Larger than life:

Monceaux's success

belies a humility.

ESSAY:

CARMEN C. SCHEIDEL

11-94 *************On the Town Arts and Entertainment

PAINTING BRING MORGAN MONCEAUX FAME THE REST IS UP TO HIM.

Before talking to Morgan Monceaux, I'd heard his story secondhand, A Southern black man educated in theology and music,his aspirations were to be an opera singer. He got off track though, in the sixties, when he was drafted into the navy and served four years during the vietnam war. released in 1969, Monceaux spent the next twenty years adrift, doing odd jobs, maintenance work, and slinging it out as a short order cook throught the U.S. Befor he knew it, the year was 1989 and he was homeless, out on the streets in the south Bronx. Three years later, by happenstance, New York gallery owner Morgan Rank discovered Monceaux's portraits of U.S. presidents.They were actually personality portarits, done in oil pastels and adorned with bits of lace, campaingn buttons, and other flea market collectibles Monceaux had picked up along the way. crowning each presidentwas a spiral of words, Monceaux's thoughts on the essential character of the man. He played up Ronald Reagan's showdiz, giving him a pompadour and a game-show host's grin; James Buchanan was sorrowful and old, a prisoner of worry befor the Civil War.

From Rank , I learned that success for Morgan Monceaux couldn't be better these days:His presidential portraits, which received outstanding acclaim from the New Yorker, from Georgr to Bill;and his recent portraits of jazz musicians were just published ny Knopf. The wave of attention had spread throughout the national media, and I would speak with monceaux between his interviews with ABC and NBC .

By the time I got in touch with him (he doesn't have a phone), I was ready to shoot the bull, to play big time with this improbable American hero. As celebrities go, he should be open enough, the kind of unreserved, welcoming man who doesn't need permission to be frank because he always is . In stories with a happy ending, its easy to mistakenly assume that everything that has come before is digestible, a part of the past, candy-coated in the T.V. movies slickness of today's sucesses.

When we spoke Monceaux in New York City , myself in Grand Rapids his voice was so hushed, so soft, it was literally inaudible. The tiny voice on the line was like that of an Iranian grandmother who communicates sweetly and generously but in a way that is impossible to make out. When I asked him to speak up. I could unfold one or two words, and then the sentence would trail off. As I waited in silence for him to continue, I would hear him say faintly, Hello? Hello?, and we would begin again.

As I continued with questions, it became clear that this bona fied American hero who had pulled himself up from the soles beneath his dragging bootstraps was acually the same young man from louisiana who had been dropped into Vietnam and dropped again back in the U.S., the same man who spent two entire decades lost and searching, only to find himself homeless in one of the world's toughest cities.

When the conversation ended, the phone went back to Morgan Rank, a personable, big-city professional, who said loudly, amicably into the reciver, "No, it's not the connection, there's nothing wrong with your phone. Mr. Shy over here just won't speak up."

Sadly, even a talented perona doesn't shake off the fear of the outside once the outside has person to be so debilitating. Mr. Shy is no broadtoothed Hollywood hero. He's the same man who ducked into a New York gallery one day on his way to the janitorial night shift to show off a drawing of a president. The rest came from the outside, as it has his entire life.

From George to Bill: the Presidential Portraits of Morgan Monceaux is on exhibit at the Gerald R. Ford Museum.