Ezra Maas
We have an idea of the world, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it378
Since he first became famous in the 1960s, Maas had been characterised as “an intensely private and reclusive personality” by the media. Whether this was true or not it was the enduring image of the artist that was held by both press and public. There were very few photographs of him in existence and his personal life was largely unknown, with many people unsure of how old he was, his nationality, or where he was based. Following the news of his sudden and impending marriage to Helena Huston, a well-known figure on the New York and London art world, Maas’s devoted fans were initially outraged that their idol was human after all and feared the relationship would “ruin him”.
They need not have worried. Ironically, his marriage to Helena would signal an even greater retreat from public life than before, as she took control of his business affairs and became the face of the newly-formed Maas Foundation. British-born Helena was an incredibly sophisticated woman who spoke several languages, boasted about having been born during one of her mother’s trips to Bloomingdales, and who had built up a hugely profitable advertising empire in New York. Although she had come from relatively humble beginnings she was now extremely wealthy in her own right and had used her money to purchase several pieces of high-profile art in the 1970s. She was also a regular in glossy magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and was regarded as a fashion icon, thanks to a wardrobe that included French legends such as Dior, Chanel, and Givenchy, with jewellery by the likes of Tiffany & Co, and Van Cleef & Arpels, among others.
Helena had also become the patron of a number of upcoming young artists, such as David Diaz, Michelle Rocha, and John Michael-Vincent – however she unceremoniously dumped this so-called ‘stable’ of artists when she began her relationship with Maas.379 From that point on she worked exclusively with him, using her wealth and extensive contacts in the media and advertising world to effectively become a one-woman PR machine, shielding Maas himself from the press, and public, while bringing together his disparate groups of followers, collaborators, and trusted friends, and turning them into a single worldwide organisation. As one friend notes:
“She was the perfect woman for Maas; beautiful, fiercely intelligent, independent, driven, ruthless, and hugely passionate about him and his work…Helena was happy to devote herself completely to Maas and sublimate herself to his ego and desires…And importantly, from a business perspective, she understood the value of money in a way that Maas didn’t. Accumulating wealth just wasn’t important to him; in fact he saw it as a distraction, but she knew the power and privacy that money could grant them…’380
The marriage ceremony was understandably held in secret although this only increased speculation about its location, with everywhere from the private Denis Island in the Seychelles and the Hayman Island Resort in Australia’s Whitsunday Islands, to the Ulusaba Private Game Reserve in South Africa, and even the Lainio Snow Village in Finland, among the speculated venues. Despite this, the most credible story suggests Maas and Helena married in Oxford at the same church where his parents had married more than thirty years earlier.381 The Maas Foundation’s official description of the marriage, at the time, perhaps tells us more about how the organisation had begun to control the public perception of Maas and his authorised narrative than it does about the reality but it is interesting nonetheless:
“It was the coming together of two great people in a union that gave a renewed strength and energy to both of their lives…”382
The couple were often depicted as eccentric 1930s-style glamour icons by the press, travelling the world, launching new exhibitions, and creating art together, but in truth Maas used Helena’s fame to disappear further into the background. While Maas prepared to begin a new phase of his artistic career, a period that would lead to nominations for The Nobel Prize for Literature and The Turner Prize383 later that decade, Helena also indulged her own interest in becoming a painter. She converted one of the rooms of their manor house into a studio space and often worked alongside Maas. A friend of the couple, Geoff Laidler, said:
“Although the public perception of Maas depicted an intense loner, he was in no way an isolated individual…Gorhambury Manor was constantly full of people, full of artists, working, living, and creating together…it was communal and democratic…every room in the house becoming another potential studio, another space to create art, from the large ballroom sized living-room to the stables and, at the centre of it all, Helena and Maas could often be seen working side by side…”384
Officially, Maas never left his studio-home during this period, but other sources say different. There were Maas sightings across Europe and America throughout these years. One such instance placed him at the last public reading by the poet Charles Bukowski at the Sweetwater Club in Redondo Beach, California, in March 1980. Bukowski was living in the San Pedro area at the time with his future wife Linda, who was a devotee of Meher Baba, leader of an Indian religious society. Maas had written several positive pieces about Bukowski when he was a teenager and was known to have enjoyed his novels from the 1970s, such as Post Office and Factotum. The Maas Journals from this period do not mention the trip to Redondo Beach but do feature a quote by Bukowski, which Maas clearly liked. The quote, originally used in one of Bukowski’s poems and explained in a letter from the writer to John William Corrington, outlines the writer’s advice to aspiring artists. As you would expect from the so-called ‘poet laureate of American lowlife’, his words are unconventionally wise. Bukowski simply says “Don’t Try.”385
This was followed by a number of other sightings of Maas, including alleged visits to see Hunter S Thompson at his Owl Farm ranch in Woody Creek, Aspen,386 and William Burroughs, in New York, but it is difficult to know which, if any, are legitimate due to The Maas Foundation’s insistence that he never left Gorhambury Manor for more than a few hours in the early 1980s, following his marriage to Helena. One of the possible reasons for this, beyond his artistic seclusion and interest in privacy, was reportedly Helena’s fears for her husband’s safety, particularly following John Lennon’s death in December 1980.387 Jules Singer, who worked for an exclusive private security firm in the 1980s that specialised in protecting celebrities and briefly consulted with Helena about her needs, said:
“After Lennon’s death Helena was terrified about someone attempting to kill Maas, but in the end the Foundation decided to handle security themselves. Gorhambury Manor was heavily guarded, but from what I gathered Maas may have been somewhere else entirely…”388
In many ways, the decade to come would be characterised by the death of a number of high-profile and hugely influential artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, two men often associated with Maas’s legacy and the profound impact of AIDS on the art world. However, the ’80s also featured at least one unexpected resurrection, namely the re-emergence of painting and return to power of wealthy art collectors. While the AIDS epidemic, the second Cold War, the ‘Wall Street’ boom, and the Reagan and Thatcher years would dominate socio-political headlines, in the art world it was the decade of the dealer.
Financial deregulation had a significant impact on the art world. Buying art was big business and prices skyrocketed as a result. Wealthy private collectors, such as Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and Peter Ludwig, internationally, and Charles and Doris Saatchi,389 in the UK, had a huge influence on the market. As a result Maas was in safe hands, with his new wife Helena guiding his career and managing his financial interests. Many artists benefited from the economic boom and became hugely wealthy, but thanks to Helena, Maas joined the same rare financial company as Picasso.
Helena thrived in her self-imposed role as promoter of the Maas ‘brand’. She was quick to capitalise on the increased wealth and affluence in the 1980s and succeeded in increasing her husband’s art sales by a huge amount during this period, including high-profile deals with a number of American investors, such as Wall Street mogul Gerald Green and Greenwich hedge fund manager Steve Goldman, for a reported $12million (£6.5m). She also personally arranged sales with Sheik Khalid-Hamadi, the Emir of Qatar, for a sum rumoured to be in the region of $30m.390 Alongside her own career, as an artist, Helena also worked tirelessly to organise and curate dozens of exhibitions of Maas’s work during the 1980s, at galleries such as the Tate Modern, Gagosian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rijksmuseum, and Serpentine Gallery, among others. It wasn’t just about money, however; it was about staying relevant. One of the ways Helena went about achieving this was to market Maas’s work to the MTV generation. She negotiated the use of his work in music videos, including images and text, and arranged for collaborations with emerging bands and musicians.
Although Maas was largely based at his studio in Hertfordshire, for much of the 1980s, the two global centres of art at the time were New York and Cologne in Germany. Helena ensured her husband was well-represented in both cities throughout the decade and that his presence was felt wherever he needed to be to remain the zeitgeist of his generation. Meanwhile, in the UK, Maas’s old friend R.B Kitaj was active alongside other painters in the self-styled ‘School of London’, with Maas rumoured to have attended the private view in secret.
The year after Maas and Helena’s marriage, the press circulated rumours that she was pregnant with his child. Helena, who was trying to launch her own career as an artist at the time, denied the stories, although a paparazzi photograph of a supposed ‘bump’, which was due to appear in a British tabloid newspaper, was allegedly blocked by The Maas Foundation’s lawyers. It never resurfaced. The rumours continued, with some stories suggesting Helena had miscarried while others claimed she had given birth by emergency caesarean while working on an art installation in the North East of England. These led to conspiracy theories that the child had been hurriedly given up for adoption or secretly smuggled abroad to live in anonymity away from the fame of being born into the Maas family.
The Maas Foundation strenuously denied this, claiming there was no pregnancy in the first place. Helena’s media activity and public engagements in this period supports the Foundation’s stance on the matter, as a pregnancy would have been very difficult to hide for someone so regularly in the spotlight. There were other rumours however, including stories of another woman giving birth to Maas’s child. These stories were quickly dismissed as tabloid gossip, but evidence has since emerged to suggest that Maas had dozens of affairs during this period.391 This was not known at the time392 and their relationship was perceived to be both happy and successful. Maas’s marriage and his newly christened Maas Foundation were operating like well-oiled machines, but there was trouble on the horizon, in the form of something that could not be controlled or foreseen – chance.
Notes
378. Jean-Francois Lyotard.
379. Diaz, Rocha, and JMV all alleged they were dropped at Maas’s request. This was never confirmed.
380. Sally Ryder, from an interview with Daniel in 2011.
381. St Michael at the North Gate.
383. Sadly, the pages detailing 1984 – 1987, which included Maas winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and Turner Prize, have been lost.
384. Interviewed by Daniel in 2011.
385. Bukowski said: “Somebody asked me: ‘What do you do? How do you write, create?’ You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you.”
386. Thompson referred to this affectionately as his “fortified compound”.
387. Lennon was shot outside the Dakota building in New York by Mark David Chapman on December 8th. The following year a gunman also attempted to shoot US President Ronald Reagan.
388. As quoted in an interview with The New Review magazine, 1999.
389. The Saatchi Museum, which opened in 1984, was a converted paint factory in north London and included work by Donald Judd, Warhol, Serra, Flavin, Chamberlain, and Andre.
390. The exact figures were never revealed by The Maas Foundation.
391. The Maas Journals Vol.1 – 7 / evidence gathered from the apartment in Soho i.e. The Hallway conceptual art.
392. Although Maas did have the reputation for being an obsessive womaniser – Anonymous.