After France was liberated, his Yiddish-speaking
mother came for him and Lichtman learned he was
Jewish — but continued to visit his beloved adoptive
parents during summer breaks from school in Paris.
In 1950, Lichtman’s mother remarried and they moved
to the United States, settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
There, entering sixth grade as Ronnie — his class-
mates and teachers had trouble pronouncing Rene —
13-year-old Lichtman earned two awards from his art
teachers.
“In public school, these two art teachers said, ‘Look
kid, you’re pretty good at these posters — why don’t
you try to get into one of the music and arts schools in
Manhattan?’” Lichtman says. “I always kept that with
me.”
After graduation, Lichtman went into the Army, where
he continued to paint whatever he could — including
sets for performances — and had a show in the Army.
Returning home to Brooklyn, Lichtman entered
Cooper Union School of Art in Manhattan’s East Village.
Winning a scholarship, he spent a couple of summers in
Provincetown, Mass., where he worked as an assistant
to artists Robert Motherwell and his Jewish wife, Helen
Frankenthaler. Motherwell
was part of the New York
School, which also included
Philip Guston, Willem de
Kooning, Jackson Pollock and
Mark Rothko.
“After the war, all these
artists and teachers came
to New York and created the
New York School,” Lichtman
says. “So there were all these
influences — Surrealism,
Automatism, avant-garde
movements, Abstract
Expressionism. And it all
influenced American art.
“I was drawn to the
Expressionist tradition, and
also the geometric and the
architecture, like Kandinsky
and the Bauhaus and Walter
Gropius in Chicago. I’m
somewhere in the middle.”
In Provincetown, Lichtman
stayed away from the party
atmosphere. “I didn’t go to
any of the bars,” he says. “I kept kosher, but didn’t know
it — I just did what I knew.
“They had a studio — Motherwell rented a huge pool
hall that had been torn apart, no pool tables. It was
just a huge space with huge paintings with very simple,
geometric stuff in the middle,” he says. “He would say
to me, ‘Give me three tubes of paint, yellow, ochre and
blue, mix them together. I want you to paint this area, no
brushstrokes, just flat.’ He would do those nervous edges.
It was so big that I could do that. So I painted Robert
Motherwell’s paintings.
“Frankenthaler brought me in sometimes to do ship-
ping,” Lichtman says. “And Norman Mailer had a house
down the street — sometimes I’d cut his grass.
“Motherwell had a whole pile of horrible drawings,”
Lichtman says. “He’d say, ‘I want you to rip up all that
stuff.’ So I did that for two days. We didn’t talk much,
and he noticed this and asked why I was so quiet. I said,
‘Well, you’re painting. What the hell am I going to say to
you?’”
He also looked at Lichtman’s work — and then
gave him a recommendation to the Fullbright Scholar
program, which allows an American student to study
abroad for a year. Frankenthaler happened to be on the
deciding committee.

details

“Rene Lichtman: A
Retrospective 1960-
2018, Paintings &
Collages” will be on
view through May
25 at Lawrence
Street Gallery in
Ferndale. An open-
ing reception will be
held 6-9 p.m. Friday,
May 4; a mid-month
reception will be 2-5
p.m. and an artist’s
talk at 2 p.m. Sun-
day, May 20. (248)
544-0394.

ABOVE: Lichtman in
Brussels, where he had
his first one-person
show, on a Fullbright
scholarship.
FROM TOP: An enor-
mous Rothko-inspired
collage dated 1964.
Leger’s Dream, mid-
1960s. A 2016 geomet-
ric work.

continued on page 39

jn

May 3 • 2018

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