Arts and Letters

Just sitting here looking at Berenice Abbott's portrait of Phil shakes my memories and has me compulsively wishing the impossible. How, with these poor words, can I stir your recollection of this marvelous guy? John Baur's definitive biography, soon to be off the press, is anticipated by all of us. For now however, let me shuffle some tales and choose several that bespeak his wit, whimsy, and disarming charm.

We first met Philip and Julia some thirty-five years ago and for us it was love at first sight. Though never tranquil, with that bursting energy and his pursuit of ideas, we never had a troublesome disagreement. Evergood wanted to be understood.

Where to begin, with this many-faceted original? Perhaps with his houses in all their clutter. The petit-bourgeois gathers prettified knick-knacks and displays them like a shopkeeper, as if pretending to a cultural bent… the coffee table book. One has to be careful where to sit within this array and where to position one's elbows. There was clutter at the Evergoods, but it was an accumulation, not a collection. However, all of these odds and ends had quality and they mushroomed accordingly. There weren't enough mantlepieces to go around and the shelves were creaking, and finally the top of the corner cupboard was almost out of sight. One had to put stuff on the floor in order to set the table. Surely this accumulation would anchor one permanently—but not a chance. Over these years there was Barnstable, Wellfleet, Woodside, Patchogue, Bank Street, and the two houses in Connecticut. He seemed to delight in buying, moving, and transforming each into pure "Period Evergood." Every move found new images that invariably found their way onto his canvases. An indefatigable observer.

While as a tot his mother would dispatch him on some outside activity but before he left she would have him scan the room. On closing the door she would move a chair, open or close a book, add tea to a cup, or remove an antimacassar. On returning he would precociously mark the shift.

He had a predilection for old things. All of his accumulations were antique, none of his houses were new, none of his animals were newly born and all of his automobiles were second-hand. We arrived at his place on one occasion and there in the driveway were a Jaguar sedan, a Volkswagen bus, a Ford station wagon, and another model that escapes me. A real patsy for the used-car dealer. Immediately inside the front door there were twelve pegs driven into the wall and each held a hat or a cap of some sort—a collection as varied as Connecticut's weather. When we gathered to leave there was a moment of decision when he would pick a given hat to go with a given car. He played out his fantasies.

Such a superior raconteur and drinking companion—only I would reach a point in his story, in my drink, where my concentration would slip, or maybe I'd heard the story before. Anyway, I could never gauge the effect of the alcohol until we would get into one of his automobiles and though he would head in the right direction he would drive right through the red lights. I realize there was limited traffic at those hours, but I'd yell, "For Christ's sake Phil that was a red light, are you color blind or something?" The immediate reply was, "Why do you paint blacks?"

Occasionally our beloved Herman Baron of the A.C.A. Gallery would persuade Phil to accept a portrait commission from some innocent bystander. One time it was an ill-advised husband who had lost his way in "the little woman and the kids" syndrome. The props were made to order. The wife was youngish, blondish, dressyish, and richish—one of those white-on-white cosmetic displays that are seen at intermission on opening nights. The two sons, weak and clinging, completed the grouping. Of course the canvas was unacceptable. Then with a bare minimum of repainting—adding some belching factories on the horizon, pumping some additional white corpuscles into the effeminate youths, and making the mother-wife just a bit more of an ornament—it was titled "Contentment in New Jersey." It is now in one of our museums.

Some mistakenly thought that Phil had a wide streak of naïveté, when in truth he was most sophisticated. This notion came about, I think, because he was a believer, not a non-believer. One could tell a tall tale or pull a practical joke and both might escape him. It seems to me that this defined his inherent, his extended honesty. He simply could not have managed a lie.

Homer Saint-Gaudens chose to come directly to the artists' studios, instead of visiting the dealers, when lining up his Carnegie Annual exhibition. Incidentally he wrote a little book on this practice. He loved his work, was happily irrepressible and as deaf as a goat. He had me call Phil to remind him of his impending drop-in. At the same time I told Phil, with his congenitally booming voice, that S. G. was deaf and that he had better speak up. On seeing Phil later I asked what S. G. had said and he reported that S. G. had said, "Evergood, I'm not deaf." Phil added that judging from the canvas he chose one would have thought so.

One day he asked if I thought that Douanier Rousseau signed his name too large and perhaps just a bit too flamboyantly. "Oh no!" I said. "Not at all. No, no, not in the least." It seemed to please him.

There were numerous aphorisms jotted down on scraps of paper and randomly thumb-tacked to his studio walls. The sources of what he called his "man-given" verities were ancient, modern, Eastern, and Western. One of the last of this collection was from Thomas Mann, having to do with vogue, fashion, bandwagon, and lack of personal conviction. The essence of it was that in the history of writing, the great authors were recognizably, at seventy-five years, the same writers as they were at thirty-five. He was assured and staunch in his beliefs—no metamorphosis.

Philip Evergood was a humanist, a way of life which rejects belief in any form of the supernatural and sets up the happiness of all mankind as its guiding ethical aim, using reason and science as solutions for human advancement. But beyond his incomparable body of social comment, social satire, there was the other side. I'll just mention one, "Juju As A Wave." No more beautiful a nude exists within our period.

I could apply superlatives, on and on for both the man and the work. Simply stated, he was the most. The most.