Prince at Greene: Daniel Pinchbeck on Peter Pinchbeck - Slant

ArtForum, Summer, 2002 by Daniel Pinchbeck

WHEN MY FATHER DIED, in September 2000, he left behind hundreds of paintings and sculptures in his rent-controlled loft on Greene Street. The work ranges from severe wooden constructions made in the 1960s to woozy zigzags crafted out of plaster, from icon-size images to rolled-up canvases of vast dimensions. My father's art went ignored, essentially unseen during his lifetime. There were no career retrospectives, no solo museum shows, no fanfare. His artist friends were his only audience.

In the aftermath of his life, I find myself compelled to fight his battle for him: I think that my father's art is late-breaking news from the last century. The work is probing and profound, abject and obstinate, luminous and eerie, eccentric yet true to its own internal logic. It revels in metaphysical doubt; it radiates the belief of its maker.

Is it simply too painful for me to relinquish his belief, to imagine that all of that effort was wasted? Or, to put a more positive spin on it, to accept that for my father the process was its own reward?

The universe as a vast garbage heap of matter, a constant recycling of elements, an indifference to their use or purpose (the universe as a pile of junk).

Peter Pinchbeck, notebook entry, 1995

My family moved to SoHo in 1968, when I was two. My father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract artist who worked on an enormous scale, commensurate with his ambition. My mother, Joyce Johnson, was a book editor and novelist. SoHo was a failing commercial district of cheap lofts. We were part of a wave of artists moving into the area.

During the day, trucks rattled down the crumbling paving stones of the old streets. Laborers yelled to one another as they hauled crates from the trucks onto concrete landings. In the windows of small factories, steel cutters spun, shooting out sparks.

At night the streets fell silent. Time seemed to stop. Occasionally an alley cat screeched, or the footsteps of a lone passerby echoed against the buildings. When I walked with my parents at night, the stillness pressed down on us. Ghosts appeared to hover above the old streets. It is bizarre to recall now, but SoHo in my early childhood was marked by a strange emptiness.

The loft was an enormous cavern. Gridded windows at each end let in a dull gray light. In those days my father made large wooden constructions and painted colored rectangles that floated on vast sheets of stretched canvas. Most of the space was used for his studio. For my mother and me he built bedrooms out of wooden beams and Sheetrock and installed bathroom fixtures and a water heater.

When you are a child, everything belongs to a process that is both mysterious and essential. I didn't separate the work my father did on his paintings from the world of the streets, the rattling trucks and rag bales, the laborers and spinning machines. I assumed my father's paintings were necessary to the running of the entire system. I think I believed that most fathers spent their nights and days like he did, organizing colored shapes on enormous surfaces. To my child's mind, his constant activity seemed to have a vital connection to the city's mechanical processes. It was as if he were trying to distill some totemic essence from that confused tangle of trucks and streets and machines.

After my parents split up in 1971--their marriage destroyed by a lethal combination of the sexual revolution, Max's Kansas City, and my father's bad behavior--I would visit him every few weeks. He tore down the walls that created the illusion of a domestic interior to liberate the space. My bed was a small army cot set up in a corner of the studio. I slept surrounded by his huge icons, breathing in the sweet odors of turpentine and oil.

The neighborhood around us transformed like a slowly developing photograph. The factories and loading platforms vanished one by one. Galleries and restaurants and boutiques proliferated like new life-forms escaped from some laboratory experiment. Once SoHo was declared chic, the rich descended on the area. They bought out the lofts that the artists vacated or were forced to leave. "The zombies," my father called them.

Possessed of a rare social generosity, my father was like an unappointed mayor of the old SoHo. He knew hundreds of people in the neighborhood, all the original settlers, and he would often be late to meet me as he stopped to hail each person cheerfully, then listen to their sagas.

In my twenties, when I passed through SoHo late at night after some party, I would detour by his block to see the light shining in his window. I would feel oddly secure in the thought that he was up in his loft working, revolving like a planet through his self-created cosmology of painted shapes and plaster structures. He kept working in his loft until his death, of heart failure, at the age of sixty-eight.

the need to believe handwritten note found on Peter Pinchbeck's desk after his death.

My father did not like to talk about his past; therefore I know little about it. He was born on December 9, 1931, in the seaside resort of Brighton in southern England. His father, Gerald Pinchbeck, an Irish Catholic pub keeper, left his mother when Peter was small, vanishing forever from his life. We are rumored to descend from a line of alchemists and horologists. In the eighteenth century Christopher Pinchbeck, an English alchemist and clockmaker, invented pinchbeck, an alloy of copper and zinc that was used as false gold. In the nineteenth century the word pinchbeck came to mean "anything false or spurious."