Partner Joe LeSueur, Larry Rivers

Queer Places:
St John's High School, 378 Main St, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
New England Conservatory of Music, 290 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
326 E 49th St, New York, NY 10017
441 E 9th St, New York, NY 10009
San Remo Café, 93 Macdougal St, New York, NY 10012
Green River Cemetery, 787 Accabonac Rd, East Hampton, NY 11937

Image result for Frank O’HaraFrancis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements. "You are ruining American poetry, O'Hara," a bellicose Jack Kerouac once shouted at him at a reading. O'Hara instantly and witheringly returned fire: "That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac."

O'Hara had three major romantic relationships, including Larry Rivers, the love of his life. It was a stormy and not entirely mutual relationship in every dimension: at O'Hara's funeral Rivers, though he had slept often with O'Hara, called him, not his lover, but his "best friend." Always somewhat on the rebound from Rivers, O'Hara also had affairs with Vincent Warren and Bill Berkson. Warren, an handsome but rather flighty Metropolitan Opera dancer, not O'Hara's usual type, became O'Hara's love object and chief muse in his early thirties; the result a cycle of no less than fifty poems. Warren, however, was only twenty; "the whole tragedy about Frank and me... is that he loved me," Warren later admitted, "and I didn't know how to love at that age. It scared me. He gave the poems to me and I never could know what to say." Berkson, on the other hand, a Brown output, also twenty-something (though O'Hara by then approaching forty), was full of "patrician reserve, bohemian curiosity, intelligence and politeness and brash rudeness", much more in O'Hara league. In Berkson's case the demon was not age but sex; though the relationship was an intimate one, friend, confidant, sounding board, collaborator, soul mate, it was not physical enough for Berkson, who did not find O'Hara physically attractive, perhaps the deciding factor in their breakup. It was "like being friends in the eight grade," Berkson complained.


Grace Hartigan with Frank O'Hara

JOHN JONAS GRUEN
JOHN JONAS GRUEN Frank O'Hara Smiles, Southampton, NY 1961 gelatin-silver print 13 x 10 inches

LARRY RIVERS and FRANK O'HARA
LARRY RIVERS and FRANK O'HARA Portrait and Poem Painting 1961 oil on canvas Private Collection

NELL BLAINE Frank III
NELL BLAINE Frank III 1952 India ink and traces of graphite on paper 12 x 9 inches Private Collection

LARRY RIVERS Frank O'Hara
LARRY RIVERS Frank O'Hara c.1955 plaster 15 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches Private Collection

GRACE HARTIGAN and FRANK O'HARA
GRACE HARTIGAN and FRANK O'HARA Oranges no. 11 1952 oil on paper 44 1/2 x 35 inches Marie-Helene and Guy Weill Family Collection

GRACE HARTIGAN and FRANK O'HARA
GRACE HARTIGAN and FRANK O'HARA Oranges no. 5 1952 oil on paper 44 1/2 x 35 inches Marie-Helene and Guy Weill Family Collection

LARRY RIVERS and FRANK O'HARA
LARRY RIVERS and FRANK O'HARA Stones 1959 suite of thirteen lithographs 18 x 23 inches

JOE BRAINARD and FRANK O'HARA
JOE BRAINARD and FRANK O'HARA I"m Not Really Flying, I'm Thinking 1964 collage and ink on paper 10 x 8 inches Collection Bill Berkson and Connie Lewallen, San Francisco

JOE BRAINARD and FRANK O'HARA
JOE BRAINARD and FRANK O'HARA I Grew This Mustache... 1964 collage and ink on paper 12 x 9 3/4 inches Collection Bill Berkson and Connie Lewallen, San Francisco


Poets Dressed and Undressed, two panels portraying Joe Brainard, Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima, by Wynn Chamberlain


441 E 9th St

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and has been described as sounding "like entries in a diary".[1] Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".[2] O'Hara's writing sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."[1]

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen (Knopf, 1971), the first of several posthumous collections, shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry.[3]

Frank O'Hara, the son of Russell Joseph O'Hara and Katherine (née Broderick), was born on March 27, 1926,[4] at Maryland General Hospital, Baltimore and grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts. He attended St. John's High School. He grew up believing he had been born in June, but in fact had been born in March, his parents having disguised his true date of birth because he was conceived out of wedlock.[5] O'Hara first sexual experience was with a stable boy in a barn on his family's farm. He studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944 and served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

With the funding made available to veterans he attended Harvard University, where artist and writer Edward Gorey was his roommate. O'Hara was heavily influenced by visual art and by contemporary music, which was his first love (he remained a fine piano player all his life and would often shock new partners by suddenly playing swathes of Rachmaninoff when visiting them). His favorite poets were Pierre Reverdy,[6] Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love of music, O'Hara changed his major and graduated from Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. Once at Harvard, the 20 years old O'Hara kept the private screen around himself and though many began to sense he was different, no one called him out during his freshman or sophomore year. His Grafton friends came to realize that O'Hara had no sexual interest in girls, but the subject remained unmentioned. The O'Hara began to reveal himself under the friendship of Edward Gorey, who would later gain fame as a macabre illustrator. Another freshman veteran, Gorey was tall and dressed flamboyantly in black. Becoming roommates, they decorated their Eliot House suite with lawn furniture and a tombstone used as a table. Gorey often fell asleep in the living room after all-nighters spent designing wall paper and drawing ghoulish Edwardian cartoons using India ink. Some of O'Hara's music department friends thought that Gorey had corrupted him. O'Hara and Gorey were not lovers but they consciously adopted the highly stylized manners of an Oscar Wilde-era couple.

In his senior year O'Hara moved away from Gorey and was finally able to come out. He had several discrete liasons with other students and began to enjoy seducing men. That year, O'Hara had a relationship with a non-veteran student from the class of 1950, Lawrence Osgood. A native of Buffalo, Osgood had dropped out for a year for psychoanalysis in Philadelphia and then continued to see a therapist to deal with his homosexuality. After a night of drinking that ended with them back in O'Hara room with a bottle of Southern Comfort, O'Hara and Osgood were dancing to Marlene Dietrich records when O'Hara decided he wanted Osgood. I was Osgood's first time with a man and O'Hara kept asking him if he was okay. Osgood saw the evening as the beginning of a relationship, while O'Hara just wanted a one night stand.

In the early 1950s, Edward Gorey, with a group of recent Harvard alumni including Alison Lurie (1947), John Ashbery (1949), Donald Hall (1951) and Frank O'Hara (1950), amongst others, founded the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, which was supported by Harvard faculty members John Ciardi and Thornton Wilder.[6][7][8] He frequently stated that his formal art training was "negligible"; Gorey studied art for one semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943.[9]

O'Hara attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. While at Michigan, he won a Hopwood Award and received his M.A. in English literature in 1951. James Schuyler met Frank O'Hara at a party in John Bernard Myers's 9th Street apartment after a Larry Rivers opening at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. O'Hara and Schuyler shared an apartment at 326 E 49th Street, on and off, from 1952 until January 1957.

In 1951 Dwight Ripley offered to back the Tibor de Nagy Gallery opened by John Bernard Myers as gallery director. Dwight missed the excitement generated by Peggy Guggenheim's art gallery, closed in 1947 when she followed the last of the exiled Surrealist back to Europe. In London, his Oxford contemporary Peter Watson had helped found the Institute of Contemporary Arts and was planning shows to feature the painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Encouraged, probably goaded by this example, Dwight turned to his art-critic friend Clement Greenberg for help. On the Monday evening of January 23, 1950, he took aspiring art dealer John Bernard Myers to Greenberg's apartment in Greenwich Village. "Ripley and John Myers," confirmed Greenberg's biographer 47 years later, "came to Clem's apartment to consult with him about a noncommercial gallery that Ripley would finance as silent backer and Myers would run." Greenberg suggested the initial artists, Dwight wrote the first check, and the result was Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which opened its doors that December and rapidly became one of the influential art galleries in New York. In its first full year Dwight provided the gallery with more than 5.000$, or five time its annual rent. This was an historic contribution. Tibor de Nagy sponsored the first solo shows of Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Fairfield Porter, artists whose works would alter the conventions, then supreme, of Abstract Expressionism. When the gallery's director John Myers published the first chapbooks of poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, Dwight's support altered the conventions of poetry as well.

Rupert Barneby owned a copy of Frank O'Hara's Oranges, its cover individually painted by Grace Hartigan, who in those days signed herself George. It was inscribed "to darling Dwight and Rupert, oranges and kisses, George."

In December 1955 John Wieners worked on a production of Finnegan's Wake at the Cambridge Poets' Theatre. There, Wieners met Frank O'Hara while an understudy for O'Hara's role in a play and the two bonded. They hung out at Cronin's on Dunster St, and on the banks of the Charles. O'Hara was staying in an apartment over the Wursthaus in Harvard Square at the time.

At the end of the 1950s O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York City with Joe LeSueur, who would be his roommate and sometime lover for the next 11 years.[7] It was during this time that he began teaching at The New School.

Known throughout his life for his extreme sociability, passion, and warmth, O'Hara had hundreds of friends and lovers throughout his life, many from the New York art and poetry worlds. Soon after arriving in New York, he was employed at the Museum of Modern Art, selling postcards at the admissions desk, and began to write seriously.

O'Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Artnews, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also a friend of the artists Norman Bluhm, Mike Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers.

In the early morning hours of July 24, 1966, O'Hara was struck by a jeep on the Fire Island beach, after the beach taxi in which he had been riding with a group of friends broke down in the dark.[8][9][10][11] He died the next day of a ruptured liver. Attempts to bring negligent homicide charges against 23-year-old driver Kenneth L. Ruzicka were unsuccessful; many of O'Hara's friends felt the local police had conducted a lax investigation to protect one of their own locals.[12] O'Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery on Long Island.[13] The painter Larry Rivers, a longtime friend and lover[14] of O'Hara's, delivered one of the eulogies, along with Bill Berkson, Edwin Denby and René d'Harnoncourt.[15]

My published books:

Amazon Logo Nero 010.pngSee my published books

BACK TO HOME PAGE