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""Between You and Me" is a brilliant read that flirtatiously winks and kisses its way through the New York art world of the postwar period, turning our favorite icons inside out and back in again. It's all in the gossip. Larry Rivers painted a 'visual gossip column' and was described by Frank O'Hara as a 'demented telephone, ' but it takes a smart flirt (the best kind) like Gavin Butt to see gossip's methodological promise. Taking gossip into his own mouthy hands, Butt slurs the studios of Rivers, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol with their own reckless talk: kisses turn into smacks, and winks into home runs. (Between you and me, that's how I like it.)"--Carol Mavor, author of "Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden"

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BETWEEN YOU AND ME

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS....................................................................ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS..........................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION Gossip: The Hardcore of Art History?.......................................11 The American Artist in a World of Suspicion............................................232 Idol Gossip: Myths of Genius and the Making of Queer Worlds............................513 The Gift of the Gab: Camp Talk and the Art of Larry Rivers.............................744 Dishing on the Swish, or, the "Inning" of Andy Warhol..................................1065 Bodies of Evidence: Queering Disclosure in the Art of Jasper Johns.....................136AFTERWORD Flirting with an Ending.......................................................163NOTES....................................................................................167BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................189INDEX....................................................................................201

Chapter One

In an article published in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1951, entitled "What's Holding Back American Art?" the artist Thomas Hart Benton provides a downbeat assessment of the condition of postwar U.S. art. In part a lament for the waning influence of the Regionalist school of painting, of which he was the most public proponent in the 1930s, it tells the story of an art world tragically diverted from the task of producing an "American" art for the American people. Tragic because, for Benton, not only had his two chief compatriots in the Regionalist project, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, recently died, but, by 1951, support for the idea of a popular nationalistic art was dying out with them. Younger artists were no longer interested in making heroic images of laboring men toiling with a mythologized American land, nor were they concerned with making an art that would have mass appeal. Instead, Benton writes, they were increasingly drawn away from the "living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty pattern" (9). This "world," pejoratively invoked by Benton here, was that of modernist art-one in which the narrow Americanisms of the prewar years had no place, and in which the values of a certain kind of internationalism had come to hold sway.

But in setting out his views in the Saturday Review, Benton does more than simply lament the passing of artistic fashion. He also elaborates a dramatic tale of art-world intrigue that purports to explain this shift in artistic priorities. Vividly evoking a profession held in the yoke of powerful and malignant forces, he ventures that modernism's rise, and Regionalism's concomitant fall, had been brought about by the concerted efforts of a few "cultist groups" and their "disciples" working to control the direction of American art. Led by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Benton contends that various art professionals-including museum directors, curators, critics, and teachers-were working in concert to actively discredit the values of Regionalism and promote modernist art in its place. "Coteries of highbrows, of critics, college art professors, and museum boys," he writes, "the tastes of which had been thoroughly conditioned by the new esthetics of twentieth century Paris," were involved in a conspiracy to undermine American art in favor of securing the widespread acceptance of elitist, imported alternatives. Modernism-invoked here as a distinctly foreign, European phenomenon-was simply being imposed upon the American art-world by means of the stealth and duplicity of its chief defenders. By readily accepting modernist values and priorities, young artists were doing little more, Benton suggests, than colluding unwittingly in a sustained campaign to erode American art from within.

As we shall see during the course of this chapter, similar kinds of conspiracy theories were common currency in American culture during the early fifties. In many ways Benton's assessment of the postwar art world here can be seen to typify McCarthyite concerns with rooting out an anti-Americanism presumed to be rampant within the nation's governmental and cultural agencies. But what concerns me here at the outset is how, in referring to the architects of this supposed conspiracy, Benton's fondness for vituperative innuendoes, such as "museum boys" and elsewhere "ivory tower boys," leaves us in little doubt about the more profoundly sexual basis of this institutional conniving. The use of the word boys here refers elliptically to homosexuality by suggesting "nancy-boys" and "sissy-boys," the most widely used terms to denote gay men at the time. It is clearly intended to suggest the prevalence of gay men among the communities of America's museum curators and other art professionals. In addition, the word conjures up the objects of desire supposedly favored by these men, and it suggests a pederastic core at the heart of their attempts to influence young artists. Benton worries that gay men will turn young artists away from the world of "active men and women" toward the supposedly empty patterning of avant-garde art and in the process create a generation of effeminate and ineffectual, if not homosexual, artists. Drawing on the rich and allusive power of suggestion, Benton works to make his readers share this worry by imagining an art-world conspiracy profoundly motivated by a deviant, predatory dynamic; viewing modernist art as a kind of European homosexual sensibility being schooled into young artists by their pseudo-Wildean elders.

The stark outline of a gay conspiracy here will likely strike present-day readers as absurd, and, for those familiar with Benton's near legendary chauvinism and homophobia, as simply the paranoid imaginings of an arch reactionary. This was also the view of many of Benton's own contemporaries who, by the early 1950s, had come to be largely incredulous of his prejudicial and abusive agenda. Cut off by the turn in the artistic tide, his regressive and provincial tendencies were paid scant serious attention by a generation of artists engaged in debates about "advanced" modernist art. Speaking perhaps for many in the art world at this time, the art critic James Thrall Soby dismisses much of Benton's diagnosis of American art as absurd invective. Writing in the same edition of the Saturday Review, Soby belittles the artist's argument on numerous counts, parrying it point by point with the "facts" to the contrary, including those to counter the accusations of homosexuality in high places: "That there have been a few homosexuals on the staffs of American museums no one can fairly deny. But they have been and are vastly outnumbered by normal men. Indeed, I can't think of a single major art museum in this country whose director's sex life is open to Mr. Benton's innuendo." Soby hereby attempts to put an end to the idea of a gay conspiracy by denying any actual basis for it in reality. Benton's assertions of an art world overrun with gay men simply do not square, Soby contends, with the reality of a situation in which "normal" men outnumber them. And, of the most influential positions...