A Surprise One Would Never Seek

by Jeff Weinstein

DECEMBER 10, 2007 TAGS: BURIAL, ARTS, WRITERS COMMENTS (1)

You’re wandering through a cinematic moonlit graveyard, when, with a shudder, you are unaccountably pulled toward a newly polished, upright stone. You approach, and…yes, it’s Your Own Name, the date of death obscured by your own shadow.

Then, of course, you’re supposed to wake up.

Yet graveyard intelligence may also show itself in the bright, cold light of a real-life wintry sun, as my partner and I discovered when we drove to the vest-pocket Green River Cemetery in the Springs, outside of ritzy East Hampton, near the end of New York’s Long Island.

Both of us are writers who love art, and we knew that the ground-breaking abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (Jan. 28, 1912 - Aug. 11, 1956) is buried here, not far from where he lived, painted, drank, and crashed his car and died. Plenty more history-book artists who worked or summered in or near this once avant-garde outpost are buried at Green River too: painter and Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner (Oct. 28, 1908 - June 19, 1984), proto-pop modernist Stuart Davis (Dec. 7, 1892 - June 24, 1964, maybe you’ve seen his knockout Lucky Strike), and an assortment of art-worlders we were hoping to come upon.

Still, we didn’t know exactly why we were visiting. Neither of us is a “graveyard tourist,” signing up for $20 midnight jaunts to one or another moldering, willow-clotted site. But something significant drew us. Perhaps it was that a few writers who also loved art, such as poet Frank O’Hara (June 27, 1926 - July 25, 1966), a prescient curator at the Museum of Modern Art who was run over by a Fire Island beach buggy and killed, and seminal art critic Harold Rosenberg (Feb. 2, 1906 - July 11, 1978), are laid to rest here, too.

Writing and art inseparable, even after death? “The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value -- political, aesthetic, moral,” Rosenberg wrote of Pollock, trying to explain the impulse that moved the now quiet hands of the man buried 20 yards away.

Rosenberg’s elaborate traditional headstone, and that of his wife, May Natalie Tabak Rosenberg (1910 - 1993), are the first we fasten on as we turn the car onto the narrow road that winds among the graves. The cemetery, bordered by a low, white wooden fence, is no larger than a typical plot for any of the slapped-up trophy homes that have for years been turning the area’s farms and potato fields into investment opportunities.

Friends of ours who bought and lived in the Rosenberg house a decade ago had shown us the gnarled tree in the front that provided shade for many an artists’ cocktail and spat, and background for the photogenic Pollock, leaning rakishly on the bark like a middle-age James Dean. (Those good friends kindly gave me a lidless teapot they found squirreled away in the modest kitchen, and I am pouring from it while I write.)

As wind whips the stripped maples and veteran flags and knocks over vases of plastic flowers, we walk to see where a crucial portion of American imagination has come to rest.

There’s the magnetic Pollock, signified by a sizable boulder with a metal “signature” plate set in, which seems to have been a fashion at the time -- although the style now looks frivolous and is certainly not the same as having the artist’s John Hancock on canvas. Visitors have left pebbles on top of the rock, as they do in the ancient Jewish cemetery of Prague, to give something of themselves in honor and in warmth.

A smaller rock a few feet in front marks Krasner; in spite of the Great Leveler, the two do not seem equal. The brilliant and contrary Ad Reinhardt (Dec. 24, 1913 - Aug. 30, 1967), best known for a series of all-black paintings, surprised us beneath our feet by a plaque set into the ground: just name and dates, the off-white marble softened in a particularly un-Reinhardt way by a gray pentimento of mold and dirt.

Here’s food artist Pierre Franey (1921 - 1996). Did you know that this 60-minute gourmet, who worked at the French pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair, was in charge of the menu for all Howard Johnson’s restaurants -- now near extinction? His raw rock has one of those signature plaques, but with a chef’s toque. It’s much smaller than artist Davis’s unusually tall, severe slab, right out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and not at all reflecting the painter’s brash, colorful style.

Suddenly I see my partner wilt, so I run over. Inscribed on the stone that stopped him is a bare, beautiful woman looking over her shoulder, one of her arms covered by or changed into a bird’s feathered wings: “Hannah Wilke, 1940 - 1993.” John knew Hannah and had recently written about some of her last, most moving work: Hours of videotapes show Wilke in a white bed, bald and bloated, dying of lymphoma, talking and talking, making art to the last.

John did not know she was buried here. Tears roll into his beard.

Seeing that grave was a surprise one would never seek, but also never reject.

After an hour, we began to feel the cold, but still hadn’t found Frank O’Hara’s plot. We scoured the 19th- and 20th-century family groups to see if he had been placed randomly among them -- most of the creators buried here are far from their forebears, which I believe is no coincidence.

“Here he is!” John shouts. It’s another dirt-level plaque, almost invisible. But now know we know why we came.

In “Why I Am Not a Painter,” O’Hara tried to distinguish what he did:

One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.

At a time when the spirit of art-making is being warped and trampled by greed, when Pollock’s breathtaking drips are measured not by exhilaration or meditation, but by the sounds of an auctioneer’s gavel and millionaires’ applause, we are standing quietly in a place where we can remember exactly why words and pictures count.