Image: Fred W. McDarrah/ The Village Voice
John Perreault, an artist, critic and poet died on Sunday in Manhattan due to complications from gastrointestinal surgery.
Perreault was a champion for cutting edge art and used his position as art critic at the Village Voice to praise feminist art, like works by artist Judy Chicago.
An ally to women, Perreault was the subject of some notable portraits. He had a great relationship with Alice Neel, who painted this rather risque image of Perreault in the 1970s for a show he was curating about the male nude :
John Perreault by Alice Neel at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
A great quote from Neel via Perreault: “Wild woman Alice Neel once told me, when I was posing naked for her, that she would have been famous much sooner if like Jackson Pollock, she had Lee Krasner for a wife, or like de Kooning she had had an Elaine.” Yeah!
Perreault must have gotten a taste for turning the tables and letting the ladies paint him, because he got naked again for the fabulous, stud-studded Turkish Bath by Sylvia Sleigh:
At the Smart Museum of Art.
John Perreault is the man with the curly blonde hair in front of the corner of the window.
Handsome, smart and an advocate for the most exciting and politically relevant art of the 1970s and beyond. The art world will certainly miss John Perreault.
By: Angelica
Sr. Editor