René Ricard: Pop recluse who was a fixture in Warhol’s Factory

RENÉ Ricard, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a cultural provocateur in Andy Warhol’s circle of oddballs, transsexuals and aspiring “superstars”.

An art critic, actor, poet and painter, Ricard was a renaissance man for the cocaine age. But he accepted that, in conventional terms, he had never worked a day in his life. “If I did,” he said in the ’70s, “it would probably ruin my career, which at the moment is something of a cross between a butterfly and a lapdog.”

Ricard’s contemplative, literaryminded nature was at odds with the more chaotic aspects of Warhol’s entourage at The Factory. In Warhol’s 1965 film, Kitchen , Ricard was seen washing dishes to the hum of a refrigerator while the director’s tragic muse, Edie Sedgwick, sneezed in the background. “It was a horror to watch,” stated author and activist Norman Mailer.

The following year Ricard starred in Chelsea Girls, Warhol’s tribute to residents of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. The notorious landmark on West 23rd Street was, in fact, Ricard’s on-off home for more than four decades. In its cloistered confines he wrote poetry and art criticism, painted experimental oils and nurtured his reputation as a recluse.

Albert René Ricard was born on July 23 1946 in Boston, where, as a gay, gangly teenage aesthete, he later modelled for art schools. In the early ’60s he moved to New York, quickly settling into life as a struggling poet, before meeting Warhol in 1964. Ricard’s time at The Factory saw him experiment with acting and free verse.

He would sit at their “happenings” wrapped in furs. “The Factory was a cold, frightening, forbidding place,” he recalled. “I mean, it was all silver. It was frigid.

“Andy never gave us money, but he took us out to eat every night. He’d take the whole Factory to a place called Emilio’s and would be so high on amphetamine that he couldn’t eat. He’d serve himself an olive

My career is a cross between a butterfly and a lapdog

and cut it into 36 slices with the knife and fork.”

During the ’80s, Ricard’s art criticism for Artforum and Paris Review promoted the fledgling talents of artist Julian Schnabel and graffiti artist Jean Michel-Basquiat. “He was this invisible force behind so many artists in the ’80s,” said Schnabel, adding: “There’s a lifetime behind his work. He’s a grown-up.”

Ricard’s interests were unapologetically avant garde, although some journalists claimed he eschewed objective criticism in favour of “high-octane” appreciations built on “panegyric, vituperation and gossip”.

Ricard’s Chelsea apartment consisted of a single room and a shared bathroom (he ate out). “I don’t own anything,” he said in 2007. “I always manage to come up with the rent, knock wood.

“‘Poet’ is not a salaried occupation. And anyone reading this who’s in need of a poem, we can talk.”

He published four volumes of poems, which echoed the streetwise wisdom of Leonard Cohen’s songs. In The Death of Johnny Stompanato (named after the gangster killed by the daughter of actress Lana Turner), Ricard detailed the aftermath of a punchdrunk romance: So you submit to that mild form of boxing called love / Then, happy he’s earned his keep / He picks your pocket, drives off in your blonde Lincoln / And you pass out.

Ricard’s eclectic artistic trajectory was, he said, intended “to amuse and delight, giving my rich friends a feeling of largesse, my poor friends a sense of the high life and myself a true sense of accomplishment for having become a fixture and a rarity in this sharkinfested metropolis”.—