Chances are she picked that address because it was convenient—a walk of about a half dozen blocks—to the Francis W. Parker School, where, a year earlier, thirteen-year-old Ted had entered the ninth grade. It was there that Gorey’s sense of himself as an artist would take shape. At Parker, the outlines of the Gorey persona—eccentrically brilliant, quick with the offhand quip, charismatic and sociable yet unselfconsciously himself—would come into focus.
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The Parker Gorey attended was housed in a picturesque pile in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. “The building looked like a Gorey,” says Paul Richard, a Parker alumnus (class of ’57) and, from 1967 to 2009, art critic for the Washington Post. There were “little secret compartments where you could hide in the different rooms,” he recalls, “and every classroom [was] a different shape and size. It had a kind of spooky quality, especially if you had an imagination.” It’s unthinkable, says Richard, that a kid like Gorey—fond of mysteries, drawn to the gothic—didn’t soak up the building’s cozy spookiness.
A private institution, the school was founded in 1901 by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, an enlightened educator who was staunchly opposed to the notion of the K–12 system as an assembly line for mass-producing standardized minds. Happily for Gorey, the arts were central to the Parker curriculum, a by-product of the colonel’s belief that education must serve the whole child, fostering not only intellectual growth but civic engagement, aesthetic appreciation, and self-expression, too.
Gorey would have been Gorey even without Parker’s influence, but the school’s celebration of creativity, its embrace of interdisciplinary thinking, its foundational faith in the importance of making room for every style of mind to bloom—“Everything to help and nothing to hinder” was the colonel’s maxim—undoubtedly played a part in making Gorey the artist he was, encouraging his restless intelligence, emboldening him in his intellectual idiosyncrasies, nurturing his growing sense of himself as an artist.49
The teacher who, more than any other, brought out the nascent artist in students like Gorey was Parker’s self-appointed liaison to bohemia, Malcolm Hackett. A big man whose “strong, handsome face” was dominated, as a worshipful student recalled, by “deep-set eyes” and a bushy mustache, Hackett worked the van-Gogh-of-the-WPA shtick to the hilt, wearing lumberjack shirts and loose-fitting cotton pants and sandals at a time when teachers, even art teachers, wore suits and ties.50
Gorey’s signature getup, in his New York years, recalls Hackett’s insistence that “artist” isn’t just a job description but an all-consuming identity, too, reflected in the way you dress. Playfully quirky (as opposed to calculatedly shocking), the classic Gorey look was every bit as self-consciously “artistic” as Oscar Wilde’s famous “aesthetic lecturing costume” of velvet jacket and knee breeches. In fact, Gorey’s New York persona is a textbook illustration of the Wildean truism “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”51 (This holds true, in spades, for Gorey’s art.) Hackett urged his students to stretch their minds by seeking out the work of timeless masters like Titian, Goya, and Manet at the Art Institute and, at showcases for vanguard art such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the work of modernists like the Viennese expressionist Oskar Kokoschka and the morbid magical realist Ivan Albright. But no less important, he preached, was the gospel truth that art isn’t just something you do but, equally, something you are; the true artist is an artist in every fiber of his being, looking at the world with an aesthetic eye, using personal style to make an artistic statement.
Hackett was the only Parker teacher Gorey ever mentioned—“I had a good art teacher in high school,” he said when his friend Clifford Ross, himself an artist, asked about his formal training—so he must’ve made some impression.52 Certainly Hackett’s emphasis on oil painting may have had the unintended consequence of disabusing Gorey of the notion that he was destined to take his place alongside the Old Masters. “I was going to be a painter,” he told Ross. “The fact that I couldn’t paint for beans had very little to do with it. I found out quite early in the proceedings that I really wasn’t a painter at all. Whatever else I was, I was not a painter.”53
Hackett himself was a painter of modest gifts. “You didn’t really learn anything except his attitude,” Paul Richard recalls. Then again, “if he didn’t teach you how to cast shadows or render, he did teach you something: scorn for the proprieties,” he says. “What he taught Joan [Mitchell] and Gorey was not a history or a discipline or a skill set but a subversion: Be an artist. Show it. Do anything you want.”
But épater-ing the bourgeoisie in the Chicago of Gorey’s youth was more complicated than it sounds. On one hand, the city was easily caricatured as the Vatican of Babbittry. The city’s reigning art critic, Eleanor Jewett of the Tribune, was a former agriculture major who was implacably hostile to everything but academic kitsch. Josephine Hancock Logan, whose stockbroker husband sat on the board of the Art Institute, raised the alarm about cubism, futurism, and other horrors by founding the Society for Sanity in Art in 1936. Chicagoans fell hard for the fanfare-for-the-common-man hokum of regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood (whose American Gothic the Art Institute had acquired in 1930). On the other hand, the city was home to the black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s and the New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhausians who’d fled the Nazis.
So you’re teenage Ted Gorey, under the spell of the first artist you’ve ever known up close, a “wholeheartedly, authentically, continually subversive” bohemian (in Paul Richard’s words) with the untamed mustache to prove it.54 How do you put into practice his credo that an artist must be free, break the rules?
The answer, if you’re Gorey, is: by turning your back on the future and forging boldly into the past. At a moment when everyone’s talking about the Shock of the New, jolt them with the Shock of the Old: proclaim your love of silent film, insisting, “I really do believe that movies got worse once they started to talk.”55 Provoke the provocateurs by announcing that although you’re “perfectly willing to admit that Cézanne is a great, great painter…anybody who followed him is a lot of hogwash,” then watch jaws drop when you add, “And Picasso I detest more than I can tell you.”56
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While we’re on the subject of subversion, it’s fascinating to speculate about Gorey’s aesthetic as a witty riposte to another aspect of the town, and time, he grew up in: the “stormy, husky, brawling” manliness Carl Sandburg extolled in his poem “Chicago” (1914), a concept defined, in the City of the Big Shoulders, in corner-bar, working-class, Polish-Irish-Italian terms.57 Stanley Kowalski notions of masculinity, in the Midwest of the late ’30s and early ’40s, were more frankly homophobic than they are now, and an odd bird like Gorey would’ve found them oppressive.
Hackett, for instance, had no great love for gays; his plaid shirts, he-man mustache, and rough-and-ready aesthetic were a reaction, writes Patricia Albers, in Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter, “to the American stereotype of the artist as clubwoman’s lapdog.”58 In The Boardinghouse, a chronicle of life in a house full of Art Institute students den-mothered by Hackett, Donald S. Vogel recalls the time the art teacher was “really mad, shouting mad,” after catching a guy named Jules in flagrante with a male friend.59 “Hackett’s roar was heard throughout the house,” and by day’s end Jules’s room was for rent.
What did Hackett make of Gorey? No one from his Parker days remembers Ted being