Cover
photography – Marcia
Ward
Angelo
A feisty – or should I say
fiery – first generation Italian from Paterson New Jersey, Angelo di Benedetto
was an artist who set the bar high in Colorado when he moved to Central City
after World War II. He was temperamental, once
knocking Jack Kerouac down because the at-the-time seemingly homophobic author
insulted an opera singer who Kerouac believed was flirting with Angelo.
During the War-to-End-All-Wars Angelo never used a weapon; an aerial
photographer and cartographer in the campaign against Rommel in Africa he later
served as an artist whose task it was to disguise Manhattan. “Disguise
Manhattan, what does that mean?” you might ask. Well, the deceptive aspect of
art can be very useful in war and the United States employed artists to trick
their enemies. Cardboard tanks would be built and set on hillsides and the
sound of tanks maneuvering would be broadcast loudly in the hopes of directing
enemy firepower in the direction of unmanned positions. The rooftops of strategic
buildings would be painted to look like something else or camouflaged so as to
be unrecognizable. At one point Angelo came up with a smoke and mirrors scheme
to disguise Manhattan in the event German bombers ever got as far as the skies
above New York. When I asked Angelo in 1987 about the artful trickery he told
me his plan was still classified, and he was not at liberty to discuss it. Too
bad it wasn’t in play in September of 2001.
I met Angelo in 1979 when
he sculpted a grave marker for the poet James Ryan Morris. Jimmy and Angelo and
the filmmaker Stan Brakhage all lived in Gilpin County – Morris in Wondervu,
Angelo in Central City, and Brakhage in Rollinsville – and they were pals,
artists and intellectuals who would talk on the phone for hours at the local
rate of ten cents a call. Cabin fever is real when you live in the mountains,
and during the bitter cold long night-short days of winter, they would explore
ideas and rage against bourgeois art and, in the case of Brakhage and Morris,
government funded art. Brakhage told me that when he made a short film of
Morris playing the roll of Doc Holliday, it was the most dangerous behind the
camera experience he ever had as Morris carried and fired a loaded gun for the
shoot and possessed an existential drug-addicted stance to match Holliday’s.
Stan told me that filming Morris as Doc was “Even more dangerous than filming
calving icebergs from a canoe where death would be instantaneous should the
canoe overturn and dump you in the water.”
Well, Angelo’s tombstone
sculpture consisted of a pair of moons, a quarter and a full, welded a top
three steel rods affixed to a ground level nameplate that read POET. The large full moon was somewhat bowl shaped and
the smaller quarter moon that fronted it was flat. At six feet in height the
tombstone resembled a sculptural expressionist’s take on a poet’s lyre; the
play of shadow and light on the sculpture itself was almost musical as the sun
progressed across the sky. I was part of the volunteer beatnik crew who helped
poor the concrete to set the sculpture on the southern side of the hill in Dory
Hill Cemetery outside Blackhawk Colorado. At the time there was a rusty iron
revolving gate that you’d pass through to enter the cemetery grounds and
Morris’ tombstone to the left near the top of the hill was a visual complement
to the eerie metal on metal creaking sounds of the gate as it revolved. You
just knew you were entering a not so ordinary otherworldly place.
That day of the sculpture
installation I also met a young woman, Kelley Simms, who assisted Angelo. A
talented artist herself, Kelley was both Angelo’s assistant and muse. Almost
instantly Kelley and my wife became fast friends, the result of which was that
we, Marcia and I, became good friends of Angelo as well. Our friendship was
further cemented when I hooked up Angelo with a regular customer of mine at The
Boston Half Shell where I waited tables, whom I overheard talking art. Against
my better judgment and contrary to waiter etiquette I interrupted Charlie Barnett
(Charlie was a wealthy scrap metal entrepreneur and an over the top Bronco fan
(he personally had coined the phrase “Orange Crush”), butting into his
conversation with my assertion that I was friends with the greatest living
Colorado artist and that if he was interested I would set up a meeting and tour
of Angelo’s studio, which, as it turned out, happened the very next day. Before
we’d been in Central City an hour Angelo had a check for thousands in his hands
because my call party customer friend Charlie Barnett bought a few small
paintings and a large assemblage for his office consisting of arranged polished
brass gear wheels on an orange panel that resembled – in Charlie’s mind - a
offensive football play diagram. A win-win for everyone, well everyone except
me. When all was said and done, I must admit, I harbored a little resentment
that neither Angelo nor Charlie had tipped me for making it all happen. But I
got over getting stiffed and put it in my bank of petty grievances under the
column marked Oversights and Slights of Others.
Well, over the next decade
I visited with Angelo many times and we talked art and the politics of art in
his studio atop the Mermaid Café. I learned of his friendship with scientists
like Einstein and artists like Diego Rivera and of coming to grips with fame
when, in 1940, paintings Angelo had created in Haiti were centered folded in Life
Magazine. Together we co-produced
multi-media art events in both Denver and Central City. The same year we met we
were simultaneously awarded Colorado Arts Awards from the James Ryan Morris
Society – Angelo for art and me for poetry.
The building where Angelo
lived and worked, which he had purchased when he originally arrived in
Colorado, was the largest building in Central City, having been built to house
a mining-supplies warehouse during the boom times of the Colorado gold and
silver mining industry. To this day, it is still the largest building in
Central City. Outside of major museums I had never seen so much art in one
place. Sculptures, paintings, drawings and assemblages, monumental and small,
filled the cavernous building. Of special note were some sixty large conte
crayon studies of the figures used in, at the time of its making, the largest
mural in the United States; Angelo and his assistant Phyllis Montrose painted
legal giants from history on asbestos concrete panels for the ceiling of the breezeway of the Colorado Judicial
Building at Thirteenth and Broadway in Denver.
The mural was 3000 square feet of art weighing 7400 pounds! Everything outside
the studio – outside being a steep slope with a cruel pitch - was artfully
divine as well: I’m talking birdbaths and bird feeders and fountains and fences
and furniture. Stonework was reminiscent of Ireland and no item’s placement was
haphazard. Within his personal space, his kitchen table was utterly like no
other because over the years dozens of visitors had carved their names or
initials into its surface and his visitors were some-bodies, both local and
international. Summers when American high society visited Central City to
attend the opera at The Teller House, invitations to supper at Angelo’s studio
were sought after. Eating garlic pasta at Angelo’s with Kelley and Angelo and
Marcia and looking at the names carved into the oak table I came to realize
that the very seat that supported my humble Irish ass once supported the asses
of America’s greatest cultural stars. Marcia sat where the burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act, Gypsy Rose
Lee, liked to sit.
Well, the last years of
Angelo’s life were hard as are most everyone’s. He had always been a prominent
figure both in Colorado and in Central City and against the prevailing and
naive opinion that gambling is good he fought the arrival of state sponsored
gambling and lost. He sold then refused to sell his building, a bad faith
renege that cost him dearly. He had been dealing with cancer but a stroke took
him away in 1992. When his sister arrived from the East Coast to sort out his
affairs she contacted me and asked if I would conduct a memorial for Angelo.
Because Angelo had been one of the prime movers in the creation of the
sculpture park in Burns Park at Colorado and Alameda Boulevards – his is the
large yellow double arched sculpture - we held his memorial there on a Sunday
afternoon. Hundreds attended and I was witness to one of the most unplanned
cinematic events of my life. It rained off and on all day. Setting up the gear
for the event – we’re talking gasoline generators for power and a PA for the
musicians and speakers was difficult. The event was scheduled for 4 PM and it
was still raining on and off when that time rolled around. Every available
space near the park where a car could be parked was occupied and the small
parking lot on the south end held five times the amount of cars it was built
for. And when I turned on some music to announce that the stage was set,
hundreds of people who had taken shelter from the intermittent rains got out of
the cars and advanced en masse down the small slope at the south end of the
park, all carrying umbrellas. A moving quilt of a myriad of colors approached,
an unplanned Cristo like happening if you get my drift. And then at 4:15 when
everyone was ready, the sun came out!
A week or so after the
memorial Angelo’s sister contacted me and told me that because Angelo’s
remaining art had been catalogued and already appraised for tax purposes I,
along with any of Angelo’s friends who might like to purchase something from
the collection, could come to Angelo’s studio. Angelo’s art had always sold for
high dollars, well beyond the financial reach of me and my friends; but because
the family was trying to escape paying a huge inheritance tax bill, everything,
she said, had rock-bottom prices. Sculptures and paintings that had sold for
thousands were priced in the hundreds. Drawings were even less. So along with a
number of di Benedetto aficionados I went and indulged myself and came to
owning a number of paintings and drawings and sculptures, two of which need
further explanation.
When my friends and I were
about to leave the studio, Angelo’s nephew remembered that there were a number
of paintings not on display that he had found just that morning, paintings
which had escaped the scrutiny of the IRS and the purview of the art dealer who
was handling the art of the estate. The nephew had been walking across the
floor of the top studio where Angelo did most of his sculpting and he heard a
strange squeak emanating from the floorboards. He recalled that Angelo had told
him once that “a poor artist was one who sold everything,” and so the thought
of a secret stash came to mind. And, sure enough, a thorough scrutiny of the
squeaking hard wood floor revealed an access point where with the aide of a
large screwdriver he unearthed a stash of some thirty canvases rolled into a
log, most of which Angelo had painted in the 1930s before joining the military
and before his Haitian experience that had catapulted him to fame. The stash of
paintings had obviously been hidden the entire time Angelo lived in Central
City, works he obviously cherished for personal reasons. Most were realistic
oil portraits of the avant-garde of Broadway circa the early 30s: actors,
writers, Prima Donnas, opera singers and musicians, the New York artistic intelligentsia if you will, who looked the parts they played in
American culture with wild hairdos, clothing and appurtenances. But two of the
paintings were like no other. Painted in 1937, they were a pair of Diego
Rivera-esque murals illustrating a di Benedetto family farm in Connecticut
circa the early Twentieth Century. In one the farmers were clean-shaven
unadorned men and women, plainly dressed, who looked as if they just arrived
from Italy fresh off the boat, tilling and planting a hillside in spring with
manual implements and an open book. In the next the autumnal hillside was
prolific with fruits and vegetables ready for harvest and the farmers had grown
into their true selves with beards and mustaches, forsaking the clean cut look
they’d employed to pass through Ellis Island. As they were not priced I offered the nephew a C note each
for the pair because they were the same size as paintings priced likewise. He
accepted my offer because of what I’d done for the family in terms of arranging
the memorial and I walked away with what I’m sure were two of Angelo’s most
prized possessions, things he had hidden because he did not want to sell them,
because he did not want to be a poor artist, an almost other worldly chain of
events starting with, if you will, a squeak from beyond the grave that more
than made up for me not getting a percentage of the deal I brokered a decade
earlier.
