The Truth About Lorin Jones

GRACE SKELLY,

art collector

Of course, as everyone knows, we were the first major collectors to buy Lorin’s work. At the time almost no one who counted in the art world had ever heard of her. Everything was New York School, right? That’s all most people would even look at.

No, I’ve never gone along with the crowd. I like to study a piece of art and judge it for myself. If I can relate to it emotionally and aesthetically, I don’t give a damn what anyone else says. I play my hunches, and it’s weird, but they almost always turn out to be right. Take graffiti art, a few years ago everyone was saying ...

Oh, yeah, when I saw Lorin’s paintings, they hit me like a bomb. That was at her last big show at the Apollo, when was it?

Nineteen-sixty-four, really? That long ago. Of course I was very young then, just a child bride really. But somehow I had an eye already.

Well, you know how it is at big openings. There was a crowd, and a lot to drink, and nobody was paying much attention to what was on the walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was about the only person there who really looked at the work. But when I saw those marvelous paintings, I just knew I had to have one of them. And pretty soon I decided it would have to be the big triptych. It was an important piece, I just knew it. After I and Bill got back to the penthouse, it kept coming into my mind, the way a tune from a show you’ve just seen does sometimes, right? It was like a kind of obsession.

Well, the kinetic energy there, and the, uh, interplay of values. There was a physical tension between the three canvases, too, a kind of almost sensual vibration. You know what I’m talking about, you know the work. Birth, Copulation, and Death. Well, that says it all, right?

I told Bill the next morning, Honey, I can’t get that damn painting out of my mind. It’s really got something. I made him go back to the gallery with me. And when I pointed out all the exciting visual things that were going on in Lorin’s work, he saw them too. He has a real instinct, you know, though he’s not as quick on the uptake as I am sometimes. Last summer when we were in Rome...

Well, you know Lorin was living in Florida by that time, so Bill and I didn’t see as much of her as we would have liked. But we got on together great, from the word go. She was such a sensitive, sympathetic person.

Yeah, I know she was shy, with strangers and people she didn’t trust. There are a lot of assholes and climbers in the art world, I’m sorry to say. But it’s the goddamn truth. But when Lorin was with people she knew appreciated her, and understood the complex things she was trying to do in her painting, she opened right up.

Oh, yeah, that’s true, she hated to be separated from her work. Her paintings meant so much to her, they were almost like her children, I used to think. But of course she knew she was always welcome to come out to our place in Southampton to see Birth, Copulation, and Death again whenever she liked. We’re used to having artists around, we know how to take good care of them. Jackson Pollock ...

Well, no, actually she never visited us. It’s a hell of a long way from the Keys. And she was so passionately involved in her work down there by that time, I guess she just couldn’t bring herself to leave. She was always such an intense, dedicated person. It’s tragic that she had to die so young, isn’t it?

But at least she died knowing her most important picture was in good hands. I mean, it’s a central work, right? Not only in Lorin’s career, but in terms of American painting in the sixties, as a whole. It looks ahead to the seventies, too, of course. And even beyond. Because Lorin was way ahead of her time. Everyone knows that now, but Bill and I saw it from the start.

Oh yeah, sure, we told Lorin what we thought. Plenty of times. Artists need encouragement from people who count; they’re like kids, in a way. And I think knowing how we felt about her and her painting was a real help to her, in those last hard years. I’m sure of it.