American Masters Three: Cole, Kelly and Lemon

In the waning days of the old year, death—which stops for nothing and everyone—took a little and a lot from our culture, and its aesthetics, to boot. 

The three persons we lost at the end of 2015—an American artist  with giant standing in contemporary art, a singer who escaped the shadow of her father’s stardom only to merge with it for arguably her biggest success, and the biggest star of a basketball institution which played the game for laughter and lightness even while amazing us with its difficulty—were contradictions in their fields and originals as well.

In the end, their lives exemplified the ideas that art is never simple, even when it seems that way, that music embraces the personal, no matter what the song, and that difficult games, when played and watched, are full of improbabilities and a gag and joke or two.

NATALIE COLE

Natalie Cole was the daughter of an American icon, not an easy thing to be under any circumstance, but when your father is Nat King Cole, an African American super-star in an time that had few, and when your dad’s song stylings are on television, jukeboxes and radio airwaves, and when the folks that visit at your house regularly include the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin and Duke Ellington and Count Basie, it leaves a mark both rich and heavy.

Natalie was Nat’s daughter to the core, even though she initially studied to be a child psychologist. Almost naturally, she  fell into music, mostly not because of her father, but because she had a singular voice and talent, and an appealing personality.  She began recording and soon had a huge R&B hit with “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love),”  a smooth number that’s a part of million of people’s soundtrack of their lives, along with “Unpredictable,” “I’ve Got Love On My Mind” and “Thankful.”

The career went up and down, along with an addiction problem, but then the work went supernova, and returned to the music of her father, in a recording of “Unforgettable” (which was a Nat King Cole super hit), duetting with her father on the track and a video.   The result was indeed unforgettable (it got a Grammy and a Song of the Year Award), and sold seven million copies, followed by an album.) She sang the song at the Grammies to and with a video image of her father . It was exhilarating (because it seemed like some kind of wizardry) and heart-breaking in a good way, because it was a kind of reunion, a love song.

Cole had a series of medical problems, including kidney issues and hepatitis C.  She died on the last day of 2015 at the age of 65 in Los Angeles.

ELLSWORTH KELLY

The American artist Ellsworth Kelly, who died at the age of 92 in New York on Dec. 27, became over time, and in a quiet manner, a giant in the field of Modern Art, partly by not joining the club: although his works could loosely be termed abstract, and sometimes pitched into total abstractions, they were also wholly his, not the representatives of a school, or pied piping for abstract expressionism.

Sometimes, Kelly, who spent a considerable time in post-war Paris where he loved the “gray” aspects of the city, would almost define what people either loved or hated about abstraction, but in the end, he defined and explained its roots.  Many museum or gallery goers, confronted by blank or monotone canvasses of distinct similarity that give art critics the status of high priests, feel left out, not because they’re keen on representational art and miss Norman Rockwell, but because the result is puzzling. It’s missing a connection.   Mondrian’s minimalist works are both admired and yawn-inducing, depending. 

Kelly seemed that way a little upon first view, especially exhibitions and works that emphasized the abstraction without context. But we recall a smaller exhibition of his works at the National Gallery of Art which was an eye-opener and explained exactly what Kelly meant when he said, “I don’t paint paintings. I paint objects and things.” He was in his own way and especially in his paintings a kind of reductionist, giving us, not the thing itself, but its source, common objects revealed as if presenting a flower with only its roots.

There was in his works—sculptures, too—the eye of an engineer, chunks of lines and math, a love for architecture, and a master drawer. He had an eye for the odd detail and made it fit and big and made it take wing: he was once after all an avid birdwatcher, a designer of camouflage patterns at other times in his life.

In a way you had to learn Kelly, not like a foreign language, but as a way of seeing things that were hidden, waiting for the insight, the ah or the oh, the bulb going off brightly in your line of sight.

MEADOWLARK LEMON

Basketball—the antics and commerce of the NBA aside—is a difficult, often grueling game.  It requires certain physical skills, peripheral vision, a magic touch of wrist and fingers, stamina of a kind that would wear a footballer and baseball out in the course of a couple of quarters of play.  At its best, it’s a precise game—the swish of the net, the perfect bounce pass, the fakes and moves, seeing things out of the corner of your eyes.  Above all, while it isolates stars, it is at its best a team sport—five-on-five, live.

Meadowlark Lemon was a tremendous basketball player. He was a Harlem Globetrotter—they did indeed globe trot and brought the game to world audiences, especially young people and people unfamiliar with the game.  He was the star of a team from 1954 to 1978 that said something else about the game—it’s a lot of fun to play, and maybe even more fun to watch. 

He was called the “Clown Prince of Basketball,” playing for an all-black team that almost always won against home-grown competition. The team and its members—driven by a whistling tune—laughed, joked, acted like magicians, played with  beauty and precision, although laughter was the soundtrack of their game.

“My destiny was to make people happy,” Lemon said.  That he did, and they were indeed happy.  There’s barely an ounce of sadness among the comments sections online about his passing, and none of the usual snark.  People reacting by saying that they broke out into a smile, instantly imaging him and them on a court.

Surely, if there is justice, there’s a basketball court in heaven, ready or not.

Meadowlark Lemon died at the age of 83 in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dec. 27. He was the father of ten—or two basketball teams.