Tony Siani, 10 Years After His Death

Why Did Tony Siani Die?
By Tom A. Milstein
New York City
Jan. 30, 2005

All of us who loved Tony know that his death was preceded by a long period of intense discouragement, verging on despair. During this time he became more and more bitter and hostile toward the world around him. And while it is true that he never allowed this bitterness to spill over onto his friends and associates and family, it is also true that he did become much more private and reclusive than he ever was before. Tony had always been an immensely gregarious and sociable individual; he maintained an incredibly wide circle of friends and acquaintances from very diverse backgrounds. He could as easily mingle with millionaires as with the proprietor of the corner hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon. But during this last period he withdrew, and sometimes it seemed that his last real connection to the outside world had been reduced to his TV set, where he loathed most of what he viewed.

Normally when a creative person undergoes this kind of an experience, it manifests itself in a sharp drop in artistic productivity. Not so with Tony. His artistic output remained prodigious, as it had always been, notwithstanding his “hermitage.” The content of his output changed rather markedly, that is true. The characteristic Siani style did evolve – in fact I would argue it did more than evolve, it dissolved and recrystallized – but it never flagged.

It was almost as though the two Sianis – man and artist – could no longer coexist. The artist was willing to go on, and knew how to go on, but the man simply couldn’t continue. Something happened to cause them to part company. And that something is what killed him – long before he was finished with his business as an artist, which is what makes his death so disheartening and poignant.

Today, on the 10th anniversary of Tony’s death, I want to offer some thoughts about what that “something” was. These are things I wanted to say at his funeral, but could not find the words – or rather, the words I did find seemed somehow inappropriate to that occasion. I hope that today, after so many days and even years have passed, I have found better words, and better circumstances in which to utter them.

I begin with a consideration of the forces that molded Tony as a young man. I can’t really consider his preceding life as a boy, because I didn’t know him then, even though we grew up in the same town and even went to the same high school, in Denver, Colorado. But we were separated by 4 years and so never met until college at the University of Colorado, where he had already established himself as a husband and father, as well as a working artist, when I met him. He had met and married Hatsie, and they had already had one child, Nora, and were expecting another, who became Jennie.

I doubt I ever would have met Tony had it not been for a curious campus organization known as the Young People’s Socialist League, or YPSL. Tony was an active member of this group, which was inspired by a campus sociology professor named Alex Garber, and had about 20 active members. I had arrived on campus as a freshmen, together with a high school friend of mine, both of us bearing a tentative commitment to another, rival left-wing organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, or YSA. The YSA was Trotskyist; the YPSL was democratic socialist.

YPSL was the youth organization of the Socialist Party USA. This venerable group, which had been around from the turn of the century, was at that time a coalition of two groups: the Norman Thomas socialists, who represented the Christian Social Gospel/Settlement House tradition in American Socialism, and the Schachtmanites, who were followers of Max Schachtman, who had split away from Leon Trotsky just before World War II, on the grounds that the Soviet Union under Stalinism had ceased to be a “worker’s state,” and had in fact become a new form of class society, every bit as evil as capitalism, which Shachtman called “bureaucratic collectivism.” Most but not all of the members of the YPSL chapter at Boulder were “Shachtmanites.” What held the two factions together was a shared commitment to the replacement of capitalism with socialism and a shared rejection of Communist totalitarianism.

It didn’t take my friend and I long to move from the YSA to the YPSL – about 4 months, as I recall. One of the major motivating factors, at least for me, was the difference in character between the members of the YSA and that of the YPSL. The former group had all the charm of the seedy underworld milieu depicted in certain David Mamet movies, or by Dostoievsky in Notes from the Underground or The Possessed. But the YPSLs, especially as typified by Tony Siani and his two close YPSL comrades, Penn Kemble and John Maxwell, were altogether fresher and more appealing, especially to an impressionable undergraduate looking for role models and life-choices.

Siani, Kemble and Maxwell were as different from each other as three people could be. They constantly fought over ideas. Each of them came from totally different backgrounds. Tony was a Staten Island Italo-American transplanted to Denver. Penn Kemble was the son of an old New England family whose father happened to be campus psychiatrist at a 7 Sisters Ivy League Women’s College (I can’t remember which one, but I think it was Vassar). John Maxwell was the son of New York gangster Dutch Schultz, but after his father was gunned down by the Mafia to prevent him from assassinating DA Tom Dewey, his mother sent him to be raised in a Roman Catholic monastery-orphanage in Canyon City, Colorado.

As I have said, these three men were quite different from one another, not only in background, but by upbringing and temperament. An ethnic American, deeply cherished by his mother and basking in the warmth and pathos of a typical Italo-American family; a cold but brilliant New England WASP, and an orphanage semi-sociopath who was the smartest man I’ve ever known (notwithstanding his proudly-boasted of IQ of 106): I don’t doubt that were it not for the message which Alex Garber brought to them, they would never have dreamed of befriending one another or of making common cause in an obscure political organization.

Maxwell had the most penetrating sociological mind I ever encountered. The socialist movement had a strong pacifist wing in those days, and it manifested itself in an anti-American, unilateral disarmament mentality that was always apologizing for Soviet motives in the Cold War. Since peace movements weren’t tolerated in Iron Curtain countries, the “objective” effect of the peace movement was to favor Communist world policy aims, and we made no bones about saying so. But John Maxwell went further – he did an original historical analysis of the roots of pacifism in Christian otherwordliness that extended the theories of Max Weber. It was devastating, far more than our political polemics, because it demonstrated that pacifism’s “counterproductive” consequences were in fact exactly what the pacifists intended.

Penn Kemble had been dubbed by Garber “our prince of pamphleteers,” a reference to George Bernard Shaw’s admiring characterization of Leon Trotsky. A masterful writer, Penn dreamed of a literary or cinema career and certainly had the talent for it. I’ll never forget a demolition he did on Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s nauseating prep-school narcissist, in those days very much in vogue on campuses.

But of the three, it was Tony who made the strongest impression on me, who influenced me in the deepest and most personal way. This impact came from two things. He was an incredibly warm and affectionate man who had a way of reaching out to people that both put them at ease – included them in the family, so to speak – and also inspired them to think outside the bounds of the “family,” to think in terms always of huge questions and cosmic issues. Of the three young men I’ve described to you, only Tony conveyed this sense of a common endeavor to ascend to the heights of cultural and political greatness. With Maxwell, one always had the rather chilling feeling that the issue was always power. Kemble fairly radiated the Yankee curse of invidious competitiveness. But Tony let you know that his train had plenty of spare seats in it and that it was all aboard who wanted to come aboard.

And where was this train going? That was the really odd thing! Tony wanted to take art back to the Renaissance. He wanted to make this journey not because he was a cultural reactionary – such attitudes would not have been tolerated in the YPSL – but because, after a brief fling with abstraction, he became convinced that the history of Western Art since the Renaissance had been a history of downward decline. He said over and over that artists since the Renaissance, no matter how great and profound their achievements, were all haunted by a huge inferiority complex, and rightfully so: that none of their work measured up to the incredible masterpieces of European Renaissance painting.

Now Tony Siani was not one to cohabit with an inferiority complex, cultural or any other kind. So for him the solution to this problem was to rejoin the figurative and narrative traditions in Western art and shepherd them back to the Renaissance – not as if post-Renaissance art had never happened, but as part of a grand project to capture the Renaissance tradition and transcend it. In other words, he wanted to create a new grand synthesis of Renaissance figure painting and the Modernist revolution into which the Renaissance tradition had brilliantly, but destructively, devolved, and launch painting anew.

Over 40 years ago, when I was a young and callow Gascon, that seemed like a good enough agenda to me. Coupled with the politics and intellectualism and radical glamour of my other two Musketeers, Maxwell and Kemble, I had no problems at all signing on as the D’Artignan – actually one of many – of the group.
But here I want to depersonalize this account and introduce some theory. These three diverse characters would never have been able to collaborate, nor would I have ever gravitated to them, had it not been for the role of Alex Garber and the particular doctrine of socialism and socialist strategy that he brought to Boulder. It was Garber’s teaching of the lore of socialism, the values of democratic socialism , and the lessons of 20th Century world and American politics for socialism, that made it possible for the entire phenomenon I have described above to exist. Garber presented us with a movement, a movement that had a history and even more important, as he presented it, a future. This future he called Realignment.

By laying the groundwork for orchestrating the diverse personalities described above (and many others besides) into a common cause, Garber made it rational for people with great talent, big egos, and giant aspirations to collaborate and cooperate. In other words, it wasn’t the charisma of Maxwell, Kemble, or even Siani that ultimately attracted me and others to this little group, it was the charisma of Socialism. Socialism made it possible for Maxwell, Kemble and Siani to fuse their appeal into one appeal. Thus one could join them without becoming their acolytes, their lackeys or their flunkies. What we all belonged to was bigger than any of us. The Socialist tradition had been doing that for young intellectuals for many years. But socialism as a tradition was winding down, sputtering out, by the 1960’s. Garber’s doctrine of Realignment made it possible to envision a rejuvenated socialism that might actually claw its way into the mainstream of American life.

What was this Realignment idea? It was simply a way of adjusting the traditional socialist program of radical economic and social transformation to the unique realities of American politics, or what socialists have traditionally referred to as “American exceptionalism,” the features peculiar to American history and American society, that had hitherto rendered the country remarkably immune to socialist politics.
Realignment abandoned the old doomed socialist endeavor to set up a third, labor-based political party in America, and instead called for activity in the more leftist of the two major parties, the Democrats, aimed at pushing it further to the left and thereby to polarize politics into a struggle between a GOP based on the rich and their allies, and a Democratic party composed of labor, liberals, and minorities. To bring this about, it capitalized on the catalytic role of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. The victory of the Civil Rights Movement would drive the Southern Dixiecrats out of the Democratic party and thus shatter the Dixiecrat-GOP alliance that had been the real ruler of American politics since the Great Compromise of 1877. That in turn would have the effect of turning the Democratic Party into a replica of the great Social-Democratic parties of Europe. This Realignment idea came pretty close to succeeding. Schachtmanite socialists played key roles in the most critical areas of the Civil Rights Movement, helping to push the movement into an alliance with Labor and Minorities, counseling Martin Luther King away from the more unhealthy influences on him, steering organized labor into a strongly supportive role, and joining with the Democratic Party liberals to advance civil rights legislation aimed at overthrowing the remnants of Jim Crow, insuring voter rights, and marginalizing the Dixiecrat racists. It all culminated in the glorious March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1962, a historic event we basically organized under the auspices of Max Schachtman’s close ally, Bayard Rustin.

Then it all fell apart. The Vietnam War erupted as a divisive issue and suddenly a chasm opened up within the coalition upon whose cohesiveness we had pinned our socialist hopes. I am not going to conduct a postmortem on the disastrous effects of this foreign policy issue on our domestic strategy. What’s important to realize is that the Realignment strategy disintegrated as a result, and with it went our hopes for socialism. This was the end of a great historic cause. The horrific series of defeats that began in the trenches of World War I, and then stumbled on into the Bolshevik adventure in Russia, the Hitlerite reaction in Germany, the apocalypse of World War II, and finally the East-West superpower conflict known as the Cold War, presented its final bill to a movement that was by this time without reserves of any kind. It is a testament to the intrinsic vitality of that movement that it took such a tremendous series of smashing blows to dispatch it. But dispatch it they did; the disintegration of the liberal-labor-minorities coalition in American politics may have been small potatoes compared to these mighty European events, but nevertheless it was the straw that broke a very wounded camel’s back.

With the collapse of realignment came the collapse of rationality on the Left in American politics. Out of the bowels of Ivy League there spewed forth the pseudo-leftism of the draft-dodging elite, hiding behind a Counterculture whose putrid effects are with us today. Into the vacuum left by the dissolution of New Deal and Social-Democratic values came the only other ethical system viable in the modern world, the ethics of commercial capitalism. It was this environment of crass commercialism “counterbalanced” by crass Counterculturalism that became our atmosphere. We breathe this toxic stew to this day, God help us.
The collapse of realignment meant the collapse of socialism. But the hope and dream of socialism was what fueled Tony Siani’s great enterprise! The socialist engine is what powered Siani’s neo-Renaissance locomotive. If socialism collapsed, then so also did Tony’s entire artistic program.

Socialism was a movement that rooted itself in materialism, not idealism. That means, among other things, that its own principal criteria of validity was success. If it could not be successful in America, and if it had been defeated in Europe, then it was a movement based on false premises and deserved its fate. This is a harsh judgment but one to which all socialists of integrity would subscribe. Therefore, enough! It’s over.

No one drew this fearful conclusion with more austere intensity than Tony Siani. He not only drew it in the political realm, he drew it in the artistic realm as well. I would like to prove these two contentions with two observations, and then conclude with a third.

When I was struggling with the implications of our defeat, and trying to come to theoretical grips with those implications, I hit upon an idea. The idea was so radical that at first I hesitated to share it with anyone. I knew that to do so would render me even more of a pariah than I already was. It was simply that Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism is what doomed his movement. I was not the first to take note of Marx’s anti-Semitism, and I was certainly not the first to blame socialism’s failure on Marx’s ideas. But I was the first to relate the two, and to show that Marx’s failure to anticipate the rise of Communist totalitarianism was a direct effect of his denigration of the Jewish people and of his own Jewish roots, that his inability to appreciate the role of Oriental Despotism in the world was part and parcel of his suppression of the Jewish world-historical role in his theory of socialism. When I did gain the courage to utter these ideas to a few friends and comrades, all I got in response was scorn and derision. Only my beloved Emily offered support. Emily and one other person – Tony Siani. I’ll never forget Tony’s response to my tentative exposition of this concept: “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.” I can’t tell you how much I need that encouragement. I owe this idea to the spiritual and intellectual influence of my wife. But I owe the courage it took to write it down and publicize it to the support of Tony Siani.

The other observation has to do with a radical change in Tony’s artistic style, a kind of explosive decomposition and recrystallization already referred to. It was during this period that Tony’s work began to lose its close affinity to Renaissance style and began to exhibit a much more austere, “Hebraic” flavor. I’m not speaking of his use of the Biblical narrative only. This was a trend that had already started in his work. I’m referring more to the painterly style he adopted to convey Biblical themes. Although his death deprived us of a chance to see where he would have taken this trend, how he would have cultivated it and what it would have flowered into, I do think it is fair to say that much of the grandeur and beauty we can now perceive in our friend John Bradford’s work can be glimpsed in embryo in Tony’s last works.

In other words, Tony Siani had grasped in artistic terms, and before I grasped it in political terms, that the train of art could not be rejuvenated in Renaissance Station. The true rejuvenation was pre-Christian and hence post-Christian. That’s as radical and shattering an idea for artists as Marx’s anti-Semitism is for socialists. But they are really the same idea working in parallel worlds.

Now I come to my third and last observation. It is a somber but noble one. I have already noted that whereas Tony the comrade and Tony the artist could draw the necessary conclusions from the fall of socialism, Tony the man could not. As a man, he was so invested in the beauty of the Renaissance, so dependent on the sensual and tactile pleasures of its shapes and forms, so thrilled by its sheer mastery of formal problems, and his personality was so shaped by the pride of Renaissance values and vitality, that he simply could not remake himself the way he remade his art. When he realized that this mighty city-state – the city-state of Renaissance art – would have to be abandoned, the way socialism itself would have to be abandoned, it broke his human heart. Not his artistic heart, mind you, and not his comradely heart, but his human heart.

And so he lost his life to art. Perhaps it will be vouchsafed to us to win it back for him.