silhouettes in his footsteps for a signature, and so we called him “Shadow Man”

“ShadowMan”

Photo Courtesy of ©Martha Cooper

Just as a sommelier must speak of wine without failing to consider in depth the soil, the terroir, I would like to discuss Hambleton’s work as a phenomenon that took shape in a hostile landscape lacerated with all manner of criss-crossed written message, in layers of meaning. In so doing there will be no editing out the narrator, as I witnessed up close a broad arc of Hambleton’s poetic development from these first furtive gestures, to the work of a fine artist now considered canon. 

My father was by trade a private art dealer, so our home was a showcase of high-concept sculpture and painting, a little of everything but primarily from Picasso straight through to Warhol, lingering on Abstract Expressionism with some piety. And while the geniuses of western tradition were compelling in their museum or gallery settings, legions of unknown artists took me by surprise from passing trains. Deciphering the names, like Phase 2, Riff 170 and Tracy 168, Stay High 149, Kase 2, Futura and Lee, along with hundreds of others, I developed a dangerous obsession with graffiti from earliest childhood.

“WTC 50” View of NYC Skyline from a Jersey City scrapyard, late 1980s. Photography by Steven Siegel

Now, no graffiti artist during the subway era referred to their way as graffiti, a media term and a slur, yet it is still the best term to describe the multi-cultured avant-garde movement that began with Taki 183’s straightforward autographs of the late 1960s and ended with Jon One’s wild abstractions in the late 1980s, when the last illegally-painted 1 train was taken out of commission. And all throughout, every scrawled word or scribbled face spoke a code, puzzling my curiosity like ancient hieroglyphs. Indeed it was a strict orthodoxy of form, and yet allowing for a complete freedom of innovation for the proven initiate, as some amorphous council of ascended “kings” maintained ever-evolving standards. 

A procession of fresh masterpieces rumbled past, convoluted multicolored letters twisting back on themselves, taking my breath away like no other form of Beauty. In time I grew to understand their mysteries the way a hungry man understands a sandwich. Here it should be stated as fact that neither Basquiat nor Haring were ever graffiti artists as such, and neither was the Shadow Man, yet no conversation about these artists would be complete without first understanding their complex relationship to this craft. And if so-called graffiti was to my mind the biggest art breakthrough of the age, to say another kind of artist was every bit as relevant is no mean praise.

Rooftops in Chinatown Manhattan, 2019

Photograph by Howie Mapson

On this new cultural wave of the early 1980s rode several Art world mavericks, who would storm the citadel of galleries and museums by first laying siege to the war-scarred city streets. We first saw Keith’s chalk drawings on the blank subway posters, the soft curves of a Tex Avery or Disney illustration but in situ, in our hardscrabble subterranean domain of mass transit, these speciously innocent characters took on a subversive attitude. We all regularly appropriated comic book characters as alter egos beside our subway paintings, yet Haring had created an animated iconography of his very own, and was thus first embraced by the graffiti underground as a true original before rising to prominence as an bona fide Art star.

Basquiat was a native New Yorker, a Brooklynite, and he learned to write on walls side by side with actual taggers of repute. He did everything in his own variety of cool, and his inscrutable slogans and unadorned manner of penmanship were at odds with formal graffiti, almost to the point of constituting an anti-graffiti. And yet his modus operandi, even down to his raw anti-aesthetic stance, endeared him to the ranks of graffiti artists from the “beyond” category, restless young turks themselves who sought to break away from the stylistic trends that had already become codified as an -ism. Basquiat was accepted by members of the elite TDS crew and particularly Rammellzee’s Iconoclast Panzerist inner-circle: A1, Arbitrator Koor and Toxic. So Basquiat would ascend to be heralded by the Art establishment despite his early flirtation with illegal Art. So Martin Wong, Kenny Scharf , David Wojnarowicz and a few others found success while simultaneously earning credibility for street authenticity, as did the Shadow Man, Richard Hambleton.

Continue to Part 2

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