Rene Ricard (1946 — 2014)

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Poet, painter, actor, and art critic Rene Ricard was born in Boston MA on July 23, 1946 and grew up in New
Bedford and Acushnet, Massachusetts. He moved to New York City when he was 18 after seeing an Andy Warhol
flower painting. Ricard told Interview magazine, “I completely planned out my life looking at that painting.”

In New York, Ricard became part of the Warhol Factory scene, appearing in Warhol’s films Kitchen (1965), 

ChelseaGirls (1966), and, as Warhol himself, in The Andy Warhol Story (1967). He later acted in the neo-punk
film Underground U.S.A. (1980), directed by Eric Mitchell.
 
Ricard began publishing poetry in the late 1960s in journals such as the Paris Review. His collections include Rene
Ricard 1979-1980 (1979), which was published by the DIA Foundation to look like the Tiffany Christmas
catalog; God with Revolver (1990 Hanuman Books); Sarcophagus Co. (1990 Inanout Press); and Love Poems (1999
Cuz Editions). In the 1980s, Ricard began to paint poems, sometimes directly onto antique prints or other found
works. A monograph of these works, Paintings and Drawings, was published in 2003 (Percival Press, edited by Edit
DeAk. Poet Kevin Killian described Ricard’s poem paintings: “Words twist across the surfaces of Ricard’s painting
like clotheslines woven from military ribbons, striking attitudes, deft and sassy. Or like folded tubes of toothpaste
squeezed into angles and bends. There must be two sorts of people, one who sees the image first, the other who
postpones ‘seeing’ the image until the words are deciphered.” Ricard’s use of text and phrases recalls artists such
as Jean-Michel Basquiat. Ricard’s art writings of the early 1980s, especially his essay “The Radiant Child”
in Artforum, are generally thought to have launched the careers of Basquiat and Keith Haring. 
 
A long-time resident of the Chelsea Hotel, “Ricard was both a commenter on and participant in some of the most
seminal artistic moments of New York City’s vibrant scene,” according to his Rolling Stone obituary. His paintings
and drawings are represented by Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York. His literary estate is supervised by his executor,

Raymond Foye. Rene Ricard died from cancer in 2014 at Bellevue Hospital, New York City. He is buried in New
Bedford, Massachusetts, next to his beloved mother, Pauline.