Sunday Morning! Richard Hambleton

There’s a point early on in “Hero in Art,” Istvan Kantor’s “bionovel” about Richard Hambleton, in which music producer and photographer Hank O’Neal says something that sums up Hambleton’s art for me. Describing the first shadow painting he saw in 1981 in downtown NY, O’Neal says:

It had a strong impact on me as I walked by. It was very mysterious, somewhat disturbing, and out of the ordinary.

Hambleton’s street art remains overshadowed (so to speak) by the more palatable works of artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, or Jean-Michel Basquiat who emerged from the same graffiti scene in the early 80s. Partly, this would be welcome news for Hambleton, who fought against the label “graffiti artist,” believing he was doing something very different, and more in the vein of conceptual art. It was also a direct result of that uncanny and disturbing aspect of his art. There’s something frightening about Hambleton’s paintings, which you can’t quite put your finger on, that makes me wonder if he won’t be the artist we’re still talking about in a hundred years.

There’s also something mysterious and disturbing about Hambleton’s life. He was born in British Columbia and finished art school in Vancouver, where he helped found the PUMPS Centre for Alternative Art in 1975. Aside from the fact that he had a sister who survived him and an architect father, it doesn’t seem that much is known about his early life, even by the people who knew him best. It’s one of my shopworn complaints that Canada doesn’t do a great job of documenting its most interesting art, beyond the “group of seven.” If Hambleton had remained in Vancouver, it’s likely there would be no record of him today. As it is, he seemingly burst forth from Terminal City brilliantly talented and addicted to heroin from the start.

He first worked in mail art, which is where Kantor met Hambleton, and had at least one gallery show in Vancouver; but perhaps he first went “public” with his “Image Mass Murder” series, where he painted fake body outlines in white and added red “blood” in cities across North America- at least 620 of them. I find the prank aspect of these paintings a little too obvious honestly, but they found a readymade home in the Lower East Side when Hambleton first arrived there.

They’re also an inversion of his next project, and the one for which Hambleton will be best remembered: the Shadow figures. Hambleton painted hundreds of silhouettes of a lurking figure around the city, often in places where they scared the hell out of those who first came upon them. The figures seemed to tell an instant noir story, about a lurker in the darkness, the anonymity of urban spaces, and the threat of violence. They were menacing in a way that goes deeper than reason, like seeing a shadow in your bedroom as a child.

They were conceptual pieces and, when he soon emerged to the light, the artist who made them was revealed to be strikingly handsome, extremely intelligent, and driven in a way that most artists are not. His days already seemed to have been structured entirely around art and heroin.

And they remained so for about four more decades.

Hambleton took these dual obsessions about as far as he could. One of the repeated comments throughout Kantor’s book, and the 2017 documentary Shadowman, comes from people who knew the artist and thought he was dead after the 80s. He was living, but doing so in any number of locations, including under a bridge at one point, nearly as anonymous as his shadows. He sold a great deal of art, and lost a great deal more. At some point, he began a series of “beauty” paintings that, I believe, are his crowning achievement. An art world that could embrace the darker and more frightening works was not prepared for his works of beauty, however.

The documentary, which plays like a horror movie, depicts Hambleton’s late-period “rediscovery” in which Giorgio Armani hosted a celebrity-laden opening for the artist, who was, at the time, being evicted once more, homeless again, hunched over by scoliosis, his face covered in bandages. He was sort of a reverse Dorian Gray by this point: his art had grown more beautiful in retrospect, while his face was eaten away by cancer. The art market circled in anticipation, vulture-like, knowing that artists are worth more dead than alive, and Hambleton seemed to be headed in that direction for decades. Of one type or another, “dealers” hounded him for much of his life. He still lived another four years, maybe just to spite them.

In the end, it was the cancer, not the heroin, that killed him. William S. Burroughs often claimed that junkies are healthier than average people because they need to be. This seems very specious, but Richard Hambleton lived much longer than most junkies I’ve known. It’s hard not to take his life as some sort of moral lesson or parable: he was a towering master and one of the key artists of the last half-century; but he somehow survived as close as one can get to hell on this earth. His work is all that remains, powerful and disturbing, uncanny and sublime. If life in this world nearly overwhelmed Richard Hambleton, his paintings still have the power to nearly overwhelm the world.

And so, what are YOU, reading, writing, watching, playing, pondering, or overwhelming this weekend?