At the Movies with Weldon Kees and Frank O'Hara

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Yau, John

It is the subverting tone that sets both Kees's and O'Hara's poems apart from the work of many of their contemporaries; they are making fun of sentiment because they don't trust it, and because they know how easily it can devolve into the sentimental. In fact, Kees uses his awareness of the reader's desire for palatable sentiment to fuel "For My Daughter." He wants to compel his readers to reflect upon their expectations and, in this regard, the poem functions like an accusing mirror.

II.

In the fall of 1949, Kees, who had written for Time and Paramount Newsreel, began writing art reviews for The Nation. He replaced Clement Greenberg, whom he would later make fun of in a limerick4 he included in a letter sent to a friend. By this time, Kees numbered among his friends artists such as William Baziotes, Fritz Bultman, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell. His paintings and collages were beginning to be taken seriously. He eventually had four solo exhibitions at the Peridot Gallery, which also exhibited work by Louise Bourgeois, Hans Hofmann, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. For three consecutive summers (1947-49), he and his wife, Ann, stayed in Provincetown, where many artists and writers gathered. He wrote essays and poems for catalogues and brochures. After moving to California, he made friends with Hassel Smith and Edward Corbett, as well as resumed his friendship with Janet Richards, who had been married to Manny Farber, a film reviewer, critic, and painter.

O'Hara moved to New York in the fall of 1951, one year after Kees left New York for California. He got a job at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art. After working as an editorial associate for Art News from 1953 to '55, he rejoined the staff at the Museum as a special assistant in the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1960 he was made Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculptures for the Museum, and in 1965 he was promoted to Associate Curator. O'Hara wrote about art, curated important exhibitions, and collaborated with artists. He was the subject of paintings by Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Elaine de Kooning, and Alice Neel, and he dedicated poems to Norman Bluhm, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell, among others. Shortly after his death, the Museum of Modern Art honored O'Hara's presence and memory.5

Kees and O'Hara were right where the action was, particularly when it came to the rise of the Abstract Expressionists, and artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Both men were active participants in the downtown New York art scene long before others knew that that world existed. In 1948, Kees wrote a review of an exhibition by Robert Motherwell. In 1965, in the exhibition catalog O'Hara wrote to accompany a retrospective exhibition of Motherwell's paintings and collages he had organized for The Museum of Modern Art, Kees's review is the earliest listed in the bibliography. Certainly, what Kees wrote about Motherwell in the March 1948 issue of Magazine of Art helped establish the parameters for O'Hara's catalog essay: