Arts and Letters

It is strange and wonderful how we remember in death what was coeval in life. Many years ago, decades in fact, Stuyvesant Van Veen and I were at the MacDowell Colony one summer. I am almost certain that we met there. But what I am certain about is that he read to me one evening a poem that one of his friends had written. It was about a painter. And the poet was Kenneth Fearing. I want to read this poem in memory of Stuyvesant.

If I am to live, or be in the studios,
If I am to be in the quiet halls and clubs;
Quiet at tea;
If I am to talk calmly at dinner, when evening falls,
If I am to breathe
When it is night, and millions are awake,
Moving like a sea, not human, not known;
When millions are aroused to stare, to laugh, to kill;
When I feel them;
When they have no voices, but they have mouths and eyes;
When their wants are confused, but implacable;
When a theory about them becomes nothing,
and a portrait of them would look well on no studio wall;
When they cringe, when they scream, when they are counted by millions;
When they have no meaning to me, to themselves, to the earth; but they are alive;
If I am to live; if I am to breathe,
I must walk with them a while, laugh with them; stare and point;
Pick one and follow him to the rotted wharves;
Write my name, under his, in grey latrines:…
I must follow him, screaming as he does, through the docks, basements, tenements, wharves,
Follow him till he sleeps…¹

Stuyvesant came to us in 1972. For fifteen years we were much aware of his presence. He was already suffering from the disease that would waste him little by little. He would sit among us in his wheelchair and with difficulty try to articulate his thoughts. We were patient and attentive. The man cared so much about our membership, took pride in his membership and enjoyed our company.

Many of us remembered him from WPA days. Among those friends were fellow muralists, some, like him, former students of Thomas Benton at the Art Students League of New York. He was only nineteen when his paintings were shown in 1929 at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Already in his earliest work was the cunning blend of realism and surrealism, allegorical subject matter tossed into a boiling cauldron of graphic witchcraft, by turns taunting, stimulating, meticulously executed. The seven murals to honor the Brooklyn Dodgers are among his best-known works, and can be seen today in the lobbies of the Ebbets Field apartment complex in Brooklyn. I know that Marianne Moore enjoyed them and once invited her friends the ee cummingses to attend a game and see them. I know that cummings went and whooped with pleasure. Marion Moorehouse stayed in their Patchim Place apartment and read the tabloids, her favorite reading matter.

Other works were seen at the 1938 New York World's Fair, and in 1945 at the Wright-Patterson air base in Fairfield, Ohio. Raphael Soyer and Isabel Bishop admired his skill and flair. Like his sonorous voice, his work had a special ring of authenticity and the fabulous. His murals are in many parts of the United States and his work is in permanent collections like the New York Historical Society and Lincoln Center's Library of the Performing Arts. He was considered a superb teacher at the College of the City of New York and at Columbia University. Having been born in New York, he outgrew its visual temptations and allowed his imagination to guide him through the fleshly temptations of Burlesk or Children at Play.

There was joy and celebration in his work. His smaller paintings and watercolors and drawings tell us much about the man who loved the night as much he as did the day, but once told me he could only ponder at night but prance during the day. Prance was his word for himself when he was twenty-five. His word for me was ebullient. I had to look it up in the dictionary. I did not want him to know that at twenty I did not know what that word meant. At one of-the first dinner meetings that he attended here, we were seated at the same table, the food was delicious, the wines soothing, but as is my way sometimes, I was "carried away" by memories and admirations, and at one point Stuyvesant smiled, accompanied by that crinkling around the eyes so typical of him, and said, "Still your ebullient old self, David. You don't change." He had not forgotten. And so today, in remembering Stuyvesant, I cannot forget his reading of Kenneth Fearing's searing poem.

Some painters must look all their lives for that world they find right for them before the intrinsic can be separated from the risk-taking necessary for so many painters. Stuyvesant belonged to that clan of truth seekers who find at once, as though by revelation, the path they will pursue, and in that realm of discovery rest certain of their life's purpose. Strength and modesty were his blessings. And I, for one, feel proud that I knew him. ¹Kenneth Fearing, "John Standish, Artist." From Angel Arms (New York: Coward McCann Inc., 1929).