“New York was like a great big bunch of batteries, rolling together,
about to connect into this great illumination.”
Edward Meneeley
By the middle of the 20th century, Western civilization had succeeded in developing technologies and principles of organization that threatened human life and freedom on an unprecedented scale.
As America’s New Deal ended and WWII began, the military industrial complex consolidated its tendrils of power on American politics. Media advertising began its bombardment, severely dulling public perception, while the Office of War Information gradually evolved into a propagandist public relations firm.
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| charcoal drawing by Meneeley, untitled, year unknown |
Veteran of two wars, Meneeley followed the tides of artists and intellectuals to New York City where studios were cheap and a growing movement of people came together as the Beatles commanded.
And those who listened--bebop musicians, Beat writers, Action painters, Improvisational dancers and others--discovered that together they had clout. Tapping into what Carl Jung called the “collective” energy of the “unconscious,” the power of a group of individuals dedicated to a singular discontent manifest into new forms of spontaneous expression.
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Jasper Johns played chess with Marcel Duchamp in Washington Square most mornings around the time Ed and Viola moved in to the basement apartment of his old instructor's building on 13th St and 6th Ave.
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| The Chess Players, a bronze sculpture by Lloyd Lillie |
Meneeley’s few years in Philadelphia after the war ended with the Donovan Gallery closing. New York promising greater opportunities, Ed convinced Viola to rent the two rooms in the basement of John Cabor’s brownstone. They would have to go upstairs to shower and cook, mostly communal meals, but in the end there would be the delight of having something like “a funny little family.”
Shortly after moving in, Ed’s expected job as a shipping clerk failed. But later, a chance meeting resulted in a steady paycheck fashioning monthly window displays for Heller Knitted Jersey in the Metropolitan Opera Building.
For his first 2 years, the artist became acquainted with his new home city by helping it get dressed in the morning, one show window at a time. He couldn’t have known Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were following similar paths in advertising and window display.
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Jackson Pollock, Time magazine’s “Jack the Dripper,” was already living in East Hampton’s seclusion as Ed arrived on the scene. And for years, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg have been having it out in print.
Rosenberg, who coined the term “Action Painter,” described an artist’s encounter with his canvas as an epic battle. Every painting was an act of spontaneous origination. No longer was the canvas merely a place to “reproduce, redesign, analyze or express…what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
At the same time, Rosenberg claimed Action Painters agreed only on one thing, which was that they rarely agreed about anything. A spirit of pronounced individualism and artists producing work to reflect “unconscious raw emotion” was all very fine and good for some people. Clement Greenberg, writing chiefly for the Nation and Partisan Review, disagreed. Echoing Hans Hoffman, to Greenberg, lack of a singular structure in a movement was “unhealthy” (Fineberg, Jonathon. Art Since 1940, Abrams).
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| Time Magazine August 8, 1949 |
These attitudes at the forefront, Meneeley began classes at the NY School of Visual Arts on his second installment of the GI Bill. Viola found work at an antiquities dealer, and shortly after the two were married at The Little Church Around the Corner.
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Minds broadening in the new environment, money began running out. Sitting in a park behind the public library on 42 St. as a young man, Ed remembers scanning the wanted ads of the New York Times.
"I’m going down the list thinking, my god, there is nothing here that interests me, until I get to Photography…and right then, I finally know what I am."
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| Meneeley in New York |
Meneeley had no commercial experience, but he had retained advanced knowledge of 35 mm color photography from his time in the Navy. Nevertheless, Erwin was hesitant to hire him.
"I think I need to think it over and call in a few days,” Mr. Goodman said at the conclusion of the interview.
Three days later, Ed went back offering to work 2 weeks without pay. Five later, he was offered a salary.
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| Park Avenue tunnel 1941 |
One afternoon, Meneeley remembered a particular instance in which his boss suddenly stopped to ask, “What’s going on?”
Unsure if he had done something wrong, Ed replied, “What do you mean?”
“You don’t hear anything?" Mr. Goodman said, "Something’s going on.”
Ed followed his employer to the window. Outside, life went on as usual. Then Irwin remembered. It was the first day the ban against blowing horns came into effect.
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In the ensuing months Meneeley learned up-to-date production techniques of color materials.
Viola’s boss, Johanna, recently became a widow. The deceased husband had been afriend of Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik revolutionary often stayed in their apartment while in exile.
Viola’s mood at work progressively darkened under the random State Department surveillance. Welcoming the warm weather, Ed often took the subway to Viola’s street and the two would walk the rest of the way home together. On the second floor balcony next door to their apartment, a woman took an interest in the attractive couple. Friendly waves evolved into an eventual invitation for cocktails. Her name was Kay, recently divorced from a Hollywood composer.
While living in California, the couple got involved in wife-swapping, and, in the end, her husband preferred the another guy’s wife. Kay decided to take her settlement and move to NY where she often sat and yakked and drank martinis. To the Meneeleys, it seemed as though whatever small amounts of Hollywood contingencies came to NY, they would often turn up at her place.
Once Kay found out Ed was an artist, she immediately introduced him to her friend, Herman Cherry.
“Herman was shortish, Jewish, had an extraordinary dry wit and was a clown to boot. He’d put a colander on his head and entertain everyone until we were all on the floor laughing,” Meneeley recalled. The pair would eventually become very good friends.
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| Meneeley (left) with friends |
After the first encounter, Cherry announced he was coming over the following Saturday and would bring the food and make dinner. A new circle of friends had formed.
During these intense sessions of friends-making, Meneeley learned new tricks in the kitchen. After years of steaming artichokes and dipping the leaves in clarified butter, he evoked gasps from the rest of the dinner party when he nearly tossed out the heart, not knowing how much of a delicacy remained hidden underneath.
“They’d eaten all the leaves, so I began gathering up the plates and Cherry looked at me and said, what the hell are you doing? That’s the heart of the artichoke. Turns out I had been tossing out the crème de la crème of the artichoke for years!”
When the party moved to the Meneeley’s apartment, Herman noticed the photographic equipment. Intrigued, he began asking questions. Curiously technical questions.
Eventually Meneeley found it necessary to take Kay aside.
“You say Cherry is an artist,” Ed said, “but I have never seen his work. What exactly does he do?”
Not satisfied with her response, he confronted Cherry himself: “Herman, you are asking a heck of a lot of photography questions. If I knew exactly where you are going with this, I might be able to give you more appropriate answers. Then, also, I could feel good about what I’m telling you.”
Herman hesitated. “Uh, um, photographing works of art. We’re having technical problems.”
The glow of opportunity spread across Ed's face.
Cherry continued, “I would need to talk it over with a friend before I tell you anything else.”
A few days later, Herman returned with news. Kyle Morris wished to meet him.
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Kyle Morris lived in an elegant townhouse. His wife, June, was an heir of the Kraft cheese fortune, so the fact that her husband was struggling to make a business out of a basement full of slides was an interesting dynamic for Meneeley to experience.
After a brief discussion on matters of technique (yet without giving up too many secrets), the first meeting between Morris, Meneeley and Cherry resulted in the three men deciding upon a test: each would go into Cherry’s studio, they’d all individually photograph a painting using their own equipment and lighting, and later wait to judge the best one.
Meneeley won.
“I don’t think they ever got over it,” he said.
But they did hire him, and within the first week Meneeley replaced the industry standard, Kodachrome, with state of the art Hollywood technology. With the help of the motion picture processing lab in Mamaroneck, NJ, Ed pioneered the use of professional color negative film for the production of slides. Turns out motion picture film was truer than 35mm film at the time and also yielded a more durable negative. This way, they could produce a large number of slides without losing quality from the master.
The only drawback: negatives were printed in reels the size of motion picture spools and had to be cut, frame by frame, and mounted by hand in cardboard holders.
"A black & white print from a negative is not an original,” Meneeley set about convincing Morris and Cherry, “But if we shoot this way, we can make thousands of originals and make them cheaper. You can freeze the negative if you want, but this way you not only get better quality images but you can use the same film, indoors and outdoors, without changing the process.”
Months after implementing and perfecting these suggestions, Morris’s company ran a test for Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art.
In the end, Barr stood up and applauded.
Within a year since meeting Morris and Cherry, Meneeley was given his own set of keys to the Museum of Modern Art.
“Guernica used to be right there when you walked in the door!” Ed shouted, pounding his fist on the table.
High on the prospect of private museum viewings on a whim, Meneeley’s excitement intensified with the prospect of financial security. Stockpiling information for museums and galleries equated to good money.
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| contemplating female subject, with self-portrait behind him |
This confidence propelled Ed to begin working on a new set of paintings.
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Enjoying the camaraderie with his newfound colleagues in the art world, many nights after falling asleep Meneeley suffered from the same haunting dream.
“During the dream I am at the YMCA swimming pool and everybody is naked. In those days you could swim naked…,” Meneeley paused his confession during our interview due to my astonished reaction.From his perch on the couch, producer Wayne Adams quipped, “The Young Man’s Christian Association let it all hang out!”
We all shared a laugh before Ed continued the description of his recurring dream, “You have all these people parading around the edge of the pool in a circle and occasionally some would grab each other and fall in the water. Once they were in the pool, they were romping around, frolicking and having a good time, and I would fill in the gap in the line and keep walking. But eventually, I’m the only person too afraid to jump in.”
“What do you think it meant?” I asked.
“It’s a way of explaining how I couldn’t live up to my urges,” he admitted. “In those days, it meant being homosexual, which is a lot different from being gay. Homosexual is analytical and doesn’t seem like a pleasant word.
“Thinking maybe this could be treated, I asked my family doctor to recommend an analyst. My first appointment, I carried in a painting and laid it on the floor in front of Mr. McClain and said, do what you want with this (pointing to my head) but leave this (pointing to the painting) alone.”
Meneeley continued therapy for months, continuing to break down barriers. “It wasn’t as though I hadn’t had sexual relationships with other men in the past; it’s that I had never thought of them as anything unnatural. I thought about it as being buddies. It was just a part of life. It wasn’t until you heard about people calling others queer that it became a problem.”
At one point during his sessions, Dr. McClain recommended Ed read the works of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. In so doing he realized the two poets, who were at one point lovers, consumed much of their intellectual energy ensnarled in guilt—and Ed knew he didn’t need any more guilt.
“Reading Verlaine and Rimbaud, I realized, this has already happened. This is not a new human experience. It was so liberating. The therapist also broke down repressed barriers of being left handed. And eventually I had to accept why I wasn’t jumping into that pool. Once I realized what was going on, I got on my lambretta and headed downtown. I was crying, but then, after a while I started to laugh. This is you now, I realized. Be you or fight your true self off with nervous ticks.”
When he finally faced up to the truth of his sexuality, it became impossible to remain married. By April 1958, just one month after his entrance into the Artist’s Club, Ed and Viola parted ways.
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| One of Meneeley’s earliest surviving paintings, Viola (1955c.), painted with the artist’s bare hands, depicts a woman sprawled open while a dark beast prowls behind her |
“It was very sad, but also very heartfelt,” Viola recalled during a phone interview. “Ed remained gracious, and after my father died in October that same year, he offered to drive my sister and me back to Wilkes-Barre. He was very kind. My parents still didn’t know that we were no longer together, and he was a great support, even offering to buy a new suit for my father to be buried in.”
Viola would remain in their same, rent controlled apartment until 1974 following the rest of her ex-husband’s career from hearsay and the pages of the New York Times.
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| MoMA courtyard c.1950s |
The museum director’s attraction to Claude Monet’s water lilies was apparent. Barr often traveled to Paris for the summer seeing how many of the French Impressionists works he could buy up. Upon returning, he hired them for 15 color detail shots of his favorites.
The next morning Ed and Herman met at the museum early and spent the morning shooting. After they finished, they spent a few minutes walking around the Suerat retrospective before heading out for lunch. While leaving, they passed a crew of workers and joked about someone’s decision to cover the windows.
“The whole outside of Museum is a glass façade, why not allow for the natural light?” Meneeley asked as he mounted his motor scooter.
Their film already sent off for processing, the two rode back to Cooper Square for a celebratory lunch.
As usual, Cherry was fooling around in the kitchen as Ed bopped around to the radio when the song stopped midstride with breaking news: the Museum of Modern Art was on fire!
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The Art Institute of Chicago only agreed to let Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte travel once.
“Because the artist had soaked the oils out of the paint, if you happened to bang them, the paint fell off like pastel dust," acording to Meneeeley, "Therefore there were a lot of restrictions and special humidifiers brought in to protect the painting.”
Listening to the reporter describing the scene, Ed envisioned representatives from Chicago flying in to throw their bodies in front of the flames. But then another notion came to him.
“Herman,” he said, “Think of it, we were on the other side looking at the Monet.”
“Yea.”
“Think of Fontana…”
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Concetto Spaziale, Attese by Lucio Fontana |
Cherry's thoughts recalled Lucio Fontana, an Italian artist famous for his colorfield, often monochromatic works that look as though he took a razor and cut slits into the modulated surface.
“Okay,” he responded.
“Well, that’s what happening right now!” Meneeley stood up and, wielding an imaginary axe, slashed through the air. “That’s what’s going on. Those firemen are going to walk right through that Monet to gain access to the museum.”
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At the same time as the great fire of 1959, the Whitney Museum of American Art had temporarily moved into an annex in the courtyard of MoMA during construction of its building uptown.
The three-alarm fire halted lunch traffic until the flames were contained. By then, most of the artwork was rescued by dripping wet workers walking the artwork across the roof annex to the temporary housing of the Whitney immediately northward.
Alfred Barr wept in the street as six canvases burned and blistered inside, including two large “Water Lilies,” one of which had been hacked just as Meneeley suspected.
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| woman photographing a Monet in Paris |
Chicago was relieved to learn the Seurat was saved without incident.
Besides the six canvases destroyed, 55-year-old electrician Ruby Geller was found face-down in six inches of water, his sooty handprints smeared along the newly plastered walls.
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