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| The Life and Times of a Black Leatherman | |||||
Hail To The Chiefs by Morgan Monceaux
New Yorker 10-19-92
ADAM GOPNIK ARTIST' S NOTEBOOK Morgan Monceaux, an artist who has been homeless for part of his career, was born forty-four years ago, in Alexandria, Louisiana. His mother was a singer, his father a chef. He went to Bishop College, where he studied music and theology, and hoped to become a Jazz singer. Then His life began to take unexpected turns. He was drafted into the Navy, and served during the Vietnam War. After his dischaged, he gave up singing, and for the most part of the next twenty years he wadered. About two years ago, he came to New York." he says. " I liked the excitement and at first I liked the dirt. Honestly." Within a year, however, he found himself without a place to live, and he remained without a home for most of the next twelve months. " It was intersting." he says today. Like all homeless people, I had never imagined myself living in that way. I think what happens is that people with homes think of homeless people as though they born that way. Your strongest emotion when you are homeless is bewilderment. How did this happen to me? There were many nights when I thought, Is this happening to me? You manage though." During that time Morgan Monceaux began to be possessed by a peculiar ambition: to draw a portrait of every American President, from George Washington to GeorgeBush. " I m a history buff, and my focus has been African -American history," he says. "I was interested in the idea that aa couple of Persidents had had African-American ancestry. One thing led to another, and though I had no real place to work, I thought, I"ll draw the Presidents." Earlier this year, he found work out in East Hampton, as the janitor of a night club called LIl's on Three-Mile Harbor Road. He also found a place to live, in a little shack near the railroad tracks in Southampton, and began, at last, to workon his Presidents. " the first President I completed was John Quincy Adams," he says "One thing led to another, and thenanother. It was my first time working with oil pastels, a totally new medium for me ." Most of Monceaux's portraits were enlivened with small collage elements_bits of lace trim and silk ribbon and old campaign buttons that he had collected over the years on visits to flea markets. Emanating from the head and torso of each President is a halo of words: Monceaux's account, in tiny , barely legible printing, of the life, career, and essential character of his subject. Monceaux's Presidents, whichwere on view in September at Morgan Rank's gallery of American art, in East Hampton, are a unique meditation on American history. Instead of trying for a simple likeness, they seek some hidden, expressive element of the Presidential character: Andrew Jackson, spectral and impassioned, his cloak wrapped around him, looking like the ghost of Hamlet's father; James Buchanan, shrivelled and mornful, the approaching Civil War concentrated into a single band of worry across his forehaed; Ronald Regan, all pompadour and used-car salesman's grin; Franlkin Roosevelt, his own stern features somehow melded with the gentler ones of Eleanor. Monceaux has an affection for the failed_or, at any rate, the least famous_Presidents, and he has a particulaliking for John Quincy Adams ("His concept of public service has been rarely, if ever, surpassed. He was more interested in being right and in the general good than he was in gaining popularity and in extending political patronage"), Grover Cleveland ("The country was changing, but he managed to keep it from changing for the worse, which a lesser man mightnot have done"), and William McKinley("It is not as though William McKinley were without memorials. You may notget to see one very often, buut his picture is on the five-hundred-dollar bill"). "People always ask me why I don't do pretty paintings," Monceaux says "I think all my work is pretty in its way. I just want to give facts. I record facts as they are, and not my own personal ideas. We all have ideas about what the Presidents stand for, and how they wanted to bring change. But they were also men who had faults, and their own personalities. You know what's funny? Whats funny is that while I was doing all this it never occurred to me that this was an election year. I had sort of lost track of politics." --- ADAM GOPNIK 2007-07-22 17:18:10 GMT
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