The Truth About Lorin Jones

SARA SACHS VOGELER,

artist and illustrator

Yes, we were good friends for a while.

It was in about nineteen-sixty, sixty-one, when I was studying at Cooper Union, and Laura was still living in New York. I guess some people already knew who she was, but I’d never heard of her, though of course I’d heard of her husband. We met at the Modern: a guy I knew from school was working there, selling tickets; he introduced us. But he just said: “Laura Jones” — I didn’t connect it.

We got on pretty well from the start. There was a new show of drawings, and we went around it together. It turned out we liked most of the same things. Then we had tea in the members’ lounge; it was the first time I’d ever been up there.

Yes, of course Laura was nearly ten years older than me, but I didn’t realize it then. She had on the kind of clothes she always wore, paint-streaked jeans and sneakers and an old black turtleneck sweater. And no makeup, and a mass of long dark hair. She looked like a student too.

No, she didn’t seem especially shy.

I don’t know. Maybe she felt comfortable with me because I was young and kind of awkward. I was just a skinny kid from the Bronx, and I didn’t have any social manner.

We used to meet about once a week. We’d walk around the Village, go to galleries, have a sandwich and a malted, sketch in the park, that kind of thing.

I don’t know. We talked about painting, the work we’d seen, new techniques, you know. I remember Laura’d just discovered Piero della Francesca, and she wanted to try doing frescoes in egg tempera. I got interested too, and we went around to art stores and tried to find out about that.

No, it turned out to be too complicated, and awfully expensive.

Sure, we talked about other things: films, and books. And I guess I told her some of the trouble I was having at home, the way my parents were always after me to study something useful like bookkeeping, because they were afraid I wouldn’t get married.

No, I don’t think she ever gave me any advice. But she was a good listener, you know.

How do you mean, strange?

I don’t know, maybe. I mean most artists are kind of strange, compared to other people, don’t you think? I guess I’m a little strange myself, at least that’s what my husband tells me.

Well, for instance, there were a lot of ordinary things Laura didn’t like, hated really, and I didn’t like them either.

A whole heap of things. I can’t remember most of them now: TV, and pay telephones, and Léger and Stuart Davis, and wobbly Jell-O salad with fruit in it, and men in brown felt hats, and watches with metal bands. ... We had a word for all of them: we called them “creepos.”

Well, what happened was, she came to Cooper Union to look at a painting I was doing. A couple of people saw her there, and afterward they mentioned that she was married to Garrett Jones and had shown at the Apollo and been written up in Art News.

She hadn’t said anything about any of it to me. She’d told me she was married, but she didn’t say to who. I got the idea that he was an older man, and pretty well off, but she didn’t want to talk about him. I thought maybe it wasn’t going too well.

Yes, it made me feel a little funny. I didn’t understand why Laura’d never even told me she had a gallery. Now I see it differently: I think maybe her success embarrassed her. Maybe she thought she didn’t deserve it, kind of. I mean, she must have known she deserved it, but maybe she thought she wouldn’t have had it so soon without her husband’s help.

She didn’t say much about my work, not that I remember now. There was one drawing of a mouse that she liked, but that was just kind of a joke. I’d done it for my niece’s birthday. Most of my painting was abstract then, big canvases. It’s funny, though; I never thought of it before, but about ten years later, after I had kids myself, I went back to drawing animals for them, and that started a whole new direction in my art. My last show ...

Yes, we went to her place a couple of times, when Garrett Jones wasn’t there, and she showed me some of the small semiabstract flower canvases she was doing then, the ones everybody compares to Redon now.

They about knocked me over. I knew then she was way ahead of me.

I don’t know if Laura had other friends near her own age. I never met any. The important artists of her generation, people like Rauschenberg and Johns and Rivers and Frankenthaler, I don’t think she saw anything of them. What she met in New York was the middle-aged established painters, and then the dealers, the collectors, the critics. And the hangers-on, the creepos. At least, that’s the idea I got from her.

Yes, I tried inviting her to have lunch with some of us after class a couple of times, but it didn’t work out. Laura kind of froze up, and my friends thought she was snooty. The thing is, she was serious about painting, and she was really good, but none of them wanted to admit it. All they could see was that she was married to Garrett Jones, and he was promoting her. Afterward they said things like “Sure, I could show at the Apollo too, if I was sleeping with him.”

Not really. I only met him once, at a happening. You remember happenings?

This one was in a swimming pool at a New York health club. It was a good location for something like that, a big empty underground space, all Art Deco tiles and weird acoustics. There was a mixed audience: students, artists, musicians, and some collectors and café society types, because word was starting to get around. I was there with a couple of people from school, sitting on the tiles at the edge of the pool and waiting for things to start, and I saw Laura come in with this middle-aged man, that I knew had to be her husband. Anyhow, my friends recognized him. Laura stopped in front of us, and said hello, and sort of introduced us. She was got up like I’d never seen her before, very glamorous, in a long black skirt and an antique fringed silk shawl and silver chandelier earrings.

I was kind of nervous. I mean, Garrett Jones was incredibly powerful in the art world then, and I knew that to my friends he was the uptown establishment: the enemy, you know. And besides he was old enough to be my father.

Well, they just said hello, mostly, and went on past us and sat in some folding chairs that were reserved for important people, I guess. And the happening started. While it was going on I looked over a couple of times to see how they were liking it. Laura seemed interested, I saw her smiling, but it was obvious that her husband was disgusted. And then in the middle of everything, when they brought in buckets of fish and started throwing them at the audience and splashing us with water, Garrett Jones walked out, sort of pulling Laura behind him.

I guess I felt bad that she went along with him. I kind of looked up to her, and I wanted her to stand up for herself, you know? The next time we met, I didn’t know what to say to her about it, so I didn’t say anything, and neither did she.

Well, not much. After that we sort of drifted apart. For one thing, Laura was in New York less and less. Garrett Jones kept dragging her off to Cape Cod, and she’d be gone for months. We used to mail each other postcards, mostly of pictures we liked. And when I got married she sent me this drawing I showed you, of me being carried away over New York by a big bird. Because of Dave’s last name, you know.

I wrote to her when our first child was born, but I didn’t hear anything back. Then much later I found out she’d died down there in Florida, at about the same time. She probably never even got my letter.

I was really broken up, even though I hadn’t seen her for years. Every time I thought about her I started crying. Well, I was expecting again; I think that always makes you emotional. When the baby came and it was a girl we called it Laura, sort of after her. I always liked the name anyhow.

No. I wish we could afford one, but her prices are so high now, and with four kids to put through college...

What I think is, marrying Garrett Jones, it didn’t do Laura’s painting any good in the long run. It cut her off from the artists she should have known, and made them, well, kind of despise her. This was when pop art was coming in, and he was really stupid about it, he called it vulgar and self-serving. He couldn’t see beyond his own heroes, people like Rothko and Motherwell and Kline. Of course later on he went for color-field and hard-edge abstraction in a big way, but by that time Laura and he were separated.

The thing is, if it hadn’t been for Jones, Laura’s painting might have developed differently, been more contemporary. He kind of surrounded her and cut her off. She was really good, but her work was completely out of the mainstream, almost irrelevant to what was happening here in New York in the sixties.

Yes, I guess I do hold it against him. Even now.