Untitled, 1980
(detail)
Ink and colored
pencil on paper.
23.75" x 19"
1989.0052

The Office, c. 1980
Ink on paper
14" x 11"
1989.0100

"HE DID IT NIGHTLY"
Neel Bate According to the Men Who Knew Him

On the evening of September 27, 2004, I sat down with four men who'd known Blade-artist and writer Neel Bate-in the last decade of his life, the 1980s. During these remarkably productive years, Bate turned out drawing after drawing, including his important work in color, and wrote essays on pre-Stonewall gay life and accomplished pieces of erotic fiction for all the important gay skin mags. Discovered by art lovers, collectors and rank-and-file gay men who got off on Blade's work, Bate, in his mid-60s, at last found minor fame. I wanted to find out what these men knew about Bate and his work habits in this final flowering.

Neel's friends and I gathered in the SoHo loft of two of those friends, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman. They collected Bate's art and gave him his first one-man show at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery, November 11-27, 1980. Charles Vozzi, businessman, art aficionado and bon vivant, was a pal of Bate's on the gay social circuit. Robert W. Richards, a major erotic artist himself, befriended Bate and involved the older artist in a movie project, a bio-pic with director Joe Gage that never materialized. But from this project, Robert's taped interviews with Neel survive, a trove of information about the artist and a record of the deep, rich grain of his voice, his easy laugh, his sensibility.

For this discussion with Charles, Fritz, Charles and Robert about Neel Bate's life and work, I wrote out about thirty questions beforehand. After we all sat down, surrounded by Charles and Fritz's eye-popping collection, I'd pose a question, his friends would respond and I'd pose the next. This went on for nearly ninety minutes. The insight of Bate's friends deepened my understanding of the man and his art. A tape and transcript of the full conversation is in the Foundation's archive. Here are some highlights. I'd like to thank all four men for their generous responses.

— Jim Eigo

How and when did you first come across Neel Bate's work?

CL: The work was famous but no one knew who the author was. He didn't have a name at that time.

How did you first meet Neel Bate?

CL: We had an opening [at Leslie-Lohman Gallery] for a wonderful Canadian artist named Peter Flinsch. That must have been 1980. That show brought out a lot of people I'd never met before. One of them was Neel Bate. He seemed absolutely swept away by the atmosphere and the fact this work was being shown in public. He approached me before the evening was over and said, "I am an artist." And I said, "Well, show us your work," my standard answer. I had no idea who he was. Within two weeks he made an appointment. I recognized the style. I'd seen old photo reproductions of his early things like The Barn and Ardmore Station, wonderful series of intensely erotic sex. I stupidly said, "You know your work is all over the place." He said, "I know, I know." That was the beginning.

RR: I don't remember how I met him but I do remember that I went out of my way to meet him because I loved his work. It was so rural.

CL: There is something strangely innocent about Blade's work.

RR: Yes. I always had a sense of discovery.

CL: It was like homosexual encounters out of the situations of pure innocence. Everything just seemed natural.

Bate said his show at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery in 1980 was the high point of his life. What can
you tell us about that show?

CL: After I saw his work I was struck with it, I loved it, so I proposed we mount a show. I said, "Do you have enough work to show?" Well, he came down with a shoe box full of pencil drawings on typewriter paper, but they were wonderful pencil drawings. They'd been under a bed for years. He had no thought that anything could ever happen to them. We claimed many of them. We also told him to get to work, and start doing some color work. And he did. The idea he could have a public exhibition seemed to absolutely rivet him, and I mean he almost vibrated with expectation, enthusiasm and creativity. He poured out a lot of work for that show. And when the show actually happened, I do think it was a kind of apotheosis for him, because suddenly there he was, a gallery full of people oohing and ahing, asking to
talk to him.

CV: I was familiar with Neel's work from pictures, so at the gallery opening I went over and introduced myself. He was really impressed that I knew [his work] and that I was so excited about meeting him. He really didn't have any ego in that way.

CL: He never understood how wonderful he was. He even perhaps had a slight lack of self-esteem about his work. He'd never been recognized for his work until his show. He was rather dazzled by the response. I think it was a transformative moment. He once told me that he'd thought his life was just going to wind down slowly, with no place for his art to go. That night, I think, changed his life. He then became an integral part of the gallery. Even when he wasn't in a show people would come and ask to see his work. We had two flat files full of his work and we sold consistently. And every time we sold something we would incrementally raise the price of his work. Having sold something, he made more money. It was an absolutely satisfying experience for him. And it kept him drawing until he couldn't stand up anymore.

RR: I think when an artist, someone who's possessed, obsessed, realizes that time is finite, that you get a huge-

CL: Rush.

RR: On fire! It can be fifteen years. It can be three months. But this is something that happens. If you really mean it, you just have ten thousand things that you want to get down, that you want to do, people you want to draw, action you want to depict, and that was definitely true of Neel. He was very hungry. He was on fire. He wanted to do it every day.

CL: He did it because he got off on it. And people who get off on it do it best.

Bate made a living as a designer. Did you see any parallels between his design work and his art?

RR: The design stuff I saw never in any way evoked the other work. It was architectural, purely decorational.

FL: He did some murals for me. The one I remember most was a series of hills that receded in the background, very subtle.

CV: Lever House every Christmas had this merry-go-round, and he worked on that every year. And Bloomingdales [designing windows], not necessarily just at Christmas, and he made a decent living.

CL: He worked for a wallpaper house that had factories in Brazil and he went down to Brazil a couple of times to oversee production. So he had a special talent in that direction, which helped him keep body and soul together. There was a wonderful example of Neel's decorative work in his apartment. Remember that big, multi-panel screen that stood in front of the kitchenette? That was an urban skyscape, done just for pure decoration, and it was charming.

Do you know anything about Bate's work habits as an artist? Did he do it daily?

CL: He did it nightly. He worked all night. He told me once that he did his best work at night. He'd have supper with Ernie [Ernest Henry, early lover and longtime companion]. They'd maybe look at the news or something, Ernie would go to bed and Neel would start drawing.

JE: A nocturnal being-which suits the work.

CL: If he had a design job to do, he was up during regular hours. But all the homoerotic stuff was produced at night.

Do you think Bate drew on his life experiences for his art?

CL: In terms of the homosexual aspect, absolutely. He was a sweet, sexual predator from the time he was a boy. He was always finding ways to put other boys in a situation where sex became-

RR: Inevitable!

CL: -the end of the story. And he was good at it. He was pretty, handsome, lovely body, everything, and a sweet personality. He had a very charming manner when you talked to him. You would see him talk to people he hadn't met and he could be very engaging. And you could imagine that working thirty years earlier, to his absolute advantage. Even in old age he remained really put together, a very handsome, compact little man. He worked at it.

How would you characterize Bate's art?

CL: Real sexuality rather than fetishized sexuality.

CV: Real people..

CL: People don't have to be dressed up in costumes to have sex. They don't have to be in any kind of intensely special situations. It can be anywhere, in a barn, in a subway john, on a prairie. It's real sex.

JE: Toward the end he was putting an awful lot of men out on the docks.

SEVERAL: Yes!

RR: It was almost photographic in a certain way, and yet not at all. Just real enough to be totally convincing, totally believable. And highly charged, of course, but it was possible.

CL: That's another difference. His images, his male figures, no matter what they're doing, never seem to be posed.

JE: No, they're there for the sex.

CL: They don't care how they look.

RR: There's a great humanity in Neel's work.

CL: Neel was engaged by real people.

Do you have anything else you'd like to tell us about Neel Bate or his work?

CL: I just think Neel is one of the great underappreciated artists of the 20th century-of any kind. On top of which, he was a lovable person.

RR: I'm glad that I met him, that I got to know him, because there was nothing disappointing about him. It was all one: him, the work, everything was all one. When you met this man you knew that was him, you knew that was the artist.

CL: There was no artifice, no pose, you got what you were looking at.

RR: And I thought he was very sexy.

CL: He was.

RR: And I thought he was a poetic soul — who knew how to get down!