Silkscreen print by Robert Merkin (1938-2004), "Oedipus and Luxor," 1980.
Number 250 of 260.
42 inches by 35 inches, framed.
Value: $1500

Richard Merkin (extract edited from the artist's obituary found on GQ.com)

Richard Merkin was a painter, an illustrator for The New Yorker for many years, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, a columnist for GQ, and a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Richard Merkin was born in Brooklyn in 1938 and he held degrees from Syracuse and RISD (where he served on the faculty for more than forty years), but no degrees are given anywhere for the sort of learning Mr. Merkin attained. He was a polymath in the arts of the cultural substrata, an historian of the nexus that determines style. His distinctive work hangs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. Merkin was very successful as an illustrator, with many book covers and New Yorker drawings to his credit.

Merkin was also an enormously influential figure among his students and among younger artists, setting an example for the idea that one needn't be a part of a movement or follow the trends, and that the most rewarding path was blazing one's own. As a painter he had a most distinctive style-astutely colorful, romantic, and dreamy.

He illustrated Leagues Apart: The Men and Times of the Negro Baseball League, which a labor of love. Merkin was a huge baseball fan. In his later years he basically traded in his splendid tailored wardrobe for a casual style. I was shocked at first to see him at the Odeon, downtown, with his young protégé Duncan Hannah, dressed as if for a baseball game. But Merkin wasn't dressed for a Yankees or Mets affair, but more like a 1948 baseball game, wearing a vintage silk barnstorming team jacket and a cap from one of the Negro League teams.

Probably the best circulated image of Merkin is the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. He's in the back row along with Aleister Crowley, Mae West, Lenny Bruce, Carl Jung, and Bob Dylan. That was the league he belonged in. But these times are slow to recognize greatness in art, dress, personality, or spirit.