Many of his works depict the interwar years, painting narrative scenes in bright colors of jazz musicians, film stars, writers, and sports heroes.

Merkin was as well known for his outré sense of clothing style and collections of vintage pornography (in particular Tijuana bibles) as he was for his painting and illustration work.

"[5] Some notable students Merkin taught at RISD include Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the band Talking Heads and Martin Mull.

[2] Four decades later, Merkin stated of his experience:[7]I went to England in 1966 ... and I got to meet a lot of artists that I enormously admired: David Hockney, Peter Blake, R. B. Kitaj ...

I spent that summer in London, and I became a close friend of Peter Blake ... [S]ix months later, I got a photograph in the mail of the cover of Sgt.

"[14] In 1986, Merkin told the Daily News Record, a fashion publication: "Dressing, like painting, should have a residual stability, plus punctuation and surprise ... Somewhere, like in Krazy Kat, you've got to throw the brick.

"[2] Upon his death, his friend, menswear designer Alan Flusser said of him, He was one of the few men who knew how to wear clothes, in a bespoke Bohemian manner.

Merkin's friend, the writer Tom Wolfe wrote:[2] He was the greatest of that breed, the Artist Dandy, since Sargent, Whistler and Dali.

He used Modernism's all-over flat designs--that is, every square inch of the canvas was covered by flat, unmodulated blocs of color of equal value, creating not three but two dimensions--but his works were full of people, rendered in the same fashion, in comic poses and situations and extravagantly caricatured.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.