Rene Ricard - Love Poems

Reprising the rare, eponymous book published by Richard Hell through CUZ Editions in 1999, Love Poems features three poems by Rene Ricard and a series of black-and-white drawings by Robert Hawkins.

Translated into French by Rachel Valinsky and Manon Lutanie, and presented in a bilingual edition, the poems are followed by a newly commissioned afterword by Hawkins retracing his encounter, friendship, and collaboration with Ricard.

Rene Ricard was an American poet, artist, and actor. He was born in 1946 and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After a troubled childhood, he fled to Boston as a teenager, where he came into contact with literary and artistic circles. At the age of eighteen, he moved to New York City and became a central figure in the city’s artistic and literary scene. Ricard appeared in several films by Andy Warhol and continued to act in many independent films throughout his life. In the 1980s, he wrote two major collections of poetry, as well as important essays and articles, some of which were instrumental in launching the careers of artists such as Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat (he wrote the famous article “The Radiant Child” in Artforum in 1981). Beginning in the 1990s, he developed a pictorial body of work and exhibited his paintings in various galleries in the UK and the US. He died in New York in 2014.

Robert Hawkins (b. 1951, Sunnyvale, California) is an American artist who lives and works in London. A fabled figure of the 1980s and early 1990s East Village art and punk scene, his work is and has been collected by artists and writers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn O’Brien, and Jim Jarmusch. Among Hawkins’ first exhibitions was Lower Manhattan Drawing Show, a group exhibition curated by Keith Haring at 77 White Street Gallery above the Mudd Club, in 1981. Recent exhibitions include Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York, (2022-23) curated by Carlo McCormick and Peter Eleey at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and Robert Hawkins: Dream Mine (2023) at Off Paradise, New York.

Published in July 2024
Printed in Europe
1,500 copies
14 × 22,4 cm, 5 1/2 × 8 7/8 in., softcover, 224 pages
Bilingual edition (French, English)
ISBN: 978-2-918685-19-7

Editor, designer: Manon Lutanie
Published thanks to the support and friendship of Raymond Foye and Bernard Picasso.

© Éditions Lutanie