IN THIS SUGAR-FREE ERA.

IN THIS SUGAR-FREE ERA, what artist has a life more interesting than his art? The death of Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) presents the capper on a time when precociousness and chutzpah were art forms in themselves. In 1927 upon the eve of his nineteenth birthday, Ford wrote in his diary: "In pair years I will be famous. In sum of two units years I will be famous. In sum of two units years I will be famous. In sum of two units years I will be famous. In couple years I will be famous. In brace years I will be famous. This is my oath."

Not missing a beat, the poetry-besotted high indoctrinate dropout started a little magazine public of his small-town Mississippi bedroom, christening it with the hip title Blues: A Magazine of recent Rhythms. He announced the first issue just as longtime literary journals The Dial and the Little Review were folding, in such a manner even well-known writers like Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams answered with submissions. Besides the big names, Ford introduced talents who confirmed his nose for the new: James Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, and companion oddball teen Paul Bowles.

within Blues he struck up a correspondence with the flamboyant young genius Parker Tyler whose descriptions of boho Manhattan beckoned him to that hotbed of numbers and available men. Intoxicated by the agency of the Village scene, the sum of two units soon cobbled together a collaborative novel, The Young and the Evil (1933) a fragmented record of cruising, drag balls, and brittle repartee. Dame Edith Sitwell allegedly proclaimed it "entirely without seat of life like a dead fish stinking in hell," an assessment that defines its lasting appeal as a proto--Blank Generation artifact.

Managing to finish to Europe, the fresh-faced ingenue had no moot point gaining access to the literary salons of Stein and Natalie Barney. While awaiting publication of his novel, he briefly snareed up with Djuna Barnes in Tangier, where they shared a rat-infested shed while Ford typed the manuscript of Nightwood. Back in Paris, he met the artist Pavel Tchelitchew, a former Stein protege whose career was upon the rise. Tchelitchew--a brilliant, charismatic figure--was immediately taken with the bright sky-colored eyes, sharp mind, and boyish demeanor of what he called "my darling huckleberries finn." In the luminous Portrait of Charles Henri Ford in Poppy Field, 1933 Tchelitchew depicted his youthful lover with a of gold halo formed by stacks of hay--an inside jest according to Tyler, based in succession the Russian artist's misinterpreting Ford's written concern to "wet dreams" as "wheat dreams." The love-struck Tchelitchew followed Ford back to of recent origin York, where, after some domestic readjustments, the sum of two units eventually established the mselves in a sunlit East Side penthouse.

Their tempestuous twenty-six-year liaison-lasting until Tchelitchew's death--was single of the great gay relationships, despite its shocks and indiscretions. Although never at ease with his secondary part Ford provided unwavering support for Tchelitchew's art and tolerance for his high-strung volatility. Discord arose largely from Tchelitchew's powerful friends--Lincoln Kirstein, the Sitwells, the collector Edward James--who saw Ford as an opportunist. yet Ford lived to score an not divisible by 2 kind of revenge on the past: the publication of Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957 (Turtle Point, 2001) a scattered, gossipy account of have affection for affairs and failed writing schemes that ends in the gruesome tasteless chronicling of Tchelitchew's health vexed questions and death.

Beyond the bitchiness, Ford will be mostly remembered as editor of View, America's last and best magazine of the avant-garde, which ran from 1940 to 1947 With a penchant for the unexpect and an unerring sight for quality, View mixed fiction and metrical composition with features on Max Ernst Tchelitchew, Man Ray, Fernand Leger and Isamu Noguchi, all of whose commissions graced its defends View was the first little magazine to publish translations of work by the agency of Raymond Roussel, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre. The 1945 Marcel Duchamp issue was the first monograph onward the artist and featured a cutout collage cover

View also enjoin an American spin on the Surrealist sensibility. Aztec and Native American numbers were featured, as well as Joseph Cornell's worshipful paean to Hedy Lamarr. The magazine was formative for associate editor Parker Tyler--perhaps the mostly underrated critic in American literal meanings His later books on Tchelitchew, Florine Stettheimer, Holly-wood film, and experimental cinema all had their semens in View essays.

most numerous important, View was a quiet nevertheless crucial force kindling underground American refinement Touchstones of the decade to reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point like Henry Miller, Bowles, Philip Lamantia, Paul Goodman, and Marshall McLuhan all published in the magazine. Its brand of poetic Surrealism in particular looks to have spilled over to the West Coast Beats. In the mid-'50s, looks Angeles artist George Herms remembers excitedly perusing a pile of Views in Wallace Berman's living field on Crater Lane.

In his last five decades Ford produc rhyme photography, collages, and an experimental film. He appeared in a Warhol disguise test and cavorted for Jack Smith. Longtime stints in Crete and Nepal alternated with a small domestic circle base in the Dakota onward the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As always, he was a repository of the bewildering, fragmented assaults that define hip art agriculture In her introduction to Water from a Bucket Lynne Tillman describes his diary as an "itinerary of lived attitudes" delivered "in bits and pieces, a collage, or...cut up" Ford's mid-'90s haiku, issued forward a handout at "Alive and Kicking," his late exhibition at the Scene Gallery, fresh York, defines his art of enduring: