Herbert Gentry, 84, Expatriate Harlem Artist
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Herbert Gentry, 84, Expatriate Harlem Artist
By STEPHEN MILLER Staff Reporter of the Sun
Herbert Gentry, an artist who was part of an expatriate American art
community in Paris in the 1940s and 1950s, died September 8 in Stockholm. He
was 84.
As the owner of a Montparnasse nightclub that doubled as a gallery, he
knew many luminaries of the postwar avant garde, including Sartre and
Giacometti and expatriates like Richard Wright and Larry Rivers.
He studied informally with Georges Braque in Paris, but his primitive,
colorful style owed more to postwar Expressionism than to Cubism. His prints
and paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Bronx Museum, and many European museums.
Born in Pittsburgh, Gentry moved with his mother, who became a Ziegfeld
dancer, to Harlem when he was 6. His mother ran something of a salon, with
dancers, actors, musicians, and writers all in regular attendance at her
home. Young Gentry met Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, and Josephine Baker,
the latter whom he was to re-encounter while in the army in Corsica during
World War II. She had become something of a symbol of the French nation in
exile during the Nazi occupation. "Your mother was very sweet to me," Baker
told him, giving him a hug. "One of the few."
Gentry was present at the liberation of Paris, and said he immediately
fell in love with the city. In 1946, he returned to study art under the G.I.
Bill, insisting to American educational authorities that they should fund
his classes despite the lack of a bureaucracy in Paris to oversee it.
"I take my hat off to Paris because it let us express ourselves as
friends, artists, and Americans," he once said. "We got beyond race in a
city that freed blacks and whites to be themselves."
He married an American singer,Honey Johnson, and named his Montparnasse
jazz club/gallery Chez Honey, after her. It became a regular stop for many
American jazz musicians, including Benny Goodman and Roy Eldredge. There, he
also met the writer James Baldwin, as well as the artist Romare Bearden,with
whom he formed a strong friendship. He eventually shut down the club to
focus full-time on painting.
He had fond memories of encouraging (unsuccessfully) painter Larry Rivers
to sit in with jazz elites at Chez Honey, and of wangling a Thanksgiving
turkey and then persuading a Parisian baker to cook it for him.
In Paris,he also became friendly with many Danes and Swedes.As a result,
he had his first one-man show in Denmark in 1959,and there found immediate
success. He moved first to Denmark and then, in 1962, to Malmö, Sweden,
where he was among the first foreigners ever to exhibit at the Royal
Academy.
His primary residence thereafter was to be Sweden, but he maintained a
studio in Paris, and his growing popularity led to exhibitions in Italy,
Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Finland.
He had his first exhibit in New York during an extended stay in 1971-72,
and his popularity began to grow in America. In 1996, he was featured in
"Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris,
1945-1965," an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem that also
circulated to a number of American museums. In 2000, Gentry was the subject
of a New York retrospective at Columbia University Teacher's College. He
retained a residence at the Chelsea Hotel until the end of his life.
Still a fan of jazz, in 1991 he talked about the role of improvisation in
an oral history interview he did for the Smithsonian Institution. "And one
of the reasons why I feel that jazz music is one of the purer art forms,
sometimes I think the best painter in America is the jazz musician, because
you can't lie." He prized the same authenticity in painting.
Herbert Gentry
Born July 17, 1919, in Pittsburgh; died September 8 in Stockholm after a
long illness; survived by his wife, Mary Anne Rose, and his children, Stefan
James Gentry, Nickolas Gentry, Elsa Kant, Alain Gentry, and Therese Gentry.