The Burnt Orange Heresy

The critical reaction to my article, when it appeared in Fine Arts: The Americas, followed the pattern I had anticipated. Canaday, in the Times, had reservations. Perreault, in The Village Voice, was enthusiastic, and there was a short two-paragraph item in The L.A. Free Press recommending the article to would-be revolutionary painters in Southern California. This was more newspaper coverage than I expected.

My real concern was with the concentric ripples in the art journals and critical quarterlies. This reaction was slow in coming, because a lot of thought had to be put into them. The best single article, which set off a long string of letters in the correspondence department, appeared in Spectre, and was written by Pierre Montrand. A French chauvinist, he saw Debierue's "American Harvest" period as a socialistic rejection of DeGaullism. This was an absurd idea, but beautifully expressed, and controversial as hell.

With my photograph of Debierue, many newspapers printed sketchy accounts of Debierue's mysterious immigration to the United States, but I kept my promise to Cassidy and the old man. I never divulged Debierue's Florida address after Cassidy had him admitted under a false name to the Regal Pines Nursing Home, and Cassidy had covered his tracks so well the reporters never found him. I mailed Debierue the tearsheets of my article, a dozen 8" x 10" photographs of the burning newspaper shot, and an autographed copy of my book, Art and the Preschool Child. He didn't acknowledge the package, but I knew that he received it because I had mailed it Return Receipt Requested.

For the first week after my return to New York I bought a daily copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (it "covers Dixie like the dew"), and searched through the pages to see if there was any mention of a body being found near Valdosta. But I disliked the newspaper, and searching for such news every day was making me morbid. I quit buying the paper. If they found her, they found her, and there was nothing I could do about it. Inevitably, though, a reaction appeared in my psyche, caused, naturally enough, by the death of Berenice. It wasn't that my conscience bothered me, although that was a part of my reaction. It was a second-thought overlap of self-doubt, a feeling of ambivalence that vitiated my value judgments of the new work I witnessed. I overcame this feeling, or overreaction, by compartmentalizing Debierue in a corner of my mind. I was able to rid myself of my ambivalence by setting Debierue apart from other artists as a "one-of-a-kind" painter, and by not considering him in connection with the mainstream of contemporary art. It didn't take too many weeks before I adjusted to this mental suggestion. I was able to function normally again on my regular critical assignments.

My reputation as a critic didn't soar, but my workload doubled and, with it, my income. Tom Russell gave me a fifty-dollar raise, which brought me up to four fifty a month at the magazine. My lecture fee was raised, and I gave more lectures, including a lecture at Columbia on "New Trends in Contemporary Art" to the art majors-and the Fine Arts Department paid me a six-hundred-dollar lecture fee. To lecture in my old school, where I had once been a povertystricken graduate student, was perhaps the high point of the entire year.

My agent unloaded some older, unsold articles I had written months before-two of them to art magazines which had earlier rejected them.

I had always done a certain amount of jury work, judging art shows for "expenses only," and more often without any compensation at all. I now began to receive some decent cash offers to judge and hang important exhibits at major museums. On a jury show I served on at Hartford, there was a Herb Westcott painting entered in the show. Westcott had changed his style to Romantic Realism, and his fine, almost delicate draftsmanship was well suited to the new style. The Hartford show had an antipollution theme, and Westcott had painted an enormous blowup of a 1925 postcard view of Niagara Falls. The painting wasn't in the First Prize category, but I was able to persuade the other jury members (the museum director and Maury Katz, a hardedge painter) to tag Westcott's painting with an honorable mention and a thousand-dollar purchase prize. I had treated Westcott rather shabbily in Palm Beach, running out on him and his show at Gloria's Gallery, and it pleased me to give him a leg up-which he well deserved in any case.

Now included in my books to review were books that the managing editor used to reserve for himself-beautiful, expensive, handsomely ifiustrated, coffee-table art books- that retailed for twenty-five, thirty-five, and even fifty dollars. After being reviewed, these expensive books can be sold at half of their wholesale price to bookdealers. This pocketed cash is found money I.R.S. investigators cannot discover easily.

I no longer slept well. I didn't sleep well at all.