Arts and Letters

This is about Jimmy Ernst, born in 1920 in Germany—our dear friend the painter and writer, who was killed instantly by a stroke on February 6th, 1984. He was at the peak of his powers, and of his happiness, too, by all outward signs. His stunning autobiography had just been published. In two days he expected to attend the opening of a show here in New York City of his most courageous and personal and successful paintings.

I will say a word about his father. Max Ernst was surely the most famous artist in any field to sire a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. To reverse that equation: Jimmy Ernst is the only son of a great artist, that I can think of anyway, who reached for greatness in the selfsame art. It was as though there had never been a Sigmund Freud.

Conrad Aiken told me one time that sons will indeed compete with capable fathers, but only at those fathers' weakest points. Aiken's father fancied himself a renaissance man, a physician and scholar and athlete and poet and so on. And Aiken himself became a poet because his father's poetry was so bad.

Jimmy Ernst was surely not the only American artist whose mother was suffocated by cyanide in a German gas chamber. This is an ordinary bond between immigrants to this country who did so much to make this city the art capital of the world. I am not entitled to say what his best painting was, although I have my favorite—a triptych, black on black, executed so meticulously that the paint might have been laid on by a jeweler using a magnifying glass. I will dare to say that his spiritual masterpiece was to live without hating anyone—to forgive no one, since there was no one to forgive.

He elected to work without drawing on this quite customary source of creative energy, and I will name it again: hate.

The painter James Brooks wrote a letter to me about Jimmy—in longhand, in pen and ink, which included a phrase which so efficiently describes the ghost of Jimmy that should live on in our heads that I will save it for the end. It was at the very top of the letter.

Toward the bottom of the letter, Brooks celebrated Jimmy's famous helpfulness to other painters—his obvious enjoyment of their work, his bringing them together with institutions which would show their work, and on and on. He also placed him in the perspective of very short-term art history, saying: "At the time Jimmy came to New York from Europe, the abstract-expressionist movement was ripening—which added to any difficulties he might be having in adjustment. The Americans couldn't easily accept his highly detailed, closely finished work, since they were then glorying in the invention of large, free-flowing shapes with little attention to detail." There ends the quotation.

He did not change, of course, and at the time of his death was widely admired not only by abstract-expressionists but by painters of every kind.

I will now tell you the phrase at the top of James Brooks's letter. "I think first," said Brooks, "of a deliberately unprotected psyche."

Again: "I think first of a deliberately unprotected psyche."
Again: "I think first of a deliberately unprotected psyche."
Again: "I think first of a deliberately unprotected psyche."

I thank you for your attention.