Merkin's friend, the writer Tom Wolfe wrote in an email to the New York Times upon Merkin's death:[REF] "He was the greatest of that breed, the Artist Dandy, since Sargent, Whistler and Dali..Like Dali, he had one of the few remaining Great Mustaches in the art world."Wolfe
The New Yorker noted that Merkin "loved and evoked the great spirit of the nineteen-twenties, thirties, and forties in his work - he was, moreover, "a connoisseur of the good life."Merkin's