GILBERT SORRENTINO
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light as being very hard and brittle, a bad painter's light-for that
kind of painter, yes; but for an abstract painter it was an excellent
light, a dry light. In any event, they all started to hang around the
Cedar when it became a bar, because it was nearby. They dropped in
at four or five o'clock in the afternoon in their painters' clothes
to
have a couple of beers. I got to know the Cedar, and soon after that it
came to be a bar for artists of all stripes.
In those early days, painters and writers didn't have much to say
to each other. Slowly it changed. A writer of "the new persuasion," if
you will, had much more rapport with an abstract painter than he
had with a writer of a 1940 sensibility.
It
was all very exciting;
everything was happening at once. Right in the middle of it, Black
Mountain closed. All those people who were at Black Mountain had
to go somewhere. Most of them came to New York. Those who didn't
went to San Francisco, so you had these two "colonies."
The Cedar was a remarkable place and became a famous bar; the
more famous it became, the more impossible.
It
finally became a
place where the wealthy came on Friday and Saturday to see the
beasts, the animals in their lair. John and Sam, though, were
unimpressed. John was a dear friend of Pollock, Kline, Guston, and
De Kooning. He took longer to warm up to the writers. John used to
be a window washer before he took over the Cedar. A story goes that
he took painting lessons secretly: he didn't want anyone to know
because his personality was that of a tough truck driver. Sam had
been a butcher, born and raised in Greenwich Village on Bleeker
Street. Sam was more of a businessman.
That was when almost everybody was broke. And the painting
community was a much smaller one at t.he time. Somebody has made
the point that one of the reasons why the first generation abstract
expressionist painters were unspoiled was because their fame and
wealth came to them too late to reall y matter. These were men in
their mid-forties. They had all been broke for years. Suddenly, they
had one-man shows and were instantly world celebrities.
It
was
amusing. They had stood at the bar all their lives with three dollars
in their pockets. Now they were standing at the same bar with five
hundred dollars in their pockets. The same men, the same beer.
Nothing really changed them much.
Barone:
What was the price of a beer in those days?
Sorrentino:
It
was a dime. Ten cents a beer at the Cedar and every
fourth round on the house. There used to be an "artist's special," not
so-called, but that's what it was. The Cedar made marvelous soup, a
