Another kind of scroll was afoot on the West Coast in the late 1950s, when America welcomed Jack Kerouac’s 120-foot spontaneous typescript.
This is the impulsive sketchbook practice of a certain Rick Burton (1928-1992), a quiet eccentric from San Francisco’s Demimond, 30 years after his obscure death at the Morgan Library & It has become an unlikely subject of triumphant rediscovery in museums.
On a 19-foot-long Japanese paper scroll, Burton chronicled underground life in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood before the rise of the hippies. Like accordions, these scrolls folded into a portable sketchbook, and Burton was able to carry them to the bistro tables of Black Cat Cafes and gay hangouts of the time, creating a craggy, neurotic, unrelenting I was able to inscribe the queue of people going to the cafe on a continuous bush of precise ink. Staple them end to end and you get a post-war underground bayou tapestry.
Two of Burton’s folded books (1961 and 1962) meander through the long shelves in the center of the gallery. In a highly engaging show of drawings and prints, they are a marvel, beckoning your nose towards the glass with honeycomb-like detailing while at the same time inducing seasickness.
What is confusing in them is their neglect of scale and depth. Faces and bodies appear in a patchwork of eateries, sidewalks, bars, bookstores and crumbling Chinatown apartments. In his 1961 scroll of him, a car antenna morphs into a dog. The dog is perched on the tiled floor. The tiles will be human feet. Feet first invade heels into a seated meeting of young bohemians. Imagine a Time His Lapse photo of Times Square with the crowd in full focus. Your day will come alive in one fell swoop.
He is believed to have made over ten known folded books. In the late ’60s, Burton abandoned nearly 800 of his drawings from 1958 to his 1962 and disappeared into San Diego. His friend and patron Henry Evans, owner of the press that published Burton’s linoleum prints, had the foresight to rescue the abandoned drawings and donate them to the University of California, Los Angeles. “The artist is still alive,” Evans warned curators in 1971. They sat there until Morgan became curious and inspired the curator’s quest.
Rachel Federman, Morgan’s associate curator of modern and contemporary drawings, has bravely compiled an overview of Burton’s life from interviews and archives. A mother in a psych ward, a Manhattan childhood so poor that eggs were a luxury, an adolescent stint in the Navy after World War II. His adulthood in San Francisco brought him creative freedom with his friends, but also mental illness, self-medication, and prison bouts. For poet Peter Orlovsky, Barton, who passed him in 1958, was “that guy who used to show up at Foster’s from time to time.” [Cafeteria]the painter was a lot in the crazy house.
It is very tempting to assume that pain and deprivation had some part in the way Burton relied on small things to express lived experience. , he took every inch of the spire of the Sagrada Familia, zig-zagging mortar as much as possible into the striking façade to Barcelona Cathedral. When these lines are piled up into arches and points, they deceive the eye with a tooth-like rise that can only be provided by a real colossal cathedral.
Self-portrait in the bedroom, “Alone Again” (1960), Burton imagines his bedspring as an unwieldy architectural mass occupying the center of the page. Your eyes fly straight over Burton wrapped in a blanket in bed, sucked under his mattress, into a web of interlocking coils, wires and acupuncture points. This is not the world as we see it, but the world we stare at and do not sleep. Like the script, some want to decipher his complex, uncorrected lines. (The show’s title comes from the 1960 Beijing Maine boy who observed, “Look, he’s writing chrysanthemums,” to his father as he passed by Barton working hard in his square. comes from.)
He may have been uneducated, but Burton was no anarchist. He quotes Dürer and Vermeer forcefully. He captions his work backwards, just like Leonardo da Vinci did.His clear dedication to the traditional line drawings of China (where the navy brought him) and Japan (where he used fine yatate) Brush) describes the uniformity of his occasionally masterful compositions. In “Central Market, Los Angeles” (1960), he creates a bewildering pile of geometry (surrounded by a precarious pot rack of concentric columns, columns, cables, boxes and plumber’s pipes). are piled up in a Hokusai-esque balanced food stall.
Classical music, not jazz, belonged to Burton. When he briefly ran a gay nightclub near Oakland Bridge, he stocked its jukebox with Bach fugue. He was a traditionalist beatnik and a true freak.
Such is the difficulty of putting this outsider with little exhibition history into an artistic environment. Federman argues that Warhol’s sketches of flowers (self-published and “not widely”) may have influenced Burton’s gentle horticultural prints, suggesting that Cocteau’s psychological refraction in ink (Because the Museum of Modern Art showed him before Burton, suggesting…had left New York) is a “visible presence” in Burton’s burly portrait.
can be But in this remarkable museum debut, I can’t help but see Burton’s experimentation in perception not as a conscious innovation at the forefront of modernism, but as the product of solitary and painfully personal necessity. not. His friend and fellow artist recalled that Burton began painting portraits with the fingernails of his sitters. Another saw him scribble on a tablecloth when he ran out of paper. It would be helpful to know if this breakneck pace continued after Burton fell off the grid. By 1971, he had partially blinded himself in a drunken rage while ripping a toilet tank from a wall.The rest of his 20-year work is unknown.
Rick Burton stands somewhat in the kin of nanny photographer Vivian Maier and janitor-fabulist Henry Darger: self-knowledge through a monastic, unquestioned creative ethic. Asked weekday recluse. No one has gone through a rare Curatorial Eureka moment to become someone instantly captivating.
Writing Chrysanthemums: A Drawing by Rick Burton
At the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan through September 11th. (212) 685-0008; moorgan.org.
