Chapter 5: Cooper Square, Portable Gallery & Artists Club

 “…there had to be a painting wholly liberated from dependence on the figure, the object—a painting which, like music, does not illustrate anything, does not tell a story and does not launch a myth.  Such a painting is content to evoke the incommunicable realms of spirit, where dreams become thought, where the sign becomes being…”

                                                                                                Michel Seuphor

1958 marked the opening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum just off Central Park in the upper east side of Manhattan.  The same year, a New York Times article headlined “Vigorous Manifesto” tried to explain to the public what was going on in the minds of the artists responsible for perpetuating Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing trend in contemporary painting.  In the following excerpt, Stuart Preston quotes Ray Parker:

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright 

While the painter’s subject is the painting, the painting’s subject is the artist himself as his experience is consummated in the making.

A century from now, [Abstract Expressionism] will be recognized as a period style, Franz Kline’s pictures being as much reflections of present disquiet as Boucher’s were of the decaying gallantry of the Ancient Regime.  We are too close to our own time to see, as the future surely will, the connection between AE and current culture.

            Perhaps Abstract Expressionism is part of the protest against an age of complacency, an
            heroic, abstract, violently personal stand against a world whose values are concrete and
            conventional…or it may be that painting of this sort is a half-conscious attempt to reinvest
            art with the element of mystery the intellectualism of cubism or rigidity of functionalism have
           done their best to dispel. At any rate, A-E shies away from any precise definition, and
           demands nothing of its admirers than the exhilarating spectacle of joyous splashes in the
           rushing stream of self-expression.

This experimental attitude attracted Ed Meneeley to New York years earlier and he welcomed the broader discussions taking place in society as he pushed on, beginning to make a name for himself in the Manhattan art world.  Looking back, Meneeley explains that while some first generation abstract-expressionist artists and dealers acquired wealth, most participants remained poor. A healthy interdependence developed, studio visits were still common and the resulting energy of this tight artistic community continued to manifest into an international force.

“People looked out for each other,” Meneeley insisted, stressing the openness and sense of trust among the scene. “When nobody had anything, it was a lot easier for everyone to get along.”

Cedar Street Tavern, Greenwich Village,
1959. (John Cohen/Getty)

Still seeing a psychoanalyst, Meneeley began working out his emotions onto canvas. Herman Cherry took notice. His new friend wasn’t just a cutting edge photographer. With this realization, Cherry suggested Ed accompany him to the Cedar Tavern.

“It was a long room with average ceilings, your typical, nondescript bar,” Meneeley recalls. At first whiff, acrid air indicating spilt beer and the bleach used to mop at the end of the night stung the nostrils. Legends told of Jackson Pollock (by now he had already perished in an automobile accident) tearing off a bathroom door and Jack Kerouac urinating in an ashtray.

Located at 24 University Place in Greenwich Village, in the early days The Cedar hosted Robert Motherwell’s weekly salon, as it was the closest place to his studio after which to have a drink. Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and the others liked it for its cheap drinks and lack of tourists and middle-class squares.

University Place, in those days, was down market and dangerous because of the several welfare and single-room occupancy hotels in the area. Muggings were common. Despite the sketchy neighborhood, Meneeley’s introduction of the Cedar Tavern was a turning point.

“He’s here,” Cherry said, one of their first nights out together, lifting his beer glass to wave at a small crowd across the bar. “Follow me. There is someone I want you to meet.”

Frank O'Hara & Franz Kline
at The Cedar St Tavern

About a year earlier, Meneeley had gone to the Guggenheim, which, at the time, was still a townhouse. Inside, he recalls, everything was white, even the carpets. There, he saw an incredible black and white painting. “It blew me away,” he recalls, “When I finally picked up the catalogue, I nearly fell to the floor. Jesus Christ, I thought, the painter's from Wilkes-Barre!”

Franz Kline, first the painting on the wall, now the man in the bar, already famous, surrounded by a small circle of admirers, wearing a tattered coat.  After Herman finally introduced the two Pennsylvanians, small talk came easy.

“Franz and I hit it off like magic,” Meneeley claims. “When he realized we were from the same town, we began joking about the different Indian names in the outlying areas like Mauch Chunk, Tamaqua and Mahoning. We kept racking them up to the point where everyone thought we are speaking our own language. All these people were there wanting to talk to Franz about art and here he is talking to this newcomer and they can’t figure out what the hell we’re talking about!”

Meneeley’s connections expanded with a nomination to join the Artists Club, the famed group formed in the wake of the historical, ground-breaking exhibition known as the 9th Street Show in 1951.  Club membership boasted a number of notable artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell as founding members.

“I think a lot of people understood much more about me than I understood about myself at the time,” Meneeley chuckles, looking back, “I got voted in. So there I am and there’s De Kooning! There’s Merce Cunningham! There’s David Smith!”

On March 13, 1958, Meneeley was approved for membership after his nomination by sculpture Sidney Geist. His annual dues of $12 had to be paid in advance. The first topic: New Music.

Wednesday night was open discussion with no monitor and members could bring up to 2 guests. Thursday night was artist’s night. There was free coffee, and most came to enjoy a casual atmosphere to meet and talk. Maybe people would bring in records and some would dance. There would be Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Conrad Marca-Relli and Jack Tworkov. According to Ed, Warhol wasn’t yet on the scene.

Friday night included a panel. Guests were allowed but had to pay 50 cents each and would have an opportunity to remark from the floor.

“The whole thing became sort of a free for all,” Meneeley recalls. “You learned how to shout and scream and argue. Panel members might be a designer for the ballet, a painter, a sculptor, Harold Rosenberg or Tom Hess, Editor of Art League magazine or Harold Greenberg, all arguing loudly and passionately with each other. Then, from the floor, people would scream back at them when they were done. It was a glorious time!”









                  2


On December 10, 1958, the New York Times called Meneeley a “notable contributor” to a group show at the Fleischman Gallery at 227 East 10th Street.

“My painting orientation was for color composites to be emotional and passionate,” Meneeley recalls of his early paintings.

One of his first sales was to Hugh Mercer, singer Johnny Mercer’s nephew, whom he met out on the street, cruising. Meneeley invited Mercer back to his studio where Hugh fell for a canvas with heavy impasto, similar to Viola in mood, but with no subject; just swirling, heavily tactile paint.

Mercer decided to return the favor by inviting Ed over that evening for cocktails. When Mercer’s roommate, Wayne Adams, returned home, he was completely swept up by the painting’s powerful orange and yellows.

“It was astonishing,” Adams recalled during one of our interviews. “I had seen Abstract Expressionist work before and had been attracted to it, but this was the first I saw close at hand that completely consumed me.”

“Do you like it?” Mercer asked.

“I love it,” Adams replied.

Yes, Irene 1958

“I’m glad,” Mercer explained, “because in about twenty minutes you are about to meet the artist who created it. He’s coming by for drinks.”

Not long before, Adams had purchased two small silk pillows, which he remarked matched the painting perfectly. After Ed arrived, Adams recalls smelling something strange, “Looking over and seeing Ed’s arm extended with the tip of his cigarette submerged in one of them, I reached over, grabbed the pillow and threw it out the window. The moment it hit the air outside, it burst into flames.”

Shortly after, Adams visited Meneeley’s studio where he fell for another abstract titled Yes, Irene—bold blues, whites and darker violets—hanging on the wall.  Ed painted the work in response to an encounter observed between Franz Kline and a British woman visiting from London.  The woman kept insisting Franz introduce her to other artists.  Kline kept repeating, “Yes, Irene” to subdue her questioning.

In the Ed's minds eye, the scene started out white as he emblazoned it to canvas. As her nagging increased, Kline’s responses grew blue, and later, clearly irritated, almost black. The brush strokes of emotion swirled, married, separated, overcoming each other with passionate color.

For weeks after it was painted, Adams would come around just to look at it. Eventually, he found the resolve to acquire it. Sometimes he’d pay money, other times with objects—Meneeley recalls a lamp and dining room table procured in this way.  From these encounters a friendship blossomed that would last over 5 decades.

53 West 83rd Street, Wayne Adam’s home for over 30 years has today become one of the finest collections of Meneeley’s work in the world, and Adams would play a seminal role in the production of this book.









              3

Cooper Square, 1957 

After separating from Viola, Meneeley found his new home on the second floor of an industrial shell sleeping on an old Army fold-up cot in the wake of some failed enterprise still wired with DC current.

“I stood across from the building one day and I had these vibrations, and I knew that’s where I was going to be," Ed recalls, "There was no sign or anything, just my intuition. So I began making calls to find out how I could get a floor.”

Number 14 Cooper Square was a four-floor industrial building down the block from the Cooper Union. Directly across the street was The Five Spot, a Greenwich Village gin joint frequented by artists and their groupies which hosted many major figures in the American Jazz scene.

Most of his friends thought $100 a month was too much for the industrial shell. The going rate for squatting in similarly squalid conditions was closer to $64. But the landlord wouldn’t budge, despite a hole exposing the floor below and lack of livable amenities.

From the wiring alone Ed new the building was old. Dating back to the late 1800s, direct current’s slow steady stream of power maintained enough energy to provide for a restaurant supply store below, as well as the constant whir of sewing machines in the sweatshop above, producing vast quantities of Jewish kippahs.

“It was pitch dark and the floors were black with oil. There was electricity from a few naked light bulbs and that was it. I called the telephone company and they came with colored phones. I ordered a turquoise one. It was the only thing with color, the only thing that glowed in the whole place.

“We had the floor repaired and converted one of the toilets into a large shower that had a platform on it, so you could use it as a steam room as well. I began connecting the sewer lines and inventing a kitchen. Then I built a dark room, and eventually a concealed bedroom within a large painting rack.”

The Five Spot
St. Marks Place

Before long, he began to feel at home. “With the Artist Club not far away, The Five Spot was a convenient meeting place,” Meneeley recalled. “We were all fanatics about jazz much like people are today about baseball or football. Discovering we could influence management, we suggested they change the appearance of the back area for performances and bring in a decent piano. Before long it became a jazz club where San Francisco beat poets read while passing though.

“Some artists liked a little bit of entertainment, so they might put in a few hours at the Cedar and then would wander over. Following behind were younger artists and others. After the bar would close, a number of these people, including some collectors, would end up in one of our studios for after-hour drinks or coffee before calling it a night. That’s how I befriended Bob [B.H.] Friedman. The first time he was over, he mistook one of my balsa wood sculptures for a chair and crushed it.”

On the 4th floor of his building lived the eccentric artist and raconteur, Patrick Carey, who insisted his toilet not be surrounded by walls. Prior to moving to Cooper Square, Meneeley met Carey while still living with Viola on 12th Street through Kyle Morris and Herman Cherry.

Carey maintained the archives within the offices of Contemporary Slides where business soared with a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts bank-rolling an archive of the MoMA’s entire permanent collection. For this task alone, Meneeley recalls taking over 24,000 pictures.

Yet for all the excitement associated with the honor of photographing major works of art, Meneeley couldn’t help but feel there was also a lot of interesting things happening out on the streets and in galleries that Contemporary Slides wasn’t covering.

For instance, Robert Rauschenberg, who had started out showing with Eleanor Ward, had moved to Leo Castelli. Throughout the process, Ed got to know both Rauschenberg and Castelli at openings, and casual talk resulted in Ed stopping in over the next few days to shoot the work free of charge. He later provided the gallery with an 8x10 contact print negative for The New York Times.

Meneeley with camera

Equipped with the 8x10 camera, as well as a 4x 6 and 35 mm, Meneeley could handle subtle situations with individual works. At first, many artists and dealers were shocked by his results, honed from the most advanced military technology and later practiced to perfection during his years photographing MoMA’s collection.

By the time Kyle Morris sold his company, Ed was ready to finally strike out on his own. Word got around and other galleries enlisted him to take pictures of their holdings, which he would then make available to the press. In this way, credit for photo would read “Provided by Leo Castelli Gallery.” Rauschenberg at Castelli would be the first of thousands of shows he would document over a 30 year period.

With Ed as photographer and technical brain, Carey began taking care of the business end. As any burgeoning business, it ran in fits and starts.  At the same time, both Meneeley and Carey also working hard to create their own inventories as artists.

“A large part of my motivation was this sense of personal duty to keep the record,” Ed insists. “Sure, I was eventually well paid. But I also recognized, collectively, we were making history.”








                        4


A few months after his annulment, Meneeley met Michael Katz, young man in his early twenties who had been in New York for only a year. Katz had first met Wayne Adams through some mutual Ohio connections and was later invited to a party at the apartment Adams shared with Hugh Mercer. By now, the apartment featured a second Meneeley painting Yes, Irene hanging prominently.

Around this time, Meneeley claims he was looking for someone to pick up Carey’s slack with the photographic archive, not realizing he was about to experience a remarkable cross-pollination of culture, experience, and ideas.

“Socially around us—the late 50s—it was a very repressive time,” Katz explained during our phone interview. “As I listened to Ed talking for the first time, I realized this was someone I could learn from. After he realized I lived only a couple of blocks from Cooper Square, he offered to give me a lift back on his lambretta.”

Katz would become the first man in Meneeley’s life after his annulled marriage with Viola.

Katz continued, “I think everyone who enters into a serious relationship with Ed sees that he represents freedom. Freedom from a person’s own hang-ups and the no no’s you were exposed to from how you grew up.”

For two years they lived together at Cooper Square before parting amicably, remaining in touch to this day. “I was fresh from Cleveland and wanted to socialize,” Katz recalled. “After a few weeks, Ed asked if I wanted to move in and learn photography. I said yes and became his assistant, learning the work, developing film. For the first year our days were filled with so much conversation about which books to read and the names of philosophers to learn about. I also met all of the Abstract-Expressionist painters, who then taught me how to look at Abstract Expressionist painting. With kindness and generosity, Ed stood back as I tried out freedoms.”

On the business front, Katz won a contest held by Meneeley for the best name for his then burgeoning business. "Portable Gallery."  As a reward, Katz received a recording of Madame Butterly and later contributed articles to the Portable Gallery Press bulletin.

Decades later, Portable Gallery grew to become the archive of American Painting from 1940-1966, later providing slides to colleges, libraries and universities of shows featuring Willem De Kooning, Andy Warhol, John Graham, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, George Segal and many others.

Albert Vanderburg, who would succeed Katz as Meneeley’s partner, paints an informative picture of Cooper Square at the time:

     The loft was basically a long bare rectangle with very high ceilings. The front wall, facing the Square, was  
     mostly glass, and in the far back corner was a door leading out onto a small roof terrace. It was still  
     illegal to be living there despite the fact that all over downtown Manhattan and the Village, artists,
     dancers and musicians were living and working in similar spaces. It took a few more years for the city to
     wake up and see this Bohemian presence as an asset and initiate the Artist-In-Residence (AIR) program,
     after which one saw an almost overnight materialization of the little AIR signs by stairwell doors. Until that
     happened, at least some effort was made to disguise the fact that someone was actually living there
     instead of just using it for a workplace.

     By far the largest part of the Cooper Square loft was dominated by Ed's working space. He was
     working both on sculpture, much of which was relocated to the roof terrace when completed, and a
     number of large canvases in preparation for an upcoming one-man exhibition at the Parma Gallery. There
     was a steady stream of people through the loft, old friends of his coming to share a drink and provide
     encouragement, past and future patrons looking to put a reserve on any work they particularly fancied
     before the exhibition took place, and occasional students who would come to work under his
     supervision.

In the rear of Meneeley’s Cooper Square loft was a courtyard which opened into an alley. Soon after moving in he bought the Lembretta and kept it in the back for free off-street parking. The motor scooter gave him mobility.  Soon, he began to invest in photographic equipment and built an extensive darkroom. Near the front end he built a painting rack. This was meant to be a visual diversion and was bigger than it seemed.  Since he wasn't technically allowed to live in the space, he built a bedroom inside so building inspectors would't see signs of living or sleeping quarters.

Sometime later a group of artists helped establish the Artist-in-Residence program, which provided decals that could be put on the front of the building, so firemen knew someone was living inside. Those who had been concerned about people living in the old buildings later realized it was better having artists there than them remaining unoccupied.

Other artists had similar clandestine living arrangements.

Robert Rauschenberg made a painting called The Bed, a work Meneeley claims helped to advance his career tremendously. Rauschenberg’s actual bed, in his studio, was disguised as a model’s stand. The mattress slid out from the bottom when he wished to retire, or have afternoon affairs.

Rauschenberg, expanding on this duality of form, began calling his works “combines” in that they contained elements of both sculpture and painting. Most materials were found objects he picked up on the street while walking around the block. According to his dealer, Leo Castelli, “Rauschenberg liberated the artworld to do something else and not just obey slavishly what the abstract expressionists set up before them.”

A sybolic gesture illustrating this was Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning.

“I had been trying to figure out a way to bring drawing into the all whites before I finally figured out that it had to begin as art,” he explained in the 1998 BBC documentary. “Then I realized, it was going to have to be a de Kooning, so I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and knocked on his studio door. I wanted to see how far one could push a truth like that….I came into the art world absolutely nude. At first Willem was outraged, but eventually he came to understand my intentions. He finally agreed, insisting that it would have to be a good one.”

Many would later think of Erased de Kooning as a gesture of protest or destruction, but to Rauschenberg, it was “poetry.”

Throughout our interviews, Meneeley recalled a more personal anecdote: “Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were lovers, though there was a great deal of effort made to closet the relationship. Rauschenberg was highly energized and determined to make it. Johns was more outwardly subdued.”

Meneeley had been executing the majority of photography for the Martha Jackson Gallery, whom Rauschenberg once worked as an assistant. Meneeley also photographed a lot of work for Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, who had opened a gallery in her mother’s brownstone inherited on 77th Street. According to Ed, Sonnabend's mother had once been married to John Graham, and the gallery was ahead of its time.  Graham, a Russian, had encouraged his wife to buy works of artists of her time, and so her daughter had inherited paintings by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and others.

When her first husband, Leo Castelli, needed a photographer who could handle a special problem, he hired Meneeley, who also photographed Ileana’s entire inherited collection, which she later sold to finance the gallery.

“Ileana was a strong woman with a very different approach to art. She enjoyed playing the radical daughter, and expressed her strong dislike of emerging American art, much of which was in her mother’s collection. She was responsible for the acquisition of Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, though she didn’t catch on to Warhol in the beginning stages.”

She hired Meneeley to photograph Rauschenberg’s work in his studio and spent the afternoon using an 8x10 view camera with a black hood to shield the light.

“There was a lot of startling relief properties to Rauschenberg’s work, which he referred to as assemblages. It was difficult and disconcerting to have little sense of composition, however, once the image was in the brown glass, it was not dissimilar from seeing a print where depth of material was minimalized,” Meneeley said. “Bob insisted on putting the hood over his head and checking out the works himself, which delighted him. Because his work appeared upside down, it gave him a different point of objectivity.”

Meneeley with Johns 

When they were finished photographing, Rauschenberg called on Jasper Johns, who lived upstairs and later came down with a tray of drinks to share with the men below.

“There was an awareness of Rauschenberg’s physicality and the attractiveness of his enthusiasm and wit,” Meneeley recalls. “After Jasper arrived, I felt a certain vibration, as though there was an attraction in my direction. I was intrigued by his smoothness, his dry wit and poker exterior.”

After drinks, the trio went out for Japanese food.

“We began chatting and going on. Jasper was more broad based and socially concerned. Bob was more interested in art history and other artists, and after endless amounts of sake, there was a real intensity developing between Rauschenberg and myself, while Jasper seemed to be drifting away and losing interest.”

As Johns grew more restless, Rauschenberg persuaded him to return home while he helped Meneeley carry his equipment back to Cooper Square.

“A great passion developed and within a short space of time, we were in bed together,” Meneeley recalls. “In the context of homosexual activity, Bob was more experienced than I, so I think he was attracted to the idea of my naivety. The consequence of the evening and the following day was that I fell in love with him. Since neither of us had commitments in the morning, we lingered in bed. Then came a knock on the studio door around 10am.”

Meneeley got up and closed the side door, leaving Rauschenberg hidden in bed.

“Who was standing there but Jasper, asking me if I knew anything about the whereabouts of Bob. In order to encourage him, I sat in my kitchen listening to him talk about Bob, while Bob himself was privy to the entire conversation. Jasper stayed about an hour and went on his way. Then began a series of clandestine meetings between Bob and myself. He didn’t want Jasper to know anything happened between us. I don’t know if he ever did.”










5


Meneeley’s affair with Rauschenberg faded after he realized he would never be more than a fling. At the same time, his relationship with Michael Katz evolved from romantic to friends/roommates.  Later, with the introduction of Albert Vanderburg to the loft, Katz’s role shifted.

“Wayne [Adams] and Hugh [Mercer] found Albert and brought him to Ed while I was still living there,” Katz explained. “A stormy relationship evolved. I began doing the housekeeping and eventually threatened Albert with a broom. Dr. McClain, who I also started seeing, called it ‘Kafka keeping house from Proust.’ But in the end I am glad Albert entered in because Ed needed someone who could better return his affections.”

At the same time, a shifting dynamic was underway at Portable Gallery as Patrick Carey moved to Chicago.”

Interestingly enough, Carey gave up his apartment to future founder of Scientology.

“Hubbard’s friends were eccentrics,” Meneeley recalls. “They were always walking around with swords on their waists. One day I came home and a bunch of them were in my place. In the middle of my studio was a big Franz Kline canvas hanging there. Sidney Janis had it delivered so I could photograph it, and there they were, clowning around in front of the painting, one guy had a broom in his hand. I didn’t need that, so I had to start locking my door.”

Struggling to keep up with the day-to-day operations of his business as well as satisfy his own artistic ambitions, Meneeley was relieved when the newcomer Vanderburg handed him an analysis of the current state of Portable Gallery and proposed ideas for improvement. Sufficiently impressed, Meneeley elevated Albert to his new partner.

One of their first steps forward was to make advancements with the Portable Gallery Bulletin, a small brochure with their initial offerings of slides they mailed out to members of the community. Soon, they began to tie in College Art Associations and bought mailing lists to extend the reach of their catalogues. For extended content, one of their favorite things to do was get an obscure article with an expired copyright and reprint it.

In addition to slides, Portable Gallery continued offering 8x10 color transparencies for galleries and individual artists and later branched off to publishers. Their first big job, for Harry N. Abrams, was on Hans Hoffman, published in 1963. With these successes, Vanderburg’s profile rose, along with his ego. According to Meneeley, his partner took to calling himself “President of the Corporation.”

To further complicate matters, aside from being business partners, the two men were lovers. Meneeley claims, “Albert stalked me delicately, yet his delicacy was a front. Underneath he was hard-nosed and ruthless. Before Albert, I had never experienced being in a same sex relationship where I felt like I had to fill a role similar to heterosexual relationships. He had such flowing beauty, but remained so hard inside, catlike, surrounded by drama, and could turn on you instantly.”

In public, according to Meneeley, Vanderburg began to absorb a lot of credit. In contrast, Ed began to feel as though he was being perceived as the grunt working behind the scenes.

Despite his perception of himself, Meneeley continued to solidify his relationships with galleries and artists, and he continued taking care of the art scene’s special needs, including shooting 4x5 color shots which artists and dealers could use for invitations and catalogs.

For the second time in his career, Meneeley was again given keys to the Museum of Modern Art and enjoyed the tremendous luxury of wandering around the collections after finishing his work. In these quiet moments, he felt the rarity of his experience akin to that of a millionaire collector walking a wing of his mansion, studying his holdings.

Through it all Ed received an incredible visual education, more than just what might be available to the serious student. He not only had access to extensive private collections, private holdings of dealers, and many home collections and estate collections, but he also had the privilege of spending time with insiders like Sidney Janis, who often spoke at length about a piece brought out of storage and placed on a pedestal before Meneeley’s lens.

Moments like these, Ed recalls fondly, having a dealer or collector’s complete attention, and would often stay as long as he could to sit and chat about each work of art.

“Janis was very generous with you,” Ed recalled, “if you showed interest in a particular subject he was also interested in.”

As Portable Gallery’s reputation solidified, Ed's connections continued to accrue. One of his favorite friends to speak of was Alfonso Ossorio. Originally from the Philippines, Ossorio hailed from Domino Sugar wealth.

Alfonso Ossorio

While on assignment for It Is magazine, published by sculpture Philip Pavia, Meneeley met Ossorio while documenting the lives of artists living in the Hamptons. Ossorio later became a fixture at Meneeley’s New Year’s Eve parties at Cooper Square, which attracted so much attention, Time Life offered to pay the expenses for access to photographs. “At that point,” Meneeley said, “I stopped having them.”

Ossorio lived on a large estate in East Hampton with his companion Ted Dragon. Scion of a wealthy Filipino family, in 1951 Alfonso purchased The Creeks, a fifty-seven-acre estate which became a cultural hub of the East End, a meeting place for friends like Pollock, Krasner, Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Costantino Nivola, as well as the home of Ossorio’s magnificent art collection and gardens.

Intrigued by the photographer’s work in It Is, Ossorio hired Meneeley to photograph his entire body of work, and Ed would later rent a garage in East Hampton as a summer studio.

Ossorio’s studio had previously been used by a past owner to create backdrops for the Metropolitan Opera. In order to facilitate long continuous canvases, the space had been equipped with rollers hung from hooks to store the long canvases as they were made.

After a time Meneeley was invited to make himself at home at The Creeks. His favorite room housed Dragon’s piano and a little bar. A few steps down from the living area, this music room boasted a lot of natural light from the glass doors leading outside, and on the main wall lived a Jackson Pollock's Lavender Mist.

Lavender Mist, Jackson Pollock, 1950

One afternoon, standing before the painting, sipping a drink, Meneeley noticed something strange. He understood how a person could lower insurance payments if they had a painting “backed” with wax. He had seen Kline paintings in which the black would separate itself from the white due to the different qualities of paint. To prevent this separation, wax applied to the back helped hold the work together. Standing there, staring at Lavender Mist, Meneeley motioned for Ossorio to join him.

“God that’s amazing…,” Ed began their usual banter.

“What do you mean?" Ossorio asked, "You’ve seen that picture for years?”

“Yes, I know it very well. It’s just interesting how they called him Jack the Dripper when it’s easy to see the difference between what has to do with gravity and what was poured as a line on a canvas stretched out on the floor.”

“Why do you say that?

“Well, you know the argument of whether Pollock painted, whether he dripped or poured, the uniqueness of this particular painting makes it quite clear.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s right there in the painting. Can’t you see it?”

“See what! What, what are you looking at?”

“Well, there’s the painting, and coming down across the surface is this brown material, poured, flowing, as a consequence of gravity. So the painting is this way, and then this piece of surface is totally dependent on gravity to pull it down the front of painting and down to the floor. But it never reached the floor, of course, before it dried.”

Alfonso began to panic. He went right up to the painting, squinting.

“Right there into the center…Alfonso, what did you do? You sent the painting off and had it backed to protect it?”

“Yeah, yeah…it’s a tradition…it’s conservative…it’s…it’s archival….”

“Yes, but either someone mis-handled it with a razor blade or something and cut a couple of slats. Some of the hot wax must have oozed up from behind and into the front of the painting….”

Enraged, Ossorio fled the room "to call his lawyer or get a gun and shoot the conservator."

In another instance, Meneeley was with Clyfford Stills in the Cedar Bar getting drunk and rowdy. Ossorio had bought one of Stills’ paintings but was late on the payments.

As the night went on, others got Stills so worked up about it that he ended up taking a cab to the Springs from New York.  The drunk artist walked in and nearly stepped on an editor from Time magazine asleep on Alfonso’s sofa when he pulled out a knife and cut a piece off the painting. According to legend, Stills let it fall to the floor and left.

Ed later went out to see if he could take a look at it. “Where’s the centerpiece?” he asked. When shown the damaged work, he laughed.  “Look on the bright side," Ed said, "You should take the cut-out and glue it to another canvas and have 2 Clifford Stills!

"At the every least," Ed continued, ""Set the two beside each other as a monument to that action.”

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Another valuable Cedar Tavern connection was poet Frank O’Hara. According to Meneeley, Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art recognized O’Hara’s value while many other academics did not. Beginning at the sales desk, O’Hara advanced to Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions by 1960, landing him an influential role in the selection of who received the right to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale.

Frank O'Hara

While most nations had cultural ambassadors select work for the Venice Biennale, according to Meneeley, the United States showed little interest in becoming an international player in the arts or as seeing art as a signal of public psyche.

“They took away no cultural meaning from us,” Meneeley recalls. “To older generations, we were just kids talking about jazz. They couldn’t own up to the major changes we represented. Perhaps they could never see us beyond a passing fad.”

Welcoming the freedom, MoMA became the official US home base, encouraging oddball exhibitions and igniting artists like Rauschenberg, whom O’Hara also had an affair. When dealers like Leo Castelli realized MoMA was the key to sending artists, he began courting Frank O’Hara, giving him tremendous power.

Meneeley describes his acquaintance with O’Hara stemming out of conversations about current events and exhibitions. According to Ed, “Everyone knew Frank O’Hara was gay but it didn’t bother them because he was so valuable in his position at MoMA.” Through O’Hara and Helen Frankenthaler, Meneeley was introduced to an inner circle including Theodoros Stamos, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell.

Frankenthaler, in particular, liked the idea of O’Hara and Meneeley visiting her studio to select the next round of paintings for an upcoming show. Sometimes they would come together, other times they advised her separately, but Meneeley never recalled any noteworthy disagreements.

Meneeley & Helen Frankenthaler

“I very much respect Helen Frankenthaler as a colorist,” Meneeley recalls. “As well as a person, she was smart and tough, came from a family of New York judges, a Jewess from a family who liked owning all the seats at the opera; in effect, an uptown girl hanging out with the downtown jazz scene, free of major financial constraints to paint.” Their friendship continued throughout their lives.

On the single time Frank O’Hara and Ed shared a bed, Meneeley recalls, “We were kind to each other. It was nice, but we somehow knew it was not something we were ever going to do again.”








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Few friendships meant as much to Ed as with the man who shared the same roots. “Franz Kline,” according to Meneeley, “was most charming, most enlightened in terms of sophistication.”

 After a while, an unspoken agreement existed between the two men and they would meet in the evenings at the Cedar Tavern to drink. “Once we got to know each other as humans,” Meneeley recalled, “a natural friendship fell in to place.”

Franz Kline

From this friendship Meneeley became one of a few who knew of Kline’s second studio. Hidden behind the artist’s well-known 14th street space, Franz led Ed out on the roof and walked across the building where the garden normally was to enter into the next building behind. There, he kept a clandestine space unknown to his dealer, where he made the occasional studio sale in bulk to foreign collectors.

When warmer weather in Manhattan compelled the scene to migrate, Meneeley volunteered to drive Kline’s Thunderbird back and forth to the Hamptons and Providence, Rhode Island, but mostly Kline drove and Ed sat in the passenger seat.

“I couldn’t treat him the way his friends did at the time—like a useless, worthless drunk,” Meneeley recalls. “It made me so mad I went around telling them off, reminding them how useful Kline was as a person.”

One particularly maddening time Meneeley described Norman Mailer crashing Kline’s cocktail party. According to Ed, Mailer drunkenly made his way to the garden, loudly wondering “if there [were] any faggots here.”

Looking back, Meneeley said, “We all looked at him as if he was out of his mind. After he left, there was an announcement on the radio, an all-points-bulletin, detailing how Mailer was wanted by the police for purportedly stabbing his girlfriend.”

Such are the memories Meneeley describes, sometimes, if he’s had enough wine, by pounding his fist on the table, laughing triumphantly.  Enraptured by his tales, one grows convinced of his wellspring of strength.

Then, just as easily, he becomes solemn, as though quietly honoring the past—days when a close community of artists flourished outside the residual fears of nonconformity and the lingering effects of blacklists and Panels on Un-American activities that would define much of the culture he was working his hardest to preserve and protect.