Lycanthropia

Everyone knows Renault. Born in 1900, he was among those who, in the Jazz Age, caught the eye of Gertrude Stein and was regularly invited to her salon. He achieved this coup by degrees: First by charming Alice B. Toklas and then by painting a portrait of Miss Stein that was second only to Picasso’s in greatness. He was one of a handful of people who both recognized and celebrated Miss Stein’s homosexuality, something that endeared him to both women. “Il charme très, si mal orienté,” Miss Toklas said of the artist, when she spoke of him at all. In those days he painted small, garish canvases after the Cubist style, but with an eye toward the East that differentiated him from the Picasso-influenced mob.

His reputation among writers and artists of the time carried him well into the McCarthy era, when his sensibilities faltered. He found himself floundering in an ocean of pigment with no destination in mind. The few paintings he made for public consumption during the 1950s were routinely denounced by critics, and the informed public thought of him as over-the-hill. “What a shame,” they said, when they spoke of him at all. “He spent his gift recklessly in his youth. He has nothing left to offer.”

Then, in 1962 in a little-known Soho gallery, Renault held a one-man show of Impressionist-influenced landscapes executed on enormous canvases. Though the paintings stunned his audience, Renault further courted and astonished them. For each canvas hid a nude model, colored with theatrical makeup to perfectly match the landscape he or she represented, and the highlight of the show occurred when the exotic chameleons started moving and Renault’s paintings came literally to life. Critics marveled that the artist had blurred the line between illusion and reality, and they lauded his audacity. After the show Renault was restored to the community that had shunned him and was again a favorite at dinner parties and social gatherings. When Andy Warhol “discovered” him in 1965, Renault became a part of the emerging Underground, and was regularly seen working at the Factory and holding forth in the back room of max’s kansas city. He would have been welcomed in the front room as the guest of Willem de Kooning or Robert Rauschenberg, but Renault had a nose for artistic trends. He knew Warhol, for the moment at least, held the future of art on a leash.

In photographs from the ’sixties, Renault is the little gray-haired man on the very fringe of the action. Sometimes all you see of him is a hand or a foot. That’s because Renault was always working. While others floated silver Mylar pillows over New York City, Renault experimented with new forms of theatrical makeup; while hangers-on silkscreened images of Marilyn Monroe on canvas, Renault learned to operate a tattooing machine; and while Gerard Malanga and Paul Morrissey, Billy Name and Candy Darling, Paul America and Baby Jane Holzer, Ultraviolet and Joe Dallesandro, Viva and Ondine, Brigid Polk and Edie Sedgwick scrambled over one another to become Warhol’s next superstar, Renault quietly studied every aberration and permutation of body drawing and skin writing he could find. He had become obsessed with creating art on human flesh. In the spring of 1966 he wrote the entire French text of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom with a felt-tip pen on the body of a celebrated blonde, then made photographs as she showered and rinsed away 78 continual, caffeine-driven hours of work. (It is these images, with the gray water swirling down the drain, that are most often reproduced in art anthologies next to the title “Auguste Renault: Cubist painter and abstract photographer.” ) In 1967, he discovered the Hindu art of mehndi, using henna dyes to paint long-lasting but impermanent images on the skin, and his work evolved into Beardsley-esque line drawings that gyrated and shimmered as his models moved. Then, in 1968, he found the tiny passage in the Upanishads that he whispered over a Moroccan henna syringe and that transformed his work forever, breathing into it the breath of life.

In the spring of 1968, at a Central Park be-in, Renault displayed a dozen mehndi-illustrated models (among them Viva and Edie Sedgwick) that so electrified critics he was the cicada-buzz of the literati for months after. Each woman bore the intricate line drawing of a vivid landscape, executed in such a way that the illustrations seemed to come alive when the model moved. Waves crashed on a Maine beach; fields of Kansas wheat rippled in the wind; leaves on the trees of North Carolina oaks turned ahead of an advancing thunderstorm; an Oregon trout steam babbled over smooth stones. Renault’s accomplishment was so profound, said some critics, it would be decades before the rest of the world would catch up to him. Renault shrugged off the accolades and retired to his East Village apartment.

That same year he was killed, one might say, by Valerie Solanis.

You remember Ms. Solanis, don’t you? She was the woman on the fringe of the Warhol entourage who wanted him to produce a play based on her “S.C.U.M Manifesto” (the Society for Cutting Up Men), and who later shot the artist three times and so gained her 15 minutes of celebrity. Renault was working in a back room of the new Union Square Factory, cutting apart clumps of henna powder with a pocketknife when the shots rang out. He was so startled that he jabbed the knife blade through the palm of his hand. In the waiting room at Columbia Hospital, he wrapped the wound in a handkerchief and forgot about it. Two days later the injury was badly infected, but Renault treated it with mercurochrome and the infection later subsided. What the artist failed to realize was his injury had triggered in him an infection of his heart valves. A month to the hour after the shooting, Renault developed a raging fever and died of bacterial endocarditis a day later. His remains were cremated, according to instructions left in a handwritten will, and were scattered over Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. His personal effects, including his Moroccan syringe, various henna powders, and several of his diaries became the property of Andy Warhol and later of his estate.

How they ended up on eBay some years later is anybody’s guess.

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