O'Hara's Artful Life - poet, curator and critic Frank O'Hara - Critical Essay

Art in America, Feb, 2000 by David Lehman

The impact of poet, curator and critic Frank O'Hara on postwar American art is examined in a traveling exhibition now at the Wexner Center. The show brings together works of art that O'Hara inspired, collaborated on, posed for and wrote about.

Who was Frank O'Hara that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles should mount an exhibition centered on him? A poet, beloved, anthologized, imitated, studied, though still underrated by the sort of academic critic who metes out the words major and "minor," O'Hara championed the great avant-garde art of his time. He stood in relation to the New York Schools of painting and poetry in the 1950s and early '60s as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire stood in relation to Cubism in the Paris of the teens. O'Hara could provoke paintings--and participate in them as model, collaborator or kibbitzer--with the same seeming ease with which he composed what he disarmingly called his "I do this I do that" poems on his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he worked his way up from postcard clerk to curator. What made him so singular a presence among painters was his generosity of spirit, which transcended the usual factions. When everyone else was either for Pollock or for de Kooning, as if it were a choose-up stickball game, O'Hara embraced both. (He wrote a monograph on the former and was planning major retrospectives on both when he died.) His enthusiasm for the work of others, including artists far from the Ab-Ex orbit, never flagged. "To us," the composer Morton Feldman said, "he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem--a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers."

O'Hara died in a freak car accident on a Fire Island beach in July 1966. At his funeral, Larry Rivers estimated that some 60 New Yorkers, himself among them, considered the poet to be their best friend. John Ashbery [see p. 37], an O'Hara best friend since the pair met at Harvard in the late 1940s, called O'Hara's death at the age of 40 "the biggest secret loss to American poetry" since the tragically obscure John Wheelwright died in 1940. Unlike Wheelwright, however, O'Hara didn't stay secret for long. Artists united in eulogizing him. In 1967, MOMA published a memorial portfolio of his poems with drawings by Ab-Ex pioneers (Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell), "Second Generation" stalwarts (Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell) and 1960s luminaries (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg). At the same time, Alfred Leslie mourned his friend's death in a series of huge paintings he called "The Killing Cycle" (1967). In the preliminary watercolors for the series, Leslie juxtaposes the fatal Fire Island beachscape with lines the poet had composed for an earlier collaboration the two had done. "I have the other idea about guilt. It's not in us, it's in the situation," O'Hara had written. And, "You don't say the victim is responsible for a concentration camp or a Mack Truck."

O'Hara did not pursue a career as a poet, and in fact he stands as a great counterexample to the role of the academic poet-in-residence, which some people mistakenly think is synonymous with the poet's lot. Poetry to him was all-important, but he saw that there was no point in being solemn about it or taking himself too seriously. "After all," he liked to say, "only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies." Unlike most poets, O'Hara did not unfailingly preserve or seek to perpetuate the products of his encounter with the muse. Certain of his major poems exist only because his friends copied them out for one another. From the several slender volumes he published in his lifetime, no one would have guessed that his Collected Poems, published in 1972, would turn out to be a massive tome. The book won the National Book Award, and his readership has grown steadily in the years since.

O'Hara was the nearest thing in poetry to an Action painter. His poems chronicled his impressions and experiences, but more immediately they chronicled their own coming into existence. Cosmopolitan, witty and open to life, the poems established a tone that was two-fifths melancholy, three-fifths joy. From a handful of classic O'Hara works--poems such as "My Heart," "Why I Am Not a Painter," "Memorial Day 1950," "Personal Poem," "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul," and the prose mock-manifesto "Personism"--you could derive a radical new conception of what it means to be a poet:

   It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering if I will finish this in time to
   meet Norman for lunch ah lunch! I think I am going crazy what with my
   terrible hangover and the weekend coming up at excitement-prone Kenneth
   Koch's I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems at Joan's
   studio for anew book by Grove Press which they will probably not print but
   it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether
   you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did
   it

   (the passage is from "Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul, "the
   title of which refers to O'Hara's painter pals Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell
   and Jean-Paul Riopelle)