Arts and Letters

One day on 57th Street I passed a majestic figure of a young man whom I could not help but notice and remember. A straight-stemmed pipe protruded from under a well-nurtured moustache; the gloved hand, carrying a cane, matched the gray spats with pearl buttons. The rest of him was dressed to enhance these well-chosen accoutrements. A day or so later I again saw him in a corridor of the Art Students League. In this dimly lighted narrow passage I was once more struck by the length of the fellow, more so even than on the street where a few inches were added by an obviously cherished bowler hat. We nodded to each other and continued to do so whenever and wherever we met.

Three or four art students, myself included, had decided that we no longer wanted to paint in a school studio, crowded in part by desolate people escaping from whatever private lives were in their pasts, while we dedicated young men were seeking to find and make our future. Our purpose was to rent a studio, hire and pose the model with more imagination than was possible under the rule of "monitor poses model" while the rest of the class waited outside the room to be called in after the pose was set, then to choose one's spot by a number picked out of a hat. We wanted a place where we could have more room, and limit our number by the sum each of us would have to pay to come close to, but not exceed, what our tuition fee was at the League. Soon thereafter we found and rented a studio in the Lincoln Arcade Building on Broadway and 65th Street.

Joining this small group of "ratty art students," as we were sometimes lovingly called by our elders, was Louis Bouché, my dapper nodding acquaintance, whose presence definitely raised the tone of the personnel. When his face was in repose (and up till then I had only seen it that way), the whites of his eyes showed beneath the large brown irises not unlike the lugubrious expression of a basset hound—registered, of course. Almost immediately after he joined us we found him to be a most jovial fellow who laughed hardest at the ridiculous, particularly if he made himself out to be the butt of his stories. He had a free spirit with an abundance of curiosity and a Frenchman's frank and open attitude about love. Besides his eyes, the only other possible resemblance to a basset hound was his engaging and sympathetic gentleness.

That was the winter of 1916-17, the beginning of our friendship, which lasted until his death on August 7th, 1969. Between these dates there were hiatuses when we didn't see each other, but not many. It would take more than this allotted space to record the similarities of our lives together: the rowdiness of the Prohibition era, some of which was spent with the Bouchés living in the same house in a flat just above ours, and of which we were a living and lusty part; the similar jobs we had and their contributions to fun and frustration; our good luck and our despair—these and many other joys and vicissitudes were shared intimately between us. And now as I look back and recall those fifty-odd years there remains but one regret, and that is that it was ages too short.

In the spring of 1917 our little studio group parted to go our separate ways, and some of them I would never see again. I had gone to Woodstock for the summer and had also lost track of Louis. One day the following winter, after we had gotten into World War I, I went to see an exhibition of contemporary Swedish art at the Brooklyn Museum. It was rather cold in every sense of the word, but to relieve it all I saw Louis again for the first time since those exuberant days at the Lincoln Arcade. He was in the uniform of a U.S. sailor; incongruous it seemed, but chic too. I learned later that his uniforms were made for him by Brooks Brothers, including the preposterous disc hat worn at that time. He had had it made an inch or more bigger in diameter to better suit his height! His companion, another gob many inches shorter, looked out of place in the company of such elegance. We embraced and laughed and made much too much noise, shattering the genteel quietude of a staid museum whose attendance fortunately at that moment included no one but ourselves. Louis and I discovered that we had both, since last seeing each other, been operated on for hernia. More noise, and then he insisted that we compare scars there and then in front of all those frigid Swedish paintings. We did, but I had the better of him, for he had thirteen buttons to undo and do again. His extrovert nature always performed on a grandiose scale—an enviable trait to have and to maintain with undiminished zeal as he did through a long and exciting life, excitement derived not so much from adventure as from the adventurous spirit he brought to it.

Louis fortunately had as a beginning a comparatively rich and indulgent mother who for years took him in the summer to Paris, her native city. In Paris he studied and painted, went to exhibitions where he became aware at first hand of what was going on in that early stimulating period of Picasso and Matisse, of Derain, Juan Gris, Picabia and all the other young men who were putting their lasting stamp on the early part of our century. He accepted them and understood the new idiom, absorbed it and used it.

His father had died, when Louis was about fifteen years old, after a successful career in this country as an interior architect. Among his numerous jobs were decorating the Metropolitan Opera House, "The Breakers" at Newport, and the bar at the Plaza Hotel, where Louis stopped on his way home after receiving a $2,500 prize at the Artists for Victory Show at the Metropolitan Museum in 1942, to drink a toast to his father, and, I hope, to himself.

In New York Louis soon got to know the men who had taken part in the Armory Show in 1913, men who had shaken up the Old Guard with their "advanced ideas." During the war Walt Kuhn organized the Penguin Club with quarters in a room on East 15th Street where many of the men of spirit and gumption, with ideas and talent, met on prescribed evenings to sketch from the model and have stimulating social exchanges. Louis was in the Camouflage Department of the Navy, stationed in New York and living at home. One of his duties was to go to rallies, principally at theaters where he would, between the acts, make sketches with Pierre, his Brooklyn Museum companion, that would be auctioned off for Liberty Bonds, as well as use his engaging persuasiveness to sell bonds to the audience. As part of the come-on and to start the ball rolling he would buy the first bond himself with money given him by his mother for this purpose, to make it seem that just an ordinary gob was doing his bit. Living as he did in New York, he could, when off duty, take an active part in the Penguin Club's affairs. Exhibitions were held, parties were given, and little auctions took place and at least one ball a year to raise money for upkeep; to these Penguinettes, as Walt Kuhn called them, were invited. Marian Wright, who married Louis in 1920, was one of them. Added to the roster of local artists were Pascin, Polumbo, Brodzky, Brancusi, and others to give it an international flavor.

Louis was, as Carl Van Vechten accurately called him, "the bad boy of American art." He was a member of the Daniel Gallery Group, where such men as Marin, Dove, Demuth, Hartley, Spencer, and many more got their start. His wit and gaiety showed through his remarkable youthful talent, as his titles would indicate. "The Plumber's Daughter" was a shocker for that time; "To My Darling, Fish and Roses" was a low-toned still-life dominated by a ridiculous Victorian vase; "Mama's Boy" was a long narrow canvas of a child low in the composition complacently gazing from between layers of lace curtains; and "Nana," a blond floozy in a frowzy room was bought by Walter Arensberg for his collection. I wish these paintings and others of that ten-year period could collectively be seen again. They were really great.

In 1921 Louis was in charge of the Belmaison Gallery at Wanamaker's, where he organized exhibitions that were far in advance of most of the galleries further uptown. He had a keen, critical appraisal of painting, and if some of the painters he showed are temporarily or permanently forgotten they at least added their part to the farsightedness and humor of his shows. Later, after he left the Belmaison Gallery and turned to mural painting, he was commissioned by "Pat" Riley, the general merchandise manager of Wanamaker's, to paint some decorations for a room to be shown at the store. There were no strings attached to this job and Louis really had a grand time, painting them on glass from the reverse side. I think they should be numbered among his finest achievements.

These panels may have started him on a series of magnificently painted abstractions that were subsequently shown at the Dudensing Galleries. At that time it was not chic to approve of non-objective art, but as I recall them and on the rare occasions when I have seen them since, they remain in my memory as the most original of any paintings done in this category. When he went to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 he settled in the English countryside for a few months and there painted a series of both abstract and semi-abstract pictures, one of which I have and still see daily without any diminution of pleasure.

For me it is rather painful to have to label pictures in categories such as abstract expressionism, realist, dada, et al. Some years ago I was in Bucharest where our group was being conducted through some rooms of Byzantine art recently returned after being held for many years in Russia. Our guide, an elderly, distinguished professor who had gone there to bring them back, was asked if he thought Rumania would ever accept abstract painting. He replied with a wave of his hand encompassing the whole room and said, "All Byzantine art is abstract." I will leave it at that and of necessity continue to use these sometimes misleading terms.

Louis gradually began painting with less obvious imagination and a greater dedication to what he saw. Whatever period one may choose to dwell upon, none was indifferent in execution, all were redolent of a worker's innate talent; he never wavered in his absorption of the sensuousness of sheer paint. To his credit and glory he sang and he painted and painted and sang his joys and his beliefs.

It was ignorance of the work of the first half of Louis' life and lack of understanding of the latter half that prompted the writer of his obituary to say he was "a painter of genre." A few paintings might perhaps be called genre, but for me the very spirit of his painting per se transcended any literal theme. He was far too aware of what a painting must be to fall into the pit that traps less talented realists, and much too keen a critic not to know the demarcation point between the love of what he saw and the wish to spin a story. He was an astute and articulate critic of all types of painting, including his own; with every sensitive nerve he knew the real from the phony, the born adventurer from the one who consciously acquires experimentalism. Despite his many extra-curricular jobs—among them mural painting, some commercial work, lecturing, teaching—he always bounced back to his love of painting, successfully shedding the gnawing frustrations of these other chores. He was loved by his students—he called teaching "baby-sitting"—and many stories about them added to his well-deserved reputation as a superb raconteur.

Despite any rise or fall of his financial state he always remained the custom-built dandy. One day when I went to see him at his studio on West 10th Street, it was apparent that the sight of me caused him acute pain. His expression did not change until finally he expressed himself. I had committed the unforgivable sartorial boo-boo of wearing a black hat and tan shoes. Later when I was in London I wrote him that I had met what seemed to me an unimpeachably-dressed retired colonel who was wearing a black bowler and tan shoes. Louis never wrote a letter of more than a couple of sentences. His reply was that "brown shoes are never called tan." That was all. His luggage, made of the finest leather, was kept waxed and polished, though he might not use it for months. Perhaps the most poignant comment about his fastidious preoccupation with his clothes and concomitant addenda came after his death. Marian sent me a package in which was contained a small, square, spotless but obviously meticulously cared-for leather box. Carefully placed on a chamois pad were his studs and monogrammed cufflinks. Also in a tiny red leather case 2-3/4 inches long and 5/8 of an inch wide were his gold collar stays.