The body of art collector and dealer Kenneth Walker was still smouldering on the rocks by Lake Michigan when Sgt. Edward Dolan arrived. ”I never saw a body so badly burned,” he remembers. ”It was so warm we had to call the fire department to pick it up.”
A can of gasoline was nearby. The death was ruled a suicide by police, and the Cook County medical examiner said the cause was ”inhalation injuries –a hot burst of flames and fire into the back of the throat.” The call reporting a body by the lake, at Waveland Golf Course north of Belmont Harbor, came in about 6:30 a.m. Sept. 21, three Sundays ago. The body was identified five days later through dental records.
Most art collectors and dealers do not end up in flames. Why Kenneth Walker met such a bizarre and grisly end remains a mystery, and a subject of continuing fascination and conjecture among the people who make up Chicago`s art scene. That he may have ended his life seems plausible given the circumstances of his crumbling world.
The media had given extensive coverage to his trial on charges of stealing art, and although he had been acquitted he faced more criminal charges as well as a civil trial. His nine-year love relationship was ending. He had increasing financial difficulties. And he was being cut off from the art world that he loved, which in the end may have been the very crux of his identity.
Walker, who was 33, had worked a long time to get where he was in the Chicago art community. He started in his adolescence in the arts section of the Des Plaines Public Library. He graduated from Maine Township West High School and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute, a mecca of creation. He went to parties. He met artists Ray Yoshida and Don Baum, dealers Phyllis Kind and Karen Lennox, collectors Dennis Adrian and Jim Faulkner. He stopped making art and started collecting it.
One person, one party, one object led to another. In the year and a half before the morning he was found on the rocks, he was director of the Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, president of the board of directors of N.A.M.E. Gallery, and part owner of an extensive collection of naive and folk art that was drawing increasing attention nationally. Several people with an interest in the kind of art he collected paid him the compliment of saying that he had a great eye. And great charm, great knowledge.
”He was well on his way to becoming a force in the art world,” said James Yood, Midwest editor of the New Art Examiner.
But something happened. The identity that he had so carefully established over the years cracked in May, 1985. He was arrested on a charge of stealing about $225,000 worth of art from a dead woman.
The woman was Miyoko Ito, a well-known painter. She and Walker met in 1973, when he was a student with the last name of Hodorowski (he changed his name to Walker in 1984). Walker had seen Ito`s paintings at the Phyllis Kind Gallery and told his painting teacher that he had to meet her. She was 55. He was 21. They had spinach quiche in her Hyde Park home. One thing led to another, including a four-year relationship, of which the degree of intimacy depends on whether you hear the version that Walker told or that of Ito`s friends.
Somehow, at some point, Walker acquired from Ito`s collection a Picasso etching, a Giorgio Morandi etching and a wooden African fetish dog. After Ito died in 1983, her husband, Harry Ichiyasu, said he realized that the works were missing. The Picasso had been sold at a Christie`s auction. Ichiyasu filed criminal charges against Walker and a Cook County grand jury indicted him for 15 counts of theft.
At the trial last June, Walker, with perfect composure, told the jury that Ito gave him the art works in the midst of their love affair in 1977. His narrative describing the obsessive love affair, which some friends likened to an opera, was compeling. The jurors, who were never told how Walker might have removed the works from Ito`s house (the prosecutors said they didn`t know), acquitted him. Walker held a victory party at Side Dishes restaurant in the gallery district. He was happy for a while, his friends said. But there was more to come.
He faced a federal civil trial in a suit Ito`s husband filed, demanding that Walker turn over the etchings and the fetish dog, plus damages. He also faced another criminal trial, on theft and forgery charges in connection with the theft of more than $15,000 worth of art from the Carl Hammer Gallery, where he was director from 1983 to 1985. All the while, the art community remained divided on whether Walker was innocent. Many never understood how she simply could have given away such valuable art.
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Almost every inch of the loft on Broadway north of Addison Street that Walker shared with painter Mark Jackson was filled with the more than 600 objects from their combined art collection. Furniture was secondary to the little houses elaborately painted by Aldo Piacenza, the shell-encrusted cigar boxes, the early 20th Century ashtray stands, the life-sized deer made from a concrete pipe and the drawings by celebrated Chicago bag lady Lee Godie.
At an interview in the loft after his acquittal, Walker said that he started collecting things as a kid. He remembered collecting coins.
”He wasn`t a typical collector,” said Ann Nathan, owner of Objects Gallery, who also deals in the kind of art that Walker collected. ”He was a pure collector. He collected pieces the average collector doesn`t understand
–sailor art, prisoner art, tramp art. These kinds of things range from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars.”
”His respect was for untrained artists and not for educated artists,”
said Carl Hammer, his former employer. ”He prided himself in having a certain focus or vision. He had a great deal of disdain for the classic 19th Century collector. He had great faith in his own knowledge. He had a sense of infallibility about him. He thought he was always right.”
”He had an unflinching need to discover the location of a new artist,”
Nathan said. ”He never forgot anything and he literally programmed this kind of information. If he would have gone on, he would have tried to surpass everybody. Whether he knew it consciously or not, he wanted to have the biggest and the best collection.”
Walker told Chicago magazine in a 1984 profile of his collection that
”Collecting is a way to love the world through objects.”
”It was strange,” Hammer said. ”I never met anyone so moved by art. The first time he saw a wall of Bill Traylor paintings at a museum in Louisville, he sat down on a bench and started crying.”
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”The first time I met Ken was at the Belmont and Western police station,” his lawyer Philip C. Parenti said. ”It was after the second arrest and I saw him in the visiting room behind bars and he looked like a wet cat, a frail, scared kid who was totally out-of-place. Ken was deathly afraid of jail.”
It was after the second arrest, in June, 1985, that Walker made the first of three visits to a psychiatric ward and had himself hospitalized, according to Parenti.
”I couldn`t talk about this before,” Parenti said, ”because it would have hurt him in court. The second time was definitely a suicide attempt.”
There was another side to Walker that people saw in that same year following his arrests–calming to others, intellectually seductive, always in control. He went on leave from the Betsy Rosenfield Gallery after he was arrested, but he maintained a public profile, going to art openings, walking around the gallery district, staying on as N.A.M.E. president. Walker had a way of acting as if nothing had happened.
”I met Ken when I got on the board of N.A.M.E. last year and he had just missed a couple of meetings,” said Beth Berlozheimer, a video teacher at the School of the Art Institute. ”I thought he was pretty wonderful, myself. I knew there were a lot of rumors in the art world but I thought Ken was great to work with. He was very high-powered.
”He had the idea to do the Fluxus show at N.A.M.E. celebrating mail art
(envelopes, stamps, contents of envelopes created by artists). He`d say, `I want to do sensational shows. I want them to think twice where N.A.M.E. is at.` He wanted every show to be a heart throb.
”He expected a lot from you as a board member. If you complained about how much time you put into something, he would get irritated with you. It was in large part because of him that the last Valentine`s Day benefit was such a success. He knew so many people and got them to come. They donated artwork.
”It was a silent auction. He ran around and put bids on every single piece of art. He kept upping the bids to get board members to up their bids to support the gallery. He walked away with a lot that night. The gallery owed him a lot of money. He had personally invested in the gallery to help them get out of financial trouble.”
Walker`s parents, Stanley and Bernice Hodor, make helium balloons in their house in Des Plaines. They donated pink balloons for the N.A.M.E. Valentine`s Day party.
”We went to the party,” said Hodor, a retired labor negotiator, ”but we really didn`t know Ken`s art world. I wouldn`t know those people if I met them again on the street.”
”We don`t know anything,” Mrs. Hodor said, referring to her son`s death. ”Right at this moment we`re in the dark as much as anyone as to how this could have happened.
”The way we found out was we got a call from his lawyer who said they found Ken. Mr. Parenti said we didn`t have to identify the body and he asked us where we would like it sent. The last time we had talked to Ken was two or three weeks before. All we know is what we read in the paper. Nobody else has called us. He graduated with honors in art. He never had a traffic ticket.”
The last time Mark Mattson, Walker`s former high school art teacher, saw him was at the opening of N.A.M.E.`s Fluxus exhibit nine days before his death.
”He seemed fine,” Mattson said, ”to be very much himself again. We talked a little about what was still hanging over his head. He had concerns about financing his defense.
”When I heard later, the whole thing was a shock. There`s always been a romantic side to Ken, a melancholy side. I`m having difficulty reacting because what happened seemed to fit so snuggly into the novel of his life. It`s too clean.”
The police ruled out foul play. All drug tests were negative, according to the medical examiner. There were no barbiturates, antidepressants, alcohol, marijuana, PCP, methadone or opiates in the body. Though there was no test for valium, it would have been difficult for valium to be the cause of death, the medical examiner said.
There were no stab wounds, no damage to the brain. The only evidence that would have been lost would have been the mark of a blow that might have knocked him out before the burning. That would have been erased by the fire.
Some of Walker`s acquaintences cannot believe that he chose to end his life so painfully and gruesomely by setting his body on fire. If he tried to do it with drugs before, they ask, why not again?
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A friend of Walker`s, also in the art business, remembers the evening they spent on Sept. 11, the day the Reader, a free alterntive newspaper, published an extensive cover story about Walker`s trial in the Ito case.
”He was composed, controlled,” the friend recalls. ”It was one of the nights he looked a little happier inside.” It was ten nights before he was found on the rocks.
”I suggested we go somewhere fun and get away from it all,” the friend said. ”We went to the Orbit Room near his loft and watched a video. I remember him telling me–I`m just going to take on the life of a Buddhist monk and take six or eight objects that mean the most to me and just try to start fresh.”
As soon as the body was identified, the friend said, he recalled the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire in Vietnam to protest the war. ”I put two and two together,” he said.
Walker was dancing at the Limelight with a man who was not his roommate on the Thursday night before he was found on the rocks. He reportedly was giving away possessions to people that night.
The police report says that on Saturday night, Walker`s friend Jim Faulkner told officers that Walker came to his house and gave him a painting of himself and said he was saying goodbye. In a brief interview, Faulkner declined to elaborate.
In the weeks before Walker`s death, his almost nine-year relationship with his roommate Jackson was ending. He declined to comment. Jackson is a well-known Chicago artist whose work is carried by the Rosenfield gallery. He paints large canvases, many of which have powerful images of men and skeletons. Jackson gave the police a note in Walker`s handwriting that he said he had found on the kitchen table on the morning of Walker`s death. Walker reportedly was supposed to be moving out of the apartment that night.
”Inspiration has abandoned me,” the letter read in part. ”I am physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. Life is without beauty or meaning for me. I do not wish to hurt anyone, merely to end the horrible pain and aching which is with me constantly. Please remember me with the beauty and kindness I`ve attempted to bring into the world.”
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Before Walker`s first trial, the state offered to reduce his charges to one count of theft if he would make restitution. If he had pleaded guilty to the one count of theft, he likely would have received probation because he had no prior arrests. Walker did not take up the state on the offer. It would have been an admission of guilt and would have devastated his career.
At the time of his death, both Walker`s attorney and Carl Hammer were trying to settle the Hammer matters out of court. The state, having lost the first round, was intending to go to trial. Walker faced the threat of a prison sentence.
”Everytime I had to tell Ken that we couldn`t count on the state dropping the charges, it made him depressed,” Parenti said.
”I remember coming out of the door of the Criminal Courts building one time and he just started crying on my shoulder. He hated that building. He hated everything about it. He was crying like a baby and talking about not having anything, any friends.”
N.A.M.E. Gallery director Lanny Silverman said, ”His ability to function in the art world was becoming more difficult. This was the thing that had given him the most pleasure. He felt it was being taken away. He felt it was being taken away unjustly. His suicide was clearly a statement to the art world. I don`t think it was a statement of guilt or complicity. He felt the art world had done him in.”
New Art Examiner editor James Yood reflected, ”A lot of people in the art world say that art is their life. But for better or for worse, when Ken said it, he really meant it.”
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Self-immolation is not listed as a category in the Center for Disease Control`s Suicide Surveillance Report. It is so rare that it falls under ”all other means,” which was reported to be 7.6 percent of the 20,505 male suicides nationally in 1980, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. (Firearms are the most popular methods for men.) The incidents of self-immolation most people can recall were Buddhist monks in Vietnam and women in India throwing themselves on their husbands` burning funeral pyres in ancient times because it was the custom.
”Self-immolation is a very violent and dramatic method,” said Richard M. Glass, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. ”I certainly can`t recall hearing about it in recent times. Since it`s such a dramatic method, it would be more common with people who ordinarily have a dramatic personality trait.”
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Popular opinion perceives the art world as a cloistered and mysterious place. If the extraordinary takes place, it is because people in the art world are extraordinary, and that explains it.
It has had some unusual moments. Carl Andre, the renowned minimalist sculptor, took his bride on a honeymoon cruise down the Nile, gave her a pair of Bulgari earrings and eight months later in 1985 was indicted for throwing her–a fellow artist with a predilection for performance art evoking rape and death scenes–out of the 34th-floor window of their Greenwich Village apartment.
The New York art dealer Andrew Crispo, who was said to like cocaine and sado-masochistic sex and was charged last year in a kidnap and sodomy case, was also being investigated in the death of a young Norwegian man in a black leather face mask whose carcass, stripped by raccoons, was found underneath a charred door in a small stone smokehouse in upstate New York. There was a black leather mask covering the man`s face.
That was in New York. For Chicago`s quickly growing art business, the Walker affair may be a first in the realm of the bizarre.
Artist Deven Golden questions the stereotype of people in the art world being any more on the fringe of society and normal behavior than anyone else. ”It`s an overly romantic view. Most artists grew up in the suburbs like everyone else. Now maybe only three in my high school went into the arts. But I was there. I had a normal life. I still do. I pay bills. Artists pay electric bills.
”With Walker, I don`t know. First he was a painter and then he was a dealer. He was able to go from working for Hammer, who didn`t want him to leave, to Rosenfield, who hired him as her director. He must have been a good business person.
”The way his life ended questions the rest of his life. To think, it all started over possession of three objects that are equal in worth to a large suburban home. It`s hard to believe someone died over it.”
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People who know Walker say self-immolation is an inconceivable act for almost any human being, but for Walker it may have been conceivable. ”He was one who may well have calculated his death like he did his life,” a former coworker said.
The process of calculation is hard to imagine. He had to get the gasoline can, fill the can by going to a gas station or siphoning it from a car. He had to write the note, put a book of matches in his pocket. Then he had to get to the rocks.
If he walked to the lake–he lived west of the spot on Broadway–he either crossed the Waveland Golf Course sometime in the night or went down the path from the parking lot, passing Brett`s Waveland Cafe on his left and the fieldhouse on his right to get to the path that runs along the rocks, all the time knowing that he would soon be lighting his body on fire. Once he got to the rocks, he had to choose a spot, climb down near the water, pour gasoline over himself and make the irreversible decision to light the match.
He was fascinated with the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, his friends say. Mishima, who endlessly rehearsed his own death for years, committed hara- kiri on November 25, 1970, in a public and dramatic way in a military headquarters in Tokyo.
A friend remembers seeing Walker and Jackson last year at the showing of a film about Mishima at the Biograph Theatre. ”He said he wanted to read everything Mishima wrote,” the friend said. ”He couldn`t stop talking about it.”
In the Mishima film there is much poetry and talk of ”suffering under a monstrous sensibility, thinking of ”the self as a kamikaze for beauty,” and ”entering the realm where art and action converged.” There are frequent images of the sun rising over the water. There is a scene in the end in which a man commits hara-kiri on the beach, in the first light, just before the sun comes up. The voice-over says: ”The instant the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disc of the sun soared up behind his eyelids and lightened the sky for an instant.”
The morning Walker was found on the rocks was a cloudy morning. The sun never came through. It would rain soon after the body was found, between Lake Michigan and a public golf course.
