Terrible End for an Enfant Terrible
ART BRUT Dash Snow, left, had achieved a measure of celebrity in his 20s with artwork like the 2006 collage "Bin Laden Youth," right. PHOTO: Elfie Semotan Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, BerlinBy ALAN FEUER and ALLEN SALKIN
Published: July 24, 2009WHEN the artist Dash Snow died of an overdose on July 13, stoned and alone at the Lafayette House in the East Village, detectives found the following items in his room: an empty can of Amstel Light, an empty can of Heineken, an empty bottle of Bacardi rum, three used syringes and 13 glassine envelopes emptied of heroin.
Mr. Snow, who would have turned 28 on Monday, had checked into the hotel that morning, the authorities say, booking a three-day stay. He spent the afternoon and a good part of the evening on a dedicated bender, but as the night drew on, he called his companion of several years, Jade Berreau, who was at a nearby restaurant with friends discussing his deteriorating state and a possible intervention. He was cheerless and dejected on the phone, ranting incoherently and hinting at a fast-approaching death. As the conversation ended, he told Ms. Berreau, who was sitting with their 2-year-old daughter, Secret: "Goodbye. I love you. I'll see you in another world."
Ms. Berreau, a dark-haired model, scrambled to find the hotel's address and hurried over with a friend, the photographer Hanna Liden. The women burst into the lobby and asked the startled desk clerk for keys to Room 11, then rushed upstairs to find a bolted door.
They managed to get the lock undone but struggled with the chain, then finally kicked the door down to find Mr. Snow naked and submerged in the bathtub. They called 911 and started CPR. When the medics arrived, they, too, tried, banging on his chest for nearly 90 minutes.
But Mr. Snow's heart had stopped. He was pronounced dead in the room at 12:24 a.m.
It was a gruesome end — a pathetic end — for an artist and provocateur who, at least according to his birthright, never should have been there to begin with. Dash Snow was, in no particular order, a jokester, a jailbird, a thief, a freak, a successful art-brut savage, a doting father, a connoisseur of various cocaine bathrooms, a retired writer of graffiti and the latest incarnation of that timeless New York species, the downtown Baudelaire. Two years ago, New York magazine anointed him one of "Warhol's Children" in a skeptical but mostly glowing profile that served to intensify his celebrity if not elevate his artwork.
But he was also East Side royalty, the discontented scion of the famous de Menil family, whose contributions to the American art world are vast. He met a junkie's end but did so in a $325-a-night hotel room with an antique marble hearth. His death was not unlike his abbreviated life: a violent, jumbled collage of high and low.
As the days and weeks go by, that death and life are certain to be studied as a cautionary tale. But Mr. Snow's demise could also be read as a story about New York and the tribal immobility that undercuts the city's reputation as a celebrated home for self-invention.
"The facts are pretty simple," said Javier Peres, Mr. Snow's art dealer. "Dash, as a child, rebelled against his family. There was a lot of anger and unresolved baggage with the family — especially with his mother. There might have been a blanket there at times, but he thought about himself as basically being alone."
Being alone, of course, is not the same as being free. And after the drugs, the sex, the squats, the art, the casual stance toward hygiene and formality, some basic questions linger: Did Mr. Snow ever escape the East Side pedigree that caused him so much anguish? How long does someone have to live their life before they fully possess it? Was he on an inevitable crash course from the start?
IT was July 2007, and the myth of Dash Snow had ascended toward perhaps its steepest peak. He was married to Agathe Snow, another downtown artist, but Ms. Berreau — who declined to be interviewed for this article — was about to give birth to their child. It was during this period that two of Mr. Snow's close friends died of heroin overdoses. His own career was on fire, but he had not yet been singed by the flames.
With the artist Dan Colen and others, Mr. Snow installed a Hamster's Nest at Deitch Projects, a SoHo gallery. A Hamster's Nest is what it sounds like, but with humans in the rodent roles: You shred a few hundred phone books, paint the walls, then ingest enough intoxicants so that every scrap of sentience disappears.
"It was really intense," recalled Ms. Snow, whose divorce from Dash was finalized this summer, though she remained close to him to the end. "We were all really high, and there were concerts. It was like a whole other world, an intense moment, all these people with paper, piles of Yellow Pages, no air or ventilation and fumes everywhere. We were already so drunk. The iPods kept getting lost in the paper." Three days later — with no clue how it happened — she woke up in Berlin.
That weekend was the end of what looked in retrospect like the innocent phase of Mr. Snow's rebellion. There was notoriety, youth and beauty in copious proportions, a big show at one of the city's finest galleries. Six months earlier, the New York magazine profile had traced his journey into prominence from his days as a mutinous graffiti tagger roaming the streets.
It was a story that is fairly well known by now: how at 15 he helped found Irak NY, a graffiti operation led in part by a man with the Dickensian name Earsnot; how as a teenager he stole a Polaroid and always documented his location so as to remember it when he sobered up; how Mr. Colen and the photographer Ryan McGinley took him on as a fellow blithe spirit and something of a muse. They encouraged Mr. Snow to exhibit his collages of newspaper headlines, many of them revealing his obsession with Saddam Hussein, and his photographs of oral sex, nude girls, lines of cocaine being snorted off body parts. It worked: His first solo show was in 2005, and his work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.
The art world was not yet settled on whether Mr. Snow was an important artist, a young talent with promise or a reckless pretender. Well-known collectors including Charles Saatchi have bought his pieces, generally at five-figure prices; Benjamin Godsill, a curatorial associate at the New Museum, said Mr. Snow's work "captures this period bracketed by the fall of the World Trade Center and the fall of the financial system."
Jacob Lewis, the director of Pace Prints Chelsea, said, "Some people think of him as the Kurt Cobain of the art world. Other people think of him as the Paris Hilton."
When you talk to those who knew Mr. Snow, certain phrases tend to recur: crazy, free-spirited, lived by his own rules. "Irresponsible, reckless, carefree, wild, rich — we were just kids doing drugs and being bad, out at bars every night," Mr. McGinley wrote in an e-mail message circulated to friends after Mr. Snow's overdose. "Sniffing coke off toilet seats. Doing bumps off each others' fists. Driving down one-way streets in Milan at 100 miles an hour blasting ‘I Did It My Way' in a white van."
For such a feral presence, though, Mr. Snow understood how to turn criticism into opportunity. New York magazine derided him for making art by ejaculating on copies of The New York Post; he blew up that section of the article, ejaculated on the copy and displayed it at an art show in Los Angeles.
His sadness and his money and his drugs were a powerful dynamic, said Jack Walls, a close friend of Mr. Snow's who is a former lover of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: the sadness was abetted by the drugs, the drugs abetted by the money.
Mr. Walls distinguished Mr. Snow from working-class addicts like William S. Burroughs, Herbert Huncke — and himself. "It was like his money never ran out," Mr. Walls said. "When it came to doing drugs, he could do these marathons for days and days on end. In my day, in Huncke's day, in Burroughs's day, when we wanted a fix, we had to go work — we couldn't just sit around getting high for three straight weeks."
A HALF-BLOCK off Fifth Avenue, on East 81st Street, down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a baroque town house rises like a monument to the Manhattan establishment. This is the familial home of the de Menils, the wealthy French-Texan clan to which Dashiell A. Snow was born.
His great-grandmother Dominique de Menil was an heiress of the Schlumberger oil fortune, an American grande dame who rode horseback in the Bois de Boulogne and married a French banker she had met in a ballroom at Versailles. One of their daughters, Philippa, co-founded the Dia Center for the Arts in Manhattan, while another, Christophe, married Robert Thurman, a famed scholar of Buddhism. Mr. Thurman eventually divorced her and remarried, fathering with his second wife (a German-Swedish model previously married to Timothy Leary) the actress Uma Thurman.
Reached in Italy while on vacation, Mr. Thurman — Mr. Snow's grandfather — suggested that the family's foundational conflict was between his ex-wife, Christophe, and their daughter — Dash's mother — Taya Thurman. "The mother insisted she knew better — she interfered with the daughter," Mr. Thurman said. "Taya realized at a certain point that Dash might end up going a little out of control, so she tried to instill a bit of discipline. Dash, of course, resisted."
That resistance took the form of teenage pranks: tire-slashing, truancy. And when Mr. Snow was 15, his parents (his father was Christopher Snow, a musician) sent him to the Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia ("a little boot-campish," Mr. Thurman said). Mr. Snow's mother obtained a restraining order barring her own mother from seeing the boy until he was 18, but Mr. Thurman said the grandmother nonetheless set up expense accounts that Dash used to fuel his binges.
Christophe de Menil declined to be interviewed, as did Taya Thurman, who released a written statement.
"As a mother, watching Dash self-destruct through addiction has been the most devastating experience of my life," she wrote. "My efforts seemed only to create a painful rift between us, a rift that adds to my sadness over his senseless death."
Ms. de Menil grew up in a family whose sensibilities were such that they often had black guests at their home in Texas at the height of segregation. An artist, she is deeply involved with the family museum, the Menil Collection in Houston.
For Mr. Snow, the choice between an authoritarian mother and a creative, laissez-faire grandmother was no choice at all. At 18, he and Agathe, just married, moved in with Ms. de Menil, staying from 1999 to 2003.
But his rebellious ways continued, even deepened, until it seemed that he was not only strung out on drugs, but strung up between the poles of a privileged East Side life and a gritty existence on the street — plagued, some friends have said, by a tortured-rich-kid syndrome in a way that never seemed to bother his brother, Maxwell (a socialite who once dated Mary-Kate Olsen), or his sister, Caroline, a writer.
Other friends, however, insisted that Mr. Snow's outlaw nature was not concocted or tormented, but authentic and instinctive.
"When I first met him, he told me his name was Tropical Fantasy — I think he was 19," said Jesse Pearson, the editor of Vice magazine. "Say what you will about his background, he put himself into a lifestyle that only the strong survive — to a point, as we see now. He was living the life you saw in his work. There was nothing that was a pose."
THE one thing that truly did not care if Mr. Snow was posing or not was drugs.
He tried a rehab program in upstate New York, according to several friends, and attempted treatment with an experimental drug called Suboxone. In March, he checked into a private detox center in the Caribbean, having reached that stage of addiction where his problem was not his problems; his problem was the drugs.
"He could go a month clean," Agathe Snow recalled, "but then if he had one glass of wine, it would become a bottle, then coke, then heroin. There was not a slow buildup. It was like a beast building up."
The last time Mr. McGinley saw him was over the Memorial Day weekend at Mr. Walls's property upstate. "We chilled all day, picking yellow flowers, watching ‘Sesame Street' and petting cats and dogs," Mr. McGinley wrote in his e-mail message. "Dash stayed in his room the entire time."
After that weekend, Mr. Snow disappeared. "Instinctively, I knew he was strung out," Mr. Walls said, "because if he wasn't strung out, I would have heard from him."
The weekend before his overdose, Mr. Snow, his girlfriend and their daughter went with friends to the home of Ms. Berreau's mother in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
"He spent about five days partying, not sleeping, and then went out to the Hamptons and slept for an entire day," said a friend who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of a code of silence adopted by some after Mr. Snow's death. "He wanted to be left alone and didn't come down for a dinner party. He stayed asleep the entire time. Then he went back into the city, got his drugs and knew exactly what he was doing when he went to that hotel."
MR. SNOW's body spent the night of July 13 in a basement refrigerator at the New York City morgue, chilled to 32 to 40 degrees. The next day, it was sent to the Andrett Funeral Home, a few blocks away.
That night, friends gathered at Ms. de Menil's house, where Ms. Snow, Ms. Berreau and others drank Prosecco, the hostess's favorite wine. The next day, the family held a private viewing at the funeral home.
"We went there," Ms. Snow said. "There was no actual funeral. Only his next of kin could go in and recognize his body. Jade went in and she wanted to take pictures of his tattoos. His parents didn't think that was a good idea and didn't let it happen."
By the end of the viewing, there were dozens of mourners milling on the street — friends, admirers, pillars of a certain downtown scene. There were stories, reminiscences, tears, then everyone went to eat at Lucien, a French bistro on First Street and First Avenue.
Mr. Snow's body, meanwhile, was taken to New Jersey and cremated.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 26, 2009, on page CT1 of the New York edition.Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
