Chapter 8: Expatriate Exhibitions & Lovers

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.  It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky act to send it out into the world.  How often it must be permanently impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend their affliction universally. 

                                                                                    Mark Rothko

           

                       

           

        
By the early 1970s Edward Meneeley was living in London full-time where the support of friends enabled him an average of two exhibitions a year.  Meneeley reports, “On the other hand, I was exhibiting the Brits back in New York in my studio and trying to help them gain exposure.”

        
This cross-pollination of culture between New York and London culminated into the Two By Two Project in which Meneeley teamed up with R.C. Kenedy, Robert Motherwell and others to create a journal for the international art world bridging the Atlantic.

One of the first artists in the UK to catch his eye was Brian Wall:

          One afternoon, while shopping along the Thames near Holland Park, I stopped in Grovner Gallery and was fascinated with a small black metal sculpture. When I approached the woman working there, I learned her name was Monika Kinley, and she explained the work was by Brian Wall, an instructor at the Central School.

            After I told her a bit about myself, Monika invited me to her flat to show me her large collection of Outsider Art, created by people in mental institutions.  I knew about it from Alfonso Ossorio who came to the UK to collect Dubbofet. Dubbofet also collected Outsider Art, so Alfonso started doing the same in NY. From this mutual understanding, Monika and I became close. She introduced me to people like Brian Wall and I did the same for her in New York, so we were mutually supportive.   

            Brian was a ball of energy, but he never had enough extra money to do things in a certain way and travel and promote himself, so after we met and became fast friends, we realized we could nurture a mutually beneficial relationship.  I had the connections in New York and could help set him up with shows, and Brian would, in exchange, help introduce me to the British art world.

One of their first bonding experiences, Wall and Meneeley traveled together to St. Ives in Cornwall, roughly a 300 mile journey. Brian, who is a bit on the short side, drove a small van Meneeley described as feeling a lot like a tin can. “It was almost as much a toy as a car and you felt like you could pick it up and put it in your pocket after you got out. But the ride was well worth it.  I was immediately impressed with the architecture and landscape.” 

        
Wall recalled stopping for a drink in a pub called the Castle Inn where outlandishly dressed Meneeley and de Marigney were denied service.

        
“I’ll serve you two,” the bartender said, pointing to Wall and his future wife Sylvia Brown, “Not those two.”

“Why not?” Wall asked, looking over his shoulder at Chris and Ed.

“I don’t need to tell you,” the bartender replied, frowning.

        
It was the first time in Brian Wall’s life he remembered encountering such prejudice, and the foursome left without incidence to spend money somewhere else.

        
While visiting the quiet seaside town, Brian introduced Ed to celebrated Modernist sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, whom Wall once worked as an assistant. 

        
Modernism, at its most fundamental level, questioned the axioms of its previous age, including all "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization, etc. in the face of an emerging industrialized world that made previous economic, social and political conditions obsolete.

        

Barbara Hepworth
Single Form
1964
United Nations 

Niels Bohr's quantized atom (indicating a person’s active participatory role in the universe rather than static, outside observer status), Ezra Pound's founding of Imagism (clear, sharp language opposed to sentiment), and the Armory Show in New York (featuring painters such as Pablo Picasso who shocked onlookers by their rejection of traditional perspective) were all indicators of the ground-breaking movement in which Hepworth helped lead the way in the world of sculpture.

Meneeley recalls the afternoon of their visit:

Barbara’s studio was close by but we never left her living space.  I sat on one of the few chairs. She sat on her bed. Next to where I sat was a drapery over a cube as an end table for our ashtray and drinks. Later we found out it wasn’t a table, but rather a stack of newspapers with a doily on it.  Under her bed were more stacks of newspapers. We talked mostly about pleasantries. She was a very complicated woman, who’d once married Ben Nicholson, and after having triplets together, the couple decided to never see each other again. It was too dangerous.  They were both too creative, so she raised the kids on her own. About a year and a half later she died in a tragic accident when her home caught fire. I always figured with all those newspapers stacked all around she had been building her own pyre. 

St. Ives also provided a visit to Patrick Heron, who now worked out of Nicholson’s studio, and his wife Delia.  From the warm reception they received, Ed realized they would be staying for several days: 

           

        
The first evening we talked in the kitchen long past dinner into the early morning. We had a frantic all night mental ping pong match.  I thought my brain would explode.  To my amazement, Patrick started right in again the next day at breakfast.  At that time a big subject to talk about with Heron was Greenberg’s role in the art world.  I thought Patrick was a battleship in mothballs and wondered if he could be retrofitted to sink the USS Greenberg.  He had the clout, if we could only get him to start writing again, to challenge Greenberg, but most of all we thought Patrick’s rationale for writing about sculpture off the pedestal would be a valuable perspective.  

Meneeley took advantage of the opportunity to familiarize Heron with his concept for a show of free-standing works resembling hybrid sculpture/paintings that had fallen on flat ears under Bill Agee’s lobbying at the Whitney  close to a decade earlier. 


“Patrick looked at photographs of my free-standing paintings, which I had been trying to build up the momementum to produce for nearly ten years, and said, You need to do more of these,” Meneeley recalled, “ I replied, ‘the day, someone offers to show them in public, I would resume.’” 


Ed first concieved of experimenting with this structural element in 1963 and in a year later made the first prototype out of 7’x3’ flush doors screwed together at right angles.  While the idea of the pieces was rendered concrete, the communicative element was impeded in the quality of the craftsmanship and financial concerns in the largely unsupported late 1960s New York. 


Encouraged by Heron’s interest, Meneeley found fresh enthusiasm to apply and eventually receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington D.C. And about a year later, he would finally get his chance to produce the works properly for a groundbreaking exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in April 1973. 

        
Conceived as a series of dual units, the two sculpture/painting hybrids would stand side by side to form a repetitious structural component. Each was constructed out of ten foot high panels mitred at right angles. Widths, varying between 3-5 feet, formed an angular space into which one could walk and, on the reverse, an angular corner which jutted out directly at the viewer.

        
The surfaces were painted with bands of varying widths and numbers, traversing the panels from top to bottom to create an illusion which suggested to the viewer that he/she was in fact seeing a flat surface rather than a three-dimensional unit. Here is Christopher de Marigny’s recorded account of the exhibition:

            There is in fact an inherent contradiction between the structures and the painted surfaces which both affirms and denies in each the existence of the other. Most of this is achieved both by the use of composition (division of surface) and colour, as applied to the real scale of the piece.

            Meneeley is an aggressive artist. He sees scale, composition, and especially colour as psychological and intends to manipulate the viewer according to what he thinks the viewer’s response to those elements will be…by bypassing intellectual processes to arrive at a gut communication with the emtotions and avoiding what he describes as people’s inherent prejudices.    

         

Paintings or sculptures?  Or some new media still-to-be-properly-defined?  In so much as these works are free-standing in space and not attached to any wall, they are sculptural, however, Meneeley’s dealing with formal problems of space and illusion are, according to de Marigny, “the painter’s concern.”  Regardless of classification, the massive scale contrasted with the cool colors defied humanity’s limits for a quick label and easy processing in the annals of art history.

           

        

             2

“For god sake Irving, why are you not writing about Ed?” Victoria & Albert Museum librarian Robert Kenedy asked art historian, Irving Sandler, after a few glasses of wine at a dinner party at de Marigney’s flat.


Meneeley had been causing a stir abroad in which the American enjoyed the opportunities for multiple shows in 1971-1972. His Electrostatic prints became part of a traveling exhibit scheduled after multiple UK venues to go on to France and Belgium.  He traveled widely throughout Europe during the summer after accepting a full time position at the Institute for Contemporary Arts.  Despite such success, Kenedy was concerned Meneeley’s accomplishments may be lost to the attention of the New York establishment. 


“Robert felt all this could be detrimental in the long run,” Meneeley recalled, “unless we could find a major American writer who could produce a published work accessible to the art community in the U.S.”


Prior to the evening of the dinner party, the two had created a mental list of people they thought would be appropriate for the task, before eliminating most for various reasons. Here is Meneeley’s account of what happened:

In the end, we both agreed that Irving Sandler was the right person for the job.  I explained to Kenedy that Sandler had only once written a piece on an individual artist, his close friend Al Held, and that it had always troubled him.

Irving was warm and friendly, but he operated like a buddy, like an enthusiastic coach. Although he was in a position where he could have naturally operated like a critic, he was interested in being an art historian and was reluctant to do individual pieces on artists because he felt it broke protocol and shattered his objectivity.

I knew it would be an uphill battle to get Sandler to agree, but that did not diminish Kenedy’s enthusiasm.

To Meneeley’s surprise, at dinner Kenedy began right in on Sandler, who later agreed to a meeting with a critic for Studio International, one of Britain’s leading magazines. Ed recalls the situation unfolding:

The meeting took place in my flat in London and within 15-20 minutes I was able to connect to the theme of the plot.  It went like this: The young woman critic was to research the project and do the writing. Irving Sandler would be the editor and   his name would appear on the piece.  Kenedy and Sandler continued going on   about details of how the project would progress. Kenedy was carefully stoking the fires of competitiveness and enthusiasm he believed asleep inside Sandler’s subconscious. As Kenedy fanned the flames, Sandler became more and more possessive of the project. It became increasingly clear to both the young woman and me that her role was shrinking, and then it reached a point where there seemed to be no necessity for her at all.

Both Kenedy and Sandler were acting like complete male chauvinist pigs. To the credit of the young woman, she stood up and informed them of that and politely excused herself from the meeting. At that point, Kenedy gave the evening its last little twist and informed Sandler that he should complete the proposed project himself. To my amazed ears, Sandler agreed. 

Here are two excerpts of Sandler’s 1973 article in Studio International detailing Meneeley’s free-standing paintings on exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery:

           

Aside from the expressiveness and skill with which Meneeley relates colours, there is further fascination in the manner in which he juggles the very terms of painting and sculpture, the ‘opticality’ of the one against the ‘tactility’ of the other.  If the fusion of the two can be considered a problem—and it is a widely held notion that they are incompatible—then Meneeley’s solution is particularly elegant, since he makes colour a property of painting and the physical support of the colour (the tangible stretched canvas) a property of sculpture—giving each it’s own, as it were.

Meneeley has discovered his artistic identity in the realm between painting and sculpture. His desire to bridge two- and three-dimensions has presented him with ever fresh challenges, enabling him to exercise his abundant inventiveness and artistry.

In a letter to B.H. Friedman, dated April 1973, Whitechapel curator Jenny Stein described Meneeley’s exhibition as “very refreshing new energy on the international art scene." More press followed.  Barbara Cavaliere, writing in Arts, called the free-standing works, “Meneeley’s greatest achievements…a brilliant interpenetration of the painting and sculptural languages…which, through contradiction, establishes a tense equilibrium between flatness and depth.”

        
Such attention prompted London’s Tate Modern to accept Louina’s Dream (1973), a print on paper from Meneeley’s Alecto Editions series, named for the London print shop where he created the works. Publishers of work by David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and others; Alecto Monographs invited Meneeley to experiment with their equipment, partly for the publicity he was able to attract.  The resulting series maintained a metallic visual quality resembling colorful steel rivets.


Through it all, Meneeley remained an active man about town, drinking and chatting up members of the scene, all the while passionately promoting art as a force to change the world. At the conclusion of the Whitechapel exhibition, the publisher of Studio International invited Ed to lunch in the summer of 1973. Meneeley recalls the afternoon:


            Peter was high-spirited and said it was time for him to ask me his favorite question of any artist whose work he had been enticed to follow over a period of time. He prefaced this by saying it was the worst thing he could ask an artist, and he hoped I understood there was no malice intended.

‘Now that you’ve developed yourself and brought your work to a climactic position,’ he said, ‘where do you go from here?’

'That certainly is a great question,' I answered, 'and there is no answer to it. The only non-answer I could relate is that I’ve been in this position before. The first time, it’s frightening. The second is manageable. After that you have to trust that your enthusiasm is intact and that the work you have allowed to remain in your possession will provide the key to the future.'

                        3

        
Christopher D’ Marigney’s mother, Giselle, was an Australian ballerina.  Prior to World War II, she traveled to London to explore the cutting edge of contemporary dance, most of which she later realized was taking place in Berlin. 

        
Relying on her trust fund (her father sold hardware down under to gold speculators) to cover her expenses, Giselle was so caught up in her love of modern dance she ignored warnings from home about Hitler, pleading her return to London. And soon it became impossible for her to leave.  Cut off from the outside world, Giselle started dealing butter and other essentials recovered from bombed out buildings in order to survive. 

        
Among the men confiscated abroad to work in Berlin factories was Jean D’Marigney, who often bought supplies from the long-legged smuggler. Jean’s family, well-known among French hospitality circles, understood the inner-workings of fine hotels and restaurants.  Taking cue from Giselle, he began exploring bombed out structures, hoping to discover provision cellars intact.  With luck, together they’d open an impromptu cabaret, often lasting as long as the wine and caviar. 

        
Jean and Giselle’s son, Christopher, was born in the midst of intense bombing.  Once Soviet troops captured Berlin, Giselle became a translator and began working her way back to London, eventually settling in Camden.  Jean returned to France, found his family business in shambles, and soon after left to find Giselle and their son. 

        
While Christopher was growing up, the twisting, turning he suffered in order to compensate for his hearing loss caused him back trouble, so Giselle enrolled him in ballet to straighten him out. 

        
After relaying this story, Meneeley sat up very straight, pounded his fist on the table, and proclaimed, “What a wonderful way to use the arts!”

        
As the years went by, Christopher began spending more and more time in New York with Ed promoting English artists such as William Turnbull and Brian Wall out of Meneeley’s 12^th Street studio. Yet, near the end of 1973, Meneeley reports, the couple began to drift apart:

        
           Christopher had a slightly dark side to him. After a while, as I was doing my best to create a bridge between the art communities of Britain and America; he began to go off with men heavily into leather. That was when I began to lose him.

People involved in sadomasochism often confuse sex and religion. Some have a strange religious relationship with sex. It’s as though they can’t just have sex, but need to have certain rituals. Unbeknownst to them, what feeds this development is that they have often acquired a tremendous appetite for cynicism.

           

            Whenever Christopher came to NY, he began to frequent leather bars. It was the last thing I was interested in. People involved in the leather scene never really feel free.  Love doesn’t give them any security or confidence, the ritual gives them that. Worse than that, in the back room of the bars people could have sex with multiple people, after which no one washed up.  No one washed their hands. I wouldn’t even drink out of beer glasses unless it came with a straw.  As a medic, I knew all about germs and sterilization. I kept thinking: these places are fucking loaded! They’re going to explode. 

            The elaborate relationships, leather gear, women’s clothes, paraphernalia and ritual were not dissimilar to Catholic church full of choir boys, incense wafting, and jeweled wine glasses.  Each has a certain aesthetic in culture, but how can you participate in certain other parts of culture when you are inundated by all of this?  I came to realize some thought of real life as a holding tank. Some didn’t feel truly alive unless it was during sexual, hedonistic rituals.  As a medic, I could not put up with it.

            Christopher eventually met someone else who could share in that side of life. We didn’t have a fight or anything. He met someone from Denmark and rode away on the back of a motorcycle. 




Meneeley continued life at 69 Elsham Road alone where his career continued to receive the attention of major media.  In these excerpts from a 1975 Vogue Magazine interview, Ed’s overall mood shines through his summation of the role of film, dance and the plastic artist in English society:

For the past 20 years the film industry has been concerned with documentation set to music—which is not what has been happening to us at all. Earlier filmmakers were concerned with the inherent quality of the media itself, like the experimental filmmaker Len Lye, who scratched directly onto the film.  Colour is used by the industry as a bonus to sugar “the window into reality” rather than seen as the breakthrough it is. 

Dance shows how culture is balanced, and when it was important—like the plastic arts are now—the right hand knew what the left was doing.  In Asia, dance is still that important.  But the present art world here succumbs to the same mistake that the technological world is making—that dance is simply peripheral to culture.  It is a conspiracy between technology, colonialists and the universities—concentrating on one side of the brain, on “cleverness”—thus devaluating space, colour, tenderness, physical expression and the subconscious in one blow. 

           

                        5

        


During one of Meneeley’s previous light-hearted summer excursions with de Marigney, he experienced a transcendental moment while visiting Sainte Chappelle, a Gothic chapel in the heart of Paris: 

           
            There were no pews or artifacts, just a circular staircase constantly turning as it led up into the main room where the nuns meditated. If you were too heavy   the stairway narrowed so you couldn’t fit. At the top, all four walls were 12 feet of stained glass. As I sat there on the floor looking up, bathing in the light, I experienced a transformational moment as the color rushed in to fill the space. I cannot overstate how important the afternoon was for me, it validated what I had been doing as a colorist.

         

            You see, colors need to be understood as frequencies which have the power of producing certain physical effects, much like taking an aspirin.  And the efficacy of different colors vary by the way they are handled.  In another sense, in our everyday lives sometimes color demands what we do, like at a street light.  Green means go. Red signals stop. That’s rational color. 

           

            If you are going to make a situation, like a landscape, in which the elements have the same value everywhere but the colors don’t interact, then it’s not really painting but illustration.  Unless an artist understands a sunset as a colorist, then they will approach it as a rationalist, much in the same way quilt-making has definitive lines.

           

         
What, I wondered aloud, was irrational color?

         
Dismissing my remark, Meneeley recalled his exchanges with Patrick Heron, whose insights made Ed feel like he was back in the Cedar Tavern.  In fact, the Englishmen’s essays, preserved through ESM Documentation, were the source Ed often returned for further contemplation, especially when designing his lectures.  Excerpts from the first, published in July 1953 titled Space in Colour, contains these lines:

In painting, space and form are not actual, as they are in sculpture, but illusory.  Painting, indeed, is essentially an art of illusion; and “pictorial science” is simply that accumulated knowledge which enables the painter to control this illusion, the illusion of forms in space. 

Colour is the utterly indispensable means for realizing the various species of pictorial space.  The imaginative, intuitive re-creation of form which, for years, I have been trying to pin down in a definition is only conceivable in terms of a vibrant picture surface. And the vibration is colour.

Pictorial space, I have suggested, is an illusion of depth behind the actual canvas. It may also be a projection—of plane or mass—apparently in front of the canvas. But the existence of pictorial space implies the partial obliteration of the canvas’s surface from our consciousness. This is the role of colour: to push back or bring forward the required section of the design.

Colour is therefore as powerful an agent of spatial expression as drawing. Indeed, one “draws” with flat washes of colour, as often as not, and not with line at all.  Tonal colour is thus the sole means of bestowing that physical vibrancy and resonance without which no picture is alive.

Spatial colour is, however, a grammar: the language of space in colour can doubtless be made to express anything that stirs the consciousness of man.

           

            In 1962, Heron continued to intellectually explore his use of color in A Note on My Paintings published in Studio International:

I can dwell endlessly on the magical realness of such superbly satisfying areas of colour—with merely their purely physical nature to contemplate. Images physically reflect the physical realities of the world surrounding us: but symbols are merely linguistic devices invented by men.

           

I do not find myself “designing” a canvas: I do not “draw” the lozenge-shaped areas or the soft squares. And these forms are not really “forms” at all, anyway, but simply areas materializing under my brush when I start to try to saturate the surface of the canvas.

            Colour determines the actual shapes, or areas, which balance one another.

If an entire canvas is a Chinese vermillion—then one’s eyes soon becomes so saturated by the vibrations of vermillion that the conscious      sensation of redness rapidly ceases to be felt!  One must then allow a tiny slither of dull green to swim into the arrangement somewhere.  This instantly restores the original intensity of redness of vermillion expanses.  But one thing leads to another: and the sliver of green cries out to be matched, or balanced, by a second or even a third little area that is not Chinese vermillion.  (But a fifth, seventh, or tenth little addition must be resisted.)  And, of course, the sharp and small green form may well be balanced by a much larger, softer, diffuse form, perhaps of a color very close indeed to that Chinese vermillion ground.  In that case, optical after-images inevitably join the dance.  So [the artist] doesn’t have to put in, physically, all the area-shapes that will in fact be present in the eye of the spectator.

            Later, in 1969, Heron elaborated yet again the use of color in an essay aptly titled Colour in My Paintings:

            In painting, one proceeds intuitively, never knowing which way things are going to go…the only rule I follow is I always allow my hand to surprise me…and I always follow impulse—for instance in the choice of colours, deliberation is fruitless.  But this does not mean that every act connected with the painting of a picture isn’t deliberate: it is.

            

Studying these texts and Heron’s 1955 book The Changing Forms of Art, Meneeley found the intellectual explanation mirroring his own intuitive experiences and quickly integrated Patrick’s essays, compiled with his own experiences, into his classroom lectures.

         
If he could no longer be in the Cedar Tavern, bantering about color theory with Robert Motherwell or Clyfford Still; if he could no longer sit around a circle with Helen Frankenthaler and Theodoros Stamos, he would bring the conversation to his lecture hall.

         
Finally fully confident as he flipped through slides from the podium, Meneeley explained to his students:

Stamos is not rational.  Neither is Frankenthaler.  I can skirt it, play more to twisting it and playing games with the idea of where is the actual space, making the surface appear more vaporous, so that as you approach it, how will you know when your finger is going to touch it? 

Most make a drawing on a canvas, not with it. Materials have to evolve in a way so that they lose any practical reality that it is paint.  So you can look at a Pollock and see he poured it, not dripped, and rather put all colors together before starting, which flowed down a stick like a pencil, as he danced and swept it around his canvas on the floor. The more he can overlay it the more lyrical it becomes. Silver, lavender mist, you call it that because it is what it is.

Me, I feel I have to use every fucking inch of it, so the whole thing reads from corner to corner. And lately, the movement is vertical, as if trying to aspire to heaven from earth, using color in a more spiritual sense, which is its nature.

On the other hand, I do recommend now and then everyone create a black and white, just to make sure you have toughened up your sense of composition. 

         
In the wake of an emotional break-up with Christopher, Ed began focusing all his efforts on teaching.  And academic life refilled Meneeley with a sense of joy.  To be able to impart his knowledge on to a younger generation was gratifying. On the other hand, he also learned of the politics inherent in the institution, casuing him, in his later years, to pronouce the word academic through slit teeth as though it were a curse.

         
By the same token, academia allowed Meneeley to champion others and make life-long friendships as with the case of Brian Wall and Patrick Heron. The former would go on to accept an invitation to teach at California University at Berkeley. The latter, Meneeley would later join with part-time on the faculty in Winchester School of Art. 

           

                      6       

          
Shortly after de Marigney’s exodus, Meneeley accepted a part time position at the Winchester School of Art.  Two days a week, he boarded a train from London for the hour long commute.


On his first day, a member of the staff met Meneeley at the station. When the two arrived at the school, they went immediately to the cafeteria to settle in out of the rainy morning with a cup of tea.  That same day, the art students had attended a lecture given by a guest speaker elucidating on the noble values and traditional role of artists in society. To protest, the entire student body, prior to tea time, headed back to their rooms to emerge dressed in drag.  Meneeley remembers the afternoon quite well:

The rest of faculty didn’t know how to take it. ‘Look at it!’ my escort nearly shouted, ‘Look at it…they’ve all kept their mustaches but are wearing women’s clothes. What is going on?’

I could tell right away most of the staff were tight-asses, while the students loved to joke and clown around.  So I went over to one student I would later learn was named Mike Van Joel and, playing along, began to flirt with him.  ‘I can’t believe I never noticed you before, I said, would you like to go out to dinner sometime?’ I decided to blend right in, complimenting them on their outfits, which played into my hands beautifully.

            There was much more of a community in Winchester, so I began staying some nights. Students put me up in their flats on the couch, rather than stay in a pricy hotel, before taking train back to London the next morning.

            I would come to realize their was a political war going on, much different from the situation in London.  The school had the money to bring in many guests, most of whom were conservatively bent, and I would take care of the video equipment and record their lectures.

            Eventually, most of the students thought I was nuts, while most of the staff simply dismissed me as non-traditional.  One of my closest friends was Derek Seagrief. I think he felt like I was something from outer space he had captured.   He and I stayed at each other’s places and it evolved into a relationship. 

            Derek had this thick working class accent and was often dismissed by the rest of the faculty as a bumpkin.  Realizing his talents, I encouraged him to travel to New York and put him in touch with art world players he could interview. He wrote an article about the New York Art Community, which I later insisted he send to the publisher of Studio International. I figured, whether they published it or not, he would benefit from working with a true editor. 

            After his piece was published, I noticed another professor reading it on the train.  When I brought it up, my colleague nodded his head, impressed. Then he mentioned the author with a puzzled look on his face, as though he couldn’t equate him.  ‘Oh, he’s one of your students,’ I said, to the man’s astonishment.

            By then I had taken to living in an abandoned house to which I ran a heavy electrical cord over from the neighbor’s roof to the top floor where I lived.  The whole back garden was filled with my sculptures, as well as beds of naturally growing herbs.  I eventually felt the whole time I was in Winchester, I had to out-maneuver everybody. Most of the faculty wanted a quiet, laid back place, but I knew the students were looking for more.  So I decided to challenge them.

            I encouraged them to really look at and feel what they were doing. Rather than end up a bunch of illustrators, I tried to get them to look upon themselves as agents of change who would effect society for the better. It got to the point where if they didn’t want any waves to rock their peaceful little provincial boat, they better start thinking about getting rid of me. 

            I was amazed and honored. Students really began to open up and expose these things from inside. My job was not to pull them out, but rather to create a comfortable environment without imposing too much influence.  I might later ask whether what they were doing was rational, spiritual, ephemeral, etc. in terms of color. But I would barely instruct in terms of process. 

            A prime example was Mike Van Joel, a friend of Derek, who came to my classes only to realize he should give up painting and start writing.  I allowed for this sort of freedom and his career eventually evolved to publishing his own magazine in London, which functioned in association with Flowers Gallery. 

In addition to his teaching salary, Meneeley was awarded a grant from the British Arts Council for the continued development of his own work after splitting his week teaching 2 days in Winchester and the rest of the week at the Central School in London.


With Monika Kinley’s help, Ed arranged for two of his free-standing “screen” paintings permanent homes in Ireland.  One to Trinity College, Dublin.  The second, Queen’s University, Belfast.


“The idea was that if they were ever to be shown together,” Meneeley said, “they would have to be united much in the same way I hoped the Irish people would reconcile their past.”


In part to celebrate these gifts, Meneeley showed his newest works in 1976 at the Oliver Dowling Gallery in Dublin.  The new series of paintings, he described, as “minimal with one massive color playing off and being activated by neighboring bands of a secondary color. In this way, they exude like sunshine, the mystery and energy emanating out from the canvas.”


Continuing in the same vein as the free-standing painting/sculpture hybrids, Meneeley created a pair of wooden triangles best described in Hibernia published December 3^rd, 1976:

            Meneeley has extended his study by showing not only what happens to colour when seen on a flat surface but what happens to it when one sees it on an oblique angle, a right angle, or a totally unusual position as from underneath as he continues the painting around the sides of the freestanding canvas.

 

            Meneeley makes us move to use our eyes and see what different angles and different light do to the colors.  In some of these phenomena, it actually is difficult to believe the testimony of your own eyes, e.g. that the red that is on the underside of the folded down relief does not change colour along its length (as can be ascertained by its side view) but is only altered by the juxtoposition of the mauve plane beside it.

            His paintings are in the broadline tradition of American artists like Barnet Newman, but where Newman manipulates his planes with divisions of sharp straight lines, in Meneeley’s work the central plane of the large painting is cut off from the borderings colours by a thin nervous white line in the early abstract painting of Kupka, Kandinsky or Muholy Nagy. This uneven straight line profoundly effects the character of the paintings, bringing in the world of human nerves, brains, sensibilities into an otherwise pure “psychic phenomena” of colour, the “intimate” aspect of what R.C. Kennedy has called the “noble and intimate” painting of Ed Meneeley.

     

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During the summers following de Marigny’s departure, Meneeley began visiting old friend Theodoros Stamos on the Greek Isle of Lefkada. 


Following Mark Rothko’s suicide, and the famous scandal surrounding his good friend’s estate in which he was an executor, Stamos returned more frequently to his homeland from New York. Meneeley recollects:

Many knew how fiercely Rothko and his wife argued.  Few knew that after they visited Patrick Heron, they reconciled and would concieve their son in England. Mark later gifted certain paintings inspired during this time to the Tate Modern in honor of his son. Now Christopher Rothko lives in Stamos’s old house on West 83^rd street after the fall-out from the scandal.

            Not only did Stamos have to find his best friend, in a bathtub, drained at the wrists; but would lose everything during the trial.  When I spent my summers in Lefkada, I helped council him back to health.  

            From my understanding, everything would have been fine if the accountant wouldn’t have taken the work out of Rothko’s attic. As executors of Rothko’s will, they already had access to everything in the studio.

Rothko’s wife’s estate battled back. The work in the attic belonged to her, as with the house.  The dispute continued even after her death. Eventually, the teenage daughter, Kate, was persuaded to battle back.  Her claim: the executors defrauded her and her brother with the Marlborough Gallery.   

The third executor, the children’s piano teacher, got his own legal representation. 

Stamos was devastated.  Reeling from backlash following the scandal surrounding the Rothko trial, he retreated to Greece for half the year to paint.  Frankenthaler sent him updates.




Stamos lost his house in the upper west side.  Negative press stained  his reputation to the point were he was forced to exile himself to his homeland in the Ionian Sea in order to paint. There, in the evenings, light reflecting off the sea effected everything, particularly toward the end of the day when colors shifted.  Off in the distance, the hull of a ship no longer looked like rusty metal with the setting sun, but turned to suede.  During Meneeley’s summers with Stamos in Lefkada, Ed painted a new series of works called Ionian Reflections.  Here are his lasting impressions:


Almost every summer while living in London I had a summer home next door to Stamos.  We were never lovers, but Stamos liked to watch me shower. We were close friends, but it evolved into taking care of him a lot like a nurse, caring for him, after the trial.  He called my work “art of the insane” because my first ever Window done in Greece, had been painted with small brushes and gave the impression of someone totally obsessed. 

For the first fifty years of my life I worked in many forms and style. The Windows series would be my most prolific.  In 1905, Malevitch discovered that a surface could be opened up through the illusion of Supremetist geometry. He called it a window you could reach into, so I did not invent the opening, but I went running in there! And I can talk about how it can be so enriching. 

            People look at modern art and often feel like it is inaccessible to them. I don’t blame them. Especially because the last thing they want is to look puzzled and be afraid a dealers going to come out and talk to them in technical terms…it’s…intimidating.  I feel like Windows give a structure that helps allow people to walk up and have a natural body reaction before too many distractions get into their minds.

While the first window may have been born in Lefkada, Meneeley believes it had been concieved out of residual frustration left over from the previous semester. After settling in to the peaceful sounds and sights by the sea, Meneeley’s Ionian Reflections inevitably aroused in him a sense of peace.  Over the years he would become so much a fixture in the Lefkada community, he was asked to do a public sculpture for the town.

 

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In 1977 an opportunity to exhibit paintings in a show called ‘Real Life’ at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool would be Meneeley’s last exhibition abroad.  Here are his impressions of leaving London at this time:

Edward Lucie-Smith and Peter Moore, who curated the show, came to my studio in London and selected the work, but I never made the opening. By then I had left London after falling victim to the wage freeze.  While my NY apartment was rent-controlled (and sublet), my cost of living in London continued to increase while my earnings remained the same.  At last I lost my studio to a housing project. 

            For some years I had had a modest income from the archive, but in 1968 I discovered that some of the color negatives were unstable, requiring quite a bit of money to preserve the recorded works on a stable film stock.  I had a few good sales and took a gamble on the stock.  I closed its recording activity in 1971 and tried to cut my losses, but it went into debt.  So to survive in Britain without some dollar income (and with no way to get an increase in teaching salary) was hopeless.  I was at the point one reaches while in Britain—too young to be British to the Establishment, too old to be a novelty. 

           

Earlier, Meneeley bid his students farewell in Winchester with an elaborate ritual.  True to his nature, before leaving he made copies from his master set of keys to give the students access to the art supplies locked away by other faculty.  Because their tuition kept the school open and paid his salary, Ed felt that the art supplies belonged to the students. He also encouraged them to harvest the rose hips and watercress growing wild on campus. He knew how much health food stores in London charged for them.

         
Meneeley also did his best to talk the administration into getting chaplains more involved after concern arose regarding students threatening suicide.  For this, his students loved Ed passionately. 

         
On his last evening in Winchester, his students held a farewell ceremony.  Ed was led to a pool surrounded by candles and bottles of wine. Someone told him to take his clothes off and enter the pool.  One by one, his students stripped and circled around him, before coming up and give him a hug. 

         
The next morning, a crowd followed Meneeley to the train station. Before boarding, he threw his final set of keys to them, waving a final bon voyage back to London.