When Harry Met The Fire Princess
The one you just finished for this exhibition is an homage to a portrait of Harry Crosby based on a painting by Polia Chenthoff...
As a side note, that’s another thing I really love about art versus music – and this interview is a perfect example – you talk about the actual art and the things involved with it. It’s such a different thing to talk about. If it’s a good interview I love talking about music, but talking about art is relatively new for me and it’s exciting to do. Polia Chenthoff was a Russian painter that the Crosbys became a friend of. They held a place in the arts district of Paris and she came over and painted – Harry commissioned a piece to have Polia paint [Harry’s wife] Caresse. They loved it so much they had her do a painting of Harry Crosby, who eventually killed himself with his lover. Not his wife. So ultimately they commissioned her to paint them both separately.
It was the early 1900s and Harry was a very flamboyant, odd duck, which is why I’m so entranced by him. The painting of Caresse still exists, but the painting that she did of Harry is one of the creepiest paintings that I’ve ever seen and there’s no blood or gore. There’s a violence to it but it’s a soft violence, which, to me, is the best/worst kind. When he killed himself, it took on this whole new, very morose, almost corpse-like depiction of the guy and she burned it. So the new piece that I have for this show is of Harry and it involves that story. I mean, don’t even get me started! It’s fascinating.
The tally marks on his face represent the age when he died, right?
Yeah, that’s correct. If I’m doing my math right, he shot himself when he was 31, so that’s implied in the painting.
And what’s the significance of the word ‘sun’?
A poem he did was called Black Sun. He was all about symbology and the placement of words, of course, but he took his poetry very literally. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was basically one long suicide note. And one of his poems just said “black black black black black” all lowercase, and then right in the middle of the poem it just says ‘SUN’ in all caps. So what I did was write ‘black’ a bunch of times in oil marker and then put shellac over it, so when you see it in person you can see it says ‘black’ – which is in white – and then ‘SUN’ is written in black.
He ran the Black Sun Press and the biography I read on him was called Black Sun. He was a pagan and a sun worshipper. And a heathen and a drunk. He was a poet, a total slut and he lived really hard and really fast. He was the nephew of JP Morgan, who ran a little bank called Chase. He came from all this fortune and opportunity, but something in him said ‘Fuck this’ and he enlisted in the French ambulance corps and drove an ambulance to the front lines during World War One where he was shelled. They think he was already a reckless soul, but after he was shelled and witnessed all that death he just became lawless and really intriguing.