On the subject of
“great artists are not always great human beings,” I went to see the
documentary Shadowman about the artist
Richard Hambleton last night at the beautifully renovated Quad Cinema.
If you were in
New York City in the early ’80s, you could not have missed Hambleton’s “shadow”
paintings, quickly dashed off silhouettes that seemed to creep up on you out of
nowhere. (His first project was actually his “Mass Murder” series that
resembled the police department chalk outlines of murder victims.) These
paintings are remarkable for their power to suggest something with just a few
strokes, as were his subsequent paintings based on the Marlboro Man and rodeo
riders.
At the height of
his “shadow” paintings, he dropped out of the New York art scene and started
painting landscapes and seascapes that were out of step with the graffiti and
street art that were popular in New York City and for which he was known. It’s
hard to describe how beautiful these paintings are. Someone in the film
compared them to the landscapes of Turner, but even that doesn’t do them
justice.
Eventually,
Hambleton is rediscovered by two art dealers (including the socialite Vladimir
Restoin Roitfeld) and is feted with two large shows, studded with models and
movie stars. His paintings eventually sell for several hundred thousand
dollars.
The flip side of
this success story is Hambleton’s copious drug use and schizophrenic
personality. (I know someone who lived in his Lower East Side building and she
described it as a living nightmare.)
It’s hard not to
read this movie as a commentary on mortality, as we see the beautiful, vibrant
young Hambleton ravaged by skin cancer and scoliosis. The movie is both tragic
and heroic, in that Hambleton keeps painting, right up until his death.
During a Q&A
after the movie, the film’s director posited that Hambleton had “mental health
issues” and, according to some psychiatrist friends, fit the profile of someone
who had been abused as a child, because of the way he drew people to him and
then pushed them away.
But I think Penny
Arcade puts it best in the movie when she says that some artists (she mentions
Van Gogh as another example) we “just can’t understand.”
Hambleton passed
away on October 29, just three days before the “Club 57” show at MoMA, which features one of his paintings.
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