Art history for the day

Elisabetta Povoledo has an article in The New York Times about a two-artist painting:

One story has it that it was only when they co-signed the canvas they had just painted together, on a fall day in 1966, that Franco Angeli discovered the identity of his fellow artist: Jack Kerouac.
Another has the men collaborating on their depiction of the Deposition, the moment when Jesus is taken from the cross, after visiting the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo and admiring paintings by the Baroque bad-boy Caravaggio.
While details are fuzzy on the circumstances of their first meeting— some versions say Angeli found a bloodied Kerouac lying on the street outside a bar and took him home— all accounts seem to agree that Kerouac was drunk.
Beyond that, not much is known about the creation of the painting, which has been in a private collection for four decades and will go on public view this week, for the first time in years, at an exhibition of Angeli’s photographs at the Museum of the Imperial Forums in Rome. Certainly its creators can’t provide much information; Kerouac died from cirrhosis in 1969 and Angeli died of AIDS, after decades of drug abuse, in 1988.
“Franco and Kerouac had something together,” said Marina Ripa di Meana, a former fashion designer who is married to the show’s curator, Carlo Ripa di Meana, and who was Angeli’s lover in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “They were certainly potential partners in crime, and they were both attuned to the same things.”
Mr. Ripa di Meana, an environmentalist and former politician, knew of the painting and decided to include it in the show after a revival of Italian interest in Kerouac’s work. In recent months, translations have been published in Italy of On the Road: The Original Scroll, Mexico City Blues, and And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a 1945 novel by Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, along with ebook versions of nearly twenty Kerouac novels.
Kerouac, it seems, saw the making of the painting as a high point of his 1966 trip to Italy. According to Paul Maher Jr. in his 2004 biography of the writer, Kerouac wrote to his agent, Sterling Lord, that “apart from visiting the Vatican, singing poorly in a Rome nightclub, and painting a Pietà with the Italian artist Franco Angeli in his studio, he did not see the sense in having gone to Italy at all.”
Angeli too seemed to think highly of the collaboration, holding onto the painting— a composition of roughly sketched haloed figures congregating around a cross— until 1970 or so.
“He didn’t want to sell it, he was very attached to it, but Franco always needed money,” said Armenia Balducci, the actress and screenwriter who bought the painting with her husband, Gian Maria Volonté, the movie actor and leftist, and kept it after they separated. (Mr. Volonté died in 1994.) It now hangs in the dining room of her home near Piazza Navona. “It’s certainly something special, a glimpse onto their sense of spirituality, perhaps.”
Although both Angeli and Kerouac are known as anti-establishment figures, there is none of that in the Deposition painting, which is a traditional, if modern, representation of a well-known theme. But most people familiar with the men agree that its subject matter was likely chosen by Kerouac.
“My father was an atheist, he came from a family of atheists, they were definitely not religious,” said Angeli’s daughter, Maria, who runs the Archivio Franco Angeli in Rome and said it was unusual for her father to paint such a spiritual scene: “He was very political and against symbols of any kind.”
On the other hand, Kerouac, who was born into a family of observant Catholics of French Canadian heritage, frequently turned to religious themes in his own paintings, of which there are hundreds, said Edward J. Adler, a former professor of painting at New York University and the author of Departed Angels: The Lost Paintings, which catalogs the works. “Al Aronowitz, a reporter for The New York Post in the 1950s, said that he’d interviewed Kerouac, who told him that if he hadn’t been a writer, he would have been a painter,” Mr. Adler said in a telephone interview. Kerouac’s notebooks at the New York Public Library are thick with “little sketches,” he added.
Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University professor and the editor of Kerouac’s journals, said in a phone interview that “when he rediscovered his Catholic heritage, he embraced the iconography, drawing crucifixes and rosaries in his notebooks,” and painting popes. “Kerouac embraced the pageantry of Catholicism,” he said, adding that he also painted many Buddhas. For Kerouac, who sought comfort in God from a life riven by alcoholism and depression, religious themes like the Crucifixion and the Resurrection “were not a joke,” Mr. Brinkley said. “There is no blasphemy in Kerouac.”
Angeli and Kerouac’s Deposition has captured the favorable attention of the Vatican, which last week published an article in its house newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, trumpeting the “fervent” Catholicism that also pervades much of Kerouac’s literary work. Sandro Barbagallo, the paper’s art critic, wrote that the painting “helps to further demonstrate the profound religious sensibility of the American writer who spent his life on an endless search.”

Rico says Kerouac was a painter? Who knew?