Richard Merkin, Prince Valiant Pop Art 1969 Color Screenprint Richard Merkin, 1969

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Poetry by J.D. REED Artwork by Richard Merkin screenprint in color, 1969, edition 22/50 Published by Bizzaro, Providence, R.I. Richard … Read more Poetry by J.D. REED Artwork by Richard Merkin screenprint in color, 1969, edition 22/50 Published by Bizzaro, Providence, R.I. Richard Marshall Merkin (1938-2009) was an American painter, illustrator and arts educator. Merkin's fascination with the 1920s and 1930s defined his art and shaped his identity as a professional dandy. Merkin traveled back in time as an artist, to the time of the interwar years, creating narrative scenes (ala Robert Crumb and Ben Katchor) in bright colors of jazz musicians, film stars, writers, and sports heroes. Merkin was as well known for his painting and illustration work as he was for his eccentric collecting habits and his outré fashion sense. he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship in Painting. Merkin began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1963 and remained there for 42 years, during which time he built his reputation in New York. Some notable students Merkin taught at RISD include Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the band Talking Heads and Martin Mull. Merkin had been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair since 1986 and a regular contributor of illustrations to The New Yorker since 1988, as well as Harper's and The New York Times' Sunday Magazine. From 1988–1991, he wrote a monthly style column called "Merkin on Style" for Gentlemen's Quarterly. Merkin also designed several album covers for the Jazz record label Chiaroscuro Records for artists such as Mary Lou Williams, Ruby Braff, and Ellis Larkins. Merkin's friend, the writer Tom Wolfe wrote in an email to the New York Times upon Merkin's death: "He was the greatest of that breed, the Artist Dandy, since Sargent, Whistler and Salvador Dali, Like Dali, he had one of the few remaining Great Mustaches in the art world" Perpetually on the fly from his middle-class Brooklyn background, Merkin found the perfect escape in the mid ‘60s in George Frazier, a dapper Boston columnist who inspired the emerging New York painter’s overnight reinvention of himself. The elements of structure, stability and surprise he admired in this well-dressed dandy, a cool linen suit, a splash of suspender, a polka dot scarf and pearl-handled walking stick, soon surfaced in paintings peopled by impeccable underdogs of café society along with his personal pop heroes, William Burroughs, Bobby Short and Krazy Kat. He was also a friend of the novelist Tom Wolfe and was influenced by the artist R.B. Kitaj. He has exhibited in countless gallery and museum shows in the US and abroad and is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the RISD museum and many others. In addition to contributing drawings and paintings to The New Yorker (along with, Art Spiegelman, Saul Steinberg, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and several books on Erotica and Baseball, he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a former style columnist for GQ. Merkin’s honors include a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Museums and Selected Collections : The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, RI Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, Philadelphia PA Prudential Insurance Company, Boston, Ma Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Selected Publications : 1986-Present Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair. 1988-Present, New Yorker. 1988-Present, style column, GQ 1997, Text and Illustration for The Tijuana Bibles, published by Simon & Shuster, 1995, Illustrated book, Leagues Apart: the Men and Times of the Negro Baseball Leagues published by Morrow. 1967 Cover of the Beatles “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” Album (Mr. Merkin appears in the back row, right of center) See less