Rosetta Reitz, Rest In Peace

ROSETTA REITZ, bookstore owner and writer, age 84

 Rosetta Reitz died on November 1, 2008. In the last few years of her life she was working on her memoirs and was frustrated that she couldn't find an agent. She died surrounded by her three daughters.

Rosetta Reitz came to New York City in the mid-40s. She opened her avant garde bookshop on Greenwich Avenue, which soon became a hub for writers like e.e. cummings, James Merrill and Saul Bellow. She lived in Chelsea.

I came from Utica, N.Y. My family owned a bakery. After I went to the University of Wisconsin, I didn’t want to live the life I lived in Utica. For me, living in Greenwich Village was the only thing to do That was the place where there were writers and politics. For me, the best place to be was a bookstore. I went to the bookstore I admired most, the Gotham Book Mart. The owner had fought battles for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Ulysses” and won them both. It must have been my karma. I went in there and she adored me.


(Toshka Goldman at University of Wisconsin, 1945)


After four years, I scouted around and found my own location. I opened the Four Seasons Bookshop at 21 Greenwich Avenue. The rent was 45 dollars a month. I started the bookstore in 1947. At the time, New Directions was a small publishing house. They had a new Djuna Barnes novel then. She lived across the street at Patchin Place. She would come in the store, as would e.e. cummings and his wife Marion. Marion had long hair and she would come in and ask me to braid her hair. James Merrill and his prep school buddies would also hang out in the store.

My two most special authors, who I barely spoke to because I adored them so much, were Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison. Both were teaching at NYU. They would meet at my bookstore because they took the subway up to the upper West Side together.

Anais Nin would stop by. She was such a pest. She always wanted me to introduce her to Richard Wright. She had written her first book for a real American publisher, “Ladders of Fire.” She conned me into throwing a book party for her.

One day, Anais stopped in when she was going for a walk. I don’t know how this came up, but she said to me, “I always put my diaphragm in before I go out. You never know who you are going to meet.” She was being very serious.

There was a new paperback translation out of Raymond Radiguet’s “Devil in the Flesh.” We were excited about the book. I think it was 1950. My future husband Robert Reitz found a department store mannequin without a head. He gave it a pointed beard and put it in the window. I opened the door Saturday morning and there was a cop standing in front of the window. When the store closed at 11 p.m., I was arrested for having an indecent window display. My lawyer bailed me out. The newspapers had a field day, running headlines like “Curvaceous Bookstore Owner and Devil in the Flesh.” The assistant district attorney was a literary guy. He knew it wasn’t a trashy book. The art critic Clement Greenberg was on the jury. We had artists as witnesses. The case was dismissed. It turned out the bishop had called the complaint in, because the display would corrupt the morals of local schoolchildren.

Vince Livellli on the Cusp of 100 in Greenwich Village

 (Vince Livelli, 44 Perry Street, March 6th, 2020)

Vince Livelli, a 99-year-old Greenwich Village resident, Romeo and retired cruise director, March 6, 2020

(Editor's note: Vince Livelli will turn 100 on April 9th)

Livelli spoke with Dylan Foley at 44 Perry Street, where he has lived for the last 60 years. Born in 1920, he served in the Army during World War II and after the war in 1946 colonized the San Remo Café on Bleecker Street with the writer Anatole Broyard, helping to make the Italian social club a hotspot for New York intelligentsia in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Livelli’s small apartment had been done up like a harem tent from his years of travel around the world. Ornate carpets were stapled to the floor. The kitchen is stripped down, with only a tablespoon, two forks (one plastic) and a knife to eat our takeout pasta.  A gracious host, Livelli offered me rum at lunch.

On the cusp of his 100^thbirthday, Livelli mused on his rich family history, his great friendship with Anatole Broyard, and one of his most famous dalliances, with the French writer and sexual adventurer Anais Nin.

For decades, Livelli has written short essays about his epic love life, his career as a rhumba dancer, his deep knowledge of Afro-Cuban music and his years as a cruise director on the oceans of the world. 

Recently, Livelli has been embraced by some much younger writers and singers. A young photographer compiled his essays in a book. Friends throw birthday parties for him with full orchestras and dancing. For his 100^thbirthday, friends had planned a party at a church on Waverly Place in April, but the event will most likely be cancelled due to the coronavirus. 

VINCENT LIVELLI: I am at your disposal. Here is what is happening to me. I have to manage to survive another 30 days. I will be in a position to address a big public audience, about 70 people, at a church.

First, we are going to have a drink, aren’t we? That’s excellent rum. It comes from the V.P. of MTV, who lives upstairs. My best friend.

Annie Basulto is back in New York. She’s handling everything for the big event.

I should have been more friends with you over the years. 

Milton Klonsky and Anatole Broyard used to fight intellectually. It was a pleasure to hear them fight. They were at each other’s throats.

You’re a treasure. You’re the kind of friend I miss today. They are all gone. I have some materials that will knock you out…remembrances of things past.

As a child, I was poisoned by lead paint. That’s a basic entre into my life. I was born deaf and I overcame it with technology and perseverance. Five languages. I was a professional rhumba dancer. You’ll hear what I am going to tell you about Anatole.

Annie got me into the movie “The Irishman.” This will be a good picture. [He puts on a black floppy hat he wore in the first 10 seconds of the movie, in the nursing home scene.] I’m in a wheelchair. I’m wearing this hat. It’s going to be worth a lot of money as a collector’s item.

DF: I’m going to take your picture. On Facebook, Annie Basulto calls you her best friend.

VL: That’s nice. That’s nice to have people remember you in a nice way. I want to be remembered as a nice guy.

DF: You’ll be remembered as a Village Romeo.

VL: No, no, I don’t want that, man. That’s so corny. You got that word from a newspaper article that called me a Romeo.

DF: I called you a Romeo in the article that you are holding in your hands, from interviews we did in 2008 and 2014. You always liked women.

VL: Listen, man, the Romeo was Anatole. He beat me by about 200 women. His last words, that I remember was, “I can’t handle it,” talking about women.

DF: I had heard he called out the name “Sheri,” as in his 1940’s girlfriend Sheri Martinelli.

VL: That’s a long story. You are here to interview me about what?

DF: I want to ask you more about Anatole, but I am particularly interested in your short affair with Anais Nin.

VL: Anais? She mentioned me in her diary under the name Vincent. She never got my last name.

At Brooklyn College, they were all studying American literature, the easiest curriculum. I said, I’ll always know about Shakespeare around the town. Everyone will be talking about him. I’ll learn it on the streets. I’ll study Portugese, which no one knows. Who the hell speaks Portugese?


(Vince Livelli in Cuba, 1940's)

The children in the Village were all gangsters’ sons, the sons and daughters of Italian Mafia, Sicilians. My family was Genoese, very high class. They call us the Jews of Italy. Intelligent. Educated. My father was a journalist for the Hearst newspapers, when Hearst was running for president. I played with the Hearst children on the Hudson River. I was told to teach them how to play baseball.

Recently, I met the mother of Donald Trump and his brother. They came up from Texas and checked into the very fancy hotel on Fifth Avenue. They wanted to avoid publicity. Everybody would have wanted to speak to Trump’s brother.

DF: Could you describe Anatole to me? What was he like as a young man?

VL: He was an example—you can take Anatole out of the Village, but you can’t take the Village out of Anatole.

Anatole was a little embarrassed by some things in his life and other things he was happy to let you know about. First of all, he was always talking about opening up a bookstore. It was sort of an obsession with him. He had no money. I had no money.  You’ve read my story, “Life and Death in a Bookstore”?

(Vince Livelli, Wet Village, 2014)

What I want to tell you about Anatole, he made such an impression in my life. I call it eternal love. Nobody has experienced it to the extent I have with Anatole. [Editor’s note: Anatole Broyard, a noted critic for the New York Times, died in 1990.] When he passed away, his ashes were put into an urn that said Anatole. If you go to his daughter Bliss’ house in Brooklyn, there is his urn. She told me there is an urn with some leftover ashes. This is where eternal love comes in. I said to her one day, Bliss, I want to be incorporated in the same urn with your father’s ashes. I want to be with him forever. The funeral industry doesn’t like that idea. They would lose money. All through my life, people said “no” to me and I did it. It is kind of macabre to say something like that to the family.

DF: Could you tell me about the San Remo Café?

VL: We established it. No Anglos, they said. It was an Italian social club. “No, we don’t want Anatole. He’s black.”  You are making a big mistake, Mr. Santini. When Anatole starts speaking in the San Remo, flocks of people will come just to hear what he is telling people.” It became a salon, like Gertrude Stein in Paris.

DF: What was the relationship between Anatole and the writer Milton Klonsky?

VL: They used to cross the street when they saw each other. I was with Anatole one day and we saw Milton walking along West 4^thStreet. Anatole said, “Let’s cross the street. I don’t want to meet that guy.” When Milton met Anatole, they would immediately start talking about Henry James or Hemingway. That was a big contention when Milton wanted to talk about Hemingway and Anatole wanted to talk about Proust. It was a big difference. I hated Hemingway. I still do. He was a newspaper reporter. He wasn’t a novelist. He was a typist, like Kerouac. You know about the Truman Capote quote?

I had a fire in this apartment. I had to live in a shelter for a while.

I am guilty of giving people the false impression that I understand them. It’s not fair to them or to me. I can only understand 50 percent. It doesn’t seem to bother my approach to life. I just try anyway. I feel now more than ever in my late days that someone has been helping me all my life.

People have been stealing my manuscripts. H---. Do you know him? He takes little pieces of my life and he’s selling them. He’s stealing any manuscripts he can steal.  I say, “Where did I put that ‘Celebrities I have in Common’ essay’?” 

In 1980, I was taking some Italian tourists around the city. I took them to the Trump Hotel that is at Columbus Circle. I said, “This man is going to be President.’”

[Vince  eats eggplant and spaghetti]

One of the most beautiful experiences of my life, was when I was in the hospital for kidney problems, at St. Clare’s Hospital. I recovered. I picked up the phone and told Anatole to pick me up. I’m going home. I called Rita. They both showed up at the hospital, they got me dressed and they walked me down the street. After being in the hospital with no one to talk to, I was there with the most beloved people in my life. Anatole on one side, Rita on the other. I am arm and arm with the two loves of my life. Rita was my early girlfriend. She looked like Rita Hayworth. She turned down a party with Frank Sinatra when he was at his height. She wanted to be with me.

Make sure you are recording this. I am a contributor. I am an historical figure. I always thought I was born in Greenwich Village. We bought property here in 1861. I was born in New Utrecht, Brooklyn.

I was not baptized in the church my grandfather contributed to, the Shrine Church of St. Anthony of Padua on Sullivan Street. Unless you are baptized, you are not allowed to be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

The kids in the Village were so bad, dirty, snotty. They spit out the window, trying to hit me as I came home from school. Bad kids.

My father and mother said, “Do not play with these children. We are going to take you to 5th Avenue, Central Park and you will play with good children, the high-class children.” They tried it. The mother at 5^th  Avenue said, “Don’t play with that boy. He comes from that Village, those Sicilian people.” This was 1922. I couldn’t play with the kids in the Village. I couldn’t play with kids from the higher strata. I used to take my sailboat and play in the sailboat pond in Central Park.

I was an outcast. Guess what? I found a group of children who were so clean and well behaved on Commerce Street. That’s where the Portugese families lived. The Blue Mill Restaurant. They also owned wine stores. I had to learn Portugese. I was rescued because when I got into the Army, they needed someone who spoke Portugese to handle the Portugese officers who were going to fight in Europe.

I was also a pimp. They said, “Don’t let these guys go to 42^ndStreet, where they will get robbed.” Very dangerous because they didn’t speak English. “Call your girlfriends and tell them to take care of these guys. I don’t want them going to some whorehouse on 45^thStreet.” I knew the lead girl who knew a string of women. I called her up. “I have four Portugese officers and I am going to have more. I need to get them laid.” I was supposed to get them on the plane to Rome, so they can fight the Germans.”

H--- stole all my photos. He stole a photo of my mother in a wedding dress.

I started entertainment on ships.

A woman named Elenor Brittan put me on a ship, because I spoke Portugese, on the S.S. Brazil. You had to entertain the customers. I fell into a slot that I fit beautifully. I did all the games. I handled the orchestras. I even did prize fights on deck. I got two old ladies, put boxing gloves on them. “In the green corner, fighting from Boldfield, New Jersey, Annie Roz.” I put the two women on the dance floor. The bell rang, they came up fighting. We had false teeth that fell out on the floor. We had hair. It looked like she pulled out her hair.

The people on the old ships were high class. The waiters wore white gloves. The ships now use $10 of gas per hour. They just go from port to port.

I had to find my own way. “Put him in an institution.” I heard people say that. “Put him in the Army. Put him in the clergy.” I was kicked out of society. “He can’t function in society.” That’s when I was nearly deaf. No, wait a minute. I’m not dumb. I may appear not to be intelligent. I know I can do things that other people cannot.

When you have an incapacity, you are given liberty. The world is open to you when you can’t do things that normal people do. What do you do? You do your own thing. I lived three different lives. I lived life on land. I lived life on the ocean…I spent 20 years on ships. I lived a third life on the highway. I travelled on the road, carrying a message. I slept in a different hotel every night.

I occupied Leonard Bernstein’s bed. How come I slept in his bed?

Do you know Valeska Gert? She brought punk into America. She escaped from Hitler. She opened the Beggar’s Bar. She had money. She put it in a metal box under her pillow on Commerce Street.

My girlfriend rented her bed for $15. Bernstein had a studio that his boyfriend used. She also rented that bed. [So Livelli and her could have sex.]

DF: What about Anais?

VL: Anatole told me that when you rang the bell, you had to run up the stairs, as she timed the number of minutes it takes her lover to climb the stairs to reach the top floor, to test his virility.


(Anatole Broyard in 1971)

DF: Did Anatole sleep with Anais, as well?

VL: No, he had Sheri Martinelli [a Village painter, who lived with Anatole Broyard in the 1940’s.]


(Sheri Martinelli, 1940's)



(Historietas by Vincent Livelli, a collection of his writings)

DF: Could you tell me about Anais Nin’s book party?

VL: Anais had one woman friend and that was Toshka Goldman, a bookstore owner. Toshka, Anais and Sheri were the only women at Anais’ book party. The rest were gay boys, except for me, Anatole and Arthur, Anatole’s friend from New Orleans. 

(Anais Nin, 1930's)

Toshka was not too happy. What kind of party was this? She looked around at the guys, put her hands on her hips and said, “There is not a screw in the house!”

She wanted to get laid. I looked at Arhur and asked her, can you help her out? He said “Sure.” His name was Arthur Burrows. He took Toshka up to the roof. Anatole, Sheri and I went up to the roof to spy on them. Yes, they were making love on the roof. That was the Village, 1946.

(Anatole Broyard's posthumous memoir of Greenwich Village)

DF: Were you attracted to Toshka?

VL: No, I had the most beautiful woman in the world, Rita.

Anais was obliged to entertain Toshka, because Toshka was selling her book Ladders of Fire. [Toshka Goldman, who later became Rosetta Reitz, ran the important Four Seasons Bookshop in the late 1940's on Greenwich Avenue.]

I danced with Anais, because she liked Latin music.

DF: What was your affair with Anais like?

VL: It didn’t last. It was just two days. The first day, the meeting. The second day, the encounter. She wore a diaphanous gown and had a chaise lounge. She was very polite and calm. We were sort of innocent back then. We were unsophisticated compared to Anais Nin. 

It was a nice way for me to fit in the history of the Village with Anais Nin. I made it with her. That was no great accomplishment. She was a woman who was ready.

I like to see myself as an escort. I went around 60 countries, escorting people.

DF: You are 99 and you’ll be 100 in 33 days?

VL: I climb up and down the stairs, to keep in shape.

It is the wrong time to talk about longeivity, now that we are facing the disaster of the coronavirus.

I don’t think that we are going to make it. I was quarantined for 14 days, when I was 6 years old. I had influenza. The doctor on King Street saved my life.

How do you keep people quarantined for 14 days on a cruise ship?

I am going to self-quarantine myself. My doctor said don’t let anyone in, except maybe family. I am only going to celebrate with intimate family.

I have a cousin who is a lawyer in Morristown, N.J.  He's done very well. We did not stay in the Village because of the criminal element.  

Rest in Peace, Harriet: Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, memoirist, ex-nude model and West Village sexual adventurer (March 26, 1928-June 21, 2019). Aged 91.

(Harriet would have turned 92 two days ago...Happy birthday, Harriet! I think this piece is worth another read.
--Dylan)

My friend, the poet Edward Field emailed me on Friday, June 21, 2019 to tell me the horrible news that Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, a memoirist, ex-nude model and sexual adventurer died that morning in a long-term rehab in Brooklyn. She was 91.

I met Harriet in 2005 when Edward and I organized a photo exhibit at Westbeth of old bohemians who came up in New York in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Edward introduced me to Harriet and I went over to her apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Harriet was an imposing woman, standing six-feet tall with shoulder-length yellow-white hair and a deep voice.

“Kids today,” Harriet said in our first interview, “they don’t fuck.”

Harriet was probably the most fearless person I’ve ever met when it came to discussing her own sexuality and sex life. Under a picture of a nude painting of herself done by an art student in the 1960’s, Harriet told me epic stories of her wild youth and her sexual escapades. After she threw off the chains of her uptight middle-class youth in Manhattan, Harriet went to the radical Black Mountain College, then transferred to Berkeley. Working in the campus bookstore, the 21-year-old seduced a 17-year-old Susan Sontag with the line, “Have you read Nightwood?” referring to the Djuna Barnes novel.

In 1950, Harriet took a ship to Paris with $200 in her pocket. She got involved with a Swede who gave her gonorrhea. She then hooked up with the entrancing future playwright Maria Irene Fornes, a Cuban-American, who may have been the great love of her life.

Harriet rekindled with Susan in Paris when she left a Fulbright to escape a bad marriage and motherhood. Their fights were physical. Harriet and Susan hosted the Beat exiles at their hotel room in Paris, including Allen Ginsberg. Noticing a big bruise on Susan’s face, Ginsberg said to Harriet, “You hit her because she is better looking than you.”

Harriet came back to New York in 1959 and Susan stole Irene from her, breaking her heart. Distraught, Harriet borrowed $25 and flew to Provincetown, Mass. She started dating Bill Ward, the editor of the Provincetown Review.  Harriet was an editor there when the federal government tried to shut the magazine down for publishing the Hubert Selby Jr.’s story “Tralala,” an excerpt from his novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. Harriet had to go into hiding for a short period of time.

Bill Ward’s best friend was Norman Mailer. Harriet and Mailer despised each other, and she repeatedly attacked Mailer’s height and hypermasculinity. In the summer of 1961, Mailer coerced his wife Adele Morales Mailer to fight Harriet. The two women punched each other, pulled each others’ hair and wrestled on the ground while the men cheered and took bets.

Harriet’s fight with Adele Mailer was caused by the Mailers’ earlier menage a trois affair with Irene Fornes, which Irene ended because of her deep affection for Harriet. This angered the Mailers. The summer fight was directly linked to Mailer stabbing his Adele that fall.  Five decades later, Harriet could still get angry discussing the big fight.

While dating Bill Ward, Harriet met her future husband Louie Zwerling in the Cedar Tavern, the artists’ hangout. Louie tried to pay Harriet for sex, thinking she was a prostitute. After a turbulent dating period, they married and had their son Milo in 1963. “Being married to a seaman was great for having affairs,” Harriet once told me, with her typical candor.

Harriet continued her prolific and varied sex life. She told me with unsupressed glee that she would frequent the 55 Bar on Christopher Street, where pot smoking was encouraged and there were often two people in the bathroom stalls at a time. This was Harriet’s life as a young mother with a husband on the high seas.

Harriet later became a public schoolteacher in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she worked for 28 years. She saw the parents of her students in the old Polish neighborhood as racist.

In her late seventies, Harriet self-published a collection of essays and autobiographical pieces called Notes of a Nude Model, referring to her years modeling at art schools. There were pieces about her stint as a “Rent a Beatnik” and the time she shot heroin with the artist Larry Rivers. The book became a surprise hit. Harriet starred in Deirdre Fishel’s documentary “Still Doing It” about older women and sex. She also stole the scene when she was in Nancy Kates’ “Regarding Susan Sontag” documentary, where she discussed her seduction of Sontag. Harriet also starred in Michelle Memran’s documentary on Irene Fornes called “The Rest I Make Up.”

In 2014, Harriet published Abroad: An Expatriate’s Diaries, 1950-59, which were excerpts from her Paris diaries. The diaries are rollicking good fun, with several orgies and the Sontag fistfight, as well as the roots of her simmering feud with Norman Mailer.

 (Harriet in the last decade)

In the 2006 photo-and-text exhibit that was held at Westbeth, the artists’ housing on Bethune Street in the West Village, Harriet was the star.

The exhibit was called “The Last Bohemians” and was to support Edward Field’s memoir, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag. The exhibit included the sexual anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, the writer Elizabeth Pollet, the photographer and anti-war activist Karl Bissinger and actress and experimental theater legend Judith Malina.

Harriet showed up in a maroon bustier, preparing for a night out. The young New Yorker reporter Lauren Collins grabbed on to her and wouldn’t let her go. Harriet was featured in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, referred to by Collins as a grande horizontale. [An old French term for a courtesan, which would be inappropriate for Harriet.] At the end of the piece, Harriet extolled the virtues of the Corner Bistro’s burgers. A cartoon of Harriet accompanied the piece.

By his forties, Harriet’s son Milo Zwerling had become a successful musician and the leader of the band Milo Z. Eight years ago, he and his wife Tamara had their daughter Sierra. Harriet suddenly had a gorgeous granddaughter she could dote on and love unconditionally.

In the last five years of her life, Harriet was plagued with falls and did several stints in physical rehab facilities after a spine injury. She remained a vibrant sexual being. Several years ago, she published a poem about the number of people she had slept with over the course of her life. She then recorded a video of herself reading the poem.

Harriet also joined a website for cougars, older women looking for younger men. She had a date with a man fifty years her junior. They made out in her beloved red car, but she refused his pleas to come back to her apartment for obvious safety reasons.

In the last several months, Harriet’s health took a turn for the worse. She had several falls and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, winding up in the rehab in the Bronx, then to Mill Basin, Brooklyn, where she died. Deprived of her physical independence, Harriet was still fierce to the end. She gave the poor staff in the Brooklyn rehab hell.

John Dobbs, an American Painter (1931-2011)

I have just received the very sad news that John Dobbs, the great American figurative painter, died early last month. I interviewed Mr. Dobbs in 2005 for my text-and-photo exhibit that inspired "The Last Bohemians." He was a true gentleman, and I heard from my friend Jack Dowling that the throat cancer that took Mr. Dobbs' voice did not stop him from painting. John Dobbs said many iconoclastic things in our interview, like he didn't believe in most fine-arts degree programs, and said so at his John Jay College interview in the early 1970s. He still got the job.

Today, the arts journalist Mona Molarsky posted a beautiful piece on John Dobbs today on examiner.com. Here it is:

John Barnes Dobbs, a determinedly figurative painter who launched his career in the 1950s against the prevailing winds of Abstract Expressionism, lived to see a time when Realism would coexist with Abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and a variety of other artistic movements. On August 9 Dobbs died at his home in New York’s Greenwich Village at the age of 80.

During a career that spanned more than half a century, Dobbs painted his own dusky vision of humanity: figures embedded—more often than not—in an alienating, modern landscape of city and suburb. The people on his canvases are often seen in the distance or from behind, as if departing. They ride up escalators, wait on subway platforms or pass through turnstiles. We glimpse their silhouettes through plate glass windows or in the glare of sun on concrete.

In his final works, Dobbs’ figures appear against flat backgrounds, iconic as the images on tarot cards: acrobats, boxers and contortionists, struggling against the physics of their own bodies and that of the universe.

Dobbs had many solo shows at galleries, universities and museums. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, and the Salon Populiste in Paris. Dobbs’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MA.

From 1972 to 1996, he was a Professor of Art at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was a member of the National Academy, to which he was elected in 1976.

Born in 1931 in a small house by the Lackawanna Railroad in Nutley, New Jersey, where his grandfather had once worked as a railway express clerk, Dobbs grew up in a politically engaged family of artists, musicians and poets. Yet he credited the shining rails that ran past their little house with giving him his first lesson in one-point perspective. Although he studied with several painters during his twenties, he always referred to himself as a “self-taught” artist.

At 18, after graduating from high school, Dobbs hoisted a duffle bag onto his shoulder and hitchhiked cross-country. He worked at a variety of odd jobs before returning to the East Coast to study painting with Ben Shahn, Gregorio Prestopino and Jack Levine, who became his mentor and life-long friend.

In 1952 Dobbs was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany. He brought along a sketchbook, which he filled with drawings of soldiers and post-war German life, later published in a chapbook, “Drawings of a Draftee” (1955).

After returning to the United States, Dobbs married French-Algerian literary scholar Anne Baudement and had his first one-man show at the Grippi Gallery in New York in 1959. Four years later, painter Raphael Soyer included Dobbs—along with Edward Hopper, Leonard Baskin, Jack Levine and eight other figurative artists—in his large group portrait, Homage to Thomas Eakins.

Soyer’s canvas was a cri de coeur for 20th century American Realist painting. But, although he and Dobbs became close friends and artistic compatriots, their work developed along different directions. While Soyer devoted himself to painting from life, Dobbs worked from memory and imagination, employing both literal and symbolic imagery to invoke America’s collective preoccupations and dreams.

Those dreams, as Dobbs conceived them, can sometimes be terrifying. In Deodand #2, (1969), painted by Dobbs during the height of the protests against the war in Vietnam, a large revolver points straight at the viewer. Staring down the barrel of the gun is the shadowy face of a helmeted policeman. With its oversized revolver, gripped in huge hands, the work confronts us more directly and aggressively than news footage ever could. The artist is willing to let us squirm before this hyper-realistic nightmare of the American history from which we are still trying to awake.

“I’m not afraid to say I’ve made paintings that can be hard to live with,” Dobbs wrote near the end of his life, responding to often-heard comments that his work is both beautiful and disturbing.

Certainly we can trace Dobbs’ artistic lineage from Goya through George Grosz, those break-and-enter artists who brought fury into the drawing room and have never been entirely forgiven. As with those earlier, socially conscious painters, one senses that the demons that pursued Dobbs were as much personal as political. That’s one reason the sloppy labels “Realist” and “Social Realist” that have dogged him and his circle for decades don’t shed much light on the paintings.

In the unforgettable self-portrait White Mask (1999), Dobbs’ haunting gray eyes stare out of his long, bearded face. They are cool, appraising and unflinching. But instead of a cap on top of his balding head, the artist wears an African totem. It’s a large wooden mask, painted white, the color of death. And its coal-black eyes stare off into an otherworldly, steel-blue distance.

“I am your doppelgänger,” the ghostly second head seems to say, “and I come from a world that’s truer, deeper and more real.”

Dobbs is survived by his wife Anne, sons Michel and Nicolas, and his sister Louise DeCormier and her family. His work is represented by ACA Galleries in New York and George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco.

Here is the link to the examiner.com website, where there is a slideshow of John Barnes Dobbs' work.

http://www.examiner.com/city-life-in-new-york/john-barnes-dobbs-american-painter-1931-2011

(A Lower Depth, 1994, John Barnes Dobbs. Oil on linen)