(Photo: Ben Buchanan, courtesy of Storyville Films and Motto Pictures)
Hambleton died in his hometown of New York City, according to an announcement from the Shadowman Twitter account. The cause and circumstances are not yet known, a publicist for the film said.
The pioneering artist’s death came at a time when his career was on the brink of a renaissance. Shadowman premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April amidst two Hambleton exhibits, and is set to open theatrically at Quad Cinema on Dec. 1. In addition, one of Hambleton’s iconic “Shadowman” paintings, from 1982, is featured in a MoMA exhibit that opens today, “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983.”
RIP Richard Hambleton, one of the greatest street artists of all time. #ShadowMan pic.twitter.com/WelGZZyBi7
— Bucky Turco (@buckyturco) October 31, 2017
Around the time that work was made, Hambleton’s paintings were valued higher than Basquiat’s, fetching $15,000 just like Keith Haring’s did. In 1983, a profile in People magazine described the “shadowman” paintings he had splashed onto walls all over Manhattan: streaks of black paint that created kinetic silhouettes. “They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a holocaust, or even my shadow,” said Hambleton, who was then a “shy” 28-year-old, holed up in what the magazine described as a “cramped, dark studio near Manhattan’s rundown Bowery district.”
Hambleton had made his reputation, in the late 1970s, by painting fake bloodied chalk outlines on the streets of New York and a dozen other cities, a project he called Image Mass Murder. The San Francisco Examiner called it “the work of a sick jokester,” but fans like Lower East Side gallerist and documentarian Clayton Patterson appreciated the way it combined visual art with drama and performance art. It was a proper “murder mystery story,” Patterson says in Shadowman; it perplexed pedestrians and even police officers who wondered whether a crime had actually been committed.
RIP Richard Hambleton, the great street artist. and creator of #shadowmen. He died last night in NYC at the age of 65. pic.twitter.com/9ETa1sC2jk
— Shadowman Film (@shadowman_film) October 30, 2017
Three years later, Hambleton had moved on to another project, I Only Have Eyes for You, in which he plastered 800 life-sized, wide-eyed photos of himself around 13 cities. People were taken aback by these public displays; according to the People profile, cabbies hated the shadowmen because it seemed like they were trying to hail a cab.
Of course, graffiti artists were also plying their art during this time; a new documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat recently made its premiere at the New York Film Festival. Like Basquiat, Hambleton aspired to be a proper gallery artist. But despite his “arrogance and pride” (per Patterson) and his propensity for dapper dressing and womanizing, he never figured out how to play the schmoozing game that was so important in the art world, and he failed to ride the Wall Street boom that briefly bolstered the East Village scene of the ‘80s. Instead of capitalizing on his Shadowman paintings, he began painting romantic landscapes and seascapes in the vein of Turner. They were quite striking, but they weren’t what the art world wanted.
R.I.P. Artist Richard Hambleton ( my 2014 portrait of him) #richardhambleton #shadowman pic.twitter.com/TBSLJZP47N
— Curt Hoppe (@curthoppe) October 30, 2017
Meanwhile, Hambleton’s heroin addiction drove him to increasingly desperate living conditions, and sometimes to homelessness. He began painting with his own blood, and sold his paintings to restaurateurs in order to be able to eat. When I met him during a rare public appearance at the Outsider Art Fair in January, he was clearly in poor health, though his paint-spattered shoes indicated he was still working. At the premiere of Shadowman, Hambleton wore a surgical mask to obscure his face, which had been affected by skin cancer, and walked with a cane and stoop due to scoliosis.
The premiere wasn’t Hambleton’s first reemergence from the proverbial shadows. In 2009, Giorgio Armani sponsored a celeb-studded comeback show produced by socialites Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmordiba. Shadowman followed their efforts to revive Hambleton’s career even as they quarreled with him over his perfectionism and failure to deliver paintings on time. After being evicted from his Orchard Street studio, Hambleton was briefly put up at the Trump Soho by a wealthy Russian, but that relationship also soured. He was living in a studio in the East Village this past April when the New York Post wrote a story about his “epic rise and disgusting flameout.”
Today, as word spreads of his death, Hambleton is being remembered by colleagues and admirers in the art world.
A Shadow Forever. Very sad to hear that one of my favorite artists has passed away today: Richard Hambleton. #shadowman pic.twitter.com/Rev48bc2wD
— Oscar van Gelderen (@OscarvanG) October 30, 2017
R.I.P. to our man #RichardHambleton #ShadowMan #10thStreetMilitia
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This post was adapted from our review of “Shadowman,” which can be read in its entirety here.