By Bill Whitten
A Georg Jorgenson retrospective is at the Whitney. Georg has been dead for almost twenty years. Among the two-dozen paintings on display is one called Disancorato – Georg’s only known portrait – wherein a pair of disheveled brunettes with brown eyes and insolent faces stare at the floor. I am (or was) the young man in the torn t-shirt and filthy blue-jeans while the young woman in tattered bra and panties was Georg’s sister-in-law, Carolina. The painting is valued at 3.5 million dollars. On the other side of death, Georg’s ambivalence about success has become irrelevant.
I was reading the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini on the F train when a man seated across from me remarked that Cellini, an embezzler, rapist and murderer, differed from contemporary artists only in the fact that he was honest.
At least, I’d responded, Cellini hadn’t collaborated with the Nazis like Picasso. We exited the train together at the Broadway-Lafayette stop and as if predetermined by fate, entered the nearby Bleeker St. Bar to drink beer.
We discussed the use of the camera obscura by Brunelleschi, the type of motorcycle Antonio Ligabue drove and a film I’d recently seen called Accion Mutante, about disabled terrorists bent on exterminating beauty from the world.
He nodded his head as he lifted a pint of Guinness. “Terrorists and governments despise beauty; it’s too destabilizing for a controlled society.”
Georg Jorgenson was a 6’5” redheaded Max von Sydow lookalike, a graduate of Yale, a boxer of some talent and a reckless alcoholic. A person to be feared in certain situations. He behaved like an aristocrat, like someone without problems or cares who’d grown up surrounded by servants, which as far as I knew wasn’t the case. Fifteen years older than me, he was not only a painter but had designed and fabricated the black shoes, shirt and pants he wore like a uniform.
I was a rock musician living in Soho amid the ruins of the ’80’s art bubble and had met enough of its former fantastically prosperous denizens – while plying the trade of art-handler/furniture mover – to have cultivated a genuine hatred for artists and the art-world. Georg, I discovered, was no different; he looked down on his fellow artists and considered his collectors – those who occupied the commanding heights of the capitalist class – to be among the worst people on the planet. He understood that the very same cohort who bought his art and kept him in whiskey and cocaine were responsible for despoiling the environment, mercilessly exploiting the working class and more or less destroying Western civilization. But Georg – an avowed hypocrite – needed to make a living.
I thought his technically masterful canvasses lacked the visceral punch of his personality; they seemed to turn a cool, blank face to the world. That was the influence of Georg’s hero, Lucien Freud. Unlike Freud, Georg’s interventions were devoid of anything resembling a human subject, instead they presented the ghostly interiors of abandoned, uninhabited mansions that were populated by obscure ’70’s architectural motifs and occult pop-culture references. Georg claimed the inspiration for his paintings derived from his drug-fueled career as a teenaged house-breaker in Ridgefield, Connecticut. As the leader of a circle of young friends inspired by Charles Manson’s ‘creepy crawling’ expeditions (in middle of the night the Family would enter a house, quietly rearrange the furniture and then leave) he’d become addicted to nocturnal breaking and entering. To Georg, the vacant structures in his paintings ultimately reflected the architecture of the cosmos, which according to his bleak, clinically depressed worldview, was empty. The Creator – deus absconditus – was long gone.
When Georg suddenly jetted off to Italy with a fellowship and teaching position at the American Academy – due in no small part to the influence of his new (third) wife, the daughter of an Italian diplomat – we carried on our friendship via airmail. He often sent me hastily scrawled, telegram-like notes – I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES – or pornographic sketches made on copies of the Coriere della Sera.
Returning to my apartment on Broome Street one evening after work, I found a postcard in my mailbox: I’M SICK OF ITALY. EVERYONE IS FIVE FOOT SIX IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY. COME AS SOON AS YOU CAN.
I arrived at Georg’s doorstep in Monteverde Vecchio in a white taxicab. I carried a brown leather suitcase that had belonged to my grandfather. In the bright morning light the neighborhood looked forgotten, even abandoned. Its occupants were either still sleeping or at work. I rang the doorbell and five minutes elapsed before Georg finally opened the door.
Georg’s studio – scattered with requisite rags, canvasses stacked in piles or leaning against walls, sheets of paper covered with half finished charcoal sketches, stalagmite piles of newspapers and magazines, broken charcoal sticks, brown paper bags scribbled with words or images, overturned chairs and stools, rat and mouse droppings, hoghair paintbrushes, a photo of Gabriele D’Annunzio torn from a magazine and nailed to a wall, saucers full of pigment, empty coffee cups, unstretched canvasses – was formerly a bicycle factory.
“Look at me, I have Cushing’s Syndrome; I’m in the same frame of mind as Che Guevara when he went to Bolivia and got himself killed by the CIA. Have you ever seen pictures of him from that period? Moon-faced with a psychotic glint in his eyes? That’s me baby, that’s what I see whenever I look in the fucking mirror. A black aura is hanging over me.”
Shirtless and bearded in a paint-spattered, unzipped white boiler-suit with the arms tied around his waist, he took a step back from a canvas, paint brush dangling from his limp wrist, shoulders hunched, head bowed, looking like Bill Walton just after completing a free throw. The painting was of a chest X-ray. Instead of alveoli and bronchiole there were nebulae, white dwarfs and strands of sidereal light. Behind every image is another image that is more faithful to reality and behind that another image even more faithful.
‘Painter’, I’d come to understand, was a magnetic category. Painters were monks or criminals, eunuchs or satyrs. Paintings were a sacrificial offering that implied the inevitable destruction of their author or a non-stop celebration of the self from which there was no escape…
Georg looked as if he’d gained fifty pounds since I’d last seen him and his face had indeed taken on a moon-like countenance. Bruises, some yellowish, some blue were distributed across his torso like countries on a map. Ghastly pale with little splotches of red beneath each cheekbone he walked across the studio to a gigantic mahogany desk piled high with books, magazines and videotapes. He sat down behind the desk, opened a drawer, pulled out a mirror and then opened another drawer, removed a foil packet and dumped a pile of iridescent whitish powder on the mirror. Sighing, he rose from the desk and carried it to me.
“I get my drugs from a former member of the Brigate Rosse, a real fucking mensch. When I was in better health we used to shoot his machine-guns together.”
“What’s wrong with you Georg? What happened?” I held the mirror in my hand and looked around for somewhere to put it. I didn’t feel like snorting cocaine. Hungry and thirsty, I suddenly remembered that in Georg’s presence I became a lesser person, a sidekick, an underling. With any two friends, one is always the slave of the other.
Georg walked back to his easel, picked up his brush. “I have Sarcoidosis – something usually only blacks and Scandinavians get, I mean what a mindfuck – its in my lungs, it’s in my eyes and its even gone to my brain. The same disease killed Thomas Bernhard, maybe Gide too. Usually it’s a manageable chronic illness. My case is different. I’m supposed to be treating it with 50mgs of prednisone everyday single day…but it drives me mad, madder than I already am and it makes me violent. It was a rational choice on Alessandra’s part to leave me. Perhaps, when I eventually return to the hospital, after they’ve given me Last Rites, she might stop by…”
Nothing is so unbelievable as exact truth spoken in a calm voice.
“What a nightmare.”
I found it difficult to look into his bloodshot eyes. His personality seemed to have expanded along with his bloated body; he was somehow more Georg-like than he’d ever been before. What was the opposite of apotheosis?
“You must be seriously jet-lagged, Robert. Snort a line of the coke. It’ll sort you out, cheer you up.”
I looked down at the mirror. “When did she leave?”
Georg began to cough, a long series of dry sounding, lung-scraping coughs. Red-faced, out of breath, he spoke in short, halting bursts: “You don’t…understand…I am a prisoner here…like the man in the…iron mask…She’s waiting for me to die…Prays for it…You know…how… Italians…are…about…divorce.”
“Come back to New York with me. They have the best doctors in the world.”
Georg walked back to the desk and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, removed a silver Zippo from a pocket of his boilersuit, flicked it open and lit a cigarette. He exhaled smoke through his nose and smiled. He seemed to breathe easier. “I’m totally broke Robert. I have huge gambling debts. You can’t imagine how much money I’ve simply thrown away. I can’t stop working. And even then I can’t paint fast enough to cover my losses.”
“What can I do to help you Georg?”
“There’s a painting I need to make. It would be of you and my teenaged sister-in-law. The inspiration comes from a photo of Belmondo and Seberg. I don’t do portraits so this might be dicey but there is a dealer who has…who has…made a kind of bet with me that I can’t do it. A huge bet. Tomorrow, you and Carolina will sit for me.”
…Later that evening, we walked up Monte Testaccio, the eighth hill of Rome and one of the world’s most famous middens. Monte Testaccio was formed entirely from broken, discarded amphorae (something like 25,000,000 of them) between 50 and 270 AD. Georg wanted me to see the spectacle of Roma at night – the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’angelo, St. Peter’s, the San Carlo al Corso Church, Santa Maria Maggiore – from the vantage point of an ancient trash heap.
Cold winter wind blowing off the nearby Tiber, we crawled through a hole in a chain-link fence and followed an overgrown path up a slight incline. Above us, the bright machinery of the Roman sky. It seemed that the point of my trip to Italy was to reinforce my belief that things could go wrong at any moment and artists made their best work when they were on the brink of extinction.
Ancient pottery sherds crunching beneath our feet, nightbirds spreading their sound around us, Georg, his words punctuated by gasps, spoke of exile: “I don’t really miss New York, you understand, but I do miss my memories which were left behind in the subways, on the sidewalks, on the facades of tenements…”
“You can go back, Georg. You’re not going to die.”
Georg pulled a handkerchief from a pocket of his tweed jacket and wiped his mouth. “Exile must be accepted in the same way a terminal illness must be accepted; graciously, without defiance or shame.”
He stopped and coughed for forty seconds. Then he pointed his chin at the Eternal City: “If Emperor Julian had remembered to put on his breastplate that morning in Ctesiphon, the first moon landing would have taken place in 1342.”
A voice rang out. “You are trampling on the dust of empires!”
We turned toward the voice. It came from a wraithlike figure – a girl – backlit by the glowing city. Tall with brown hair that fell in straight lines from beneath a black felt beret, she wore a black cape and under that a man’s black suit and white shirt. Was she an apprentice waiter fired after her first day of work? A child refugee fleeing a war-zone?
When she smiled her sharp white teeth protruded slightly.
“Carolina, this is Robert.”
A new painting is like an animal glimpsed at the edge of the forest. Is the painter the hunter or the prey? If he has courage, the painter will dissolve into the painting, he will – in an act of faith – become it and live in the ecstasy of that trembling moment of dissolution.
And thus at dawn on a somber day in December, Georg positioned our bodies before his easel and painted us with paintbrushes as fine as eyelashes.
“Think of yourself as hostages not subjects.”
Carolina, who smelled – like all beautiful women – of cigarettes and dirty hair, sat on my lap. She wore tattered black underwear of unknown provenance that had been procured by Georg. They are clean was all Georg would divulge.
I wore a white tank top with slashes across the chest and ripped blue jeans that were stiff with black paint and automotive grease.
“I distrust anything that hasn’t been weathered or worn out.”
For most of the day Carolina and I barely spoke to each other which was what we both knew Georg wanted; any rapport or complicity would have excluded him or set us against his project which was to put onto canvas an image or shadow of a dream.
“Seeing is the paradise of the soul.”
Occasionally, Carolina would rise and pace around the studio. She’d pull on an old Russian greatcoat, walk over to Georg, take the cigarette from his hand and smoke it.
I’d wander over to Georg’s desk and try to read from a paperback copy of Borges’ The Aleph, in particular The Circular Ruins which seemed to be an allegory of exactly what was happening in Georg’s studio.
“Illness is servitude.”
After nine or ten hours Georg began coughing and cursing simultaneously then picked up a Ka-Bar knife and seemed ready to slash the canvas. Not long after, he announced that it was finished.
“We’ll go for drinks now. I have unlimited credit at The Tomb of Cestis. Come on.”
In The Tomb – the ceilings were so low we practically had to crouch – a man in a tracksuit and shaved head led us (come Giorgio) to a tiny, dirty room that was empty except for a round cafe table and four plain wooden saloon chairs. He left a bottle of Liquore Strega and three glasses.
A single dangling light bulb lit the space. On one wall was a poster of Maradonna, on the other a framed reproduction of Parmigianino’s Bardi Altarpiece.
The room smelled of bleach, sweat, shit, piss and Lysol.
Georg sat, chest heaving, gasping for air.
I was becoming smaller and smaller to the point of vanishing completely. Mingled with galloping fear, I felt a kind of ecstasy. The Rome I encountered was entirely made from this fear, this ecstasy. It was like a stage set. Everything meaningful had been undermined, destabilized. When I closed my eyes, images of earthquake, plague, riot, fire, mobs of people flickered before me.
Carolina drank two glasses of Strega and leaned her head against my shoulder. A woman – early sixties, five feet tall with black eyes, steel grey hair and the demeanor of someone resigned to face a firing squad at some point in the near future – entered the room and placed three bottles of Peroni on the table.
To know what something is, we need time to recognize it, thus we always miss when it happens. Conversely, if we want to know when something happens, there’s no time left to say what it was.
When Georg finally slid from his chair to the floor, I could at last comprehend the situation.
The onset of horror has something fresh about it; it shines, it clarifies.
The ambulance arrived twenty minutes after Carolina ran screaming from the room. Then we were hurtling through the narrow, dark and beautiful streets of Roma.
On the Alitalia flight back to New York, I was seated in the rear of the plane, alone in the last row and the stewardesses were merciful and brought me drink after drink. I eventually slept, not waking until the plane taxied on the cinematically lit JFK runway. As I hoisted my bag, deplaned and walked towards customs I thought of Georg lying in a hospital bed in the Machiavelli Medical House, oxygen masked affixed to his face, an IV bag of antibiotics dripping into his arm, the last line of defense as pneumonia bacilli waged war on his lungs. His eyes had scanned the ceiling repeatedly, without pattern, as if guided by some faltering reflex action. Was Georg ‘gone’ or merely in hiding as his body tried desperately to repair itself? I had seen that look before, I’d seen the same eye movement in the days before my father’s death.
Carolina had been grim and preoccupied as she drove me, in her sister’s Fiat 124 Spider, to the airport, smoking cigarette after cigarette, fiddling with the radio, her eyes seemingly never on the road ahead. Death lurked everywhere as we careened along the A90 ring road. Eventually she pulled up to the departure terminal, kissed me on the cheek and handed me a bulging envelope with my name written on it.
“From Giorgio. Your salary for sitting for him.”
Neither of us was aware that Georg had written the word Disancorato in charcoal on the back of the canvas. Did Disancorato – which means unmoored, adrift – describe the painter, his subjects or a way of life?
It was twenty-two degrees when I landed in New York. After clearing customs I opened the envelope. One million Lire. I changed the money and bought a bottle of Strega at the duty free and still had seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. It would be just enough to cover my rent.
Bill Whitten is a rock musician, writer, reader….The singer and songwriter for St. Johnny (1989-1995), Grand Mal (1995-2010) and William Carlos Whitten (2018-?)…author of BRUTES, a collection of short fiction (2022)
