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LENNIE BENNETTWatercolors by John Dos Passos may not match his mastery of the word, but they charmingly reflect his writing's curiosity and cool detachment.
TARPON SPRINGS - There is absolutely no point in discussing "The Art of John Dos Passos," a selection of watercolors on view at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, without first discussing the real art of John Dos Passos, his writing.
He was prolific, completing more than 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, but his reputation will probably stand on the monumental USA trilogy, as well as several other novels such as Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the stars of a group of writers in 1920s Paris dubbed the Lost Generation by Gertrude Stein. In the literary sense, Hemingway and Fitzgerald have been anything but lost; they're still read and studied, generations after their deaths. But Dos Passos, who was born in 1896 and died in 1970, is another story. Until recently, even his most famous novels were out of print for almost six decades, and he generally has been only a footnote in literature classes.
None of his works found lasting favor with the reading public, perhaps because they had no great, memorable characters - no Jay Gatsby or Jake Barnes. His pessimism about America's moral health (for many years he was a radical involved with the Communist Party, roundly denouncing the wealthy elitists and championing the working classes) translated into a grimness and nihilism that began to seem dated.
Time will tell if his star will rise again, thanks to the reissuance of USA, Manhattan Transfer and other fiction and travel writing in hardback by Library of America and in paperback by Mariner Books. But he's certainly worth revisiting. In an interview with the New York Times in August, Norman Mailer said, "Dos Passos came nearer than any of us to writing the Great American Novel, and it's entirely possible he succeeded."
His wholly original style in USA collages narratives of fictional characters, biographical information about well-known people, snippets of newspaper headlines, advertising logos and popular songs, and a first-person monologue. Many hailed it as a masterpiece when it was published in its entirety in 1938. Today, its originality and the ravenous curiosity of its writer still shine through.
His mind was like a camera, recording with a detachment that belied the way he lived, according to his only child, Lucy Dos Passos Coggin, born when her father was 54. By that time, the writer had settled into happy domesticity in rural Virginia, earning a steady if unspectacular living, mostly through essays and travel stories that funded his enduring wanderlust.
"I knew he did something different from other fathers when I was very young," Coggin said in an interview recently at Leepa-Rattner. "But he wasn't a person who reminisced a great deal, and he didn't focus on himself. He had wanted to be a parent, and he was a very good father."
Coggin had to discover her father's work for herself, even though she knew well his famous friends, who included the painter Fernand Leger, the critic Edmund Wilson, writers such as E.E. Cummings and Archibald McLeish and the glamorous Gerald and Sara Murphy, who was Coggin's godmother.
"I tried to read USA when I was 12 or 13, but it was pretty rough going at that age," she said. "There were lots of books around but, surprisingly, he never handed me a book he thought I should read. He felt strongly that people needed leeway to figure things out themselves."
He wrote almost every morning of his life, she said, and in the afternoons, he would usually bring out his watercolors and sketch books. When he traveled, he painted scenes as he found them.
She found several hundred of his paintings in the attic, done over a period of 50 years, most of them in good condition, and decided, after her mother died several years ago, to edit the best for public exhibition. Few are signed or dated, but the time in which they were created can be determined by the places they document.
I'll say without equivocation that Dos Passos was a first-rate writer and mediocre painter. He was obviously conversant with artistic trends and had a good eye for color. Aerial View of City Traffic and Building, painted in the mid 1920s, is a riot of motion and distorted perspective that shows an understanding of modernist movements, as does the angular face of a fisherman, painted around 1927, surrounded with planes of pattern that suggest both Picasso and Matisse.
But he is not a Picasso or Matisse, and this exhibition is not served by viewing or assessing it as if he were.
"I don't think he attempted to make any big impact with his paintings," Coggin said.
He paints pastoral French landscapes, boldly graphic group portraits of Bedouins in Morocco, constructivist-inspired posters and set designs for avant-garde theater productions (these are rather good) and some clumsy still lifes. He studied art a bit and showed a few paintings in the early Parisian years, "but I think he just wanted to sell something to make a little money, and he figured if he could get published maybe someone would buy his art," said Coggin.
Such naive logic has great charm, and both their naivete and earnestness give these paintings charm as well.
Their variety and randomness feature the same quixotic observation of his novels. Like them, the paintings troll around a subject without delving deeply into it. He keeps his distance in them as he does in his writing, painting a gallery full of interesting found faces but rarely one of a friend or relative. Perhaps, loving friend and father that he was, he still was uncomfortable with the special intimacy needed for such portraiture.
These are pretty much the dabs of an amateur; if you need convincing, walk across the museum's hall and look at some watercolor studies by a young Abraham Rattner. They surpass anything by Dos Passos after 50 years of painting.
They're worth seeing and enjoying as you would look at Winston Churchill's paintings. They round out the man, give him more dimension. And they possess a joyousness in the unexpected encounter, the sense that a new adventure, a new friend or just a new view is around a corner or a bend in the road.
"People think that a lot of his writing is pessimistic and had a gloomy view of people," said Coggin. "In the way he lived, he was optimistic and very positive."
In the way he painted, too.
REVIEW
"The Art of John Dos Passos" is at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, 600 Klosterman Road, Tarpon Springs, through April 18. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Adults $5, seniors $4, free to children and students and free on Sunday. (727) 712-5762.