The Itinerant series, as the Francis paintings came to be called, was the realization of Peter’s new artistic credo: profligacy in the service of certitude. He came to believe that he could and would paint for decades to come, and that there was no such thing as too much prefatory creation to any given work. But he did not behave in any way that supported his new flirtation with infinity. When he removed himself into silence he also began to ignore his personal life. He grew further estranged from Claire, remote from me (which I didn’t understand; and I felt myself guilty for having done something I had perhaps not understood, or did not know I’d done; but I had not done anything except witness his fratricidal behavior), his personal hygiene deteriorated to the level of the most unwashed of those bohemians in whose midst he lived; his work as an illustrator, more in demand than ever, became loathsome to him, and he did less and less of it until his income was zero, and in this latter action he achieved a secondary goaclass="underline" to so impoverish himself that he would henceforth be of no help whatever to Claire in supporting the house.
He was slowly converting himself into a replica of Francis at trackside: man without goal, home, family, or money, with only his wits to keep him alive. This was art imitating life, artist imitating man who lives or dies, who cares? Art be damned. Useless art. Pointless art. Now is the time to live or perish.
In this way Peter moved forward, trying to discover how the phantasm of death is visually framed in this life.
Peter concealed his Itinerant series for two years after he completed it, his first manifestation of that reclusive temperament that would continue for another two decades, and sold only three unrelated oil portraits (commissioned) to support himself. His year of silence had obviously fed his imagination, and led to the creative explosion he could no longer keep to himself. Critics who subsequently wrote about these paintings gave Peter his first leg up to fame, finding in them the originality he’d long sought, and either ignoring his earlier work or relegating it to the status of preparatory effort. They did not yet see that all six paintings had their subliminal inspiration in one late masterwork by Hieronymus Bosch, even to the name: The Peddler, or The Tramp, or The Landloper, or The Prodigal Son, as the Bosch work was variously called.
I doubt seriously Peter ever knew all the parallels the Bosch would have to his own work, his own family. He was not derivative, always argued against emulating the Impressionists who had so moved the American artistic world in the Armory Show in that year of his arrival in Greenwich Village, 1913. He resisted also the thrust of the Surrealists, who dominated the direction of art in the 1930s and 1940s. Peter used all these schools in his own way, never fitting any categories; yet the critics, after The Itinerant series, linked him to proletarian realists and Depression agitators, all of whom he might admire in principle, but would loathe in the particular for their politically partisan cheerleading.
An Interview with Peter Phelan
by Orson Purcell
O: These Itinerant paintings, they’re all about your brother Francis, are they not?
P: No. They’re not about anybody.
O: Who is the tramp figure in the paintings?
P: He’s anybody, nobody.
O: How can you tell me this when you and I were watching as Francis stepped onto the tracks and then off?
P: Artistically I never saw that.
O: You’re clearly lying, even to yourself.
P: All art is a lie.
O: Is your life a lie as well?
P: More often than not.
O: With the success of this art do you consider yourself an arrived man, a famous artist?
P: I will never arrive, but I’m famous with my friends.
O: Who would they be?
P: They’re all dead. Their names no longer matter.
O: What motivated you to paint The Itinerant series?
P: The paintings, as they took shape.
O: The paintings inspired themselves?
P: That’s how it happens. There is nothing and then there is a painting.
O: But things happen to make you arrive at a certain subject matter.
P: No. Nothing happens ever. There is no subject matter until the painting exists.
O: You are putting the egg before the chicken. What makes the egg?
P: The artist. He is an egg factory. He needs no chickens.
O: No guilt or envy or enmity or smoldering hatred or fratricidal impulse ever inspires art?
P: I know nothing of any of that.
O: You talk as if you have no internal life, as if only an empty canvas exists on which you, a mindless vessel, an automated brush, shape the present. This is the school of unconscious art, is it not?
P: You see this painting here? That’s a shoulder bone. This is a chest bone.
O: Whose bones are they?
P: Anybody’s. Nobody’s.
O: Why did you paint them?
P: Because they emerged.
O: Then they are your bones.
P: Quite possibly.
O: Just as The Itinerant, if not Francis, is then you?
P: I wouldn’t deny it.
O: What else wouldn’t you deny? Paternity, perhaps?
P: What?
O: I say paternity?
P: What?
O: I suggest that all your work and hence all your life is a parody of that subconscious you so revere. I suggest you cannot even take that deepest part of yourself seriously, that you have trouble acknowledging your status as a human being, as well as the status of your son, whom you treat as one of your works of art, disclaiming responsibility for him, allowing him to float free in the universe, devoid even of the right to the intentional fallacy. Your stance suggests you did not even intend him as quantitatively as one of your paintings, and so he remains a happenstance of history. Tell me if I am close.
P: Art is the ideation of an emotion.
O: Do I qualify as a work of art?
P: Art is the ineffable quotient of the work, the element that emerges when the work is done, that does not itself exist in the spatial qualities of the finished painting. Art has no subject matter.
O: Then neither do I.
P: Art is a received conception.
O: I am here, therefore I was conceived.
P: The conception of art has no logic and means nothing.
O: What does mean anything?
P: Art, as it exists.
O: What does art do after it exists?
P: It represents, it symbolizes, it expresses. Art is impact.
O: On whom? On what?
P: On the universe.
O: I doubt it.
P: Doubt is an impaction.
O: As a work of art I doubt myself, my conception, my creation.
P: A theory and its opposite may coexist in the same mind. The unavowed is the companion of mystery.
O: And mystery is the secret of art and paternity.
P: As you like it. As you like it.
Two
I was home from Germany five and a half months in March of 1953 when I visited with my mother for the first time in four years. We talked on the phone from time to time but she consistently put off any meeting. She was no longer Claire Purcell. She now called herself Belinda Love (not legally) and said at last she’d meet me, under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel, because she saw that happen once in a movie.
I arranged my one outing of the week for that day, a visit to the publishing house for which I was editing and tidying up the erotic memoirs of Meriwether Macbeth, an extroverted and pseudonymous bohemian writer and sometime actor who was having a renascent vogue as a result of having been murdered. This was an assignment that seemed doable to me, first because it was the story of a real life lived in Greenwich Village, my environment of the moment; and further because Peter had known Macbeth personally in the 1920s and loathed his acting, his writing, his ideas, his presence, and his odor.