I once knew a highbrow critic with wide-ranging lowbrow tastes and laughter who used to refer to himself as Pop Culture. The guy would have a field day going from wall to wall, right now, at the Broome Street Gallery – bouncing from Koiby Higgleby to Duke Ellington to Barnett Newman to Allegra Kent to Humphrey Bogart and back again.
He probably would have collapsed with joy if he’d known that all these highly evocative portraits – or collage paintings –come from D’Agostino’s. From John D’Agostino, that is, 52-year old Brooklyn-born artist and man of memories. Mr. D’Agostino, move closer to me.
As you may have gathered, the vivid show at Broome Street has its baseball section, its jazz section, its art section, its movie section, its dance section, its miscellany; but as in life, all lines cross and intermingle.
Here’s the Duke, and there’s Fats Waller, and there’s Monk (“with his wife Nelly”), and Art Blakey, and Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor amid a swirl of paint (“I gave him a crown of piano keys”) – but who’s that?
“Albert Ayler, a famous saxophonist they found floating in the East River. And this is Charles Gayle, probably the greatest, most radical sax player now alive in the world; he’ll be at the Knitting Factory in February.” There are four Gayle pictures here, side by side, one of them in red –“for the kind of immense heat he gives off.”
Next comes Billie Holiday, in green, and then Milford Graves, “the Jackson Pollock of drums, he plays the past, the present, and the future, and listened to his own heartbeat for his sense of rhythm.” The Graves includes four fragmented clocks in honor of his record “Pieces of Time.”
You were wondering, dear reader, if we’d forgotten Koiby Higgleby? Ninny on your tintype.
Kirby Higbe was a colorful, highly erratic pitcher and Giant-killer for the Durocher-era Brooklyn Dodgers. D’Agostino has put a No. 13 cue ball into the portrait for the number Higbe wanted (and got) on his uniform, and puts him under a green exploding cloud for his explosive temper.
“No, I never saw him pitch,” says the artist, who was just being born the year Higbe arrived at Ebetts Field. “You know, he got very religious, went on the wagon. I have his book, “The High Hard One.”
The fellow with a face like a beef trust a little farther on is Uncle Robbie, a.k.a. Wilbert Robinson, famed Dodger manager a generation before Higbe, and the “1916 / 1920” is for “the years he won pennants he wasn’t supposed to win.” Also in the collage is a grapefruit for the one that was dropped toward Robinson from an airplane. He, in catcher’s regalia, had expected it to be a baseball, and was a bit surprised when, like Higbe’s temper, some years later, it exploded on his chest.
“And here’s Clyde (Pea Ridge) Day. He played in ’31, ’32. I’ve shown him with a hog because he always gave a hog call of triumph when he struck somebody out – and the fans returned it. There wasn’t too much to cheer about in those days,” said D’Agostino, sadly. “And my latest piece Freddy Fitzsimmons, with a corkscrew for his corkscrew windup. The face in the corner is Tom (Rattlesnake) Baker, the guy they traded to the giants for Freddy. He won one game for the Giants. Freddy won 47 for Brooklyn.”
Onward and upward. Abstract painter William Baziotes – “he liked baseball.” Barnett Newman – went to City College, became an artist out of the Depression, ran for mayor against La Guardia, did you know that?” (no). Exquisite Allegra Kent, whom the present writer will never forget as Lotte Lenya’s other half in Balanchine’s “Seven Deadly Sins.” The butterfly is in the collage, D’Agostino explained, because Joseph Cornell, Surreal magician of the boxes, made Allegra Kent his last butterfly.
Here’s D’Agostino’s uncle, Tony Paoletti, who as manager of the old Wallgreen’s in the Paramount Building knew everybody, and once threw Orson Welles out after Welles had schmoozed for four hours with this one and that one over a cup of tea. And here’s D’Agostino’s father, schoolteacher Vito, “who lived on Sullivan Street as a kid and walked to City College to save a nickel and went to the 1933 liquidation sale of Tiffany Studios – when they were smashing 10-foot-by10-foot sheets of glass out on the pavement – and rescued everything he could get his hands on.”
Like father, like son. No checkout counters. But plenty of shelf life.
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