The man who paints under the name of “The Artist Formerly Known as Clark Rockefeller” — he is actually the convicted murderer and kidnapper Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter — has been quite the busy bee at California’s San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, formerly known as San Quentin State Prison.
Gerhartsreiter, a notorious fabulist who successfully impersonated a Rockefeller for at least a decade, claims his art is inspired “by the nieuwe beeldung or ‘La Néo-Plasticisme’ of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.” He is also an accomplished book reviewer and journalist, having published dozens of articles in San Quentin’s award-winning newspaper, the San Quentin News.
To refresh our collective memories: Gerhartsreiter was seen in the Globe roughly a decade ago after his trial for kidnapping his daughter in Massachusetts. He was subsequently convicted of committing a long-unsolved murder in California. He is serving a sentence of 27 years to life.
In a darkly comical 2013 interview at the Nashua Street Jail, Gerhartsreiter insisted on using his fake name with a trio of Globe reporters and “rambled on about the ‘five or six or seven’ languages that he speaks, the historical novel about the roots of Israeli statehood he is writing, and his work as a researcher of ‘anything from physics to social sciences.’ ”
In a recent brief and amicable exchange with me over California’s prison messaging service, Gerhartsreiter wrote, “Call me Clark” and said his art work was humming along: “Yes, my painting continues.” I never received answers to my follow-up questions.
When not exhibiting his not-half-bad art on the Empowerment Avenue website, Gerhartsreiter also claims in an “Artist’s Bio” to have been working on “long-form literary works about elusive topics in an elegant and engaging postmodern style he calls ‘Quantitative Equilibristic Prose’ and he types his creations on a retro-utopian Dvorak keyboard.”
Gerhartsreiter also finds time for journalism. I’ve counted 20 bylines so far this year in the San Quentin News. Last December he repurposed, with proper credit, a Globe story about federal Pell grants helping to fund prison education. He has also written about a Supreme Court decision that affected a COVID-19-related lawsuit filed by families of San Quentin staff and prisoners. He can produce lighter features, e.g., “Governor Newsom and Prince of Norway visit the Q.”
For that story, newshound Gerhartsreiter solicited brief comments from both Crown Prince Haakon — “We have a lot in common and we can learn from each other” — and from the governor — “You put out a great newspaper and you have revolutionized the podcast.”
(I can’t resist plugging the amazing San Quentin newspaper and its affiliated podcast “Ear Hustle,” a 2021 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award winner and a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist. You should subscribe to the paper and listen to the podcast. I once asked an official plugged into the Commonwealth’s correction hierarchy why we don’t have prison media like those. Her answer: “That will never happen in Massachusetts.” Sad.)
With five years until he becomes eligible for parole, Gerhartsreiter has found plenty of time for reading. His review of the multivolume “The Forsyte Saga” is full of praise for John Galsworthy’s writing (“tightly integrated paragraphs give the prose an unmistakable rhythm”).
Gerhartsreiter claims to have read another Brit doorstop, Anthony Powell’s 12-volume series, “A Dance to the Music of Time,” twice, to render this assessment: “Despite the title, the 2,947 pages have nothing to do with dance or music. Much of the action in the novel revolves around cocktail parties, dinner parties, garden parties, and weekend parties in colossal country houses. The characters talk about literature and paintings. Very little else goes on.”
Earlier this year, Gerhartsreiter published a review of Emma Cline’s novel, “The Guest,” about a female con artist. “Con-artists have always made fascinating characters for stories,” Gerhartsreiter asserted, underneath the headline: “It takes one to know one.”
Somebody in San Quentin has a sense of humor.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him @imalexbeamyrnot.
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