A Double Life: Frank O’Hara’s Amazing Versatility

(Bloomsbury Books.)

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.”

--Frank O’Hara

Matthew Holman’s exhaustively researched and methodically written book, Frank O’Hara: New York Poet, Global Curator, manages to be not only a superlative biography of this gifted poet but also a revealing memoir of the heady times in which he lived, a detailed chronicle of the city he so loved, and a tender portrait of the important Museum of Modern Art that many people, myself included at first, did not realize counted him among its most effective ambassadors of contemporary visual art. This is the first book to closely examine the curatorial work that O’Hara undertook for MOMA in New York and abroad. The day after his premature death in 1966, The New York Times ran an ironic and slightly ambiguous headline: “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator/Exhibitions Aide at Museum of Modern Art Dies – also a poet.” Also a poet? That strikes some of us as a surprise, since we felt it might well have read “Frank O’Hara, 40, NY poet dies—also a curator.”

I can still vividly recall that rainy autumn day thirty years ago when I stumbled into a dusty second-hand bookshop in Times Square to seek shelter from the storm, or so I thought. Dr. Jung would likely have called it synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, and I would tend to agree, since once I had dried off enough to handle some books in some ancient shop I came upon a momentous discovery in their impressive poetry section which has never quite left me. I was still temporarily a poet in those days, so I was eternally grateful for finding a huge section that featured what I later came to learn was a group of poets known as the New York School, a feral pack of writers who were doing in words something akin to what the abstract expressionists were doing in paint in the late 40’s and mid-50’s.

Their assortment of anthologies and collections was extensive, with multiple copies of works from each of the diverse and innovative poets closely aligned with the New York School of painting. This little tribe consisted of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Frank O’Hara. They were all influenced to varying degrees by their close personal relationships and frequent collaborations with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers and Franz Kline. I was particularly taken with a humble-looking little tome from City Lights Books called Lunch Poems by O’Hara, which still sits on the radiator next to my writing desk to this day.

(City Lights Books.)

The members of the New York School, of which O’Hara was one of the key founders and a man whose personality came to embody much of its ethos, all lived and worked in downtown Manhattan in the 1950’s and came to be called that, at first casually and later on historically, by painter Robert Motherwell, who characterized their overall sensibility as witty, urbane and conversational. The entire group, but especially O’Hara, not only allowed everyday events (such as writing poems during his lunch hour while working at the Museum of Modern Art), fragments of pop culture, wry humour and spontaneous social observations to seep into their work, but also actively sought random circumstances which would ignite such carefully crafted but apparently loosely assembled insights (much in the same way that writers of Japanese haiku often did).

They explained that they wanted to capture life as it actually happened, most often eschewing any serious intellectual content, despite the fact that all of them, just like the painters whose abstract styles they echoed, were erudite and learned, well-read in philosophy, literature, theatre and music and immersed in socially conscious political activism. Despite how effortlessly tossed off his sonnet-like stanzas appear at first, some of O’Hara’s lines tend to stick in the mind, often for at least three decades. His most incisive declamations have an emotional tone that feels like the jazz solos of Thelonious Monk, the gestures of Martha Graham, or the scrawled images of Larry Rivers (his lover for four years). Some of O’Hara’s carefully constructed casualness is perfectly contained in a poem from 1957:

Meditations in an Emergency
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Weirdly enough, he would indeed go on to become famous for a mysterious vacancy, but it was in addition to his charmingly willful lack of will power, and mostly due to his tragic early death. In the early dark hours of July 24 of 1966 he was struck by a jeep on Fire Island Beach after a taxi he had been riding in broke down in the black night. He died the next day. His own personal plot was over; however, his final chapter has entered the pages of legend. The composer Morton Feldman, an artist whose music, and the spaces it contained, was also sonically evocative of the same organic looseness and sparse poetics that felt like entries in a personal diary, wrote “For Frank O’Hara, for seven instruments” to honour the late poet.

In the more than half a century subsequent to his loss, O’Hara’s fascinating career as a MOMA curator, where he oversaw major exhibitions by such luminaries as Pollock, Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler and David Smith among many others, his art world role has been somewhat eclipsed by the serious critical attention to his cryptic and elliptical poetry. Holman’s illuminating book is the result of his access to a wealth of unpublished archival materials and it unearths the significant impact that O’Hara’s curatorial work had on both the reception of American modern art abroad and even on the curatorial profession itself.

Holman’s primary area of focal interest is on the traveling exhibitions O’Hara organized for MOMA’s International Program, which eventually served as a crucial communications tool during the tense years of the Cold War, as well as a development tool for transnational networks far afield of New York. The book merges attentive and insightful readings of many of O’Hara’s most notable poems with a wide cross-section of archival illustrations, and its author makes a salient case for the intimate connections between the two halves of O’Hara’s double life as a writer and a curator, revealing how much more than merely also a poet/also a curator he actually was. Apart from sharing the life of an art world insider running parallel to the life of a literary insider, it offers a banquet of behind-the-scenes New York social gossip and cogent insights into the dramatic evolution of global popular culture.

I called his personal and professional history a double life mostly tongue in cheek, since his was clearly a life lived large, if briefly, and with a remarkable complexity which established him as singular. Indeed, many who knew O’Hara have confided that quite apart from the lasting significance of his literary gifts and curatorial projects, it was his very personality that was his greatest invention. Curating an exhibition of visual art, when it comes right down to it, is basically a highly specialized brand of storytelling, using paintings, photographs or sculptures alluded to in juxtaposed sentences in the physical space of galleries and museums. Poetry too is an exotic form of intensely private storytelling, an exhibition in words almost, using private emotions as pictures of one moment in the poet’s life.

According to the MOMA archivists who worked with him, lunch was Frank O’Hara’s favourite meal. His influential 1946 book Lunch Poems was full of poetry he wrote during his breaks at the museum, where he eventually became an innovative curator after starting out by selling postcards at the front desk. One of his associates characterized his literary work as a lyrical document of his sensory love affair with New York City. After his death, the museum published a 1967 memorial volume of his poetry paired with commissioned drawings by the artists closest to him. Titled In Memory of My Feelings after a 1965 poem, the book was described by director Rene D’Harnoncourt as “a homage to the sheer poetry—in all guises and role—of the man.” One of the most poignant visual works was by Rivers, Double Portrait of Frank O’Hara, a detail of which appears on the cover of Holman’s important book.

Double Portrait of Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, 1955.

One of the personal delights this book provided me was the discovery that O’Hara had collaborated with one of my favourite of the abstract expressionist painters, Franz Kline, producing a unique limited edition portfolio of 21 etchings and poems. For me, the most touching of these precious collaborations follows below:

I Will Always Love You (1957/1960)

I will always love you 

though I never loved you

a boy smelling faintly of heather 

looking up at your window

the passion that enlightens

and stills and cultivates, gone

 while I sought your face

to be familiar in the blueness 

or to follow your sharp whistle

around a corner into my light

that was love growing fainter

each time you failed to appear

I spent my whole life searching

for a love which I thought was you

it was mine so very briefly

and I never knew it, or you went

I thought it was outside disappearing

but it is disappearing in my heart

 

like snow blown in a window

to be gone from the world

I will always love you

Holman’s memoir of poet, curator, city and museum, reminds us that O’Hara has become a central part of any accurate history of the New York School, and a crucial figure in the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950’s.

He was a “Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers,” as Feldman once put it, and he allowed his art criticism to shimmer with the abstractions and flourishes of poetry. O’Hara’s professional career as a curator of art has been largely underresearched, rarely mentioned beyond being a historical context for the New York poems. But Homan’s book more than adequately remedies this lapse.

Literary critics have often neglected the influence that O’Hara’s curatorship played on his poetic output. Art historians too have frequently overlooked the role played by a curator in promoting visual art abroad during the Cold War. More astute observers even have suggested that O’Hara himself had a direct role in changing the meaning of artistic expression in Europe. And this curator in particular helped put American abstraction on the global stage. For Holman: “Most of all, this is a book about one curator’s joy in art. O’Hara lived and breathed the painting and sculpture he loved and often wrote poems about, and this was partly because they were made by people he loved.” Essentially, most of O’Hara’s poems were actually ekphrastic reactions to and emphatic interpretations of the art that he personally cherished.

Another gift this marvelous book bestows on many of us is the inclusion of an appendix of O’Hara’s exhibition record while he worked at the museum. The first traveling show he curated for MOMA was mounted in 1956 when he was only 30, and he wrote the exhibition catalogue essay, featuring 41 American water colours, shown in France. The last one, seventeen shows later, mounted in the Netherlands in 1966, featured 101 paintings and collages by Robert Motherwell. The amazingly versatile installations he coordinated, and the stories he told through the paintings of his artist friends, are equally mindblowing, just as his short life itself was: “like snow blown in a window/ to be gone from the world.”

Frank O'Hara. (Photo: Poetry Foundation.)

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.