PURVIS YOUNG, HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE, and a SWARMING HARPIE

All week I'd been anticipating seeing the preview of the Purvis Young retrospective on Thrusday at the Miami Art Museum. Purvis Young (who died in April at the age of 69) was an urban expressionist painter who was born and lived in Miami's Overtown, the black neighborhood that was demolished along with its music/art/and social nexus in the 1970s when the I-95 expressway was erected downtown. Young stayed on, filling his warehouse/studio with thousands of paintings on cardboard, plywood, and all kinds of found materials. He educated himself through library books, NPR, and PBS and was markedly affected by and involved in the mid-century civil rights movement. An evanescence pervades his work. Its gentle surrealism is far more satisfying than Marc Chagall's. Within the relentless, vivid kinetecism of his surfaces lies a constant tranquillity. The fluid linearity of his figures often resembles the Lascaux-like markings of Picasso's "picador" series. The silhouettes of pregnant women and construction cranes are equally fluid. Every inch of his paintings is animated with his passion for paint, devotion to the the brush, and love of seeing. By the time of his death, his paintings had been acquired by museums and collectors all over the world.

The exhibit itself had, sadly, only about eight works. Among those closely inspecting the pictures was a handsome black woman with two teenage boys. When a guard rushed over to admonish them for touching the work, the woman replied, "Lady, these pictures have been sitting in my backyard for 35 years. I'm Purvis's wife and these are his grandsons, and we worked with him on the frames of every one of them. Don't tell me not to touch them." Her name was Eddye Mae, but, as she explained to me, Purvis called her Betty. He called everyone by a nickname. The boys, Dquon, 17, and Devante, 14, were as long, tall, and beautifully molded as the figures in Purvis's paintings. While I talked with them, a vulture flew by -- a blonde Broward woman handing out glossy business cards and hawking her collection of Purvis Young's art. Hard to think that she and Eddye Mae occupied the same planet, let along floor space. Eddye Mae told me she was rather "phobic" of people these days as we watched the harpie work the room.

A documentary film on Purvis's life and work was screened downstairs -- it showed him in civil rights footage, during the demolition of Overtown, with his famous sidewalk wall of pictures erected during the 70s, interviews with collectors, friends, family, neighbors, and, most of all, with Purvis. He was a monumental man -- big, genial, stubborn, obsessed. I thought about what a joy and agony it must have been for Eddye Mae to love and put up with such man for 35 years and that she, probably, deserved at least as much a tribute as this show.

After the film (which is a terrifically made documentary but two first-time filmmakers whose names I wish I could remember), the crowd dispersed into groups of loud reminiscence and acclaim. Clustered among them were other members of Purvis's family -- children, grandchildren, even a few-week-old great-grandbaby in a carrier. Outside the harpie was again hawking her collection amidst the smokers.