The portrait of Marvin Hayes ’63 is a creation of many colors.
The strokes on the canvass began with a small town in Mississippi, a World War II shipyard in Orange and a tiny house in Hamshire where, to the great benefit of the art world during the next 50 years, two people saw talent in the dirt-poor kid, the star of the six-man football team who could run the 100 yards in 10.2 seconds.
Thanks to a high school English teacher and an accountant with artistic talent, the sketch began of an extraordinary life and career. Hayes worked his way through Lamar University, hitchhiking 25 miles a day to do so. His talent earned him a scholarship to graduate school at Columbia University. He became a successful illustrator, whose work appeared in a veritable who’s who of the magazine-publishing world before he went on to a career in fine art and international fame in one-man exhibitions, museums and private collections.
Hayes’ 1977 masterwork, God’s Images, illustrates the Bible through 53 etchings, with text by poet-novelist James Dickey. The impressive volume sold more than 100,000 copies, attracting glowing reviews from the New York Times and The New Yorker and comparison to William Blake. In 1985, the Vatican Museums in Rome exhibited the works, which remain in the Vatican collection. A complete set of the etchings is a treasured part of the Dishman Art Museum’s permanent collection.
For almost 43 years, Hayes has been affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where fortuitous circumstances led him soon after he arrived at Columbia. Today, he works in the education, drawings and prints, media, and objects conservation departments.
His friends, colleagues and collaborators span the art world from artist David Stern to musician Dave Brubeck and actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. He helped celebrate Wallach’s 90th birthday Dec. 7 by archiving the actor’s photo collection and compiling a library of his 103 films.
Hayes has received dozens of humanitarian awards for endeavors ranging from the arts to health care. In 1983, Lamar honored him as a distinguished alumnus.
“I’m proud of the gift God gave me – to paint. That givesme the most pleasure,” Hayes says.
Though he spent his early years amid the bayous and rice fields of Southeast Texas, Hayes settled into the city. Manhattan inhabited him, even for the more than two decades he made Connecticut his home. Away from the city, he served as a caregiver and as a community activist.
Hayes was born in Canton, Miss., and, before he was 2, his family moved to Orange, where his father, Aubrey, was stationed with the Navy during World War II. Shortly after the war, he moved to Hamshire with his parents and older brother, Aubrey Jr. His mother, Myrtle, was a nurse, and he says, “I think she delivered all the babies in Hamshire.”
There, the seeds of Hayes’ art were planted. “There wasn’t much art in Hamshire, but there was one artist – I always called him Mr. Bennett. He saw that I was an artist. He was an accountant for the rice dryer there, but he was also a wonderful painter and taught me how to paint. I was poor as dirt, and he took me to the Beaumont Art League for drawing classes.”
Another inspiration was Juanita Martin of Saratoga, his high-school English teacher. Hayes said. “I was not terrific in English – I was dyslexic – but she recognized I was a good artist, and she encouraged me in that,” he said.
Hayes was athletic – big, tall and fast – and played all the positions – offensive and defensive – on Hamshire’s six-man football team. His senior year, the team was undefeated and won in the top level of competition. He was named to the All-Region team.
Legendary coach Bear Bryant recruited him to play for Texas A&M, and he well remembers the day Bryant and an assistant paid a visit to the Hayes home.
“We had a very small house, and my mother made dinner for them: fried wild rabbit, cream gravy and hot biscuits. I remember they ate four dozen hot biscuits between them. There were only 200 or 300 people in Hamshire, and, when they went to leave, all of them were on our lawn.”
Hayes received a scholarship to A&M, but, after one season on the football team, he saw his college athletic career cut short when his mother became ill. He returned home to care for hismother and become the family breadwinner.
“She had to have an operation, and, because she had diabetes, it took her more than a year to recuperate. And of course we had to pay for the operation too.” Hayes stayed out of school for a semester, then received a scholarship to Lamar and a job offer from Lamb Printing. “I had done some freelance work – menu covers – for the Beaumont Country Club. They saw them, and they asked me to come to work for them.”
Hayes had a stellar collegiate career, serving as president of Kappa Pi, the honor society for art students. Its advisor, Myrtle Kerr, edited the society’s international magazine, and he was the student editor. “I was the art editor of everything,” he says.
Nonetheless, Hayes says, “I remember being called ‘trailer trash.’ At the time, I had a friend who had bought a really beautiful trailer, and I thought it was a compliment. That’s how dumb I was. I was off the farm.” Only years later did he realize the term was derogatory.
His good grades earned him a scholarship to Columbia – and a move to America’s artistic epicenter. “I couldn’t wait to get there,” he says.
Columbia placed him in an 11th-floor apartment on Central Park. “It was 333 Central Park West at 93rd Street. I was so excited because I envisioned having a balcony overlooking the park,” he says. “But it was on the other side, so I had a view of what looked like a set from West Side Story.
“I think it was the pantry to the original apartment, with one little window. It was probably about 9 feet by 6 feet, and I barely could get a bed and a little table in there.”
When he arrived in New York, Hayes said, “I had a little box of paintings I had brought from Texas, thinking, ‘I’ll sell these to make money.’ I had no idea how I was going to survive. I had maybe $300, and it was $60 a month for rent. So I had to find a way to get through the summer.”
One day, on the elevator to his apartment, Hayes made the acquaintance of René d’Harnocourt, director of the Museum ofModern Art, who later introduced Hayes to the Met’s director, James J. Rorimer, as well as to Theodore Rousseau, then head of European painting and sculpture. He became friends with Rousseau, who helped him secure an assistantship at Columbia.
“I had applied with Dr. Meyer Shapiro – probably the United States’ most prominent art educator – and had no inkling I’d get an interview, much less get to work for him. Rousseau wrote me this terrific letter of introduction. Shapiro had already interviewed 60 or 80 people and had 200 to 300 applicants, but he selected me.
“For the next two years, I ran his slide show. He had a reputation for bombarding you with images. He had three projectors, and you had to memorize which slide went when and where. I hooked up an electric Singer sewing machine pedal where I could control one of the projectors with my feet. I was the first remote-control projector controller.”
After graduating from Columbia, Hayes became an award-winning illustrator, with work in Esquire, McCall’s, Playboy, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Time and Good Housekeeping. Encouraged by Rousseau, he turned to fine art, working primarily in egg tempera and copperplate etchings. Eventually, Hayes’ work would be featured in one-man shows in the United States, Europe and South America and as sought-after acquisitions in museums and private collections.
God’s Images is Hayes’ piéce de résistance, a monumental endeavor that, because of its biblical significance, is sure to endure as an important legacy. Its creation began when representatives of Oxmoor House Inc. of Birmingham, Ala., were in New York and saw Hayes’ work. The publisher planned a new version of the Bible and contracted with Hayes to provide 12 illustrations.
“They liked them so much that they signed me up to do 38 more. I actually did 53 all together,” Hayes said. “They realized that with the text of the Bible and the etchings, they would have to get hernia insurance to get it out of the stores. So they decided to do the book another way. James Dickey saw the etchings and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a treatment of the Bible.’”
Hayes and Dickey, best known for his novel Deliverance, traveled all over the United States for interviews. The book sold more than 100,000 copies and can still be found via online booksellers.
By the time the etchings were exhibited at the Vatican in 1985,Hayes had entered another phase of his life and was unable to attend the showing.
His mother became ill, and Hayes again became her caregiver. “I was the only one in the family who could do it. I didn’t have a nursing home to put my mother in or my grandmother or my grandfather or my greatgrandfather. I did the cooking, the cleaning, the shopping. I nursed them, giving medicine and taking blood and blood pressure.”
All the while, he said, “I was working as hard as I could to make slides as fast as I could and sell them as fast as I could to make a living for everyone. It was like putting your thumb in a dike. There was no end to it. I don’t regret that I did that because I had to. There was no other choice.”
His mother died in 1988, 15 years after his father’s death in an auto accident.
Hayes approaches his own physical problems optimistically. Besides compensating for his dyslexia over the years, he copes with failing eyesight because of glaucoma, which threatened his artistic career in the early 1980s. He takes four kinds of medication six to eight times a day, so, he says, “It’s fairly good right now.”
He lived in Wilton, Conn., from 1965 to 1991, when he returned to New York City. Honored as a humanitarian in Connecticut and in New York, Hayes received the Nursing and Home Care Emissary Award for design work he did for Brubeck’s annual concerts for nursing and care personnel. “He still sends me tickets to concerts he gives in New York,” Hayes said.
Over the years, Hayes has sent more than 40 students to college with interest-free loans, and he supports artists in all fields with grants. (One, Steve Lutvak, will soon bring his first musical to Broadway.) He donates time and expertise to teaching people to use the computer and helping the unemployed write resumes. Those benefiting from that assistance number in the thousands. He uses his computer skills to teach and assist cancer researchers.
Hayes helped Norwalk Hospital raise more than $50 million. He designed posters and programs for the Norwalk Symphony to help raise funds. Other honors include Wilton’s Distinguished Citizen Award and the Partners in Caring Award for Connecticut.
Museums exhibiting his work include the Metropolitan,Boston, Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery, Brooklyn, Bibliotheque Nationale and New York Public Library. Among his collectors have been Louis Auchincloss, Jacqueline Onassis, David Rockefeller, Barbara Walters and Anwar Sadat.
For the Metropolitan Museum, Hayes produced a 360-degree, virtual-reality panorama of the Gubbio Studiolo, an 11-year restoration project, and assisted Carmen Bambach, curator of drawings and prints, in digitizing the 15th- to 18th-century Italian and Spanish drawing collection of more than 8,000 objects – the Met’s largest collection. He worked on Leonardo da Vinci and Peter Paul Rubens drawings shows, among others. He tracks news of the Met and preserves it on DVDs for the museum library and the staff members involved as a courtesy from the media departments.
Hayes has lectured and given seminars and workshops at Yale, Harvard and Columbia universities, the Rhode Island School of Design and Carnegie Institute, as well as the Met and Lamar. A member of the Microsoft Windows development team, he was an early proponent and innovator of digital imaging and an expert in scanning, color calibration and large-format printing.
His latest venture is recording lectures to DVD, beginning with a presentation by architect James Wines. He is videotaping the lectures every two weeks. “I had done other lectures for friends, but this was my first commercial job,” he said. “My first Cecil. B. de Marvin production.”
Hayes and his partner of 12 years, Frank Bara, live in a firstfloor apartment on West 67th Street, a historical landmark next door to ABC headquarters. “We are surrounded by ABC,” he said. “But it’s a lovely old building.”
Hayes carries his zest for life into the kitchen, where cooking is a favorite pastime.
“We have a friend who works at ABC, and he comes here for lunch every day. I fix lunch, and it has turned into somewhat of a salon. A lot of people in the building have art-related jobs, and they show up regularly. Some are writers who read their offerings. It gets very exciting.”
Hayes takes his culinary avocation seriously.
“I fix Cajun things, and, at the first of the year, I have hopping jack,” Hayes says. “I don’t let these Yankees get by with too much.”
