What I Loved

or on a gallery's white walls. Out in the big world, the name William Wechsler meant very little, but in the incestuous circle of collectors and museums in New York, Bill's reputation was getting warmer, and even a dim glow had the power to burn the likes of Henry Hasseborg.
    Over the years, Bill would regularly inspire hatred in people who didn't know him, and every time it happened, he felt wounded and surprised. His handsome face cursed him, but far more damaging was the fact that strangers, usually in the form of journalists, dimly perceived his code of honor, that maddening certainty that accepted no compromise. To some, usually Europeans, this made him a romantic figure — a fascinating and mysterious genius. To others, usually Americans, Bill's stringent convictions were like a slap in the face, a frank acknowledgment that he was not "a regular guy." The truth was that much of what Bill produced he didn't show. His exhibitions were the result of severe purgings, during which he edited the work down to what he regarded as essential. The rest he hid. Some of the works he thought of as failures, others as redundant, and still others were pieces he considered unique and isolated, which meant they couldn't be displayed as part of a group. Although Bernie did sell some of the unshown work from his back room, a lot of it Bill simply kept to himself. He didn't need the money, he told me, and he liked having his paintings and boxes and little sculptures around him "like old friends." In light of this, Hasseborg's accusation that Bill styled himself to please collectors was laughable, but it was born of an urgent wish. For Henry Hasseborg, the admission that there were artists who were not driven by a preening vanity to advance their careers would have amounted to an annihilation of himself. The stakes were high, and the tone of the article reflected the man's desperation.
    After the article was published, I asked Bernie to tell me more about Hasseborg. It turned out that before he became a writer, he had been a painter. According to Bernie, Hasseborg had produced muddy, semiabstract canvases nobody wanted, and after years of struggle had finally abandoned the calling and launched himself as an art critic and novelist In the early seventies he published a book about a drug dealer on the Lower East Side who meditates on the condition of the world between transactions. The book had gotten some good reviews, but in the ten years since its publication, Hasseborg had not managed to finish another. He had written many reviews, however, and Bill wasn't Hasseborg's first victim. In the seventies, Bernie had shown an artist named Alicia Cupp. Her delicate sculptures of fragmented bodies and bits of lace had sold very well in the Weeks Gallery. In the fall of '79, Hasseborg ravaged her work in a review for Art in America. "Alicia was always pretty fragile," Bernie told me, "but that article pushed her right over the edge. She was in Bellevue for a while and then she packed up and went to live in Maine. Last I heard, she was walled up in some little cabin with thirty cats. I called her once and asked her if she wanted to sell some work through me. I said she didn't have to come to New York. You know what she told me? 'I don't do that anymore, Bernie. I stopped.' "
    The unintended twist to the story was that Hasseborg's spleen inspired three other articles on Hansel and Gretel — one equally hostile to it and two others that praised it. One of the positive articles appeared in Artforum, a magazine more important than DASH , and the contentious debate brought more and more people to the gallery. They came to see the witch. It was Bill's witch who had ostensibly driven Hasseborg into a fury. Her panty hose had so offended him that he had devoted an entire paragraph to the stockings and pubic hair beneath. The woman who reviewed the work for Artforum continued the panty-hose discursus with three paragraphs defending Bill's use of the garment. After that, several artists Bill had never met telephoned with their sympathies and praise for his work- Hasseborg hadn't meant to do it, but he had coaxed Bill's witch out into the open, and she, in turn, had cast a spell over the art world through the magic of controversy.
    The witch returned in a conversation on a Saturday afternoon in April. When Violet knocked, I was sitting at my desk, looking down at a large reproduction of a Giorgione — his painted door of Judith standing with her