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The World Famous Alfred van Loen

I didn’t want to be influenced by other artist’s work when I started sculpting. When felt I had found my voice I asked the director of the HTAL, a local arts organization, if there were other sculptors in the area I could meet and assist in their studio. Jeannie Tengelson told me that Alfred van Loen knew all of the artists in the area and he might be able to help me. She told me I could get in touch with him through the South Huntington library where he curated art shows, and I assumed he was some kind of local historian when I got his phone number,

I contacted him and explained what I was looking for. He boomed at me in a German accented voice, “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the world famous Alfred van Loen!” He told me that he had just installed a major piece of sculpture in the City Hall in Huntington. I told him that I had seen the article in Newsday, the L.I. paper, where they said that the mayor referred to it as a giant molar. I remarked that the piece was titled Snowflake, something entirely different. Alfred professed to have a sense of humor, said he was going away for a little while and we should get in touch when he got back. I wished him a good vacation and said goodbye.

I spoke with Jeannie and told her about the conversation, and she informed me that he wasn’t going on vacation, he was going into the hospital to have a part of his leg amputated from a diabetes-related infection. When I fuck up I really fuck up.

I sent Alfred a card, picturing a forlorn young man stuck in a canoe in a rainstorm without a paddle, explaining my mistake and asking forgiveness.

I was invited over to his house a few weeks after he got out of the hospital. As I drove up the long dirt driveway there was a huge concrete sculpture by the side of the road. I still didn’t know what type of work he did, and other than the size I wasn’t too impressed.

I was directed to go around the house to where there was a sign pointing to “The Loeny Bin” and I met him in his living room. He still wasn’t getting around too well on the prosthesis or we would have met out in the studio. He was tall and looked like he was a big guy at some point, but he was pretty much a bag of bones by then. Jeannie had told me that he was in his nineties, but the diabetes had taken its toll and he turned out to be in his late 60’s.

He was born in Germany and as a child fled with his family to Holland before the war, where they opened up a large department store. He had gone to school for art and had a student in the Louver. I thought that was a big deal but found out it wasn’t, most students had gotten an early work accepted there. He came to America with his tools as a young man to start his career. He was good-looking on his youth and bore a strong similarity to a young Salvador Dali, which he played up. They met in a café at some point and drew portraits of each other, exchanging the images as was common at the time.

Alfred had taught at one of the local Universities for years, C. W. Post, and they gave him a Ph.D. when they expanded their art program. Over the years I could spot most of his students by their similarity to his work, much to their chagrin. What I was really seeing was the influence of Alfred’s mentor, Jose De Creeft. Jose was a pretty big name in his time, and Alfred never strayed too far from his influence. He was a childhood diabetic Like Alfred, but he took care of himself. Only 50% of childhood diabetic’s come to terms with the problem, the rest resent it and cut short their lives neglecting the insulin regimen. Even in his 80’s Jose was a big, powerful man, and loved carving the hardest stone available. The one piece he is still well known for wasn’t in his style at all, a large bronze sculpture of the characters from Alice in Wonderland near the playground of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. He was contracted to do the piece and essentially farmed it out to the casting house to do in the style of the illustrator Sir John Tenniel. Casting houses do a lot of that type of work, you give them a sketch or a basic idea and their artists complete the work. Another old stone sculptor I knew, Jacob Lipkin, told me how much he hated the piece and that when he saw Jose on the street down in the Village he gave him a hard time over it. Jose brushed him off, telling Jacob that it had paid for his house in Spain and infuriating Jacob even more.

Alfred’s living room was done up in the 50’s modern Swedish look, accented with a lot of his work. I still wasn’t impressed by his sculpture, but it wasn’t horrible. I liked Alfred and I was able to say some nice things about them. He was filled with some great stories that I could tell needed to be taken with a grain of salt. He could walk into a room with a rose in a vase. In the first retelling it would be a bouquet and the next it would be a roomful. People ate it up. In one of the stories I did believe he claimed to have been given one of the first large pieces of Lucite when the manufacturers were trying to get sculptors interested in using it. He said he didn’t like it much and gave it to Isamu Noguchi, who was able to make a nice piece out of it.

I also I met his wife, Helen, in passing. She taught English at C.W. Post part time and seemed a little stuffy, but she was a good looking women, into tennis and about ten years his junior.

When Alfred was able to get around better I visited him in the studio and showed him some of my work. He was very impressed but also saddened that he could no longer work in stone. He had only been carving some small wood pieces and was having problems with them. His diabetic neuropathy was pretty well advanced and he had little feeling in his fingers.

One of the older bronze pieces in his studio, a cut and hammered piece of sheet metal he called Protozoa inspired me to make a similar piece in my stone, which I called Once. I had wanted to capture some movement in the work, but could only get it to “move” once, hence the name. It also refereed to the “once” of prehistoric times. It became one of Alfred’s favorite pieces. Someone later remarked to me that the piece, in abstraction, contained all of the letters of the name.

He still had a group of students that came by to use his studio and learn from the master. They were mostly middle-aged housewives that liked to get their asses pinched by the “master” and were his only real source of income at the time.

He had no galleries representing his work. There was a rumor of a book in the works and the possibility of a big installation at the UN of a life sized version of the pieces for a chessboard he had made that were in the characters of Liberty vs. Slavery in a distinctly Jose De Creeft style. Billy Rose, one of the collectors of Alfred’s work was lobbying for it to the UN and hinting that he would fund the book that was potentially going to be published. I doubt he had any serious intentions for either project, but just wanted to help keep Alfred’s spirits up. He had a huge art collection as well as a large museum for sculpture in Israel, and could have easily funded the book. Getting a massive sculpture installed on the grounds of the UN is another story. I saw the chess set when it went on display at the Met and it would have been a real tough sell.

Alfred was his own biggest enemy. He had an overblown sense of he value of his own. He told me the story of doing a show in the city once where nothing had sold. When Alfred came by to break the show down a gentleman walked into the gallery, looking all the pieces over. He came over to Alfred, offering to buy all of the work in the show for the price of a single piece. Some collectors do that, hoping to get a better price on the work at the end of a show. Alfred was outraged and asked whom he thought he was. “I’m Joseph Hirshorn, and I’m going to put them all of them in my museum in Washington, D.C.” Alfred essentially told him to take a flying leap. I was aghast when he told me this story. To have that amount of work in a major collection could have been his meal ticket for life, but he was still too offended to see it that way. I told him that I would have given them to him for free.

I did a great portrait of Alfred in my stone, and after seeing it he invited me over to have dinner with he and his wife. When I got there Helen acted completely differently than when we first met, very friendly and frisky. I knew something was going on and started to piece things together over the evening.

When Jose De Creeft was in his 60’s he had a younger second wife. One of the things that diabetic neuropathy leads to is impotence, and to keep her happy Jose looked the other way when she and Alfred started having an affair. I later would find out that one of Alfred's favorite things in the world was to cuckold someone. Alfred had a black Belgium marble sculpture of her that Jose had made and given him for his help setting up and breaking down a show, if Alfred could carry it out himself. It weighed close to 300 lbs., but Alfred was in his prime and took it out to his car. He had it outside, next to the door leading into the house. It bore a striking resemblance to Helen, who Alfred had married after his first wife died in an auto accident.

The piece was a realistic depiction, beautifully carved. It had been suffering the elements over time, and after Alfred died Helen asked me to restore it. Marble varies in hardness and this piece was like granite. There was a crack developing across the bridge of the nose that was too deep to completely remove without compromising the form, but other than that it may as well have been new when I was finished with it. The crack was probably a small fracture that had been created during the original carving.

The strange vibe I was getting at dinner was that I would do for Alfred what he had done for Jose. Although Helen was a good-looking woman I didn’t want anything to do with it. I really don’t like drama in my life and this seemed like a recipe for disaster. Helen was miffed for a little while and Alfred was confused, and the subject was never really brought out into the open. Over time I let Helen know about some of my past problems with relationships and she realized that I wasn’t rejecting her, just the situation.

Alfred warmed up again and invited me to do a show at the South Huntington Library where he curated works of young artists. The show was going to be the paintings of a Russian artist that was being promoted by the publishers of one of the local arts magazines, Victor and Jamie Forbes. No relation to the Forbes Magazine Empire, but they were pretty cagey about it unless you directly asked. They printed SunStorm, directed at the decorators and cheesy galleries, with a heavy emphasis on schlock promotion. There are many layers in the art world and they were the bottom feeders. They were actively pursuing Billy Rose to fund the book on Alfred once they heard it might be in the works, and were doing everything they could to suck up to Alfred.

I didn’t trust these people from the beginning. Their painter was doing these colored pencil images of Astral Figures in transcendence that were pretty lame by anyone’s standards when you saw them close up. Reproduced on a smaller scale for publication they looked good for what they were.

The publishers treated me like the help when we set up the show, and didn’t even put my name on the invitations they gave to me to mail out. I graffitied the front image with a magic marker and added my name to the back before mailing them out to my friends. I was a little embarrassed when they started showing up at the reception with the cards in their hands, but no one said anything to me.

While we were setting up the show, Alfred, over my objections, wanted my Mathematicians Daughter by the front entrance. I didn’t think it was a good idea because I felt it would be too east to knock over, but he assured me that nothing had ever been damaged in one of his shows there before.

I got a call from him a week into the show. He was apologizing profusely that someone had knocked over the piece. Not only that, but he was so concerned about Once that he had tried to remove it and dropped it as well. “I’m sure you could fix them” was his only consolation. I lived all of five minutes away so it would have been real easy to drop by to remove it. Mathematician’s Daughter was in too many pieces. I was able to repair Once but I had to spend days trying to match the color and texture with the limited skills I had at the time.

The publishers, who I would eventually nickname the Vampire Twins for sucking their lifeblood from unsuspecting artists, really liked the way our art worked together and invited me to show with him and another painter in a Soho gallery on West Broadway in NYC, the Gallery Saireido.

I agreed, but checked back with Jeannie over at the Art League to see if it was a good idea. She said nice things about the Forbes and encouraged me to do the show. Later I would find out that every artist that had anything to do with them had nightmare stories to tell, and I lost all respect for Jeannie as I heard the stories of botched stories and advertising that went up after the show closed.

The Publishers never gave me invites for the show, and again I was treated like the help. They insisted that I set up the sculptures while we were hanging the paintings. That is always the wrong way to go, once the paintings are hung you fit the sculpture in. They got me so frantic moving their paintings around I knocked into one sculpture that set of a chain reaction that took out another two. The Rape (of the Artist) was shattered, Dare I Dream had some damage, and Goodbye is still a little off and reversed from its original orientation with the lower section.

I had made a couple of nice wooden bases for the show and put one on top of the other as I was clearing the stuff away. They worked very well as a sculpture and I pinned them together and named it Memorial for Scott Burton. Scott Burton was an architect/sculptor that had just died. He had been one of the first notable AIDS victims. I had known of him through the Uptown/Downtown series of shows at MOMA, where MOMA invited Downtown artists to curate shows from their collection. He did and installation that consisted only of bases that Constantin Brancusi had made for his own work, which was a real thrill for me. When I later showed the piece in a Juried “Box” show out at Islip Art Museum I got a nice blurb in the NY Times from their art reviewer, Helen Harrison.

A Japanese couple owned the Gallery Saireido. The husband owned a few Pop Art galleries in Japan and flew back and forth from Japan to NYC on buying trips. The yen was strong at the time and they opened the NYC space more as a trophy gallery then anything else. The wife was the manager, and she had an MBA in business with no experience in art. When I went to meet them I had been cooking Japanese food for a while and offered to make sushi for the reception. I always get revved up for openings and need to channel the energy, so I made about 60 Maki rolls a s well as a stone and metal presentation platter for the opening. After eating in one of the first Japanese restaurants on LI I was aghast at the prices and learned how to make it myself so I could pig out and not lose a weeks pay. Getting the rice right is the toughest part, and it took me about a year to really get it down. Fresh fish is plentiful on LI so that wasn’t a problem and a woodworking tool supplier in California that specialized in hand tools also carried a line of the sushi knives.

It was a crappy and cold January night, but the place was packed. The sushi went over great, really surprising the owners.

I had one of my favorite pieces in the show, Quirk, a Portrait of the Artist as a Space Alien Duck, and I had a 20k price tag on it. I had a couple of Alfred’s students coming over to my studio for a while because he wouldn’t let them use power tools in his class. They were starting to make a few things in my stone and wanted to make pussycats and the like, but had no feel for the coloring. I made Quirk as a kind of a joke on them, and brought it over to Alfred to ask him if it was all right to name it Myrna Bird after one of the students. He didn’t like the idea and said not to do it. Following the rule of thumb that all artists’ works are autobiographical in nature I named it Quirk, as a play on my own name, Kirk. If I was a cyclopean space alien duck that’s what I’d want to look like.

An obviously well to do couple came in and really wanted the piece. We spoke for a while and I introduced them to the owners. With Alfred in tow they all went upstairs to finalize the sale. I should have insisted on going with them, because five minutes later the couple left in a huff. I was on the other side of the crowd when they left and couldn’t catch up with them. I never got a good explanation of what went sour.

On of the things I really hate about the art world is the amount of bullshiters it attracts. One of the Russian artist’s buddies was leaning on my Memorial for Scott Burton, hitting on a girl. Within my earshot was telling her that he had been carving my stone for years, and he had taught me everything I know. In another circumstance I would have said something to him but I didn’t want to make a scene.

Nothing sold at the opening of during the run of the show. I’d drop in on occasion and one of the gallery bunnies would tell me that someone wanted to buy a piece and I’d say “Well, sell it to them” but nothing happened.

Once I went across the street to another gallery to talk to Ivan Karp, but when he found out I was already showing wanted nothing to do with me.

Ivan wanted to be the first galley to show new artists, and I was no longer a virgin. He had been Leo Castelli’s bookkeeper before he opened up O.K. Harris (Est. 1493 on the logo) and he specialized in Photo-realist work, although he’d show just about anything. I kept getting referred to him over the years, and I’d write to him and he’d write back expressing interest in meeting, only to tell me to take a hike when he saw that it was me again. I walked in there one time and there were a half a dozen motorized stepladders of different sizes in the main gallery, opening and closing, moving around in circles. There had to be an attendant in the room to keep them from getting tangled up with one another. Over the years I’ve started referring to him as I Vant Krap.

My relations with Alfred cooled somewhat after the show. He called and asked me to drive him out to the Hamptons and visit Peter Lipman-Wolfe, another sculptor and an old buddy of his, as well as drop off at Elaine Benson’s, a big name gallery in Bridgehampton.

Peter was a bit of a one hit wonder. One of his pieces, The Wedding Ring, had been massively re-produced by Brentano’s, a casting and fabrication house. The image can still be seen in most of those mall museum shops around the country, and has been reduced to further obscurity by the amazing amount of Shona sculptures that are mass-produced in Africa and litter the decorator shops.

Peter was a nice old bird and had made a good living off of the reproductions. He and his wife Barbara had a small house out in Noyack and we had a good time out there. When we stopped by Elaine’s later and she was interested in seeing my sculptures. I drove back out a week or so later with my station wagon stuffed with my various works in stone, wood and Pop-Surrealism. I set them up on the car and in the driveway and when she saw everything she was very enthusiastic. She asked me if I wanted to be rich or famous, and I replied that I just wanted to be able to continue working. She also made a Freudian slip, letting me know that she thought I was good marriage material for her daughter, Kimberly. Even though I wasn’t a Hamptons artist I was invited to show in the New Artists show, the season opener in the spring. We decided on the stone and when I went out to setup she went on and on about a Japanese stone sculptor that wanted to meet me. When we finally met at the reception he had only two questions for me, how does it work (inconsistently, each color is a different hardness) and where can he get it (I wasn’t telling). He wasn’t happy with my evasions and when he showed me a snapshot of one of his pieces I didn’t express much enthusiasm. It was a snapshot of one of his sculptures on the sidewalk outside the Guggenheim, a column of four or five blocks that had a square spiral incised on each of the faces, progressing down into the center. To me it looked like he had brought the piece over on a truck, installed it on the sidewalk, took the photo, and then hauled it off again. Maybe they were showing the work at the Guggenheim, but I couldn’t understand why.

I’m sure he didn’t have anything good to say to Elaine about me, and even though I sold a piece at the reception she was a little distant when I came to break the show down. Not being attracted to her daughter didn’t help, as well as not having a studio in the area.

I still liked Elaine a lot, she was bright, funny and perceptive, and she had a very sharp tongue. When Martha Stewart first came out to the Hamptons there was an interview with Elaine in Newsday, the LI paper, where she just trashed Martha for her pretensions of art, long before any one else did. Spray painting pinecones gold is not art, its craft”, was one of her denunciations

Alfred had a show with her later that year. Elaine would keep a show up for two weeks, and opening night was always a benefit for one local charity or another. Alfred asked me to go out and pick up his stuff after the show, and when I went out Elaine was being really chilly to me. After most of the work was loaded she told me to take the pieces of one of his sculptures; it had broken during a storm when a tree fell on it. “He asked for the pieces back, I don’t know what he’s going to do with them.” I knew nothing about it, but I knew she was pissed at Alfred and me.

When I got back to Alfred’s I found out that he had very high prices on everything and that he had insisted on being compensated for the full price of the work, saying it was irreparably damaged. She had insurance to cover it, but thought we were in collusion and I was going to repair it for him to resell.

I was really pissed off when I figured it out and that pretty much ended my friendship with Alfred.

He had been in steady declining since the amputation, and still hadn’t been taking care of himself. He once recommended to me to start the day off with a shot of tequila like he did, “To get the creative juices flowing” and I was aghast. Not only is booze a poison for diabetics, but also my father had died from alcoholism. I drink on occasion but I wasn’t going to start the day off like that. I must have visited Alfred a dozen times when he was hospitalized for sugar coma or insulin shock, and I didn’t have much pity left. I’d get into the ICU telling the receptionist I was his son. Their own children were adopted and once they were out of college had very little contact with Helen or Alfred.

I hadn’t seen Alfred for a while and I got a call from Helen asking me to attend one of the last shows he would curate at the South Huntington Library. Helen urged me to come, saying he really wanted to see me again, and that he wasn’t going to live much longer.

I went and spoke with him then hung out for a while, and when I was leaving Helen approached me to ask if I would help clean up his work and studio after he died. I warned her that I wasn’t one of their college groupies and expected to be compensated fairly. She agreed, and after the memorial service asked me to come over to talk about what we were going to do.

The studio that Alfred had built himself was a mess. For all of the vaunted German craftsmanship, Alfred was a hack. The place leaked like a sieve and was close to falling down. The years of neglect and ineptitude had taken a toll on the sculpture. I wouldn’t forge his signature on any of the work, but would preserve them as best I could. The studio was a goner and we went around deciding what work could be saved and what would be trashed. First I was going to coordinate a garage sale of the tools and raw stones. Some of the pieces that Helen said to sell as raw rock I pointed out were finished and signed pieces. She said to sell them anyway and I told her I would take them myself rather than get $10~$20 for the stone sold as raw.

The fragments of the sculpture that had broken at Elaine’s were still lying around and I told Helen what had happened, and that I’d like to re-assemble them and return it to Elaine as a peace offering. All in all it was a good experience for me, as I learned a lot of things I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to. Helen tried to play off against some of Alfred’s students, letting them try to conserve some of the pieces. She was pretty unhappy when they came back with little or no improvement. A good example was the hammered brass Protozoa sculpture that had inspired me to make Once. When the now middle-aged former student tried to polish it she got nowhere, and didn’t think there was anything that could be done. She didn’t know enough to strip off all the years of wax and accumulated dirt to get down to the brass, or how to reset the mounting so it didn’t wobble. I’ve understood since grade school the old adage “If you don’t know, teach”, and it certainly applied to Alfred.

We did a show in the Hutchins Gallery at CW Post, and most of the work that sold went to people I invited, the majority going to my friend Ricky and his parents. They were Dutch, and that connection and the low prices helped. Over ten thousand dollars of work sold and I didn’t receive any commission from the sales other than $500 for moving it all and setting things up. I was constantly going back and forth with Helen over remuneration.

I had never seen the Dali drawing of Alfred, but Helen thought it was worth a lot of money. No one else seemed to thing so, since non-attributed works on paper were always suspect since they were the easiest to forge. She insisted that with the Dali signature alone it was valuable. One of the books I had mentioned an Italian reference book of the 468 styles of signature of Salvador Dali, and that took her back a bit. None of the reputable dealers she had contacted wanted to have anything to do with it.

When we were getting down to the bitter end of my involvement she offered me the Dali as the final compensation for my efforts.

I agreed and started to clean out all the works on paper that were going to be donated to the HTAL. Some were Alfred’s but a lot were the work of his students. There was a little rolling footstool in his drawing room that was going to be thrown out that I asked to have. Helen said, with a sneer, “You’re going to make art out of it, aren’t you?” “Of Course”, I said, and it became Untitled II after I wrapped measuring tape around the toe one of my work boots and mounted it to the inside shelf.

While taking out the final load of drawings I thought Helen was acting strange. I looked at her and asked; “You’re not planning to lose the Dali drawing in this move, are you?” Her reaction told me all I needed to know. She got very flustered and confessed that she had given it to someone else. I was pissed but held my temper, and we agreed to work something out in the future. Fat chance, I thought.

She still needed one of Alfred’s larger works in Tiger marble cleaned and re-mounted, and later I told her I had a nice piece of Beechwood for the base. After I cleaned and mounted it I gave her a call and left a message on her machine, “Thank you for giving me the sculpture in lieu of the Dali drawing.” She freaked. I was in the middle of installing one of Alfred’s fountains for one of her friends; a local judge that I found out she was her new boyfriend. When I got over to his pace he started giving me hell over “stealing’ the piece. I asked calmly if he had heard the whole story, and that stopped him. I explained what happened, and told him I had enough sculptures of my own and certainly didn’t need any of his, but I got screwed out of the drawing she had promised me and it was the only way I could think of to get it. He really wasn’t too happy about my methods, but agreed that I didn’t have many other options.

I delivered the sculpture to Helen’s new condo and got the drawing, which was nothing, special, but at that point it was a trophy in my mind. Helen commented that something terrible must have happened in my childhood to make me act like this, and I told her I didn’t like to be lied to and I expected people to live up to their word. I wasn’t some starry-eyed college student that would just mope away after being screwed.

I usually keep the Dali drawing on the wall by the workbench in my studio, and I had it in my office in the basement of the museum while I was there. Few people bother to look at it, and I can see the shock of the people that finally look at the signature. The best reaction was when the museum’s curator spotted it. Even though it’s worthless, it would have been more valuable than any of the museums holdings, and certainly anything in his collection if it had maintained its’ attribution.

I brought the repaired sculpture out to Elaine, explaining that I didn’t know anything at the time and that I thought she got screwed. I felt it should be hers and I would be happy to give it to her if she wanted. She was delighted, and offered to show my Pop-Surrealist work the next season. She hinted about my tiff with Helen over the Dali and I casually told hr that it had all been straightened out.

Helen must have ticked her off trying to get her to show some of Alfred’s works on paper, because when I came out to install Elaine wanted my Homage to June Cleaver in the middle of the room of his intaglio drawings. By placing it there she guaranteed that no one would look at his work. She also agreed to keep some of the Alfred’s signed pieces in her backyard sculpture garden that I had taken when Helen told me to sell them for the stone. Helen was truly pissed when I came out for the reception and I relished every evil glance. In the center of the entrance gallery was my piece, Untitled II, so she must have known she was in for a rough ride.

I may have also traumatized Kurt Vonnegut’s young daughter at the time. She must have been about five at the time and he was in his seventies. Rather than wait in line for the bathroom I went way out back and tried to hide in a tall hedge. She came back knowing something was going on and caught me, calling out to her father. I gave a “You caught me” smile to him as I went back to the reception.

I ended up selling a nice piece at the show, Service for Meret, which was misspelled Merit on the title card, but since I still wasn’t a Local Artist it was my last show at Elaine’s. When I did finally set up a studio out there, Elaine had died and most galleries wouldn’t show my work because I had already shown with her. Galleries are funny that way.