1) The exhibition "Tennessee Williams: The Playwright and the Painter" at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans features over 30 paintings created by Tennessee Williams over 30 years. Williams would paint every afternoon in Key West using wine, Billie Holiday music, and paint as inspiration. 2) The paintings provide insight into Williams' sensual imagination and included themes of Christian crosses, water, and naked figures. They allowed Williams to express aspects of himself that he did not directly address in his plays, such as his homosexuality. 3) Many of the paintings were gifted to friends and lovers in Key West and were in danger of never being widely seen again until being collected for this exhibition. It

1. E12 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST . SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2015
BY MARK GUARINO
new orleans — When Tennes-
see Williams showed up early af-
ternoons at David Wolkowsky’s
home near Key West, Fla., he
would have three things to help
get him to nightfall: “A bottle of
red wine, Billie Holiday tapes and
paint,” his friend recalls.
Out of that motley concoction
came paintings, dozens over 30
years, that the Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning playwright and poet gave to
friends,neighborsandlovers,and
when he died at age 71, there was
no discernible plan for the works
to ever be seen again.
Now, 32 years after his death in
1983, those paintings have finally
been collected for an exhibition in
New Orleans, another of his ad-
opted homes. The paintings pro-
vide insight into the sensual
dreamscape thatlivedwithinWil-
liams and that he extracted
through images of Christian
crosses, water and naked flesh.
“There’s a reason he didn’t just
take photographs, and there’s a
reason why he didn’t write about
these things,” says William An-
drews, executive director of the
Ogden Museum of Southern Art,
where “Tennessee Williams: The
Playwright and the Painter” runs
through May 31. “The act of paint-
ing is an intimate mirror. I think
Tennessee Williams liked the re-
flection he discovered in this
work.”
Williams first visited Key West
in 1941, when he was on the verge
of his most productive and ac-
claimed periods. Three years lat-
er, “The Glass Menagerie” would
establish him as one of the most
original, and poetic, voices on the
American stage, and in immedi-
ate succession, more of his classic
works followed, most notably “A
Streetcar Named Desire,” “Sum-
mer and Smoke,” “The Rose Tat-
too” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
The success allowed Williams
topurchaseamodesthomeinKey
West at 1431 Duncan St., which,
until his death, would serve as
playground and refuge. He lived
therewithhispartner,FrankMer-
lo, but after Merlo died of lung
cancer in 1963, Williams vanished
into a fog of depression that he
tempered with alcohol and pre-
scription drugs.
Freedom at the easel
Writing, however, never failed
him, as attested by the volumi-
nous body of plays, novels, poetry,
short stories, screenplays and
teleplays he left behind. But
painting was largely seen by Wil-
liams’s Key West friends as a cre-
ativeoutletthatwasmoreperson-
al and that offered true creative
freedom. He rarely sold his paint-
ings;somewerediscardedtheday
they were completed, and others
became gifted mementos to those
in his inner circle.
The paintings reflect not just
the tropical yellows, orange and
reds of the environment in which
theywerecreated,butalsoFrench
poetry, satire and dark irony.
In “A Child’s Garden of Roses”
(1976), a man and a woman stand
on a beach bleeding from rose-
colored hearts while a baby pa-
rades nearby waving a pistol. The
baby also happens to have the
head and shoulders of Truman
Capote, with whom Williams had
a long feud. Another painting, “Le
Solitaire” (1976), shows a figure
outlined in white, lost in the night
between two buildings, their win-
dows colored in blue. In the dis-
tance before him is the hazy blur
of a palm tree, but he can’t move
toward it; all he can do is rest his
hands on his hips and stare.
Andrews says that although
Williams’s paintings are often de-
scribed as naive or primitive, they
are sophisticated for their rich
expressionism.
“I look at the paintings as an
opportunity for the author to put
into the art form things he would
not put on the stage, but things
that were important to him,” the
museum director says.
Williams’s homosexuality,
rarely overt in his plays, flour-
ished in his art. Male nudes are
celebrated, but there also is strug-
gle. In “The Tidings Brought to
Mary at Far Rockaway” (1975), a
naked man is at the door, adorned
with a yellow halo and rays shoot-
ing out from his body. He holds a
cross to a man and woman, also
naked, who face away from him,
their faces dulled with blank ex-
pressions.
An enduring friendship
The exhibition also reflects the
story of Wolkowsky and his
friendship with Williams, which
lasted until the playwright’s
death. Wolkowsky was a pallbear-
er at his funeral.
Early this month, at age 95,
Wolkowsky came to New Orleans
to attend the opening reception
for the Ogden show. It was only
his second time in the city, not
that he lives far away: A Key West
native whose family moved to
Miamiwhenhewas4,Wolkowsky
met Williams in Philadelphia,
where he worked in real estate as
a developer and preservationist.
In 1962, he retired, and at age 42,
returned to Key West, where,
throughhisdevelopmentprojects
over the next five decades, he
helped to bring the quirky town
into the modern era and trans-
form it into a tourist destination.
Lunching at a bistro in the
A playwright’s other art
surfaces in a new show
F. CASTORINA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In Williams’s paintings,
including “Citizen of the World
III,” above right, and “Coeur
Violee,” right, a portrait of
French poet Arthur Rimbaud,
the homosexuality that was
rarely overt in his plays could
flourish.
CARL JUSTE/THE MIAMI HERALD VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tennessee Williams, above,
enjoyed a bottle of wine and a
seaside view, here at a
restaurant in Taormina, Sicily,
in 1961, and in Key West, which
he first visited 20 years earlier.
PAINTINGS COURTESY OF KEY WEST ART AND
HISTORICAL SOCIETY AND DAVID WOLKOWSKY
French Quarter across from the
Hotel Monteleone, where Wil-
liams often drank, Wolkowsky re-
called that in 1968, when he
openedthePierHouse,KeyWest’s
first luxury resort, Williams
would come there daily for lunch
and dinner, since his house was a
short mile down the road. When
such Hollywood friends as Eliza-
beth Taylor or Richard Burton
visited, Williams would send
them to Wolkowsky to put them
up.
“He had a quiet life, but he was
an attraction to Key West. If you
went to a restaurant, everyone
knew him,” Wolkowsky says of
Williams.
Wolkowsky owns Ballast Key, a
14-acre private island that is the
southernmost point of the United
States and is about nine miles
from Key West. Famous friends
retreated there — Leonard Bern-
stein, Truman Capote, Rudolf
Nureyev and Lillian Hellman, for
starters. Williams, too, was a fre-
quent presence there in the 1970s
and early ’80s. He painted outside
in the afternoon sun, using acryl-
ics, oil paint, chalk and stickered
letters. Despite his fame in the
Keys and beyond, most people
there had little idea he painted.
“I think he enjoyed the change
of scenery,” Wolkowsky says of
those afternoons.
One day the playwright asked
him to pose. He did, he said, but
the result embarrassed him: “I
was horrified. I said, ‘Tear it up!’ ”
The painting, titled “L’inconnu:
C’estlesYeux,”hangsattheOgden
show with an inscription on the
back: “Dear David, you realize I
wasn’t painting the physical you,
but the spirit visible to me. Love,
Tennessee.”
“I saw too many people come
and go with Tennessee, so I kept a
very pleasant and semiformal re-
lationship with him,” Wolkowsky
says. “I always saw the best side of
him.JustbecauseInevertriedthe
other.”
Building the collection
Wolkowsky now owns all of the
paintings in the exhibition except
for two; they are on permanent
loan to the Key West Art & Histor-
ical Society, which plans to take
the show to other cities. Acquir-
ing them was not always easy.
Williams gave many away, but
others ended up at local galleries.
One unexpected mover of his
work was Viola Veidt, daughter of
the early silent film star Conrad
Veidt. She routinely took paint-
ings from Williams’s home, ex-
changing them with art patrons
for cash. Cori Convertito, the his-
torical society’s curator, says Wil-
liams was fully aware of Veidt’s
actions but let the thievery persist
because she was down on her
luck, her father having died when
she was a teenager.
Convertito says she hopes the
show will raise awareness about
the Williams legacy in Key West,
which she says is overshadowed
by that of another literary lion,
Ernest Hemingway, even though
helivedinKeyWestforlessthana
decade.
“We wanted to show [Wil-
liams] was multifaceted here,
which is what set him apart here
and why he enjoyed it here,” she
says. “The weather, the autonomy
of Key West gave him a lot of
respite, especially later in this
career when his plays were not as
well received as the earlier ones.”
The comfort Williams found in
Key West would not sustain him
in the end. In his 2014 biography
ofWilliams,JohnLahrwritesthat
the playwright fled Key West in
turmoil over the fact that his new
work was not connecting with the
public. He would die three
months later in a New York hotel
room.
LeonciaMcGee,hishousekeep-
er in Key West, recalls hearing
him call a taxi. According to Lahr,
“Whensheinquiredaboutthecar,
he told her that he was going to
New York. She asked when he’d be
coming back. ‘I won’t ever be
coming home again,’ he said.”
With these paintings finally as-
sembled for all to see, now Wil-
liams is back in the Keys, the sun
is still shining and soon it will be
time for a swim.
style@washpost.com
Guarino is a freelance writer.
Tennessee Williams: The
Playwright and the Painter
Through May 31 at the Ogden
Museum of Southern Art, 925 Camp
St., New Orleans.
www.ogdenmuseum.org.
Below: David Wolkowsky, the
developer who became a
Williams friend, provided
places — in Key West and on his
privately owned Ballast Key —
for Williams to paint and drink.
“I kept a very pleasant and
semiformal relationship with
him,” Wolkowsky says. “I
always saw the best side of him.
Just because I never tried the
other.” Wolkowsky now owns
all but two of the paintings in
the New Orleans exhibition.
MUSEUMS