Max Starkloff: A Retrospective

M A X STA R K LO F F A RETROSPECTIVE

bruno david gallery

MAX STARKLOFF A RETROSPECTIVE

March 27 - June 27, 2015 Bruno David Gallery 3721 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63108, U.S.A. info@brunodavidgallery.com www.brunodavidgallery.com Owner/Director: Bruno L. David This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition “Max Starkloff: A Retrospective” at Bruno David Gallery.

Editor: Bruno L. David and Christine Bubbico Catalogue Designer: Eileen Milford and Laine Johnson Designer Assistant: Claudia R. David Printed in USA All works courtesy of Colleen Kelly Starkloff and Bruno David Gallery Photographs by Bruno David Gallery Cover image: The Assasination, 1968 (detail) Acrylic on board 34-7/8 x 21 inches (88.58 x 53.34 cm) First Edition Copyright © 2015 Bruno David Gallery All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of Bruno David Gallery, Inc.

CONTENTS

MAX STARKLOFF

BY ROBERT W. DUFFY BROAD AND BRAZEN STROKES

BY CHARLES. E. CLAGGETT MAX

BY COLLEEN KELLY STARKLOFF Afterword

BY BRUNO L. DAVID CHECKLIST AND IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION BIOGRAPHY

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MAX J. STARKLOFF

BY ROBERT W. DUFFY

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The writer, Charlie Claggett, advanced the notion of Max Starkloff’s charm forcefully in his biography of the late social activist and advocate. Certainly the description rang true for all of us who encountered Max on the street or at a meeting of one sort or another.

His charm was as radiant and affecting as it was evident.

Maintaining the charm and the good spirits cannot have been easy. When Sunday, August 9 dawned in 1959, Starkloff had not only that special charm, but plenty of other qualities going for him. He wasn’t a rich kid but he was a fellow with all sorts of personal credentials. He had noble Prussian ancestors on his father’s side. He was tall, athletic, and popular with just about everyone, particularly girls. He was a regular at the best parties in St. Louis like many young men, he liked fast cars and held down jobs primarily to get enough money to buy them.

On August 10, the fun was crushed. Starkloff rolled his Austin Healey bugeye Sprite on the way home from a party at Emmet and Ursula Kelly’s farm in Defiance, Missouri. The wreck left him a quadriplegic, and dropped him into the world of the disabled. A world that, in 1959 was the equivalent of limbo on earth, if not the equivalent of hell. Generally entering that world meant entering hopelessness. Some of his friends and certainly those looking at him from outside his circle must have believed it was all over for Max. And for many in his condition in 1959, they’d have been right.

Max Starkloff was a big fellow. For a while his mother, Hertha Starkloff, was determined to care for him at home. Eventually that aspiration proved impossible. One bad day the determined and formidable Mrs. Starkloff drove her son to a Roman Catholic nursing home, St. Joseph’s Hill Infirmary, in Eureka, where one assumed he’d spend the rest of his life. Before long, however, he gave lie to that assumption and began to turn his life around.

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One person in particular helped him to begin turning things around - a determined, ingenious and insistent Franciscan monk, Brother Matthew, who lived in a monastery on the grounds of St. Joseph’s. Brother Matthew was an art-school graduate and a World War II hero. He had a studio in the monastery. He had taught other quadriplegics to paint by holding their brushes in their mouths. He taught Max this technique.

I knew fragments of this story when I walked over to the Bruno David Gallery earlier this year. I figured what I would find in the retrospective of Max’s art on show there would be somewhere between bright and appealing kindergarten abstractions and the primitivism of Grandma Moses.

Prejudicial thinking is distracting and easily can derail one’s obligation to fairness; it can afflict even the most scrupulously neutral reporter. When you have an idée fixe going into a situation, often you will pound that square notion into a round hole to make it fit your prejudice. Thus I was stunned when I walked into the gallery, and realized there was no possible way to make Max and his work conform to my preconceived notions, or those of anyone else. His work was too original. His work represented too serious and authentic an achievement to receive attention that was either gentle on one hand or condescending on the other.

Starkloff’s work, while fledgling, dwells in the flow of 20th century expressionism: Max Beckmann, may I introduce you to Max Starkloff? By definition, his work is not only seen but felt. The best of it is anguished; no surprise there. Whatever it is, or whatever it portrays or presents in the abstract, it is affecting and valued.

This painterly apotheosis of Max was assisted by all sorts of people – his mother, Hertha; his wife Colleen, who carries on his work at the Starkloff Disability Institute; his children and friends; his fellow soldiers in the fight for equity for the disabled. Charlie Claggett is a major character in this drama. He recognized not only Max’s charm but his dynamism, and has spread his appreciation around in “Max Starkloff and the Fight for Disability Rights.”

But the way I see all this, it was Brother Matthew who set Max Starkloff on his way to a special and thrilling form of redemption.

By directing Max Starkloff away from deserved despond to genuine achievement, an American hero and man for all ages emerged.

A man who understood life in limbo, and perhaps in hell, and through that complex and painful understanding summoned up the strength and courage to lead others out of the gloom.

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Art, as is true with anything that matters, is hard work. Hard work is required to imagine it and to realize it, and then there is another reality - bringing it to the attention of an often resistant public. Similarly, changing attitudes and rules for the disabled has been, and remains, punishingly difficult. it is not too much of a stretch to conclude that having understood the challenges to making art, Starkloff could confront the difficulties involved in the opening of too heavy, too narrow doors, and too hardened and too narrow (or ambivalent) hearts, for the benefit of men and women whose lives hitherto were proscribed by disabilities.

Art is integral to this achievement, the complex, sometimes painful evolution of pentimento. Having risen from the wreckage of a bugeye Sprite, with paint brush clenched in his teeth and images painted in telling shapes and forms, Max’s spirit lives on. It soars, and urges all of us to achieve and to understand, and to hallow such an ascendant and awe-inspiring journey, one leading to enduring greatness.

Robert W. Duffy is a Saint louis-based writer. This text is one in a series of the gallery’s exhibitions written by fellow gallery artists and friends.

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BROAD AND BRAZEN STROKES

BY CHARLIE CLAGGETT

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Late in the afternoon on Monday, October 14, 1963, Max Starkloff met Brother Matthew. “He saved my life,” Max would recall. At the age of 25 Max was sitting in his wheelchair by himself in a nursing home, operated by an order of Franciscan Brothers, located in Eureka, Missouri. Four years earlier at the age of 21 he had been paralyzed from the neck down in an auto accident and doctors assumed he had only days to live. On this day Max felt destined to live the rest of his life in a home for aged and infirm men.

Brother Matthew, a Franciscan artist, offered to teach Max how to paint. He positioned Max close to the canvas, squeezed tubes of colors onto a palette, and began teaching Max how to draw simple shapes with a brush clenched between his teeth. Soon Max was painting six hours a day.

By the winter of 1964, only four months after meeting Brother Matthew, a reporter from the St. Louis Globe Democrat, Nell Gross, had heard of the young quadriplegic painter cloistered in a Franciscan infirmary. She wrote in the paper’s Sunday magazine, “With the jaunty air of a Continental clenching a cigarette holder, the handsome young man grips his brush. Then with bold, broad strokes he sweeps the canvas with a blaze of powerful color.

“Plunging into art with the same dauntless courage he developed during the troubled last four years, Max now dashes off paintings at the rate of two a week. His first seven, recently displayed at Kenrick Seminary, sold at $25 each.

“Between work sessions, he lives and dreams painting and studies history of art. Ideas for new paintings come faster than he can paint them; his mind rushes with pictures demanding expression.”

Max started painting out of curiosity and because he desperately wanted to keep his mind active. As he explored the world of art, he became interested in many painters, particularly the German expressionists. “A lot of Expressionist work was very angry,” Max said.

“As was my own work. I identified with the way they expressed their feelings in their work. Expressionism really intrigued me.”

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A diary entry dated March 31, 1970 gives a glimpse of what Max was feeling at this time. “What plays an important role in my painting is my being paralyzed. Losing my sense of touch and the ability to move adds a burden to understanding the anatomy along with feeling textures. But the other senses become more alert.”

By 1969, Max had established himself as an artist, displaying and selling his paintings. But at that time another interest had taken hold. Watching television as the Civil Rights Movement unfolded, Max began to wonder whether his rights and others with disabilities were being addressed. He gave up painting and became a leader in the movement for independent living and disability rights.

He co-founded Paraquad, Inc. with his wife Colleen in 1970, and established it as one of the first 10 federally funded Independent Living Centers in the nation. Additionally, in 1982, he co-founded the National Council on Independent Living. Both organizations are thriving today.

Starkloff lobbied for legislation for curb cuts and disabled parking as well as for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In 1979 he won the prestigious St. Louis Award. He won a President’s Distinguished Service Award in 1991 from George H. W. Bush, and was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2008. Max was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1937. He died in December, 2010, at age 73.

Max Starkloff’s vision of a world that welcomes people with disabilities lives on at the Starkloff Disability Institute, which he cofounded in 2003. The Institute’s hallmark program, The Next Big Step, empowers the disabled to find competitive jobs, and promotes their inclusion in the workforce. This, Max’s final project, aims to lift people with disabilities out of poverty and into roles where their contributions and talents are valued.

Max Starkloff’s legacy of dedication to the ongoing fight for Civil Rights has changed the face of our nation, helping America to redefine the meaning of independence for the 21st century.

Looking back, Max says today that it was long periods of isolation and loneliness that, surprisingly, helped him the most. “Those early years, 1963-1970 were very critical years,” Max said. “Critical psychologically and emotionally. I didn’t know what I was getting into in 1963. Would I die at The Hill? Would I have friends? Would I be chronically lonely? There were no [Interstate] highways in those days, so it was quite a long drive for my friends. I was really frightened.”

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Max continued to express himself in his paintings. “One of my paintings showed an angry black man,” Max said. “Another was a portrait of a hippie with angry eyes.”

The monks talked about his work to each other and to Max. Upon seeing Max’s feelings expressed on canvas, some of the monks asked Max, “Why are you doing this? It’s not right.”

“So I started painting nudes just to shock them,” Max recalled with a grin. “And it worked, of course.”

“This is a big problem for me wanting to have an intelligent conversation and not being able to dig one up. When Mike Dahl was working here there was always a penetrating subject brought up. We were interested in much the same things and willing to discuss them. I miss this very much and sometimes find it very difficult to keep my mind from being wasted.”

“There must be encouragement from some direction because I believe as Eric Hoffer says ‘the artist is chronically insecure.’ A person can paint for months at a time and never have public encouragement. The painter needs recognition, not for the money because he could popularize himself with the public by doing what is ‘avant-garde’ or doing whatever will sell. He needs recognition of his honest work to instill confidence and to let him know that what he is doing is worthwhile.”

Charles E. Claggett is a Saint louis-based writer. He co-authored (with Richard H. Weiss) the recently published book “Max Starkloff and the Fight for Disability Rights”, published by the Missouri History Museum Press (2014). This text is one in a series of the gallery’s exhibitions written by fellow gallery artists and friends.

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MAX

BY COLLEEN KELLY STARKLOFF

Max J Starkloff was not a trained painter. He never read a book about art. He didn’t go to art shows or hang out with talented artists. He never had an art lesson before he took up art. No. Max painted from his heart and soul. He took up painting because he was experiencing a very dark period of time in his life.

In fact, there are many painters throughout history, and I suspect, even today, who took up painting for reasons other than to become great painters. Many people find in painting the satisfaction of being able to express oneself. And so it was with Max. When Brother Matthew Gallagher approached Max one day, late in 1963, and suggested he take up painting as a hobby, Max was less than enthused, but polite in his refusal. However, as the reality of his new surroundings settled in he began to think it surely couldn’t hurt to try painting. After all, it would give him something to do in this otherwise isolating setting in which he found himself.

Brother Matthew painted engaging little animals, happy and sad-faced clowns, babies in blue or pink bunting, etc. on old, scrap pieces of barn wood. He had a great following of people in the St. Louis region, who would often come to St. Joseph Hill Infirmary, to see and buy Brother Matthew’s whimsical paintings.

Brother Matthew, or “Matthew” as Max called him, began Max’s foray into art by teaching him to paint landscapes. He was sensitive to Max’s inability to hold a paint brush in his hand or squeeze paint onto a palette and offered creative solutions that Max found acceptable. Max learned to paint by holding the brush clenched between his back teeth. He would put the plastic ends of hypodermic needles onto the wooden handles of the brushes so he wouldn’t end up swallowing slivers of wood, while he held onto the brushes.

The palette was positioned on a raised platform that Max could swivel into place where he could reach it by pushing it with his brush. Someone was always around who could squeeze paint from tubes onto his palette. Then Max would mix the paints with his brush until he had the colors he wanted to put onto the canvas. He caught on quickly. And typical of Max, became very focused and absorbed by his early creations.

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Somewhere during these early days at St. Joseph’s Max began to read authors like Albert Camus and Rollo May. These readings played well into his desire and tendency to be very introspective. He began to analyze his own situation, which was becoming more and more frustrating to him. He was “incarcerated” against his own will. He did not use that term lightly, but never shared it with his family, because he never wanted to hurt his mother. She had no other recourse, that she knew of, for a place where Max could live and have personal assistance with the daily needs he now had because of his disability. He could not bath, dress, feed or get out of bed by himself. In fact, most people with his level of disability ended up in nursing homes during that period of time, the early 60’s in the U.S., just because there were no other affordable or conventional means for someone to continue to live at home and have the personal assistance they needed on a daily basis. For Max, institutionalization was tantamount to incarceration because one loses one’s self respect, dignity, and freedom to make decisions about one’s own life. Max fought that degradation daily.

People began to bring Max art books and he studied them avidly. Among all the artists he read about and studied, the German Expressionists spoke to him the most. In particular, Max Beckmann, one of the more prolific German Expressionists, really impressed Max and his painting style changed – that, coupled with the mounting frustration he felt living in a nursing home.

Because canvas was so flexible and Max found it difficult to control the paint and images he was painting onto the canvas, Max began to look for a solid surface on which to paint. He settled on flakeboard. It was strong and would not yield to the pressure of his brush or palette knife, which he came to also really like using because it gave interesting texture to his paintings.

However, he felt a new frustration. Many people who saw his work marveled at how he painted—by holding a paint brush in his mouth. That was degrading to Max. He wanted his work to stand on its own merit and not be praised for how he painted, rather what he painted. He had an opportunity to sell a painting to Martin Sheen, who was visiting the nursing home when he was a very young actor. The painting was of Spencer Tracy. Mr. Sheen knew Spencer Tracy and asked Max if he could have the painting to give to Mr. Tracy. Max, upset by the fact that Sheen made such reference to how Max painted, consulted with a local stained glass artist/friend, Emil Frei. Em told Max, “Do you want to be known as a painter who paints with a brush held between his teeth or as a good painter?”

Max did not give the painting to Martin Sheen.

Max only painted from late 1963 until early 1972. He was a serious painter and no longer had the appropriate amount of time to focus on painting. He had charted a new course—to change the lives of people like himself--people with disabilities. And in so doing, he changed the world!

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Afterword

BY BRUNO L. DAVID

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I am pleased to present a retrospective exhibition of paintings by artist and civil rights activist Max Starkloff, titled Max Starkloff: A Retrospective.

A couple of years ago, my friend Richard Weil introduced me to Colleen Starkloff and her late husband Max Starkloff’s artwork. I was familiar with Max’s career as a civil rights leader, but at that time had not been aware of his artistic endeavors. Upon viewing the paintings at Colleen’s house, I was deeply touched by Max’s creative mind and talent. That day, I told Colleen that although the world knew her husband’s incredible work in the Civil Rights movement, most people, such as myself, did not know that he was also an accomplished artist. I decided I would like to change that perception by putting together an exhibition of his paintings. This catalogue is the accomplishment of this exhibition, as created at Bruno David Gallery.

Max Starkloff’s legacy, both as an artist and activist, are celebrated in this exhibition. Beyond painting, Starkloff’s life-long dedication to the ongoing fight for Civil Rights has changed the face of our nation, helping America to redefine the meaning of independence for the 21st century. Outside the walls of the nursing home in Eureka, Missouri, Starkloff went on to lobby for legislation for curb cuts and disabled parking, as well as for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. He won a President’s Distinguished Service Award in 1991, and was awarded a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In the Media Arts Room, the gallery presents a short documentary (9:20 min) “Max Starkloff: A Life” by Gary Womack, detailing the life of Max Starkloff and his profound work as a Civil Rights leader and artist. Max Starkloff was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1937. He passed away in December 2010.

Support for significant works of art has been the core to the mission and programs of the Bruno David Gallery since its founding in 2005. The exhibition of Max Starkloff at the Bruno David Gallery would not be possible without Richard Weil’s tireless support of Max’s work, and without introducing me to his paintings. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Colleen Starkloff for allowing me to organize this exhibition and borrow his paintings from her personal collection. I would also like to thank Lori Becker for her support with the exhibition. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Robert Duffy, Charles E. Claggett, and Colleen Starkloff for their thoughtful essays. I am deeply grateful to Eileen Milford and Laine Johnson, who gave much time, talent, and expertise to the production of this catalogue, and to Christine Bubbico for the editing. Invaluable gallery staff support for the exhibition was provided by Keri Robertson, Cleo Azariadis, Eileen Milford, Daniel Stumeier.

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CHECKLIST & IMAGES OF THE EXHIBITION

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Untitled, 1970 Acrylic on board 28 x 24 inches (71.12 x 60.96 cm)

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Man and His Rock, 1969 Acrylic on board 24 x 21 inches (60.96 x 53.34 cm)

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Ode to Joy, 1969 Acrylic on board 29 x 23 7/8 inches (73.66 x 60.64 cm)

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Prayer, 1969 Acrylic on board 17 7/8 x 24 inches (45.4 x 60.96 cm)

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Untitled, 1971 Acrylic on board 32 x 23 3/4 inches (81.28 x 60.32)

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Runners, 1969 Acrylic on board 24 x 29 7/8 inches (60.96 x 75.88 cm)

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Untitled, 1969 Acrylic on board 24 1/8 17 7/8 inches (60.96 x 61.27 cm)

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Mike Dahl, 1971 Acrylic on board 24 x 16 inches (60.96 x 40.64 cm)

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JFK, 1964 Acrylic on canvas 24 1/8 x 18 inches (61.28 x 45.72 cm)

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Untitled, 1964 Acrylic on board 21 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches (54.93 x 39.69 cm)

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Max Beckmann, 1970 Acryllic on board 20 x 20 inches (50.8 x 50.8 cm)

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The Assassination, 1968 Acrylic on board 34 7/8 x 21 inches (88.58 x 53.34 cm)

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The Blind Men, 1970 Acrylic on board 23 7/8 x 19 7/8 inches (60.64 x 50.48 cm)

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Institution, 1966 Acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 inches (76.2 x 60.96 cm)

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Untitled, 1970 Acrylic on board 29 3/4 x 41 7/8 inches (75.56 x 106.36 cm)

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Hair, 1969 Acrylic on board 26 x 18 inches (66.04 x 45.72 cm) 46

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The Circus People, 1968 Acrylic on board 30 1/2 x 21 inches (77.47 x 53.34 cm)

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Max Starkloff: A Retrospective (installation view)

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Max Starkloff: A Retrospective (installation view)

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