Taken too early by the Aids pandemic, the artist Larry Stanton created work for an exuberant, prodigious handful of years before dying in 1984 at age 37. Championed by David Hockney, whose work his paintings at time resemble, Stanton excelled in creating portraits of gay men that are at once guileless and penetrating.
Clearing Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting a survey of the artist’s work titled Think of Me When It Thunders, a reference to one of the last things Stanton said to his longtime lover, Arthur Lambert, while on his hospital deathbed. Trying to assuage the pain of watching his confidant and lover deteriorating, Stanton told Lambert to “think of me when it thunders.” The latter later lamented that “it doesn’t thunder every day.”
In a show that in many ways functions as a memorial to a generation of gay men lost to Aids, and a reminder of a callous government that failed to meet their needs, one of the most poignant works is called Hospital Drawing, one of many pieces that Stanton created while in the hospital. The work shows a blissfully blue sky and ocean with the words “I’M GOING TO MAKE IT” inscribed in rainbow colors.
“There were all of these sentences that he was writing in the hospital,” said Fabio Cherstich, director of Stanton’s estate and a noted Italian opera and theatre director. “He wrote things like, ‘I’m going to make it,’ or ‘Life is not bad, life is not good.’ In a way he was processing the fact that he was dying through art.”
In Clearing Gallery, Hospital Drawing hangs on its own wall, a radiant light above it. The work is meant to be approached gingerly, and to be lingered over. “It’s so powerful,” said Cherstich, “it’s like him talking to you. It’s very strong for me. When I think about it I become very emotional.”
For most of his too-brief life Stanton was not a painter. He made his way out of upstate New York and to New York City at age 18, arriving in 1965 and immersing himself in the gay scene in Greenwich Village. “He was not intending to make art, he just wanted to enjoy the freedom of being in New York,” said Cherstich. “It was the perfect place for someone looking for the freedom to explore his sexuality.”
Stanton’s beauty made him an immediate hit on the scene, and in 1967 he met Lambert while visiting Fire Island. According to Cherstich, Lambert literally jumped up when viewing Stanton from across the street and immediately wanted to know him.
The two quickly fell in love, and in 1968 Stanton followed Lambert to California, where Lambert paid for him to enroll in two semesters of art school. Unfortunately, Stanton made a poor student. “He was easily bored and didn’t want to study in a traditional way,” said Cherstich.
Ever persistent, Lambert later organized a meeting with David Hockney, who took to the younger artist and quickly built up a close friendship with him, becoming a booster of his work. “Hockney saw that he was extremely beautiful and extremely smart,” said Cherstich.
Although Stanton developed a close relationship with Hockney and even traveled with him, it was not until nearly a decade later that he took up art seriously. In 1978, when Stanton’s mother died of cancer, he experienced a psychotic episode that led to his hospitalization, marking a turning point for his life. He realized he had to make something of himself and began to dedicate his life wholeheartedly to art.
Stanton worked feverishly, at times making even incidental passersby the subject of a piece. “It seemed as if he would draw anyone who would sit still long enough to be drawn, and when there was no one else around, he drew himself,” Lambert once wrote of him. On some of his works Stanton would inscribe a few key details on the back – a location, time of day and a phone number, suggesting that many of Stanton’s subjects were casual lovers. “It may have just been a chance encounter, or possibly there was an assignation arranged for later in the day,” said John Utterson, the director of Clearing Gallery. “Like, OK, 6pm on Broadway, that’s where we’re meeting.”
According to Utterson, the way that Stanton would so intensely and almost naively draw and paint acquaintances from New York’s gay scene gives his body of work a freshness that borders on the anthropological. “The work shows Stanton as an observer of certain segments of society from the late 70s to the mid 80s,” said Utterson. “It’s his particular view of that moment in time, which is unlike anybody else’s. What I find so interesting is the idea of these works as historical documents, these images and vignettes that capture a moment in time. Over that span of time the world was changed forever, so these works are bound to this brief period of five years in this very particular way.”
Comprising some 30 pieces, Think of Me When It Thunders attempts to be representative of Stanton’s much larger oeuvre, bringing together works on paper and paintings, as well as Super 8 videos that he took. The videos include remarkable footage of Hockney creating his celebrated paper pools in his workshop, as well as recordings of the New York City Pride parade from the late 70s.
The experience of seeing the art in the gallery is haunting and powerful, as though the 1980s are looking right into you. Although the paintings have a quality of the quotidian and the momentary, there is also something deeply piercing and even mournful to them. “The way he focuses on eyes was remarkable,” said Cherstich. “That’s one of the first things you notice, the way they look at you, they immediately grab your attention.” Utterson added: “You can tell there’s a really strong connection between artist and subject, because there’s this intensity of the gaze.”
It’s the mark of great art that Stanton’s work can retain its force over the span of decades, a testament to his immense talent and ability to plumb the human soul. As Utterson put it: “Even though we’re looking at these paintings over 40 years later, they retain this immediacy. They’re off the cuff but confident and vulnerable.”
