Portraits

Throughout his career, Louis Fulgoni made incisive, thoughtful portraits of friends, lovers and relatives, as well as a series of self-portraits. Here is a selection of these works – ranging from drawings and paintings to prints and even masks – and some memories of the stories behind them. 

This may be the first of many self-portraits Louis produced in various media over time. It appears to be from the period just after he completed his studies at the School of Visual Arts, where he earned a degree in illustration. He was still living with his parents on Staten Island at the time, commuting to Manhattan by bus, ferry and subway each day.

Frank, an Irish-American man a few years older than Louis, was Louis’s first serious boyfriend. He had an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, where Louis lived for a while after moving out of his parents’ Staten Island home in 1961; at age 25, he had finally gotten up the nerve to leave, against his parents’ wishes. After living with Frank in Queens, Louis moved to Manhattan, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Louis befriended Pat Gallagher in the early 1960s, when the Cold War was at its height. He later commented on Pat’s flair for the dramatic, recalling her once saying in conversation, “If they drop the atomic bomb, I’m sticking my head out the window.” The two shared a love of theater and often attended shows together. Once, Louis remembered, they found themselves at a Broadway play where President John F. Kennedy and Jaqueline Kennedy were also in the audience. After the play ended, police officers and Secret Service agents blocked the exits so the Kennedys could leave first. Louis griped to Pat, “This is supposed to be a free country.” JFK happened to be passing by within earshot. He turned around and replied, “It is a free country.”

The well-known avant-garde collagist and sculptor May Wilson was in her sixties and Louis was about thirty years her junior when they met. They became friends sometime after she arrived in New York from Maryland in 1966, following the dissolution of her longtime marriage. The two may have crossed paths because they lived near each other in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. As depicted in Louis’s portrait of her – which he based on a Village Voice photo – the diminutive May favored jewelry that she made from objects such as bottle caps, pop tops and keys. Her many assemblages of found materials, as well as her Surrealist-inspired photomontages, probably influenced Louis’s later work on masks and collages. Louis and May were close for a time, and she gave him one of her sculptures, “Astro Baby,” which hung prominently in his living room. When a smoky fire broke out in Louis’s apartment building in 1970, he went to May’s place to wait out the blaze. 

The subject, Donald Litaker, was Louis’s boyfriend for a period immediately before Louis met Michael McKee, his lover and partner from the early 1970s onward. Louis and Donald remained on good terms following their breakup. After Louis’s death, Michael gifted the portrait to Donald, who was visiting New York from Germany, where he had relocated.

 A friend of Louis’s from his Chelsea neighborhood, Shirley Stoler acted in several distinctive films during the 1970s, including “The Honeymoon Killers” and “The Deer Hunter.” She sat for this portrait the same year she went to Europe to film “Seven Beauties” with director Lina Wertmüller. In the critically acclaimed film, she played the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp. The portrait hung in Shirley’s kitchen for many years. She died in 1999.

Michael McKee and Louis had been together for about four years when Michael sat for this portrait. They had met in February 1974, when Michael, a housing activist, needed a graphic designer to produce a flyer for an upcoming event and contacted Louis through a mutual acquaintance. Michael had just broken up with a boyfriend at the time, and Louis was single as well. Sparks flew as they discussed the flyer, which Louis finished within three hours. The next day was his 38th birthday. That evening, he and Michael met for dinner and embarked on their relationship, which lasted until Louis’s death in 1989.

Carl Frisk was Louis’s friend and next-door neighbor in the West 21st Street building where he lived in the 1970s and ’80s. Carl’s apartment was tiny – before he moved in, Louis had used it as a studio – but as a longtime ship’s steward on the United States Lines, he spent much of each year at sea. Unfortunately, Carl often fell into alcoholic binges while on land, leading to mental breakdowns and physical injuries from which Louis and Michael McKee tried to help him recover when they could. On better days, Carl and Louis shared laughs and meals; both were accomplished cooks.

Some of the first mask-like constructions Louis created were not strictly masks but, instead, what he called “personality hats,” which amounted to portraits of various friends. He originally made these pieces for the friends to wear at the annual Halloween parade through Greenwich Village, which began in the mid-1970s. This piece portrays Michael McKee, who is shown wearing it here. (In 2003, the hat was seriously damaged by water when there was a fire in the apartment above Michael’s. Amazingly, the face portion did not get wet; it is the only part of the piece that survives.)

Louis made this sensitive portrait of his mother, Mary Fulgoni, a year or two after the death in 1979 of her husband Adolph, a difficult man who Louis did not remember fondly. She was around seventy at the time and would live to the age of ninety-nine, surviving Adolph by thirty years and Louis by two decades. While Louis’s mother was always more supportive of his artwork than his father had been, she initially has reservations about this image, asking him, “Did you have to make my hair look so messy?” After Louis died, Mary and Michael McKee remained close – so close that in her will, Mary left her house on Staten Island to Michael and his husband, Eric Stenshoel.

Susan Butler, an American artist and writer who has been based in the U.K. since 1980, originally met Louis through Michael McKee. Susan’s ex-husband had been Michael’s elementary school classmate in Texas. After he and Susan divorced in 1975 and Susan moved to Wales to study photography, she remained friendly with Louis and Michael. During a visit that Susan and her then-teenaged son Michael Thompson took to New York, Louis made the portrait of Susan. He made the portrait of her son a year or two later. When young Michael sat for this portrait, Louis had him wear his Puma t-shirt inside out so the flipped image would render correctly in the finished print. In October 1988, Louis and Michael McKee took a three-week tour of Gothic cathedrals in France with Susan and her husband, the writer and photographer Ian Walker. It would be Louis’s final trip abroad.

One of the series of masks that Louis constructed in his final decade, this piece is a portrait of Alexander, a half-Siamese, half-Persian cat that lived with him and Michael McKee in their apartment in Chelsea. Alexander was born in 1972 and died in July 1987, two weeks before Louis was diagnosed with HIV.

Louis’s close friend and business partner, Tim Ledwith, sat for this portrait in the one-room office/studio they shared at 32 Union Square East, a building still largely tenanted by artists in the 1980s. Partners in the Ledwith & Fulgoni Company, Tim and Louis worked as an editor-art director team, producing publications for a variety of politically engaged organizations, including the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition, the National Lawyers Guild and Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians.

One of the series of masks that Louis constructed in his final decade, this piece is a portrait of Susan Daniel, a UK-based friend and museum curator. He made the mask while Susan was staying with him and Michael McKee on a visit to New York.

Louis’s final self-portrait and one of his last paintings. Made after a trip to France in October 1988, this piece may have been inspired stylistically by El Viejo, a self-portrait he had seen at Musée National Picasso-Paris.