Art: Dictator Or Fantasy?

HE looks like something out of an early Happening. Or an Andy Warhol movie. Or one of those puckish pop art pieces of George Segal or Marisol. As a matter of fact, Henry Geldzahler can claim all that and more. He first came into public view—a quasi-somnambulant rotundity in prison stripes afloat in a rubber raft—in an Oldenburg Happening mounted in the swimming pool of a Manhattan health club. Next came instant stardom before a Warhol camera. His role: smoking a cigar for an interminable hour and a half. “I have a certain unusual look,” says Henry, and who would dispute him? Marisol carved his rumpled pants and big black shades (now replaced by granny glasses) in three dimensions. David Hockney portrayed him as a prim, vested, bearded presence on a purple sofa. George Segal cast him in the ghostly, ghastly plaster that is his specialty, a dilapidated figure who looks for all the world to be waiting for Godot.

As the Met’s first curator of contemporary arts, he is certainly the museum’s most controversial acquisition in the last decade. No one in Manhattan’s ingrown art world elicits such studied veneration or unquotable outrage. One reason is that Henry has taken on the almost incompatible tasks of scout and judge. As scout, he strives to keep abreast, mingling familiarly with the most avant of the avantgardists. Huffing and puffing up countless stairs to artists’ studios by day, wining and dining with their patrons by night, he is equally at home in the scruffy lofts of Canal Street and the elegant appointments of the Dakota. But as a judge, he is obliged to keep a certain detachment—and it is on this score that he is most often criticized. Relentless in promoting artists he likes, Geldzahler is equally inflexible in ignoring those he does not.

Visceral Reaction. Probably the only person who ever nonplussed Henry was Salvador Dali. As Henry tells it, Dali invited him over to his St. Regis suite one winter afternoon to do his portrait. “We’ll begin by casting your tongue,” said Dali. “Why?” asked Geldzahler. “I want to do a gold head of you,” replied Dali, “and it’s going to have a tongue that wags.” Henry fled.

“I know I’m seen as some kind of avant-garde fantasy,” says Geldzahler. Indeed, he relishes the role. He collects art deco objects as well as modern paintings, secretly yearns to go to Hollywood. Born in 1935 in Antwerp to a family of diamond merchants, he came to the

U.S. on the eve of World War II. An art history major at Yale, he spent a summer working at the Met. Five years later, he abandoned his Ph.D. thesis to spearhead the Met’s contemporary arts activities. His criterion for a work of art: “Memorability and a visceral physical reaction. For some people it’s in the heart, for others in the throat. Sometimes you might even throw up.”

He admits that his choices for the Met show were personal: “If they weren’t, an IBM machine could do it.” He has been accused of being a toy dictator, and certainly his opinion swings mighty weight among collectors and dealers. Henry enjoys that kind of power. But in the end, he says, it is the show that counts. “For those people who are already familiar with the work,” he muses, “I hope that seeing it all together will open scholarly dialogues about what the period will really stand for. For those who are unfamiliar with it, I hope it will be beautiful enough to open their eyes.”