Art and Artists Book Club: Frank O'Hara, a Poet Among Painters

On the evening of April 30th, to celebrate and conclude National Poetry Month, Art and Artists Book Club readers gathered for a special poetry edition dedicated to Frank O’Hara, who was known in his lifetime as being a “poet among painters.”

Twenty readers joined us, from New York City’s boroughs to South Korea, as we read out loud, interpreted and reflected on the poems, the poet, and poetry’s relationship to painting. We read and shared thoughts on "Having a Coke With You" (1960), "Adieu to Norman", "Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul" (1964), and "Why I Am Not A Painter" (1956).

Before launching into the poems, we set the scene a bit: describing the intertwined artistic world that Frank’s poetry was written in, and how the New York School was both a cultural period that began at the start of the 1950s to the 1970s, and also a geographical space that included the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Chelsea and SoHo—where painters attended poetry readings and the poets visited the artists' studios. The commingling community strived to learn from each other, gather inspiration, debate, and even gossip.

By the time of his untimely death at the age of 40 in 1966, Frank O'Hara was more or less the axis around which the painters and poets of the New York School seemed to orbit. Because of his many friendships, and his influential post as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, he provided connections between poets, such as Kenneth Koch and Bill Berkson, with painters such as Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers (who was O'Hara's lover).

We also closely looked at a beautiful and seminal four-volume painting and poetry artists book published by Tiber Press in 1960, that is part of the Print Collection. 

Tiber Press specialized in dynamic screenprints by the Abstract Expressionists and was located in Greenwich Village. The master printers, Floriano Vecchi and Richard Miller, presented this idea of collaboration to the poets and painters in order to highlight some relationship between their work.

In a review from Fairfield Porter, he said that these volumes, to his knowledge, mark the first time in which there was an American book-form collaboration between painters and poets as extensive and ambitious as the one we see here. Each artist was asked to make five screenprints, including one for the cover, one for the title page and three within the poems. The edition was limited to two hundred numbered copies, signed by the poets and painters. Each book consists of forty pages, and all four volumes are boxed together.

Remarkably, the Photography Collection has many photographic prints and negatives from Walter Silver who documented intimate behind-the-scenes encounters at Tiber Press between the artists, poets, and publishers, as they worked as both collaborators and friends. 

For those interested in the photographs, there are others from Walter Silver and of the New York School artists in the Digital Collections! 

During the evening, participants enjoyed thinking about the connection between poetry and painting, art and love and friendship, as well as simply listening to each other read the verses out loud—with the tones and inflections of the words and formatting being heard. One suggestion for future book club sessions was more poetry! We’re excited to delve deeper. With more reading out loud!