One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard Perlin Hardcover – Illustrated, 1 Nov. 2016

The twentieth century American painter, Bernard Perlin, is not a household name in the UK, indeed, I had not come across him before I picked up this handsome, heavyweight volume - but I imagine it will soon be, at least with art lovers. This book should not be confused with the case of an artist being rediscovered long after his death - similar, for instance, to Duncan Grant in the UK, with whom there are many parallels - the book itself is an extended, edited transcript of conversations between the author and the artist, who died a year or so later, aged 95, in 2014. His relative neglect can be explained in several ways, eg his work was figurative at a time when the abstractionists were dominant; he was a gay artist who delighted in painting and drawing male nudes and scenes from gay life when galleries and critics and above all the public found such images challenging; his personality was such that he did not seek fame or the limelight, despite the high social, artistic and literary circles he moved in. He was the kid who was always the last to be chosen for the team on the sports field, and this seemed to linger, he felt, throughout his adult life, causing much self-deprecation. One 'team' he was intimately associated with, in terms of close friendships and sexual relationships, was the novelist Glenway Wescott (lover and friend), the curator Monroe Wheeler (one night only), the photographer George Platt Lynes (friend and lover), the surpreme artist of the male nude Paul Cadmus and his lover the painter Jared French; he says, with some merit, that he was at the back of this queue, the last chosen by posterity to be given the attention he's due.The author, Michael Schreiber, interviewed Perlin many times during the painter's nineties, gaining his trust to such an extent he confided intimate details about his long, rich, highly sexed life that he had never made public before. The text comes in the form of conversations between the two in which the narrative moves in a general linear mode recounting the highlights of the artist's life and work, with sidelines into different aspects and relationships. I was dubious at first about this method: it works well in magazines, where it is often preferred to the straight prose profile, but a whole volume of it? I needn't have worried: the exchange is richly informed, brilliantly remembered and commented upon, making an absorbing and seamless text. In addition, this being a coffee-table art book, it is full of illustrations of Perlin's work from all periods of his long career, as well as contemporary photographs: this aspect alone is crucial to the enterprise. Through these pictures we get a real sense of Perlin's importance as an artist. He had several styles: his silverpoint drawings of famous people and nudes are exquisite; his wartime drawings and paintings naïve and bold and, where young men are depicted, subtly sexualised; his wartime posters are effective; his realistic paintings have a haunting quality; his later paintings a misty, ghostlike, diffused atmosphere. There are some undoubted masterpieces among them, including 'Orthodox Boys', which established his reputation; 'The Garden' an Adam and Eve couple; 'The Lover', a couple entwined in a lush meadow; 'The Shore', in which a naked man rows a boat over translucent waters where every stone and boulder on the seabed is painted with hallucinatory detail; 'The Farewell' , which shows a couple leaving a dark red wood, a painting with a very personal subtext; to name a few. These illustrate better in a book of this size: the larger, mistier ones probably don't so much and have to be seen to get their full effect. The silverpoint portraits of Maughan, Forster, Capote, etc are remarkable. If this book gives only a sample of Perlin's work, then there's an important body of it out there yet to be discovered, to add to his growing reputation.The other main attraction of this book is the contribution it makes to gay history in America in the twentieth century, at a time when all the big names mentioned above, and a huge roster of other guys, famous as well as ordinary, some hiding their sexuality in marriage, had to stay in the closet; it was a time of corrupt police who allowed gay bars to stay open, the McCarthy witch hunts, police entrapment, gay bathhouses, the AIDs era, general homophobic panic and censorship. Perlin breezed through it all, being as out as he was able to legally, using it to inform many of his paintings to reflect his own life. He became part of not just the 'We Three' cabal, but knew Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, and that circle, even slept with some of them; Isherwood, Bachardy, Hockney, Mapplethorpe, he met them all at parties. He was part of the movers and shakers of the time, not making a big splash but seeing it - and recalling it decades later as an old man with a sharp brain - from the inside, in all its messy details. Though he was excused service in the war, he worked for the US Office of War information doing propaganda posters. Winning a prize, he travelled to Italy, where he lived for a time, painting some of his best pictures; and in Paris he would run into Capote, Gore Vidal, Deny Fouts, Tennessee Williams; he even competed for a hustler with Jean Genet on the Spanish Steps in Rome - and won. This is not just the story of his art and the people he knew, but of a vigorous, unashamed and extensive sex life. He had several long-term partners, including with his husband Ed whom he married in his nineties after 50 years of a very open marriage. Being happily promiscuous, and remembering so many of his encounters, he reckons that if you line up all the men he 'had' it would be two miles long! Somehow, given what we read, this doesn't sound like an exaggeration. There is a rich gay history here, reflected in one man's history, an important element of this book.Remarkably, Perlin retired from painting when he was sixty-five (which may have contributed to his relative neglect). He began again in his nineties, perhaps stimulated to do so by these interviews. This is just one of the things we owe to Schrieber, who is now curator of the Perlin estate. He has done a remarkable job here by engaging the subject of his books at such a deep level of reminiscence, providing an invaluable historical record. It's a great tribute, one which should do much to advance Perlin's posthumous fame.