Bill Beckley, Horse Thieves (2019)
Now and then, but this is rare, one has a perfect friendship, a loving harmonious experience rare enough to deserve a written record. I had such a relationship with Bill Beckley. We met twenty some years ago because he was seeking authors for Allworth Press. He published a really dazzling book, Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (2002). And he also generously did my Writing About Visual Art (2003). Bill was a distinguished conceptual artist who also had an interest in art writing. He had a studio in Soho and a country house upstate in New York, where I became a regular visitor in August. I reviewed several of his exhibitions, we talked about art and so I learned about his career. And I got to know his family. Thanks to them, I always felt completely at home in their very beautiful house. I remember, as if yesterday, the time many years ago when he took me to get the Sunday Times in his antique Morgan. Bill truly was an aesthete.
Bill, who was born in 1946, moved to New York City to be an artist in 1970. At that time, conceptual art was just starting to develop, and so after some difficult years, soon he had a thriving artistic career, with exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York and Europe. And he taught at SVA, where his star pupil was Keith Haring. The conceptual artists were initially concerned with making art employing minimal physical making, in ways that challenged the older ideas about what constitutes an artwork. For example, Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1967), which is on the cover of my Writing About Visual Art, shows Ruscha standing above the remains of a typewriter tossed out of his car speeding across the Nevada desert. When a group of gifted young artists start such a movement working together, then soon enough they are driven by their diverse individual interests to move in different directions. Consider how diversely Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko developed Abstract Expressionism. The same is true of the conceptual artists. Adrian Piper developed her conceptual art to reflect upon race, while Beckley’s friend Dennis Oppenheim took his concerns in a very different direction, as did their mutual friend, a somewhat older figure, Sol LeWitt.
Caravaggio, Seven Acts of Mercy (1607)
Although I knew some conceptual art when I met Bill, I was not, I confess, especially interested in this movement, although I was fascinated by its philosophical implications. But I was captivated when I saw how Bill himself by stages developed highly distinctive concerns very unlike those of any of his peers. You could see in his loft or country house how much beauty mattered to him. And for Allworth he had republished books by two great nineteenth-century aesthetes, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Fine writing mattered to him. Bill was a great reader of Vladimir Nabokov, and himself a stylish writer. And so it was unsurprising that he soon turned to making aesthetically pleasurable photographs. The American art world he entered circa 1970 was aggressively hostile to any such aesthetic pleasures. He learnt the depth of that prejudice when his work using color was rejected by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, an influential puritanical Marxist critic. And so it was predictable that Bill would rebel and develop in ways that expressed his deeper interests. Unsurprisingly, he went on to develop openly aesthetic art. Bill turned himself into a narrative artist, whose works used photographs (and sometimes also words) to tell stories. Intrigued by his career, whose boldness I greatly admired, I resolved to write about him. And eventually, thanks to Bill and the generosity of his dealer, Laura Trisorio, our collaboration was published as a book Bill Beckley and Narrative Art: The Word-Image Riddle and the Aesthetics of Beauty (2023).
Bill and I shared a love of Naples. His dealer Studio Trisorio was there, and so he often visited and took photographs. I, too, for a very long time had been visiting that city and writing a book about it. But although I had made many visits, and read a great deal of the history and the art history, after many years of writing I still didn’t know how to finish my discussion. I was focused on Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy (1607), the greatest painting in Naples, but I didn’t see how to resolve my analysis. In Fall, 2019, just before Covid struck, I went to the opening of Bill’s show “Neapolitan Holidays” in Naples. I looked forward to this exhibition, without knowing what exactly to expect. When I arrived, then and there something magical and totally unexpected happened. Entirely unbeknownst to me, one of the works in that show, Horse Thieves (2018), revealed to me how to conclude my book. I was astonished and immensely thankful. I was familiar with interpretations of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy (1607). But I didn’t see how to relate that old master painting to the account of Naples developed in my book. By including a photograph of the Caravaggio on the fourth panel of Horse Thieves, thus relating it to the narrative about theft developed in the first three panels, Bill revealed to me how to conclude my book. And so now it only awaits editing. The art historians identify visual precedents, and trace Caravaggio’s Catholic view of mercy. Bill, working as a contemporary artist, does something more interesting for my purposes, he places the picture in relation to present day Neapolitan life. You can see in detail from my review exactly what he proposed: https://hyperallergic.com/553789/the-quality-of-mercy-from-caravaggio-to-conceptual-art/ Horse Thieves really is his masterpiece, for it deploys his sense of humor and love of verbal and visual narrative.
A few days ago, right after his wife called to tell me that Bill had just died, I found his last text message to me: ‘Now back to the novel’. How I miss him! And how sorry I am that he cannot come, as we planned, to the signing next year for my book In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art. Bill and his art really changed my life, as only a handful people have.
