THE NIGHTCLUB VIOLINIST OIL PAINTING:
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I suppose I should call him my step-father or something, because he was briefly married to my mother before he died. But he and mom got together way back in the late sixties. My mother was the lady who really rescued and worked so hard to preserve almost all the 20th century paintings and other artwork you see in this site, but that would not have happened if the violinist hadn't happened by her apartment the afternoon she had tried to commit suicide.
The man could play some beautiful tunes. He was an accomplished
violinist and had performed in symphony orchestras, but confided in me once that
he disliked being on the road. I have an old photo of his depicting a victim
being lowered from a train wreck which I would someday like to do a painting
of. I wonder if that had something to do with it. Probably not, but
you never know. He would have been the age of the young man without a hat
in the picture.
Once in the seventies while passing through Washington on a round trip from Eastern Samoa to Paris, I tried to talk him into going "busking" with me in France. He almost did it but finally, imaging that he might land in a cheap hotel with "bugs", he reneged. That may have been an excuse, it was probably the violin that kept him from going anywhere. Anyway, by that time he was getting to be an old man and the trip probably would have been a bit much for him.
I did this portrait of him back in 1970 in a shared room of an old Staten Island house. My room mate was a surrealist named Randal Deihl who had hitchhiked with me across the USA to escape an economic recession in California at the time. I had gotten a job as a cab driver and Deihl was by then making a living off his artwork and even did drawings for the New York Times editorial section on a regular basis.
We had also shared a leaky old building on Broadway, Oakland, California before our trek across America. The place leaked so badly that, during the rainy season, with a can under each leak, the place began to sound like a never-ending movement from a Shoernburg symphony. It was there that I painted "Tree Storm".
The style I preferred using was known as abstract expressionism, but not as abstract as, say, the work of Kandinski, so, as I mentioned before, one might think of it as representational abstract expressionism. I'm not much for classifying my work. I just do the paintings, and that's hard enough, as it seems I've had to do everything but artwork just to make ends meet: Busking Expressionism, Cooking Expressionism, Cart-gathering expressionism, Plumbing warehouse expressionism... anything-but-being-able-to-paint expressionism!
But I was intrigued with Deihl's sanguine view of and execution of the style of the surrealist, so I thought I'd try a bit of it, surrealism, to do this portrait of the violinist. Deihl didn't like the painting, but I think it does the job I had intended it to do.
The violin is in the center of the theme, but half of it has become a nightclub candle and candle stick holder which has formed in a cold metallic sort of way out of the piece that holds the strings. Unbeknownst to me at the time (and we all found out a lot later after said violinist's death just before which he confided his secret to my mother on his death bed) on the back of that piece in tiny letters were carved something, I think the initials of or the name of the former owner of the violin, Bronislaw Huberman.
One of the ways the violin was authenticated in 1978 was a part of the neck that was repaired. The forceful way Huberman played had left the indentation of his thumb in the wood which had a sort of patch put over it. This is shown in the broken hammer shaft and the powerful grip of the hand. It is squeezing the wood powerfully enough to slightly indent it.
The candle is burning hotly in the wind and the violinist is becoming encased in it's melted tallow. In the sky, the clouds in the late twilight form a hand reaching out for him. It is the only realistic thing in the work, taken from life. For want of a model, I used my own left hand for a visual reference.
The clouds also form a face the jaw of which become a quill pen used for writing of music in the days of the antiquities. The face is like the masks symbolizing the performing arts, but this is neither smiling nor frowning. It is very serious. And behind it is the gray matter of a brain and a symbology of the middle ear's parts of the hammer and the anvil, the smallest bones in the human body but where music is concerned, the most important.
This hammer is broken in the painting by a heavy blow from overdeveloped muscle attached to the brain. The blow reduces the anvil to a ghostlike but delicate powder which descends through the wispy threads of the very life of the violin and perhaps the performer who had for so long been playing it in what he used to term: "the plush lined sewers of Washington". He played it for Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and for Nixon. Nixon even accompanied him on the piano. So did Truman. They loved his music.
But he is shown in the viaualization as becoming encased in tallow. Instead of the wax of today's fine candles, the tallow of the candle in the painting is as those of days gone by, when they were made of animal fat. So this candle appears not as lilly white, but of earthen whites and nearly spent. It is as if it were the candle of his life, much of it spent in other activities which kept him from being the great musician he could have become.
All the time a part of the beauty of the music came from the violin itself. It was a Stradivarius known as the Gibson. One of Antonio Stradavari's finest creations, made by him in Cremona, Italy, back in 1713. Nobody knew what it was. If anyone asked him about it, the nightclub violinist would simply reply that it was a "bastardi", meaning an imitation. He later claimed that he had bought it hot for a mere one hundred dollars, but my Mother to this day thinks he could have taken it himself, since he played at a nightclub nearby Carnegie Hall the day of it's theft back in 1936 and he knew the back stage of that place since he had performed there himself and knew how to get in by a back entrance.
Before he died he told mom about it. Origionally he had toyed with the idea of being buried with the instrument. Whether he was joking or not I don't know. She, on the other hand, as soon as she found out, saw to it that it was returned to the rightful owner which at that time was the firm that had insured the violin, no less than Lloyds of London. When it was sold by their auspices at auction it went for one and one-half million pounds sterling.
When I did the painting, I depicted the violin itself as being a living thing and painted it in cadmium red and alizarin crimson because it seemed to me as a living thing. I had heard the violinist play it for me. I had requested he play the theme song from "The Thomas Crown Affair", a lovely and haunting albeit somewhat repetitious song with an intriguing lyric: "Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, on an ever spinning reel... as the images unwind like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind".
He had to look up the song in the nightclub's snug little archives of sheet music.
At the time that I did the painting, the violin itself appeared an off brown, but as the expert that Lloyds of London (who had insured the instrument back then) sent to Mother's house after the violinist had died of incurable stomach cancer (he drank heavily) in May of 87 explained, it was that color because it had been coated with second hand tobacco smoke over the many years of having been played in the nightclubs and so on.
In fact, after it's restoration and sale for a million pounds, it was actually a remarkable sort of red in a very lovely wood-like way. Of course, I saw it on television, but still, it looked quite different from the color of the same violin I had held in my hands only months before.
I painted the bow stuck in the ground and perpendicular, the sound vibrant red between the horse hairs and the wood in color matching the violin itself. And in almost a design-like pattern, the wispy ghost-like blue on the extreme left of the work balances the gossamer threads of the life of the instrument as it dissipates into the mid-summer night air.
The violinist finds himself in the ruff of an old golf course overgrown into unkempt but somewhat beautiful thickets in front of the burgeoning trees on the edge of a forest silhouetted in dark green before the approaching clouds which remind us of the folly of succumbing to the temptation to delude ourselves, as that poor man seems to have done, with feelings of invincibility. After all, he had been extremely active in a cryptic Washington D.C. during the time of Camelot and beyond.
In the painting I show him concerned, holding a golf club over his head.
One of my favorite parts of the painting didn't show up very well in this picture. I and my wife had to do the photography and I'm afraid the difficult-to-photograph oil paint though now thirty years old got a little to shiny in that corner and you can't see clearly that it's really dark blue-black with constellations of stars showing. I love the stars. They help us to understand how very insignificant we all really are.
In the end, the violinist managed to return to the classics, playing for a small symphony in Danbury Connecticut. But all too briefly. Those who performed with him and others around him in that element seemed to view him in a different more limited light as if to be of a more noble mettle. Perhaps they viewed him as he should have been.
In circumstances we need not explore here, he was found to be ill and hospitalized for incurable stomach cancer. The whisky that he had used so often to get through this shallow life had not been kind.
In the peaceful cemetery in Bethel, Connecticut, I visited his grave. It's simply a small head stone on ground level next to that of a child which always has a small toy of some sort beside it. I reached down and plucked away some tufts of grass that had encroached over the top of the polished surface. Beneath his name it simply reads: "Violinist".
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Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
I did this portrait of him back in 1970 in a shared room of an old Staten Island house...