Gerrit Henry, a frequent contributor to Art in America, died on May 1, of a heart attack. He was 52 years old. One of the most brilliant poets of his generation, Henry was also a prolific and acutely insightful art critic. Thriving on the pressure of incessant deadlines, he could always be counted on to produce essays and exhibition reviews that shimmer with verbal felicities enough to make them worth reading for their own, literary sake. Acknowledging no ultimate distinction between art and life, Henry saw the former as life at its most self-conscious, holding the mirror up to itself. Thus he was particularly devoted to figurative painting, championing it at a time when conceptualism and "art theory" kept all painting on the defensive. Over the years, he wrote definitive commentary on Lucien Freud, Will Barnet, Jane Freilicher, Darragh Park, Robert Berlind and a host of other figurative painters. Bringing his subtle, nonstop responsiveness to abstraction, Henry treated it as if it were representation in another mode. For him, sensibility was sociability, and nothing deserved the cold shoulder. As many painters remarked, he seemed to have an unforced understanding of what it is to face a blank canvas, and he was remarkably sensitive to the ensuing expedients and inspirations.

 

Henry graduated from Columbia University in 1972, where he studied with Kenneth Koch. While still an undergraduate, he was recruited by John Ashbery to write reviews for Art News, of which he eventually became a contributing editor. Over the years, he published criticism in Art International Arts Magazine, Art on Paper, the Village Voice, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People, After Dark, the London Spectator, Zing and the New Republic. In 1979 he became an editor of Print Collector's Newsletter, where, in addition to performing his editorial duties, he wrote articles and reviews, showing a particular interest in collaborations between artists and poets. He also wrote news notes and conducted interviews with artists and collectors, curators and auctioneers. By the time he left PCN in 1984, he had become a senior editor. His monograph on Janet Fish was published by Burion & Skira, Geneva, in 1987.

 

Henry taught at C.W. Post College, Brookville, N.Y., and at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. During the 1980s, he curated a number of exhibitions, including "Neo-Romantic Landscape and Still-Life" at the Williams Center for the Arts, Lafayette College, Easton, Pa., in 1989. He was the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Cornell Woolrich Foundation, and the Anna and Erlo Von Waverer Foundation. Among his books of poetry are The Mirrored Clubs of Hell (Little, Brown and Company, 1991) and Couplets and Ballades (Dolphin Press, 1998).

 

While many of his contemporaries took poetry toward prosiness, Henry cultivated what turned out to be a dazzling talent for rhyme. Inspired as much by Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart as by Ashbery and Koch, he mastered couplets and quatrains, and in the 1970s performed as a singer-songwriter in downtown cabarets. For all the upbeat luster of their imagery and rhymes, his poems are often confessions of loneriness and distress. His own sorrows alerted him to those of others. Describing dancers in a painting by David Remfrey, he said that they "sway slightly ... as if learning some new step that has its roots in childhood but its soul in heartache."

 

Impatient with boundaries, Henry saw poetry as continuous with painting, high art in all its variety as continuous with entertainment, and all of it as inextricably mixed with day-to-day existence. In a poem called "The Watchers," he depicts himself as compelled, not entirely reluctantly, to watch a video of a dreadful horror movie. Will he turn if off? No, he says, because the movie gives him

 

   ... the courage

   To sit down and turn

   To my typewriter,

   And write you, and me,

   An alternative,

   Write away the horror,

   Write away the blood,

   The inevitable, quick progression

   Of another American night.