Arts and Letters

My friendship with Jack Tworkov dates back to the mid-fifties, when I married into the New York world of painting. During the summer of 1962, while Elise Asher and I were occupying a rented studio on the bay in Provincetown, the Tworkovs encouraged us to buy the property next door to them that had become available at a bargain price. We took it as a compliment that Jack and Wally wanted us to be their new neighbors, succeeding the recently deceased abutter, who had enjoyed some local celebrity as a retired madame. After we moved in, one of the first things I did, by mutual agreement, was to plant a tall hedge between our adjoining properties. This was a symbolic gesture, as important to all of us as the maintenance of the walk connecting our two houses. Friendship survived and flourished; so did our respect for each other's privacy.

Jack was the soul of courtesy, tact, and diplomacy. One summer the rock willow in the corner of my rear garden took ill and began to exude a horrible gummy substance that ruined the finish of Jack's trusty old station wagon parked beneath it in his driveway. Jack's way of solving this embarrassment was to send Wally over to negotiate with me the removal of the offending limb at his own expense.

Jack took good care of everything—his car, his house, his lawn, his tools, his studio, his brushes, his family, himself. Nobody could have lived a more admirably moderate, regulated, or disciplined life. In this regard he resembled Immanuel Kant, of whom it was said that when the housewives of Königsberg saw him emerge for his afternoon constitutional, they would set their clocks. Jack's routines were equally predictable. He rose and ate his meals and went to bed on schedule. Each day on the Cape he walked a prescribed distance, and each day swam a prescribed number of strokes. He was a martinet about work habits, keeping his studio hours sacred and inviolable. Such Apollonian conscientiousness put me to shame. When I was grubbing in the garden or playing with my cat or reading for pleasure on the porch, I would think of Jack next door toiling in his studio and quote to myself Yeats' guilty line, "All things can tempt me from this craft of verse."

Among the tasks to which Jack assiduously applied himself was the keeping of a journal. He was highly literate, a devoted reader of fiction and poetry, and a trenchant writer, as his notebooks demonstrate. Portions of his journal have appeared in periodicals, but the entire work, from what I have seen, is an extraordinary testament that should be collected and published. He was born in Biala, Poland, in 1900, and came to this country at the age of thirteen. In New York, at Stuyvesant High School, he enrolled in a drawing class. As a student at Columbia University, which later awarded him an honorary doctorate, he majored in English literature.

The extended Tworkov family, it should be noted, is exceptionally rich in literary and artistic associations. Jack's sister Janice, a distinguished painter known internationally as Biala, from her place of origin, lives in Paris with her husband, the Alsatian painter Daniel Brustlein, who for many years contributed to The New Yorker as the cartoonist Alain. Biala was previously married to the renowned English novelist Ford Madox Ford, for whom Wally (more correctly, Rachel) typed manuscripts in her teens, during the period when she became Jack's model and eventually his wife. A Tworkov daughter, married to the artist Robert Moskowitz, is herself a painter under the name of Hermine Ford, thus perpetuating the family tradition.

Jack was greatly valued and loved as a teacher. One of his early posts was at Black Mountain College, where he met a number of avant-garde artists and writers who were to remain lifetime friends. In 1963 his teaching career culminated in his appointment to the chairmanship of the art department at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, a job he held until 1969. Several of his students, with whom he remained in close contact, emerged as dominant figures in the new wave of the Seventies and Eighties. It never occurred to Jack to feel threatened by them. He was also actively involved in the shaping of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a resident community of artists and writers, which owes a great deal to his support and influence.

In his craft, Jack Tworkov was a master who could do almost anything exquisitely well: draw from the model, paint portraits and still lifes, make his distinctively flaming mark in the slant gestures of his Abstract Expressionist phase—but ultimately it was the divisions and proportions of the grid and the beauty of geometry that enchanted him. He embraced Goethe's dictum that art exists in limits. Within the limits he had set for himself he asserted that he had all the freedom he needed or wanted. I have heard him wax eloquent on his fascination with the game of chess and the mysteries of the Golden Section. On countless sheets of paper he plotted his diagrammatic visions and revisions, which developed into the substructure, the formal ground, of his delicate brushwork. He made me think of that extraordinary passage, in the Philebus of Plato, where Socrates says: "I will try to speak of the beauty of shapes, and I do not mean, as most people would suppose, the shapes of living figures, or of their imitations in painting, but I mean straight lines and curves and the shapes made from them by the lathe, ruler, or square. They are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are, but are eternally, and by their very nature, beautiful, and give a pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of desire…."

Perhaps, I sometimes thought, he had sacrificed too much to achieve this crystal purity of his art. He had abandoned Abstract Expressionism of the gestural variety, because he felt, in his own words, that his painting "had reached a stage where its forms had become predictable and automatically repetitive. Besides, the exuberance that was a condition of the birth of this painting could not be maintained without pretense forever."

His intention certainly was not to exclude "instinctive and sometimes random play." On the contrary, "What I wanted was a simple structure, dependent upon drawing as a base on which the brushing, spontaneous and pulsating, gave a beat the painting somewhat analogous to the beat in music." That ritualistic beat was the signature, the genius, of his late abstract style.

Like most true artists, Jack Tworkov went through alternating cycles of pride and doubt with respect to his own work. He was fearful of settling for what he called "the civilized dance.” Few contemporaries would have the courage to say, as he did toward the end, "I have misgivings about my present work." He had chosen an art that did not strive for overt significance or meaning. Now he began to feel, as he put it, "some inner deprivation, some sorrowful regret that my art is not more explicitly some expression of existence outside and beyond myself…." He would not deny that when art loses its touch with human and societal values it is reduced to existing "for itself by itself." "This is misery," he commented, "But where is the way out?"

There is a terrifying honesty in a man who is not ashamed to confess, "I've seen my work not merely as 'a way of life' but a way to save my life." The dilemma of a style, he perceived, had implications beyond the periphery of self-gratification. "Art can pollute our life," he was convinced, "as much as technology can pollute our air and water."

For reasons I do not pretend to understand, Jack Tworkov was not elected to the Institute until he was 81. Even then—this was a year before his death—the bounce and vigor of his stride reflected a superlative health and wholesomeness of spirit. He had humorous eyes and a weatherbeaten, country face with a touch of the Slav in it. Something about his appearance reminded me of the puckered and sweet russet apples that grew in the orchards of my childhood. That image remains with me, along with a sense of all the civilization at his fingertips and in his bones.