Odets the Painter
By Jerry Tallmer
A slump-shouldered, rather stumpy woman of indeterminate years, her back to us, sits at a desk in what appears to be the garment district and struggles her way into a letter that begins: “Dear Ben, I am typing this while everyone is out of the show-room during lunch. How could you be so cruel to me? How I deserve such treatment is more than I can understand. God knows I have given you plenty of signs of my feelings toward you … ”
She wants Ben to know that, contrary to what he’d been told “at the Brooklyn Strand Tuesday night” by the letter-writer’s ostensible best friend, Sally, she, the letter-writer, had not gone out with a certain Mr. Milton Levitt – “a candy-bar Napoleon from Manhattan Beach” – and in fact had no interest whatsoever in that gentleman “for reasons which I don’t have to explain to you at this late date … ”
We can, if we peer in closely, read the entire rather dramatic letter, because the artist who painted the picture of the woman sitting at that desk writing that letter has then himself typed her entire letter in and around and here and there on top of the 81/2 x 11 watercolor (on plain paper) he has just painted of her writing it. I mean, he wrote it, he knows how to write, but …
“As ever, Shirley Berger,” she signs off. Shirley Berger! My oh my. Just beneath that typed signature there is one more line. I think the artist got this from Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: “P.S. Please excuse paper and typing as am feeling punk.”
Beneath all that the artist has titled the work (“The Letter”), initialed it (“C.O.”), dated it (“10/46”).
C.O. for Clifford Odets – who else? – the socko Group Theater playwright whose 1935 Awake and Sing! is reawakening Broadway as I tackle this. Surely poor hapless Shirley Berger is some unappreciated, unwanted cousin or in-law of Awake and Sing!’s Bronx ur-mother, dynamic, dominating Bessie Berger. Indeed, this letter-writing Shirley must be – might well be – a sister of Bessie Berger’s husband Myron, that lifelong ineffective daydreamer. Everything in “The Letter” points to such a likelihood. Shirley Berger, who moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn.
“The Letter” is one of 43 paintings (gouache, watercolor, ink, graphite, tempera) by Odets that are on the walls of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, NYC, 7th floor, through August 4. Odets was born (in Philadelphia) on
July 18, 1906, and this exhibit is called “It’s Your Birthday, Clifford Odets!”
What has always stuck in my mind from something I once read as a kid is that Odets, wherever he lived, no matter (in the early years) how poor, always had Beethoven filling his room from the Victrola or record player, night and day. I did not then know, and did not for a long time know, that he not only was an early collector of Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Braque, Utrillo, Soutine, Magritte, Chagall, Roualt, John Marin, Horace Pippin, and especially Paul Klee, but that he himself, Clifford Odets, was a painter of pictures.
Like these pictures. And this is the Rosenfeld’s third Odets showing since 1996 – all three organized by gallery director Halley K. Harrisburg.
In the catalogue for the first of those shows there is this June 26, 1940, excerpt from the playwright’s journals:
I am like a child. Never know what is bothering or hurting me. Like a baby with a diaper pin stuck up his ass. Only no nurse helps when I wail. Have to wail and wail till I realize I am wailing. Then I look and find the pin. This journal is a paper of pins enough to stock Woolworth’s from coast to coast.
And his paintings, the ones here on these walls, are also, whatever their inherent or overt subject matter – sex, death, terror, tyranny, lost innocence, etc. – are also, to my eye and mind, very childlike. Ms. Harrisburg sees their relationship to Klee. She points to certain lines. But I see the relationship, rather, to drawings by gifted children age 7 or so to 12 or 14 – and to gifted or ungifted mental patients on a childlike track of any age.
There is, again to my eye, also much of a childlike-ness in his recurring and obsessive portraiture of naked women, big boobs, pubic deltas, oversimplified vaginas. A newspaper colleague once, with a few quick strokes, showed me how Mickey Mantle, between hitting homers, would gleefully sketch a naked woman ready for action. Odets’s naked women remind me of that. “Mes Petits Amoreuses” (watercolor and ink on paper, 1946) is a beach scene that provides us with a dozen or more naked young women, their limbs and other appendages stylized doll-fashion like so many mechanical Stepford wives. And in “Untitled [MRO192]” (watercolor on paper, c. 1950), Eve in the Garden ignores Adam while caressing the apple and making eyes at a serpent large enough to gratify her seven times over.
Counsel for the defense will throw against all of that the “Slaughter” (watercolor and gouache on paper, 1946) in which 15 or 16 naked, faceless, sexless corpses are strewn on the ground in random heaps before a brick wall of some envisioned Belsen Bergen or Auschwitz. Also from 1946 are an untitled cartoon-ish depiction of a skeleton legging it over the walls of a red fortress.
Shirley Berger’s “The Letter” is dated (see above) October 1946. The year is significant. Odets’s daughter Nora had been born in April of the previous year and had, after six months in an incubator, turned out to be brain damaged. His son, the future psychiatrist Walt Whitman Odets (imagine carrying that handle though life!) would be born in February 1947. The pressure was on. Family needs. Survival.
Odets had had no play on Broadway since Clash by Night in 1942; in the year we are talking about, 1946, he would feed screenplays or dialogue to Hollywood for Humoresque, From This Day Forward!, Notorious, and a film I’ve wanted to see all my life, Deadline at Dawn (he directed it; if anybody has a video to lend, please let me know). The next year, 1947, HUAC – the witchhunters – would start messing in his life. Before that was through he would, as we all know, name names – albeit defiantly, and only of those already made public.
Most if not all of these paintings at the Rosenfeld were done by Odets on ordinary writing paper or pad paper that he would rip off as soon as the piece was done. You can see the serrated edges. One of the weirdest, to me, is “Nuns Returning Home” (1950), in which five tent-like figures, completely cloaked in black, more Islamic than Catholic, are marching toward a mysterious doorway. What was he thinking of? Also in the current exhibit are a mad, staring, naked red-and-yellow John the Baptist and, behind the Rosenfeld information counter, not one but two Crucifixions.
Odets had a close cultural friendship in the 1940s with J.B. Neumann, the art dealer whose Manhattan gallery, New Art Circle, was in the Fuller Building, 41 East 57th Street. The brilliant, moody man who’d written Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy and Rocket to the Moon – and would have a string of gorgeous women that included Louise Rainer, Fay Wray, Frances Farmer – bought much of his art collection from Neumann and exhibited his own work at Neumann’s gallery in 1947 and 1948.
Odets is thought to have started painting, Halley Harrisburg says, in 1943 or 1944. Nineteen forty-four was also the year he wrote and directed, in Hollywood, a movie called None But the Lonely Heart which carried me through a war and which I have never forgotten. If anyone has a video of that to lend, you know where I am.
