My love of outsider art overcame my apathy about line drawing--no color!-- and sent me to the Morgan Library for the museum debut of homosexual man who's been dead for 30 years. You need know only a single fact about Rick Barton to know he was crazy: he programmed the jukebox of the gay nightclub he ran in San Francisco with Bach fugues. Let's go!
Enlisting in the Navy rescued Barton from poverty in New York and exposed him to art around the world. Yet loneliness more than anything informed his work. He's a man in a single bed with his shoes and socks under the box spring mattress.
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| "Alone Again" (1960) |
That's not to say he didn't have the occasional boyfriend. But his mental illness probably sent them fleeing. Would you be comfortable with this kind of obsessively repetitive portrait?
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| Portrait of Russ Zerbe (1962) |
Two extraordinary accordion sketchbooks from 1961--each 19 feet long--timelessly depict the denizens of a North Beach cafe where he hung out at the height of the beat era. They also betray his utter lack of interest in women. It's almost as if they didn't exist in his world.
He includes at least one identifiable African American and you don't have to be a Freudian to detect his obsession with phallic symbols. When have salt and pepper shakers ever been so tall?
The New York Times delightfully described the accordion books as the "Bayeux Tapestry" of the post-war underground!
Barton occasionally drew birds and plants, too. I remember composing a very, very similar owl with my mother from a do-it-yourself mosaic kit in the mid-60s. It hung in our dining room.
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| 1962 |
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| "The Green Medium" (1960) |
Barcelona delighted Barton as much as it did me half a century later.
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| 1962 |
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