Rene Ricard | God with Revolver

Rene Ricard

God with Revolver 

Madras, India/New York City, USA: Hanuman Books, 1989

104 pp., 23 x 14.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Born in Boston in 1946, Rene Ricard ran away from home several times, and by nineteen was living in New York City, where he became a protégé of Andy Warhol. He appeared in Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls, and the lesser known Kitchen (1965) and The Andy Warhol Story (1966), in which he portrayed Warhol, alongside Edie Sedgwick. 

Ricard wrote a series of essays for Artforum magazine in the 1980s, which helped launch the careers of Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Schnabel cast Toronto actor Michael Wincott to portray him in his 1996 film Basquiat, and Basquiat immortalized Ricard in the 1984 drawing Untitled (Axe/Rene).

In addition to his influential essays, Ricard published four books of poetry in his lifetime, with God With Revolver being his second. It was produced ten years after his first (the eponymously titled volume edited by Gerard Malanga and produced by the Dia Foundation1 in 1979). The cover features a photobooth portrait of Ricard wearing his signature replica Civil War cap (Union side), which he'd purchased in an East Village boutique. It includes poems written between 1979 and ’82. 

The collection was published by Hanuman Books2, which was founded by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente. Ran out of the Chelsea Hotel, Hanuman published works by William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Robert Frank, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, David Hockney, Gary Indiana Francis Picabia, Jack Smith, Patti Smith, and many others. Letter-press printed in India and shipped by boat to NYC, the titles were designed to resemble prayer books, each identically sized at 7.6 x 10.2 cm. Except Ricard’s title - he agreed only to be part of the series if his title could be a full sized hardcover book.3

On the day of the final edit, Ricard dropped by the apartment of Raymond Foye, unexpectedly. While Foye diligently worked on revisions, deletions, and sequencing for the title, Ricard and a hustler he met on 42nd street smoked crack and disappeared into the bathroom to have sex. 

Titles like "Poem For Judy Garland” and “Joan Crawford Visits Her Folks” reminds me of the work of Cary Leibowitz, as does Ricard’s later text-based paintings (see example below). Ricard discovered that text paintings were more lucrative than poetry books, noting"I must be the first poet writing in English since Alexander Pope to make a living from his own poems."

God With Revolver is valued at around five hundred dollars. The title was reprinted in 2022 by Editions Lutanie which is also now out of print, but is available here for $22.00. 

"Rene once told me about his visit to the Andy Warhol survey at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston in 1966: “I sat in front of a large flower painting and planned out my entire life.” He was nineteen.

After seeing the Warhol show at the ICA and making a few connections in Andy’s scene, Rene moved to New York and began his apprenticeship at the Factory and Max's Kansas City, where he laid the social and aesthetic groundwork for his early poems. His milieu was always the art world. He disliked poets and the poetry scene— not enough glamor or money.”

- Raymond Foye, Woodstock, N.Y., 2022

1. The book was intended to be the first in a series, with later volumes planned by John Wieners and Angus MacLise. Ricard’s title was modelled after a Tiffany Christmas catalog and the costs - said to be ‘onerous' - escalated substantially. “Any departure from the Tiffany catalogue prototype,” he wrote to the designer, "would be a liability”. Future titles were cancelled and Ricard’s book was the the only volume produced for the series. 

2. Hanuman is a deity in Hinduism. 

3. Years later Maurizio Cattelan would make the opposite request: he would only agree to be part of the Phaidon Artist series if his title was produced a third the size of his contemporaries.