Stewart Allen Hitch

The Lost Legacy of Stewart Hitch
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: February 2, 2003, New York Times
AFTER he stopped boozing and before the cancer killed him, the abstract artist Stewart Hitch had a period of intense clarity, which was expressed in one wish made over and over to friends and family: ''Find a home for my paintings.'' Since his death a year ago this month, Mr. Hitch's kin, a motley group of bar buddies and his painter colleagues have been struggling to do just that, even though it means solving the mystery of where the paintings have disappeared to first. Appropriately enough to Mr. Hitch's legacy, the trail starts at Fanelli's Cafe on Prince Street. That venerable SoHo bar was his real home. Carried from Nebraska to SoHo on the winds of the 1960's, Mr. Hitch had gone about emulating his idol, Jackson Pollock: painting energetically, womanizing rapaciously and drinking ferociously. But he achieved only minor recognition as a third-generation abstract painter, and by his death his work had fallen out of favor. If his canvases had been stowed in a warehouse, they might already have been shipped to relatives and forgotten. Instead, in a faint echo of the disputes involving the celebrity estates of Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol, Mr. Hitch's legacy is shrouded in controversy. His paintings have been taken, friends say, by a con artist who, they believe, is selling them on the black market. They have formed a posse and even hired a private eye to get them back. His friends' campaign is not only about the money, though if the missing canvases sold at prices comparable to earlier works, they would be worth half a million dollars. It is also about the art, and about honoring a SoHo that is swiftly passing. For the paintings are proof positive that this slice of Manhattan was not always about stores that featured $700 towel sets, but was once the wild and sparkling center of the entire art world. As might be expected of the regulars of an unrepentant, smoke-saturated bar like Fanelli's, no one remembers exactly when Ralph Iorio began hanging around there. He and a companion known simply as Apples were working some kind of small construction job in neighboring NoLIta and were going to Fanelli's daily for lunch or cocktails. They looked like characters out of ''The Sopranos.'' Mr. Iorio was large and loud and wore his black hair slicked back. Apples was disheveled, and he mumbled. Mr. Hitch was drinking heavily, of course. In his early days, there had been sodden nights aplenty, but back then they were just punctuation to long stretches of isolation in the studio. By the late 1990's, Mr. Hitch was known as ''Lord of Fanelli's'' and could be found tossing back his morning eye-opener as early as 10 a.m. By fall 1998, Mr. Iorio, a beefy grifter in his 40's with a shady past, and Mr. Hitch, bar impresario and straight-shooting Nebraskan, were frequently hunkered together. Others pegged Mr. Iorio and Apples as con men, but Mr. Hitch liked them. He and Mr. Iorio talked of setting up a company called S & R Construction, named for their first initials. To help establish it, Mr. Hitch forked over $25,000, a small fraction of the $190,000 he had recently got from the sale of his loft. In return, Mr. Iorio offered to store 100 of Mr. Hitch's now homeless paintings -- his life's work -- without charge at a friend's garage in Jersey City. The artist happily accepted.
The ''business plan,'' mapped out on a cocktail napkin and sealed with a vodka and cranberry juice, struck the artists' friends as highly dubious.
''We all warned him this guy was no good,'' said Kevin Bartelme, a bar buddy of Mr. Hitch's, ''but he was drinking like half a gallon of vodka a day. He was suicidal.''
Perhaps not surprisingly, the two partners soon had a falling out. Mr. Hitch wanted his paintings back, the painter's friends say, but Mr. Iorio was always making excuses. Then, in June 1999, Mr. Hitch passed out at a Houston Street bar and woke up in St. Vincent's Hospital to find that doctors had discovered cancer in his stomach, lungs and every lymph node in between. He became sober and the search for the paintings suddenly became urgent. Mr. Hitch pressed to find Mr. Iorio, making frantic phone calls and even, doubled over in pain, traveling to the Jersey City garage where the canvases were supposedly stored. The garage owner said he had never seen any paintings, adding that he himself was looking for Mr. Iorio. Until the day Mr. Hitch died, on Feb. 18, 2002, he was completely frustrated in his quest.

Template for a Generation
Stewart Hitch's work may not earn him any entries in art history encyclopedias to come, yet his life and career are a perfect template for a generation of postwar painters.
Lincoln, Neb., in 1940, the year Mr. Hitch was born, was a quintessential American town during a quintessential American era. But according to the artist's nephew, David Jones, when Stewart Hitch's high school buddies were driving Dodge DeSotos, dreaming of ranch houses and soaking up the prosperity of the postwar years, he was writing poems about a local serial murderer, Charlie Starkweather, and applying to art school.