Paul Waldman, a New York character of cinematic scale who abandoned bodybuilding to become an artist, beguiling critics and gallery patrons with provocative, surreal works — including an art museum for birds, with a board of directors on which he served as Chairman of the Nest — died on March 22 in Manhattan. He was 89.
His wife, the art historian Diane Waldman, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of a fall. She is his only immediate survivor.
Championed by Leo Castelli, the renowned art dealer whose Upper East Side gallery also represented Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein, Mr. Waldman’s paintings and sculptures were erotic, transgressive and intentionally enigmatic. They featured dwarves, hermaphrodites, winged putti and human-beast hybrids.
Mr. Waldman was acutely interested in female anatomy. One of his most admired works was a series of 13 paintings featuring portions of breasts, buttocks and armpits set against vast monochromatic fields.
“I think that a successful work is a work that can be understood on different levels but ultimately can never be understood as a total thing,” he said in an interview for a gallery catalog in 1991. “Once we understand it, then it becomes painting or sculpture, or it’s no longer art.”
Mr. Waldman arrived in New York in 1952 as a severely dyslexic teenager with bulging biceps, an interest in painting and the emotional baggage he carried from his childhood on a farm in Pennsylvania, where, he later said, his parents took pleasure in ridiculing him and gave away his favorite animals.
He attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School, supporting himself as a freelance illustrator and pumping iron relentlessly. With a 47-inch chest, a 30-inch waist and 17-inch arms, he looked like few other New Yorkers, let alone like a budding artist.
He entered bodybuilding contests, and in 1953 was awarded the title of Most Ideal High School Physique. The next year, he was crowned Mr. New York City. Strength and Health magazine featured him in a cover story that took the measure of his unusual strength.
“A press on bench with 355 pounds is a worthy mark for anyone, but for a 17-year-old youth it is phenomenal,” the article said. “In the basic exercises, Paul Waldman is one of the best performers in his age group.”
The magazine also noted another gift.
“Paul Waldman, known to Strength and Health readers for his fine physique, may someday be well known to art lovers for his talent as a painter,” it said. “He is applying himself diligently to his studies and shows promise of reaching prominence in the field of fine arts.”
At 21, he quit bodybuilding, trading weights and barbells for pencil sharpeners and paintbrushes. His social circle shifted from muscle heads in dank gyms to the emerging avatars of the downtown arts scene, including Mr. Lichtenstein, Mr. Johns and Andy Warhol.
Mr. Waldman’s work went through several phases, from minimalism to abstraction, and from baroque extravagance to unconstrained eroticism. There was a diptych period in which he explored the tension of duality.
“I like the idea of two,” he said. “Two eyes, two testicles, two knees, the sun and moon.”
He went on: “Two headlights on a car, two tailpipes on a car, double-dip ice cream cone, the Twin Towers, tea for two, butting two things together that are done separately and just insisting upon relationship. Man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, man and dog, woman and chicken, grasshopper and snake.”
Mr. Waldman entered his birdhouse phase in 1986, using wood, metal and ceramic to create elaborate, multilevel structures that he gave as presents to his wife, whom he married in 1957. She displayed them on the grounds of their home in Southampton, N.Y., on Long Island. He labeled one “Diane’s Hotel” and another “Diane’s Cottage,” but they were really for him.
“This is the story of my life, the dysfunctional parts of my life and the wishing parts of my life,” he told Architectural Digest. “I wish to have a little dream house, a little nest.”
He made the birdhouses nearly impossible to enter, though — even for the birds.
“I didn’t get to live in a home, so they don’t get to live in a home,” he said, referring to the birds as “my pals.”
In 1992, Mr. Waldman’s avian ambitions shifted from residential to institutional with the founding of the International Bird Museum, a multistory birdhouse with an art gallery that displayed miniature works by Mr. Lichtenstein and others.
He erected I.B.M., as he called it, on the roof of his studio in Southampton. It had a board of directors, but no visitors. Mr. Waldman made the structure’s openings too small for potential patrons to see inside, and nearly too small for the birds to enter, either.
“I’m trying to get the artists to remember why they did things in the first place,” he said. “They were noble once, before galleries and before bureaucracy. I wanted them to remember that.”
Mr. Lichtenstein contributed several pieces, including a painting titled “Birdica,” a diminutive homage to Picasso’s “Guernica.”
“I thought it was a brilliant idea,” he told The New York Times in 1993. “It seemed to have its own beautiful, absurd quality.”
Mr. Waldman’s wife, who was then the deputy director of the Guggenheim Museum, felt a little left out by the project, which eventually opened branches at museums in Boca Raton, Fla., and Williamstown, Mass.
“I’m not a bird, and therefore I can’t see the exhibitions,” she told News 12, a Long Island station, after the opening of I.B.M.
Still, she appreciated the whimsy. “It’s starts the imagination going, so to speak,” she said. “It’s like a fairy tale.”
Paul Waldman was born on Aug. 1, 1936, in Brooklyn and grew up on a farm in Erie, Pa. His father, David, was a baker, and his mother, May, was a bookkeeper.
He didn’t talk about his childhood often, but when he did, the details were grim.
“I was never beaten as a child, but I was constantly terrified and humiliated by my parents,” he said in an essay that the art historian Carol Strickland wrote in “Paul Waldman: Eros, Art and Magic,” a 2005 book about his work. “I was judged a moron because I couldn’t read.”
By lifting weights, he sculpted a tougher version of himself. To express his feelings, he turned to canvas.
“I started to paint because I was so desolate and alone,” he said. “I could make things happen visually for myself that I couldn’t make happen in my own life.”
His art was a kind of alternative dimension, compensating for the imaginative wanderings that had eluded him in childhood. “When I paint, I can create my own world and do exactly what I want,” he said. “It’s a place where I can’t be hurt.”
Edging toward magical realism, Mr. Waldman’s work amused and confused critics.
“Paul Waldman is a debunker of art myths, a scrappy iconoclast who challenges esthetic traditions with authority and verve,” John Russell wrote in The Times 1978. “Whether observers like Mr. Waldman’s art or not, they cannot help but be provoked by it and to think about it long after they’ve seen it and experienced it.”
The critic Ken Johnson was cooler in his assessment.
“Even when Waldman’s art is loaded with portentous meaning, a lightly comic charm keeps it entertaining,” Mr. Johnson wrote in Art in America. “But this raises the question, how deep does it really go?”
Mr. Waldman resented those kinds of critiques. His works, he maintained, were not meant to be a statement about anything other than himself.
“They are a statement about my human condition,” he said. “I’m probably too self-indulgent to know about the human condition.”
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