Jarrett Moran
Steve Clark’s exhibition of paintings, The Girl is Blue and Refuses to Sing, might surprise those who know Clark as a bilingual poet and former Senior Editor of The Paris Review. As it turns out, Clark was painting seriously even when he joined the Review at 25 and quietly continued without the usual imprimaturs of the art establishment. He remembers, “After reading for hours in [founding editor] George Plimpton’s basement on 72nd street, it felt good to go into a room (with daylight and windows!) and move around and paint, and put that motion of thought onto canvas rather than the page.”
The large canvases on display at 362 West Broadway mix drips and pools of paint with brushstrokes and writing at the edge of legibility. The title of the show refers to poems from his recent book, From the Ashes (Desde las cenizas). “Most of the writing I do on the canvases comes out in Spanish,” he says, “which is odd because my primary language is English (though I am bilingual and half-Spanish), but I think that the artistic side (or urge to paint and write) comes from that side of my family.”
Clark considers writing and painting “a pleasurable balance,” and something similar could be said of the attitude that prevails at the Paris Review. Daniel Kunitz, once Managing Editor at the Review and now Executive Editor of Modern Painters, found Plimpton, “extremely open to art of all sorts—he was far more forward-looking in his taste than most writers I know (Steve excepted). He and some of the editors and interns would often come down to Chelsea on Friday afternoon to go through the galleries.”
The Review’s offices are papered with posters from its print series, which has included contributions from the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Keith Haring, and Robert Motherwell. Warhol submitted a poster of an enlarged bill made out to the Review for two bottles of scotch and one bottle of vodka, perhaps a reference to the quarterly’s storied parties.
In fields that can tend towards insularity and self-absorption, Steve Clark and the Paris Review have remained impervious to both. Kunitz recalls, “Janine Antoni, and the whole Antoni family, were great friends of his, and Janine was often at Paris Review parties. So as young interns, and later editors, we were exposed to performance and conceptual sculpture. There was always interest in art in the office. And again, I think this is somewhat surprising because writers, at least today, are prone to philistinism when it comes to visual art. Why I don’t know. But I’m happy that attitude never prevailed at The Paris Review.”
