There’s a world of difference between art and the art world, just as there’s now a vast difference between art collectors and art lovers. Kenward belonged with the latter. He loved art for itself, not as investment, nor as an expensive means of dazzling his friends. Indeed, his friends were often responsible for the art on his walls. His longtime companion Joe Brainard, of course, but also Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Duncan Hannah, Francis Picabia, Donna Dennis and myself.

When I spent my first night at Kenward’s in 1969, in lieu of a Gideon Bible I found a Joseph Cornell box and a cutout Larry Rivers penis as my nightstand companions. A signed, unmustachioed Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp nestled in the adjacent bookcase, while downstairs in the living room was a portrait of Kenward’s actress friend Ruth Yorck by Oskar Kokoschka, unfashionable both then and now. In the same room, sitting unobtrusively in the alcove where the fireplace had been, lay one of Andy Warhol’s wooden Heinz tomato ketchup boxes, a utilitarian-looking sculpture which was once thrown out by Kenward’s maid, who naturally assumed it was garbage (Kenward returned from a few days out of town just in time to retrieve it from the curbside).

Kenward’s prose and poetry is packed with images, so it’s no surprise that he picked a play by the painter Henri Rousseau to refashion into one of his own, City Junket. And like John Ashbery, Kenward was a devotee of vintage postcards, often utilizing them in his collages (ditto Ashbery). One of Kenward’s few art reviews displays his sharp eye at its most succinct: describing an exhibition by the Surrealist Roberto Matta, he summed up his impressions thus: “(Six) huge paintings are arresting, messy and violent cartoons of juggernauts that menace and engorge saggy and helpless human outlines. Floating in space, their jagged disparities (here an entrail, there a stairway) encroach. Such malevolent combines!” An artist’s eye indeed.