Truth be told, Charlie Finch was an obscenely cruel man, psychopathic with his verbal abuse and gratified most when humiliating people. But nobody that I know of benefitted from their relationship with Charlie more than I.
Charlie was introduced to me by a mutual friend in the summer of 1992 and he wrote for the fifth issue of my art rag Coagula that fall. He wrote through Issue #40 in 1999, trashing so much of the social structure of culture and occasionally raving about something in a prose so brilliant it made people at least stop and look, which for New Yorkers is saying it moved mountains.
Everybody warned me, he would try to take me down when he was bored with the magazine or tired of our relationship or just in a pissy mood. But he finally scampered away after writing for me for seven years not with a bang but under the whimper of a defamation lawsuit – which I eventually won – and it wasn’t even over something he had written. But so worried was he about his inherited fortune being subject to attachment that he wrote me a terse goodbye resignation and that was that. I had all the street cred Charlie had helped pile on to the Coagula bandwagon and he had an online gig with Artnet. Walter Robinson was his editor there, it was like handing my high-maintenance pit bull over to someone who needed it more instead of sending it to the pound. Walter had written the foreword to the Coagula anthology Most Art Sucks (Smart Art Press, 1998) where the editor and publisher Tom Patchett pulled 19 pages of Finch material to feature in the 200-page book.
Few got that close to Charlie and came out unscathed. Years later we met up in New York (did he ever leave Manhattan for anything besides a Yankee game in the Bronx?), where he recalled our split so differently and I didn’t bother correcting him. He had stolen, well maybe just swiped, a photograph of art dealer Anina Nosei in an ecstatic embrace with a ballroom dancing rent-a-stud. It was something the ladies of her generation were doing, getting dolled up and squeezing close with a super hunk who could keep time with his feet and hips. He looked like he was on the job, there is no photo of her smiling wider. Well Charlie traipsed into the back room of the gallaery, through her office, swiped the fucking photo, and mailed it to me with the nastiest mockery of her being over the hill and unable to capture any glory being reduced to this corny ritual. My description of his writing just cannot do it justice, the thing he sent was a skinning alive of whatever dignity this woman had. I was thrilled to be publishing it. Until the very next day a letter demanding its immediate return arrived, from Ms Nosei herself. Charlie’s recollection was that he had to leave the publication that day as I had lost my balls (like ditching the paper over a lawsuit meant he had retained his nuts at all). I recall it more as not wanting to commit editorial suicide. How many laws and ethical states had Charlie broken. And was it all a setup, to screw me with liability as he moved on to the online world? You see, you had to be bright to get out unscathed when you walked astride Mister Finch.
(One aside, every woman over fifty that I have told that story to immediately gets enraged on behalf of Ms Nosei but every artist she showed who I have told it to sees its non-publication as a great lost opportunity to right the karmic wrongs she had wrought in their lives)
In addition to his forethought cruelty, there was the delusion. He would spin two types of tales: the first type of stories were physically improbable and statistically impossible. The second was the reverse of this. He was obsessed with the sex lives of starving artists and the bathroom habits of the art world’s powerbrokers. It was a winning formula. But they were just so untrue. Entertaining, designed to humiliate, scorn and disempower their subjects, a great Finch deluded tale would always include a cameo appearance by Charlie himself, first to sell you on the veracity of what he was dishing and second, often more subtle but always central to the tale, to make Charlie look great.
His greatest delusional tale I can relate can only be done with the caveat that not a word of it was true. Understand that going forward, and now enter into the mind of a vengeful Charlie Finch. One of the great hates of his life was the minimal sculptor Anne Truitt. Not for aesthetics, nor anything beyond a garden variety misogyny, no, it was much more personal. Anne Truitt had once been his mother in law. To digress, Molly Barnes once told me she was seated at a social affair next to Truitt and after making some conversation she brought up Charlie. “I don’t discuss that person,”was all the artist said and then she stood and had the hostess seat her elsewhere.
So Charlie told his grand tale, and it wasn’t just to me, he told this hundreds of times from the 1980s through the middle of the past decade. Many people I encountered who knew Charlie asked me if I had heard this specific tale or if I knew any of the facts to be true. So Anne Truitt was, according to Charlie, a military brat, the daughter of a high-ranking military officer who served at a specific military base on a certain date. It has been decades since Charlie told me and a few others this tale over an expensive dinner at Fanelli’s where he picked up the tab but made sure to point out each of our inadequacies between backhanded compliments and digging for dirt we may know. In the window of time that Charlie precisely described, some date in the late 1940s or early 1950s, there is documented evidence that a young congressman John F. Kennedy came to a function at the base. Well the officer’s daughter, married or not, may have been in attendance at this function. The way Charlie told a story was to weave these supposedly undeniable snippets of historical record into the madness of his vision. The long of the short of it is Charlie claimed that not only had his mother in law banged JFK, she was impregnated by him. But follow the self-serving nature of the tale. While Charlie’s mother in law was a cheating slut, Charlie had married a Kennedy! And sired a son with a Kennedy. He hadn’t banged Caroline but it was the next best thing, right?
To the non-believers he would add other trivia about the entanglements of the Finch family and the Kennedy bloodline via the alleged Truitt pipeline, all to strengthen his assertions, debase his mother in law and make himself look like bastard American royalty. I was never happier to be sober than to be at that table, stuffed with dinner and dessert on his dime, marveling at the absolute high the man could float on with his mere words. The pity of course was that all this window dressing was so damn unnecessary, so in the way of him receiving the acclaim he deserved for his writing. He was by far the most intelligent art writer I have ever come across; Clement Greenberg crossed with William F. Buckley in Victor Buono’s body. “There are two men who did more LSD than me,” he said once, when I had given him a disbelieving look at another yarn, “Aldous Huxley and John Lennon.” His name-dropping was always meant to make him look good. What made him look good were his glorious reviews and trashings of powerful art people. He just couldn’t help but to get in the way of himself.
I saw Charlie one final time, in 2014. It was at an opening for a solo show by the painter Max Estenger, who appropriately had introduced us back in 1992. Thirty fucking years ago, wow. Max had authored the story that Coagulagot sued for. It was all truthful and we won and it was nice to come full circle as we chatted about the “good old days” that evening. The opening was in high gear when Max’s dealer John Molloy asked for everyone’s attention. He thanked everyone for coming and Max then reiterated his gratitude. He then brought out four large envelopes and said that some people were important in making the show happen. Oh by the way, this is going to be the Charlie story to top them all, but look at how nice the evening had been up until this point. So Max hands out the envelopes to the gallery staff and Charlie for having made the introduction of the artist to the dealer. As Max is talking, Charlie opens his large envelope to reveal a signed, numbered print by Estenger. Each of the envelopes had one. It was a classy gesture.
“Paper? A work on Paper? You ungrateful piece of shit!” screamed Charlie, instantly tearing up the print and the envelope six or seven times and throwing the confetti directly at Max. Then he grabbed the other three envelopes out of the others’ hands and tore them a few times, cursing loudly at what an asshole Max was and that this whole show was a fraud and he threw the torn shards of paper into the air as he pushed through the crowd toward the exit, stomping his large frame on the hardwood floors in a manner that made the old building shake, screaming and gurgling venomous raging insults as he walked out and down the stairs, slamming the front door of the walkup shut. Max, a long time Finch associate quite used to these psychopathic outbursts, continued with his formal pleasantries as if nothing had happened and the champagne corks popped and New York celebrated a great exhibit as one bitter genius walked home, the key to his madness buried under all that leftover Lennon acid and something in the air in New York he had breathed in back when Mickey Mantle was playing in the outfield and never quite let out all the way.
–MG, August 30, 2022
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And to insist that the man is impossible to exaggerate, I can confidently assert that there are a hundred people in New York City tonight who have at least three Charlie stories crazier than the trio I offered above. Farewell madman.
Charles Barnes Finch, April 22, 1952 – August 25, 2022