Appendix B: Holty on Art and Artists

Many of Carl Holty’s statements that did not seem to warrant inclusion in the text are so outstanding that I have chosen to quote from them in this section. The following are excerpts from observations that he made on artists and art, in general:

On hearing his gallery dealer Graham say that his work was too much like Rothko’s and Still’s, Holty disagreed, and wrote:

In Rothko’s work the “space” is purely phenomenal. One can’t very well use large rectangular areas of harmonized color without attaining a sort of “w all” space (architectural). I don’t believe he even cares about the space I seek to attain. In his earlier work, where there was some resemblance to my more lyrical canvases, and his were very good, the space was very approximate and never holds up to scrutiny. Still’s work is based on the imitation of natural elements of area (trees, mountains, caves) and is hardly abstract at all (again the phenomenal resemblance to space without intention or realization). Both Rothko and Still have one great element of concrete painting. Neither one is illusionary in the means. Everything is revealed, nothing deliberately hidden by trick devices such as the Abstract Expressionists employ—that sea of paints and gummy textures that suggest a thousand illusions—the unity of confusion so popular today. Is Newman also a concrete realist? Hardly. He hides nothing, but he reveals nothing either. His huge areas of blue or red are just matter uncontrolled. The work is pretentious nothingness. (November 1, 1961)

Romie [Bearden] came by before I left the studio . . . and we discussed the means by which an apparently simple shape could be animated and made complex. Also discussed the “assemblages” show at the Museum of Modern Art and its implications. The power and persistence of the anti-art forces in art and the malevolent influence in America of that “gray eminence” Marcel Duchamp, the man who made a success out of being a failure. Bearden, who saw the warmed-up Surrealist show of objects, the ten-cent store comb on a string (mobile), the fur-lined teacup and other “witticisms” said it was like walking through a dark and musty garret that got darker and darker with low, blackened tunneled rooms, finding worthless objects all about. He said that as one left this doleful ambiance of the beatniks of yesterday and went into the Matisse exhibit, it was like leaving a sick-room and coming out into the sunshine. It would be wonderful to place a variety of stinkbombs and foul-sweetened perfumes in the rooms exhibiting for the 100th time the Surrealist and Dada trivialities—to complete the effect (not a bad idea). (November 3, 1961)

Recently a relatively unknown “descendant” of Klee, one Julius Bissier (a fellow townsman of mine (was awarded a large one-man show at the Brazilian Biennale at Sao Paulo and his one-man show here (recently opened) was sold out before opening. Also the art editor of the New York Times, Mr. Canaday, an avowed enemy of the American Abstract Expressionists (our leading school) went all out to praise Mr, Bissier, first in a report from Sao Paulo and today in the Sunday edition of the Times. Mr. Canaday fired the opening guns of his war (when he first became the Art Editor) by featuring the work of Mr. Andrew Wyeth, the young American literalist, and following this with reproductions of landscapes by unknown or obscure artists, the kind you see in auction galleries (scenes rather than pictures). A long discussion of the work of Macarelli came next. Mr, Canaday admitted that he was impressed but decided to dismiss the effort because he couldn’t find out “why” he was impressed. Only that darling of the gods, Philip Guston, met with Canaday’s approval because in his last show Guston indicated that he might be developing comprehensible symbols—if sufficiently pressed to do so. The action painters, and the “Space Cadets” (Jack Levine’s impertinent classification” were to be ostracized.

Canaday wrote somewhere that under other circumstances he might have come to their defense (a knight in armor if ever there was one) but he rejected them because of their corrupt conformism to the commercial interests that were exploiting their product. He didn’t accuse the dealers alone of being corrupt, but the artists as well. As always in such a generalization there is some truth, but it should be said who the man is or who they are that are corrupt and a chance taken of being sued for libel or slander. Mr. Canaday did not go that far nor would anyone expect him to—anyone in their right mind, as the saying goes. Now, it seems Mr. Canaday has found an artist, Mr. Bissier (“shy and retiring” Mr. Canaday is careful to note and “dismayed” at his sudden success) who has labored in the vineyard of abstract painting and come up with something of estimable value. Could Mr. Canaday have other, say ulterior motives, in speaking out in favor of one kind of abstract painting while condemning other kinds? Of course not. Mr. Alfred Barr, Jr., a man attacked by Canaday as. one who “calls the shots” in the art world, and hardly a friend of his detractor, told me that he never doubted his, Canaday’s, motives for even one second. (November 12, 1961)

I cannot make up my mind about Guston’s work. I don’t like it or don’t understand it, one or the other. But a number of people whose judgment I respect think highly of it. For once I will admit the blind spot and withhold judgment. That painting may be the real blind spot in my appreciation. There is no doubt about the man’s ability or professional acumen. He has seen much and he has looked at it intelligently. I’ll comment on the show once more after I’ve taken a long and “lonesome” look at it. No matter how intelligent and sympathetic one’s companion may be while looking at pictures a duo, you really must see them by yourself to do them justice. The usual newspaper criticism of the Whitney Annuals, as to their sameness, simply isn’t true since the abstract artists took over. Formerly the Whitney (up until about 1952) was a ghastly hodgepodge of American awkwardness in painting. The retention of some of their sacred cows (Hopper, Sayer and Burchfield) proves how the general aesthetic of painting in the U.S.A has risen despite the less attractive manifestations of the paint smearers and texture addicts. Of course, I suppose that all the abstract pictures look quite the same to the newspaper reviewers since these, despite long acquaintance with them, are incapable of “seeing” them. In their blanket denials of this idiom, both the Art Editors of the Times and the Herald-Tribune admit this inability. Philip Evergood paints more and more but still not enough like James Ensor. The color, as always, though hopelessly divorced from anything else in the pictures, is quite good. The place wasn’t as crowded as usual and a number of those usually present, weren’t. (December 13, 1961)

On hearing that George Byron Browne had died (a “boy wonder” in his youth but whose late paintings “revealed a lack of taste in color and conception”), Holty wrote:

Like certain contemporaries of unusual ability, he lacked the discernment and emotional direction of the great ‘‘individualists,” who, no matter when they lived (in periods of great or minor styles) found it possible to “realize,” to full extent, their talents. As assistants or subsidiary painters to some great masters such as Rubens or Tintoretto, such artists as Browne and Gorky, or others I could mention, would have had a “happier” career as artists. Their talents far exceeded their genius, i.e., their abilities were out of all proportion to their slender artistic contribution. As “explainers,” or as an extension of genius, their work would have appeared a great deal more substantial. Unfortunately this is not the day in which men such as these can come to full bloom.

One can wonder what would have been the fate of those craftsmen painters of the High Renaissance, the pupils of Raphael and others, had they been cast into the world at another time than the one they were happily in—1 feel certain they would have been rather rudderless ships without their traditional craft and the great masters of the bottega. I just looked at well over a hundred reproductions of the work of such artists and I can only conclude that different epochs demand an entirely different kind of talent in art. One can only imagine that genius of the first rank could find its way at any time, but the accomplishments of the lesser but still gifted are circumscribed, limited, and on occasion washed away should fate be forgetful of their limitations and have them born at the wrong time in the ever-unrolling story of pictorial imagery.

Why do I bother to note all this, and at the stroke of twelve midnight at that? Because I want to find my own position in time—our time—if that is possible and I think that it is possible and, in a very private way, necessary.

I do plan to comment in future pages on contemporary painting and hope to take issue with a good deal of the criticism levelled at it, but not here and not now. Most of what the reviewers write (reviewers who for some odd reason wish to be known as critics) cannot be taken really seriously—not that they write badly, but that they think muddily about the subject (art and painting) they deal with. Sprinkled throughout their rather breezy journalese are the bits of truthfulness about their capacities that never fail to give them away. It may be the momentary lapse in their posturing that reveals that they have “form” mixed up with “forms” or that they demand an art with which they can “identify” instead of participate in and here it is not a matter of semantics. They will dismiss the pure and monumental as cold, but will accept the watered down version of it as musical and persuasive (they would like to, but don’t dare say “charming”).

No, it is not this critic or that critic that I would take issue with. I will oppose the “whole” of their critical fault-finding with what we are trying to do in the same “general” way in which they so often attack all of Abstract Art or Concrete Art (in the modern sense) or non-representational art (to use all of the cliches). The critic of modern painting whose effusions we are constrained to read is either blindly partisan of one school or another, or unhappy about the whole affair and anti-Abstract Art, which either tells him or her nothing or awakens in him the dream of some non-existent idiom that he would will to life by exhortation. This is the case of the “neo-figurative image” of which we hear so much and see nothing. The call for something that is not there is like the call for personal virtue or the cry for a new “humanism”—another tall order no one can define and no one can deliver. The critics of our day are no more potent to accomplish art than they ever were. Whistler comes to mind: “Art happens—no prince can command it,”—and neither can the critic of whom our James said, “He regrets the passing of those great periods when Art was Art—and he wasn’t there to help.” But it is worse than that. Our critics being non-artists, or artists of minor stature, have not the mental vocabulary to comprehend, let alone criticize the “craft” which, opinions to the contrary, still exists, and the result is such that after 20 years of “intense” art appreciation, the “pupils” cannot tell the difference between a tenth­ rate work and a first-rate work of modern painting. (December 31, 1961)

“Dr.” Walter Gropius has just received the Kaufman International Design Award ($20,000) for 1961. This honor was paid him for his contribution to architecture and modern design, emphasizing his years at the Bauhaus (his brainchild) in the 1920s. Gropius’s influence has been enormous and generally on the progressive and positive side. Driven from Germany by the Nazis, he succeeded in the United States. He managed to place many of his gifted associates in positions of influence in our largest colleges and universities. Even if his idea of art based on material needs was in happy accord with America’s pragmatism and most sympathetic to non-art loving cultures such as ours, no one can deny him his achievements as a culture politician (no pejorative term in itself) of high order. I once heard him speak at Georgia Tech and was impressed by his erudition, historic grasp, and his sense of humor. In his speech of acceptance he said pretty and true things about combatting ugliness in our cities and he expressed confidence in human nature’s ability (if the humans are well educated) to respect the tree of life and abjure the worship of sales and profits, a worship contradictory to true and desirable values. But why did he get mixed up in the building of that new architectural monster, the PanAm Building? This is hardly practicing what he preaches. His old friends and students regret his association with the promoters of this real estate mammoth that will make the practical physical life of midtown Manhattan even more miserable than it already is. These friends feel that old age had softened up the good “Doctor’s” sense of values and his powers of resistance to what must have been intoxicating blandishments of those dollar-and-profit people who wanted Gropius’s name on their list of architectural collaborators. I doubt if I would have taken notice of this building project—that it rises vertically, already makes Grand Central Station look like a carriage step—had I not driven through the demolition area on the taxi ramp just as the last traces of the Grand Central Building had been removed. Here was an empty space to delight the eye, a beautiful relief in the midst of that pile of buildings. Whether by accident or not, the proportions were fine, a natural plaza if ever there was one. It brought to mind the Plaza of St. Mark’s in Venice and that reminded me of Gropius’s lecture at Georgia Tech. He emphasized the need of the outdoor plaza as a Forum in which the citizens of a city might promenade and carry on personal discussions of impersonal matters. I recall that he said he considered St. Mark Plaza (Piazza) the ideal of such a place and as he spoke, slide photos of the famous St. Mark’s were flashed on the screen. He also showed slides of the first communal housing project at Bath (18th Century?), emphasizing the difference between a place where many might “live,” not just be tucked away as in Le Corbusier’s machines for living. He did not mention Le Corbusier, but he did take a poke at the “tower box” on the empty lot such as New York City now has in terrifying abundance. (January 5 and 6, 1962)

The Hofmann show is “young” as advertised and some pictures are fresh. Nevertheless it is “improvised” and spontaneous and the first look at the work provides the greatest pleasure one derives from the pictures. There is no poetic depth, nothing sufficiently substantial for my taste—a little bit like the waltzes from the Rosenkavalier—“die wo irnrner anfangen und dann doch nichts werden”—as So[..]rgel used to say. The vitality and energy of this octogenarian painter is phenomenal. It is puzzling that a man, almost pedantic in his emphasis on structure has absorbed little of it in his personality. Granted, I speak only of the “feeling” of structure but that is the important thing and there is so little of it—excepting in the pictures of rectangles and these are the weakest of his canvases, so weak as to be embarrassing—“einfach nicht verstanden.” Certainly the 20th Century imposes curious limitations on talent, warping it and causing malformations that are not inherent. Hofmann’s best pictures are the monochromatic and monocoloristic ones. Here there is a happy lack of that dissipation of color often present in his work. He loves colors somewhat as Kandinsky did, indiscriminately and with a disregard for their relative chromatic force. There is just too much of what can be called “shooting the works.” To his credit, it must be said of Hofmann, that he has no cliche and that he works like the true expressionist he is—adventurously. (January 21, 1962)

Picasso is upon the town — nine times to be exact. The Picasso exhibitions in honor of his 80th birthday (last year) are shown for charity. Patrons buy books of tickets and catalogues and then dress up, visit the shows and hope to be seen—and photographed—and so the master has entered the second phase of social usefulness. The first one, of course, is that he provided costly objects for the trade and now he serves as the focal point of charitable endeavor. If a man as brilliant as Picasso lives long enough, the public will take him to its bosom with or without understanding him. It is almost half a century ago that a similar veneration of erstwhile rebels took place. There were several of them, Monet, Degas, Renoir and Rodin. The public at that time, however, was almost exclusively European. Americans had their own hero, i.e. Whistler, to redeem and weren’t in too much of a hurry about giving him his just due.

Fifty years ago the young men of their time Matisse and Picasso, plus others now called classical moderns, were of interest only to the immediate aficionados of art. All others, dealers and collectors, venerable, and worthy of the positions they held, if they knew of these Fauves at all, regarded them as naughty children out to pull the public’s leg.

The position of the young contemporaries today is not analogous to that of the first “moderns” or their immediate forerunners, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin. Only in the matter of having their motives questioned is their similarity. A confluence of world circumstances, the preoccupation with psychology and other factors cause the younger moderns (35 to 50 years of age) to be more centrally located in the social picture of the time than was true 50 years ago, but the ever resolving relationship between society and the artist continues more or less as always. Once the artist is universally accepted, if he is still alive, he is no longer of interest to the young artists that come after him. If the young are still young enough to require a heroic model, they will go far into the past or choose a gifted contemporary not yet accepted for the role.

This hero is of course known, may even be notorious and materially successful, but he must not be “accepted.” Within the last twenty years Picasso has passed from fame to acceptance and today’s painters have dismissed him from their minds.

This artist who had fed and nourished several generations of followers with his ideas and caprices is now beyond the pale. No longer needed, he has been dismissed as the mentor, replaced by artists who have grasped the spirit of a newer epoch.

It must have been 15 years ago that John Graham first attacked Picasso in an article for one of the art journals. Graham had been one of Picasso’s greatest admirers. I asked him why he had turned against his hero and he told me then that it was necessary to say what he said because Picasso had become a “must” in the American mind, like refrigerators or automobiles or air conditioners, that Picasso had defeated himself by his sensationalism.

Graham was a man of great intelligence but I often wonder whether he really knew why he had turned on Picasso at that time. Perhaps, and I think it was just that, Graham hated to see his idol’s fame watered down by the tides of popular acceptance, and wanted to stem that ineluctable tide. Of course Graham had turned his own face from modernism toward the past and had become more lover that artist, celebrating in his own work the achievements of Piero della Francesca. I myself feel no desire to attack Picasso for being whatever he is and still less for not being what he isn’t. I don’t particularly care whether I ever see another painting by him or not, but this is not because I find him less as an artist than I thought he was—this is not true—but because we or my generation were so saturated with Picasso that we feel he is in us all the time and his most monumental works are just that—monumental, and who can look at a monument all of the time. It’s like living with the Ninth Symphony. When I say I don’t care to see another Picasso or not I must qualify that statement. What I mean is that I have memorized most of his pictures and styles and that I don’t look forward, as we all did avidly years ago, to seeing what new things he was making, what new revelation he had in store for us. I would very much like to see almost any of the early cubist paintings (the heroic epoch) because they, the most revolutionary of all his paintings, are also those that never seem to tire the observer.

I remember when Amédee Ozenfant, somewhere in the late 20’s or early 30’s turned against the decorative Picasso, precisely the one we worshipped, he of the “Three Musicians” and the interiors with still lives. In his amusing if somewhat superficial book on “Art,” Ozenfant reproduced some of the “Cubist” paintings of Picasso and the caption underneath these read—“When he was one of the Greatest.”

Such a fine choice on Ozenfant’s part seems amazing and strangely inconsistent with the dubious taste in his own work. At any rate I must agree with Ozenfant in his judgment of Picasso the Cubist but that may be because I am growing old and less enthusiastic about extravagant things in art. If there are proper confines to art these can only be sensed, not really proved, and our response to painting depends as much on us, our current state of mind and body, as it does upon the works we are confronted with.

The life in a work of art is too often confused with the sensational impact of one or another example. One of the most curious of paradoxes is that the one thing most lacking in action painting is action, i.e., movement and real activity. But this is not true for those that look at such paintings with enthusiasm. The activity in such a case is supplied by the observer. (April 26, 1962)

Picasso once said that a new and strange work of art could not be beautiful. Beauty, he said, was not possible without understanding and approval, i.e., confirmation by observers and therefore the new was ugly. Why not neutral? What was to be beautiful could never be just neutral—ever; therefore it would first appear to be ugly or terrifying, ergo -ugly. A number of authentic artists faced by the challenge of the new, whether in the work of others or in their own researches, recoiled from the startling discovery and in one way or another sought—and sometimes found a compromise with artistic destiny. (May 3, 1962)

The talented painter Franz Kline died this afternoon (of heart trouble). He was only 51 years old. Professionally he chose the right moment to die as he was at the peak of his fame. He was not finished as an artist by any means. Indeed one might have expected much more from him if he could have survived the notoriety he had acquired at this time. It must have put great pressure on him as an artist. He never really realized his coloristic gifts but was on the way to attempting to do just that, now that he had abandoned the giant and rather crude calligraphy that made him notorious. Curiously enough his transfer from representation to abstract painting brought about no change in his formal or rather formless concept. He was an expressionist and he remained one, succeeding rather in evoking form than in attaining it. Perhaps the popular acceptance of his work was due to his artistic shortcomings in this respect. The public responds to suggestion and Kline’ s suggestion was very powerful. It is the final word in pictorial art that the public finds more difficulty to accept for the public lacks the discipline and the humility to recognize what it cannot identify with. Despite the huge surfaces Kline attacked with such vigor, he had no true sense of space. He said that he wanted no perspective in his pictures, nothing “before and behind” but his paintings were filled with false background and foreground elements he must have failed to perceive. To many, such a critique as this will appear pedantic but the lack of control in space is only in part technical. The real fault lies in the fact that many artists are mistaken about the quality of their emotions. What is wrong with such paintings and causes them to fall apart can be directly traced to a lack of sensibility where it is most important to have it. (May 14, 1962)

I could not be long entertained by this game of “hoops” [to be found in the advancing and receding shapes of negative and positive design elements in some paintings on view at the Betty Parsons Gallery] and I went across the hall to the Janis Gallery where I found a very tasteful exhibit (group show of gallery artists) of larger pictures. I believe that Rothko with its deep blood red, blacks and smoky grays was the best painting but Motherwell looked good enough as did a large Franz Kline, one in which a large black calligraphic form was painted over with deep, ringing acid blues and purples. In this picture the blue closes the plane and, being blue, it does so without loss of light and the black form attains mystic proportions. Unlike some of the pictures Kline has unified (to a degree at least) by painting them shut, this one is without the usual contradiction of his intentions by his means. (May 15, 1962)

My mood on this visit [to see the new acquisitions at the Whitney Museum] was one of curiosity rather than anything else which probably explains why I didn’t enjoy what I saw as much as I might have done had I gone to see the shows out of that hunger to see paintings which is the best reason for looking at them. Of the pictures I saw at the Whitney I can recall at the moment only one that pleased me—the Kooning harmony in yellows, white and yellowed pink. I believe that the title is “The Gate to the River” or something like that. While the de Kooning bravura is as usual in evidence, the painting is conceived in beauty and is beautiful, a meadow for the eye, but not one other painting or construction I saw there could or would claim this compliment for itself. All the others were calculated to startle rather than to attract—even the simplest canvases. They, the extremely simple ones, startled one by the impudence of their emptiness, the rest were exercises in posturing and spiritual sword swallowing. (May 25, 1962)

Went to the dinner in honor of Mark Tobey and also the preview of his exhibition (a sort of retrospective) at the Museum of Modern Art. The curator that selected the exhibit did two excellent things. He chose a collection of uniformly excellent paintings and he presented them beautifully. The myth of Tobey, the miniature latinist, collapses suddenly when looking at those pictures. They are small paintings only when one compares them to the giant canvases so fashionable today. Actually they are as large as the paintings of Van Gogh and most of the paintings by Cezanne.

Despite the filigree-like quality often noticeable in Tobey’s work the paintings are of a proper robusticity. There is no artificial “mute” on this violin, no sentimentality. I cannot help but feel that Mark’s work is the culminating achievement of a long tradition of Anglo Saxon and Celtic origin going way back before Blake and on through Ryder and artists like Dove and of course Tobey where it reaches what must be called perfection. The resemblance to Pollock’s work appears to me purely phenomenal even though Tobey once told me “that there are moments when I feel very close to Pollock.” The spirits of the two artists are oceans apart. It is a phenomenon singular to modern art that groups of artists, apparently in search of the same results are in fact highly individual in their personalities and this despite technical devices seemingly common to all of them. It began with impressionism where “all cows were purple” and all the innovators were originally judged as though they were one and the same artist. In time, or with time, the anonymity of the epoch disappears and the individuals appear clearly and separately as masters only to themselves. (September 11, 1962)

I went to the Guggenheim Museum and saw the big Kandinsky exhibit. The monster museum doesn’t favor a painter like Kandinsky because of his rather pretty decorative color. It is true that one doesn’t see all of the pictures at once but there are many shots on the ramp from which one sees bits and slices and peekaboo fragments of 40 to 50 pictures at the same time and what one is inclined to notice most are the generally pretty colors and out of context.

When Kandinsky first made his appearance in the world of art he was considered scandalous (1910) by the public. It was a time when the bombs of modernism, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Expressionism in full and violent colors were exploding all about and the general reaction was just as violent. The Great Public approved of nothing and the artists themselves certainly didn’t approve of everything. There was the deep split between the subjective and often literary approach and the objective one with its insistence on the retention of classical values even if the classical idioms themselves had been abandoned.

Opinion among those persons favorable to the new movements was even at that time severely critical of Kandinsky’s sweet color and his wasteful use of all colors. Many referred to his color as nauseous and dismissed the paintings, calling them “Schokoladen Bilder.” I don’t know whether it was this adverse criticism that drove Kandinsky to write in defense of himself but he certainly did so and we know how he regarded color and the role it was to play in the new ‘‘spiritual” art he had initiated. To Kandinsky, color was symbol and an exceedingly personal symbol at that. Nevertheless, in his reference to color he does make certain remarks, accurate or not, about the “nature” of the different colors. This was definitely a new approach even if seeing colors as symbols was not.

No one should have expected a man of Kandinsky’s temperament to be able to transcend his subjectivity or romantic approach, his intelligence to the contrary notwithstanding. When he did try to be objective, as in his wearisome treatise on “Point, Line to Plane,” he only rationalized and I believe was uncomfortable as he did so. Feininger once told me that somewhere in the early thirties Kandinsky said to him that “he felt like an anachronism” which at that moment (the birth and rise of neo-plasticism) he certainly appeared to be.

But times reverse trends and Kandinsky was to become a vital influence a quarter of century later. The American abstract expressionists of the late 1940’s and 50’s owe much to Kandinsky though not to him alone. Surrealism, not abstract painting as we knew it before that time, was the catalyst that released the new painters. But the method of their work and the abandoning of all representation stems largely from Kandinsky’s example and counsel.

The “spiritual” of his conception, especially in the matter of color, was replaced or transformed into a far more material idiom. Colors were tonal, accents heavy, and all semblance of “air” in the canvases disappeared.

Today Kandinsky is considered a “solid” modern classic but his vision remains stronger than his realization. And this too should not be seen as something so unusual.

“Ideas” about painting stem from the work that precedes them and the work progresses at a slow pace while the idea or vision of future vistas bursts forth explosively and suddenly. It is a far day before all that is useful in the idea is realized in the visual image that should result. A thousand considerations come up and must be dealt with before pictorial clarity of intention can be achieved. This is the difference between thought, idea, concept, and the picture itself. A picture must be a great deal more than just original in conception.

As I limped down Mr. Wright’s famous ramp and stopped to study one of the larger earlier canvases, a group of visitors gathered a few steps above me. A guide lecturer was reminding them that they should not forget that at the time Kandinsky painted these pictures there was “nothing like this to be seen. Nothing like it existed.” Perhaps there was nothing so named at the time but there was a great deal of painting like his as far as phenomenal resemblance went. For one thing there were Futurist paintings that were almost as non-objective as Kandinsky and there were cubist paintings that were even more remote from figurative relations than the Kandinskys because the trained eye can often detect the very thin disguise of figurative elements in the Kandinskys. To be sure Kandinsky’s ideas were not the same as those of the Futurists or Cubists and aspired to greater freedom from resemblance but as far as the eye is concerned the rearrangement of pictorial elements into a more autonomous spacial order was the concern of many. The absorption of all shapes into an ornamentally expressive surface space had already progressed to a point very close to non­representational language or idiom in both Italy and France. (February 2, 1963)

Most artists will speak of their teachers or masters with deference and gratitude but few will acknowledge the help they have received from others, particularly from the younger generation, because they feel that they should not have needed it.

Those of us who were privileged to watch Mondrian work were perhaps astonished at first when he asked for our criticism. “Does this look right? So you think this is sufficiently equilibrated?” Those were some of his questions. But he_ also welcomed suggestions as well. He did not, of course, act on any of these without deliberation but he welcomed participation in his efforts. Outsiders hearing of this smiled and attributed the motivation of his questioning to “sovereign generosity” (flattery) or to the crotchety quirks of an old man who was really just talking to himself. Nothing was further from the truth. If ever a man meant everything he said exactly as he said it, Mondrian did. (June 6, 1963)

I saw three exhibitions of paintings and sculpture this month, the most important for me being an exhibit of Cezannes, many late ones I had never seen before included. I also visited the Museum of Modern Art and saw the summer show of the “Sixteen” Americans, a rather good retrospective of Rodin’s work and a smaller one of Derain in which there were two splendid landscapes, one early and one late. There was a note on the wall by Alfred Barr, Jr, declaring all the late work as inferior.

It is true enough that Derain didn’t always keep his promise but one of those late landscapes (a scene from the Cote d’Azur) is an exception to the rule. The rather conventional idiom to the contrary, notwithstanding.

To see Rodin again after all these years was to have a sobering effect on me. No one who was not alive in Rodin’s own lifetime can imagine the influence he exerted and the prestige he enjoyed. Until his death in 1917, he was worshipped like a God. He was perfect and there was hardly anyone who even dreamed of criticizing him. Although it was well known that many of the titles of his work were given ex post facto and often enough by others than himself, to wit “The Hand of God,” even the titles were appreciated as evidence of his overwhelming conception of the universe. His shorthand-like drawings of nudes were estimated far above their worth, but these drawings were in so modern a manner technically that here Rodin appeared to step forward from his own generation into that of the younger men of that period.

Andre Gide recounts in his journals that Matisse had showed Rodin some of his drawings and that Rodin had advised Matisse to “play more” with them, a cavalier comment that infuriated Matisse. Gide gives the impression that he approved of Rodin’s snide comment and that he was amused at young Matisse’s discomfiture. But Matisse was justified in his anger because his drawings were far better, less superficial than Rodin’s more tasteful or “tasty” offerings. Then Rodin died and sunk into oblivion for more than forty years, when sculptors and public, largely inspired by Jacques Lipschitz’ appreciation of Rodin, reconsidered and re-thought and today he is again in favor with the world. It seems incredible today but in the 20’s and 30’s of this century, one was considered a “square” if one spoke of Rodin favorably. The great man of that time was Maillol and for a long time he was above criticism. There also sat, at the foot of his throne, but far below him Despiau and for the Avant Garde there was Brancusi—a “queer” and isolated figure whom Mondrian referred to as “that great realist.”

I believe that the reason for the sudden degrading of Rodin, after his death was due to the disaffection with Impressionism as such for Rodin was known as the sculptor of the Impressionists and his name allied to those of his contemporaries and personal friends suffered to some extent from this superficial—association. I say superficial because the Impressionists were the most individual artists any historical “school” has produced. We are told that all of us see the natural object with the same eyes but nothing is further from the truth. Unless we modify and adjust our vision as is done in an academic drawing class, where a teacher guides us to see in a systematic manner, no two persons will see nature in the same way.

To see Rodin again today must temper the enthusiasm of even ardent admirers of his Art like myself. His frantic search for the unusual posture and grouping appears forced. Rodin’s emphasis on the exaggerated pose, the figure straining itself to the utmost in defiance of gravity, now appears annoying and inartistic rather than original in concept. It is not that Rodin did not know the secret of movement in the human figure. He demonstrates that he did in his figure of St. John and in his “walking man” where both feet, despite the length of the stride. are firmly on the ground. The rear foot is there before the stride, the forward foot after the step has been taken. This gives the observer the experience of the step to be taken and the one already taken, i.e., we are aware of the stepping itself, the one motion not depicted. Here Rodin is Greek to the core in spirit and deed. No one understood the late Michelangelo (the slave) as Rodin did as can be seen in his statue of Eve both in the “closed” form and in the treatment of surface planes so that the hard material of sculpture is enveloped in light. Here he was a child of his time as well as the artist transcending it, for light in art as an equivalent to light in nature was an aim of Impressionism and of all the Impressionists.

As Rodin benefitted by the prejudices and interests of his time, he now suffers by failing to live up to or rather respond to the notions we have and the concepts we hold with today. Movement in the modern sense is achieved in a completely non-organic manner having little or nothing in common with the movement or motion that depends on posture and the mobility of the human body. Movement in art today is attained by the contrast of forms employed in the work itself as in the sculptures of archaic periods. We see a writhing pile of figures by Bernini as brilliant virtuoso works of arrangement but without movement as we understand the term. It is the old struggle between life as seen and life as it is known and the solution is a matter of proportion in our thinking.

Michelangelo’s forms or figures twist and writhe but his form is achieved through contrasts of the abstracted shapes nevertheless and he seems to have eaten his cake and had it too. Seduced by the worshipful love of the human figure he proclaimed himself a true child of the Renaissance and of Italy as well but he learned his composition from the Greek ideal which was both figural and abstract. Cezanne, who was a close personal friend of Rodin’s, said of himself and his contemporaries that “we have all forgotten how to compose” and of Rodin, whom he included in this sweeping statement, he added, “Rodin is but a tailor of stones.” Like all sweeping statements this one is somewhat exaggerated. Nevertheless it was inspired by the impression Cezanne had of Rodin’s “Gates of Hell” model and as this was to be Rodin’s greatest project, the criticism has point and value because in this work Rodin revealed the contradiction between the concerns of his time and the monumental concept of greater eras. Certainly Rodin remains great if not preeminent, a great artist who gained what he was after at a loss as all great artists do. In no single figure does he equal Ridel, an immediate fore-runner, not Constantin Meunier, Rodin’s great contemporary (who is hardly known in America) in monumentality or simple grandeur. Rodin’s monumentality cannot be divorced from a certain theatrically of gesture but I don’t know whether that makes him less of an artist. There are so many things to accomplish and no one can achieve all of them as they, the aims themselves, are contradictory the one to the other.

I had an old painting teacher at one time who emphasized that point by warning us that we could not attain “chalky lightness and sonorous depths of color in the same painting.”

There is one other thing one becomes acutely aware of in re-seeing Rodin. He was essentially a modeler not a cutter of stone. His whole process of working over old plaster castings of the first modelled clay, cutting them apart and cobbling them together (a sort of plaster and clay collage) proclaims the modeler. It also reveals a most important relationship to Cezanne because Rodin’s method, like Cezanne’s, was to destroy, rebuild, and destroy again in the process of creation rather than to execute for better or worse what the working sketch dictates . . . .

Milton and I discussed the Rodin exhibit I had already commented about and while we didn’t discuss Rodin at length, I would say that Brown accepted the master with less reservations than I do. He did say that he thought that Degas was in effect the sculptor of the 19th century. I don’t know whether I can agree to that. It is true that Degas did some excellent sculpture and no one admired it more than Auguste Rodin himself. Rodin is supposed to have chided Degas for not casting certain clay models he considered excellent. Legend has it that Degas took this opportunity to deride the importance of sculpture by telling Rodin that he didn’t think it was worth his while as a painter to bother about the permanence of his sculptural efforts. I personally doubt this part of the story. Degas was too well mannered to offend a man he must have held in esteem. Degas’ acid sallies and ripostes were reserved for pretentious folk of no account who bored and bedevilled him with stupid remarks. But that doesn’t really convince me that Degas was the greatest sculptor of the 19th century, I mean the fact that he sculpted or rather modelled so well.

I don’t believe that we can appoint a champion for 19th century sculpture, mainly because we are more concerned with the vision of those sculptors prominent in the second half of the century and that would leave out of consideration at least 3 first rate masters of the first part of the 19th century, namely. Carpeaux, Rude, and Baroque and I for one prefer certain figures of bronze by Constantin Meunier to the work of all the rest of the sculptors in the latter part of the 19 hundreds, including Rodin and Degas.

Brown then asked me whether Delaunay had ever mentioned Patrick Bruce to me and I answered that he had not, at least I couldn’t remember his doing so. I am convinced that they knew each other well but somehow or other Delaunay never spoke much of his early work, perhaps because he no longer considered it important in the overall picture of his art. Brown told me, and I did not know this, that Delaunay had already gone beyond the St. Severin and the early Eiffel tower motifs by 1911 in his roofs and window pictures, a great stride forward into abstraction according to Brown. But Delaunay, when I knew him considered even that period of his painting, indeed everything before his work in pure discs and split planes, as only a “tuning up” for what he really had to say. He remonstrated with me often enough for beginning my painting “avec des idees.” He denied all his own former work because of the same erroneous steps taken in the beginning and he considered Leger’s “Art Mechanique” as being in error, because Leger while eschewing the organic forms, still based his book on “things seen” much as mechanical forms or other forms that had been mechanized or stylized to look like machine parts.

This denial of his former work was no pose of false modesty on Delaunay’s part but pure abstract painting beginning with colors and areas of color in simultaneous accord as the only possible way of working in our time had become a conviction with him. Curiously enough he did not claim to speak for the future or try to guess what its imagery would look like. Delaunay had the feeling that the revolution in painting begun by Cezanne had not been completed and no substantial form been achieved. He once said that “when this revolution was completed and the eye completely refreshed, one could go back to painting an apple again if one wanted to (pourquoi pas). Until that happy day one was to forget about everything except color and composition and the latter was to be accomplished by grand divisions of the surface.” When a mutual friend of ours said that that would be little more or other than the varicolored facades of the paint stores (marchand de couleur) Delaunay said that one could learn a great deal from those “facades.” The logic of his thinking from what he wanted to do and have us do that would lead to a new way of seeing apples eludes me, but then not everything Delaunay said was to be taken too seriously. But whatever he spoke of was in some way concerned with the present and not with the past or the future, and he was capable of accepting realization in the work of others. His complete acceptance of the work of Mondrian at that time is proof of his capacity to recognize the work of another even though he felt that he, Delaunay, was the man that painted most eloquently (spoke eloquently) for his epoch.

Although he felt underestimated and unappreciated at the time of our association, Delaunay did not try to console himself or impress others, like me for instance, with a retailing of his past when he enjoyed a far greater prestige, as in the years before World War I as the French wonderboy of the new abstract painting.

Brown, who recently published a book on the Armory show of 1914 and who is saturated with facts about the pictures shown at that time and artists represented, told me that Delaunay of all the modern French artists had made the biggest impression in Germany in the exhibit (Cologne 1912) that was to feed so many pictures into the Armory show. He, Brown, also thinks that Delaunay exerted the biggest influence on the German painting of their avant garde groups, citing Franz Marc and Paul Klee as an example. This could well be true and, if it is so, it inspires to reflection on the matter of timing in art. By timing, I mean here, being ready with one’s work at a certain time when its presentation might be most advantageous. Had Roger de la Fresnaye been “ready” with such paintings as the “Conquest of the Air” or his “Curassier” and other Cubist military compositions I believe his influence on German painting would have superseded that of Delaunay, but—De la Fresnaye was some 3 years behind schedule. (August 26 and 30, 1963)

If ever there was an ill-starred devil, it was Roger de la Fresnaye. From what I have seen of his work I gather that his first essays in “Modern” style were done in 1908 when he began by painting very simple still life pictures conventional in the form but violent in color. One would have to say that it was coloring rather than color. A white plaster figure was painted orange or green but the form was small and the results unconvincing. De la Fresnaye must have been inspired by the Futurists at that time because his first large composition entitled “Married Life” (La Vie Conjugal) painted in 1910, is composed in large, rather obvious “motion” rhythms such as Boccioni might have enjoyed. A man about to fall backward off a tilting chair is holding a wine glass aloft as though he were toasting the young woman who is curving away from him on the other side of the painting. Everything, including the table, is tilted, but rather as the object itself than as forms set at “off” axis angles such as the Cubists employed. Later de la Fresnaye went a bit further into cubism using simple rectangles along with broken up elements of figures and other objects, going about as far in this direction as le Frauconnier and Albert Gleizes in his composition of the “Man on the Balcony,” a painting exhibited in the Chicago version of the Armory Show.

Perhaps “la vie Conjugal” refers somewhat ironically to Rembrandt’s painting, the one in which he holds a wine glass aloft as Saskia sits upon his lap. But de la Fresnaye’s notable work was created between 1911 and 1914 when the war put an end to his only fecund period. In those three years he painted almost everything of note that remains by his hand, including a series of landscapes that recall Cezanne and a series of still life pictures, the best known of which depicts a bottle of Sandeman Port wine (black), supported by a large rectangle (among other) in bright vermillion red. There is a phenomenal resemblance to collage in those still life paintings but not in the landscapes.

I can’t recall in which year of the war — 1915 or 1916 — de la Fresnaye was gassed, but he never recovered from his “wound” and later became a victim of tuberculosis, an illness that wore him down bit by bit until his death at Leysin in 1925.

De la Fresnaye returned to painting for a few years after World War I but never found his direction again. For a short time he was seduced by the “New Realism” backwash of that period that attained its fullest development in the German version of the movement (Neue Sachlichkeit), although de la Fresnaye’s work bears more resemblance to Picasso’s farm scenes than to any of the German artists of the time, Kandoldt-Dix etcetera.

During the last bed-ridden years of de la Fresnaye’s life he did little else than draw. His physician allowed him to work for very few hours, later, only minutes of the day. But these drawings, mostly of heads, his nurses and fellow patients in the sanitorium in French Switzerland, were very beautiful in their linear modesty.

It is customary and fashionable today to say that all line drawings are done in emulation or, worse still, in the manner of Ingres but this is exceedingly loose appraisal and woolly critique. Perhaps it makes little difference, but the line drawings of Picasso (neo Greek period), Juan Gris, and those of de la Fresnaye are expressions of their individual personalities and should be understood as being a continuity of their fully developed styles and not as a sort of leave taking from themselves.

This “return to Ingres” appraisal stems, I believe, from an unspoken judgment of modern art as, such, to wit, that the devotees of that art dedicated largely to invention and adventure in form and color, were incapable of formulating in a direct manner their visual experience (inspired by objects of nature) and still be recognized as faithful to the modern effort. One must assume, then, that despite visible triumphs of sorts, the moderns have never quite convinced the “intellectual” bystander of the integrity of their vision. (August 31, 1963)

It is curious indeed that what I have just written should find immediate confirmation in one of the obituary notices of the death of Georges Bracque in today’s newspapers, or at least in one of them—The New York Herald Tribune. In a rundown of this famous artist’s career, a Mr. Tom Wolfe writes and I quote, “He studied at the Academie Humbert and at the Ecoles des Beaux Arts but by 1904 became convinced that his talents like those of Picasso and Matisse’s were unequal to the tasks of Academic Art, chiefly because of mediocre draughtsmanship.” (Picasso is the mediocre draughtsman who passed the entrance examinations at the Madrid Academy in 3 days, the time limit for these examinations customarily being 15 days, and was 15 years old at the time—to boot). And again Mr. Wolfe writes of Braque, “In the mid-1920’s and again in the 1930’s, Braque changed his styles and not for the better. His shortcomings as a draughtsman hampered him at every turn and his use of thin paints instead of the heavy design colors (where are they?) of his cubist period was ‘unimpressive.’”

I believe that I know quite well what is meant by draughtsmanship in the academic sense having qualified well enough in the opinion of my academic professors myself, but what puzzles me is the importance · attached to this mediocre accomplishment.

Clive Bell once put the matter into proper perspective when he said that the academic professors of the 19th century, and he meant all of them—Bougereaux, Gerome, Tissot, Delaroche and Coterie, carried on no tradition but their own and that one can find no drawings even resembling theirs among the works of the great masters. Here is at this moment a loan exhibit on view at the Metropolitan Museum consisting mostly of impressionist and some post-impressionist paintings. Few of these pictures are of the greatest but all of them maintain a high artistic standard of painting, i.e., all but one canvas, a sort of maverick hue. This is a portrait of the late Stephen Clark, a collector and that is probably why it is shown at all in this company. It is by the English artist and Academic wonderboy, Sir William Orpen. What distinguishes this painting is its meretricious cheap color and the superficiality of its drawing but no academician would reject it for the latter quality. It lives up to the “rules” 100 per cent. Robert Henri, not one of the world’s greatest thinkers but a man of some brilliant insights, once said in rejection of the academic standards that he rejected these standards of work and these skills, not because they were difficult to attain but because they were too superficial, and the work was not too hard to do but it just was not good enough.

Braque’s passing brings to mind some thoughts about the French cubists and almost cubists such as de la Fresnaye, Delaunay and Albert Gleizes. The thoughts are hardly profound because they deal too much with phenomenal matters, nevertheless I think them worth noting here. In cubism, France was truly divided into three parts though only one of the divisions is geographical. There are the cubists in the tradition of French painting, especially the French painting of impressionism and stemming more or less from Cezanne’s last work, and there are the “tough” cubists, Leger, Gromaire, and Helion (when he did his rather mechanical figure work some ten years ago), and these are all Normans.

I would call de la Fresnaye, Gleizes, and le Frauconnier the French French cubists, though one could add Delaunay to their number had his work terminated in 1912. Since it did not and because I think he has the stature to merit this praise, I would say that he and Georges Braque had transcended their local character as Frenchmen and must be considered part of the big, international, or better said, supra­ national manifestation of modern painting. No one, least of all I, would deny them their Frenchness, but it is in their case only part of their personalities and not the overwhelming part at that.

The “Normans,” as I refer to them, Leger, H lion and Gromaire of whom perhaps only Leger has fully realized himself, all reveal something we have come to call Germanic (harsh) in their work. Leger did not like Delaunay but I believe this was a personal matter, but he told me that he considered de la Fresnaye a (weakling) (“Enfin, il est faible”), a judgment I consider false, but one can imagine, when comparing the work of the two men, that Leger meant what he said. Leger was once asked to comment on the work of an artist whose work emphasized emotional and expressionistic tendencies and he answered his questioner with the words, “How can you expect me to approve of what I have spent a lifetime denying in my own work,” a forthright response indeed. The Normandy and the. “French” cubists is that the “Normans” welcomed the beauties of the structural in itself, their opposite numbers employed the new structure for more pictorial purposes.

Even Derain, whom I have not mentioned here and who certainly was a great cubist in his day, said that one must “hide” the structure (czet la construction) and so would have spoken for the truly French party in the match.

This is not an attempt to write about Cubism itself but only a try at characterising the Frenchmen that had been in the forefront of the movement, that now, with the passing of Georges Bracque, has become history. Oh. there were a number of other French cubists that at one time were considered fair-haired boys, such as Herbin and Metzinger, but Herbin became a pure abstract painter and Metzinger sort of gave up, but I think I am being fair in limiting my choices to the artists I have mentioned. If someone else cares to quarrel with my choices, I shouldn’t too much mind. I realize how personal my conjectures are. (September 1, 1963)

If there is bitterness in my personal memories of those arid years among the artists and intellectuals of that time [Holty was referring to the 1930s, with particular emphasis on the American Artists’ Congress] it is because the atmosphere was laden with a hatred of all that was artistic. Opportunism was the watchword then and whatever or whoever failed to understand this or agree with it was vilified and shunted aside. Even talented artists were taken in by the false promise of a professional solidarity and union and were cajoled into taking a back seat while they celebrated such nonentities as Joe Jones, Luis Quintarilla and that murderous Mexican assassin Sequeiros along with a host of “little” big men who lost themselves in the shuffle of the war years to become art teachers in provincial universities where their “active” past was forgotten or perhaps unknown. Much of what happens in New York is a local affair and much of what is news in town is unheard of fifty miles west of the Hudson.

I remember with what cynicism the “Central” committee appointed Stuart Davis Chairman Secretary of the American Artists’ Congress “because no one who painted such decadent bourgeois abstract pictures would be suspected of having leftwing leanings or sympathies.” And I remember on visits to Davis’ studio how the “advisers” that called on him daily prevented him from working at his pictures and kept his nose to the executive grindstone. Davis had done a brilliant job as Editor of the “Art Front.” The “Front” was the official paper of the Artists’ Union and despite the modesty of its scope and physical dimensions was excellent as an art journal and far superior in matters of taste than the far more glamorous “slicks” of today. But to his art political associates Davis the painter was a joke and not to be taken seriously.

That good and very much “pre-avant garde” art was created in those years and in that atmosphere when the “hottest” thing on the North American Continent was Diego Rivera’s Mexican muralomania was in spite of the prevailing winds, not because of them.

Shortly the Smithsonian Institute will mount a large retrospective of Davis’ work under the sponsorship of the President of the United States. “Ladybird” will represent him and so Stuart Davis like Stendhal and Balzac, will have changed places with those who held him and them in light contempt and “they” as Stendhal wrote “will rest forever in oblivion.” (May 3, 1965)

I am not an impressionist and never was one for even when we were young and working in a sort of bastard impressionistic academic way, we did so from habits borrowed from our teachers and we hardly knew what the work meant. But like many others, I have adopted certain principles held by the impressionists and good bits of their anti-literary and anti-masterpiece philosophy. They were not interested in painting itself. I am not speaking of their immediate aims relating to a more faithful recording of nature but how they went about whatever they were doing. When Monet painted his haystacks series he was certainly less interested in the individual canvas than he was in tracing, if you will, the course of the sun itself and whenever friends suggested some group composition to Monet, something that would commemorate his epoch or even the camaraderie of his friends or how they lived, their gatherings or excursions, he always turned the suggestion aside in a gentle mocking way, by saying, “But, you will try and make a historian out of me,” implying his disdain for the “grand” picture where what really interested him was that slice of life or that series of slices that finally added up to Monet himself as we think of him often enough without thinking of any single picture of his at all. It is true that no artist thought of making a masterpiece in the poetic sense as we think of it. Such masterpieces are declared such by the critics and by the public. It is the work of an artist that for one reason or another appeals to the audience. But artists, especially young ones, have set out to impress the world by some particular work that is a complete statement (as far as they are able to make it such) within itself and there are artists today, very modern ones who produce, as they put it, “one picture at a time” which does not necessarily mean that they are thinking of a special effort. It is just the way some of them work. . . . Certain artists work on two or three pictures at a time perhaps to vary their diet and because of the problems of paint drying but I work in series of pictures, not for the sake of variety but rather for reason of expansion. I may begin with two colors in mind. I may add a third and a fourth and perhaps eliminate the first as the experience indicates or combine or better said bring into play, qualities of the colors used, relative density, translucency or opacity, because most though not all colors can be treated as far as light goes in a number of ways. Besides the color there is form in mind (shape, area, vertically and horizontally) and it is good to change any of these elements only if one is ready to alter anyone or all of the other elements as well. (July 1, 1965)

Now the latest group of pictures, larger in concept too because there are fewer elements of design in evidence, run to grays, roses, gray browns and grays and yellows and in the last work I have worked on two or three canvases in silver gray, medium gray and dark grays. I haven’t yet gone all the way to black and probably won’t but I will be getting pretty close to it. The switch from the multi-colored, rather laboriously constructed pictures to the simpler rather tonal ones can be traced to a number of factors. For one thing, nothing gluts and surfeits· so much as a constant preoccupation with bright colors. I had worked on too many small canvases in a long series of exercises, to leave much drive for the larger ones I was planning, some of which were already under way. And while working with all these colors, I could not help thinking that such bright, often flat colors are better put to use in representational paintings such as are called, post impressionist, and the names of Van Gogh, Matisse and Van Dongen come to mind. Such colors require definite shapes, not areas alone and the object appears to be essential and provides better limits and boundaries for the colors than abstract or rather non-representational areas of space do. I realize that the decorative phase of Cubism allows for bright colors and the whole range of possibilities from white to black but the paintings of that category such as Picasso, Leger and Stuart Davis produced never renounced the pictorial element and the object was always there, altered, stylized or simplified, it was ever present.

Kandinsky did use bright sweeping colors that looked like the tails of varicolored comets in his earlier work, that done between 1910 and 1920 approximately. He proceeded from a sort of German or Russian version of Fauvism, painting brilliantly colored landscapes and then went on to his famous improvisations, to my mind the most successful and characteristic pictures of his entire career. But in these paintings the bright colors detached from the restrictions of perspective and from any other relationships of and between objects, became approximate, often pretty and decorative and he leaned heavily on the dense red areas or spots of the same color to give the work some sort of tangible substance.

While Kandinsky spoke endlessly of a language of colors, going so far as to see them as symbols that would communicate the mood intended in each separate work, these paintings owe less to color than to the extremely brilliant arabesque of his design and from 1920 to the end of his life, though he wrote at length of color theoretically all his painting rested on exactly planned and meticulously executed design.

In the abstract expressionist work of the 1950s the over-all painting recalls the spirit or at least part of the spirit of the great Kandinsky improvisations. It is true, as far as the pictures made at this time are concerned, that the resemblance to Kandinsky’s work is largely phenomenal. The speed of the brushwork often arabesque in itself is there but there is no great expenditure of colors and even when these are present they tend to cancel each other through haphazard repetition and the result is definitely tonal. The spirit of Kandinsky is reflected in the often agonized and impatient rush to freedom of expression but these latter day painters deny the older master when it comes to the spiritual aims in painting Kandinsky spoke of so eloquently. They would have none of this, probably didn’t understand or wouldn’t have understood what these pre-World War I feelings were about. But if the painting of the young was not monochrome, the one or two colored surface came into being at about that time and not too much has changed since then in that particular aspect. Some of these paintings, notably Rothko’s are very beautiful for he has hit upon the essence of certain colors, notably red, and used pretty well all of the other colors plus black or gray in support. I confess that my current apprehensions about full colors in opposition to one another are based on recent history plus an incomplete personal experience and one of the great beauties of working in the Arts is that what was or seems impossible can be made possible at a later time usually by adding to or changing the elements currently in use. . . . Whether all contradictions can be resolved, especially those based on optical illusions or perception, is still something to think about. I can’t, for instance, imagine chalky freshness and sonorous depth of color in one and the same picture. Whistler spoke frequently about doing a canvas in full colors, “Full Symphony” is what he called it, but he never did any such thing, probably because, in his case, it was not really something he needed. (August 14, 1965)

Commenting on a couple of auctions at Sotheby’s, Holty wrote about one of them:

The big sale, however, was the one at which the Impressionist masters or rather their masterpieces were sold. The prices of these pictures go higher and higher at every auction sale held. Some years ago Cezannes, virtually unsaleable until the very end of the artist’s life, began to acquire more and more cash value and the sale of one of the boys in the red vest, the most adroitly painted but by no means the best one, brought its owner or owners more than $600,000. This was at a London auction and the two highest bidders were Mr. Mellon and I believe Mr. Niorches the Greek shipping magnate. Mr. Mellon won out and there was some talk and many rumors about this bidding contest. Though Mr. Mellon denied it, many felt that the picture was but a pawn or symbol in the struggle between the Greek and the Aluminum millionaire and that the real issue was a test of financial strength and poker players bluff between the contestants to prove who was most powerful or at least more powerful in the world of finance—not art. I, myself, was convinced that it was something like this, but perhaps I was wrong, because a Cezanne landscape, interesting, but by no means his best was sold the other day for $800,000 so the price for the boy in the red vest may only have been a natural though surprisingly large one along the escalated value (cash) of this painter’s work. A man smoking by Eduard Manet brought in more than $400,000 at the same sale. What is notable is that neither of these paintings are in any way great works or masterpieces by those artists. They are rather conventional pictures when compared to outstanding works by the two men. The Manet, perhaps of the same vintage as the one picture that was well received in his lifetime, the Bockbeer drinker, certainly betrays the master, but the lower hand that rests on the table at which the smoker is sitting (or is it the arm of his chair?) is not convincing as belonging to the figure itself. The picture is richly painted and with great authority of brushstrokes and tonality and certainly proclaims the student of Couture. Perhaps there is too much of Couture in it. Certainly this picture has none of Manet’s great vision of the impression he gathered at first glance and then held him in his painter’s grasp as in his great self portrait at the Metropolitan Museum or in the seascapes at the Chicago Art Institute. It is the work of Manet the virtuoso, a prelude to the great works, but not truly one of them. The Cezanne is quite different. The House at Estaque, I believe that is the subject if not the exact title, is laboriously painted rather smooth and full of discoveries the artist was later to put to good use in simpler but more articulated paintings. should be revealing for a student of painting because it is one of the canvases that show Cezanne shifting emphasis from the object to the picture plane, from his sensations before nature to a more viable way of realizing these sensations on a flat surface. One notices the slanted planes in the landscape foreground and middle distance as a relationship is established between these and the light on the rocks and hills at the middle right side, before the attention centers on the group of houses, the central objects of the picture. The color appears to be more local than abstract in this picture and only the sensitive hand of the master and his unfailing sense of light prevents it from becoming lifeless and monochrome. Its true monumentality cannot be missed and it is achieved, even if in a cumbersome way, by the proper means. It is modest and clear but not obvious but it reveals too much of the artist’s struggle to be in a class with the last St. Victorie series and the as yet not truly appreciated unfinished late canvases that seem to be complete with so little paint and so few marks on them and where nothing need be explained . . . . Degas once said that an artist did nothing really good until he no longer knew what he was doing and with all due respect this was no different with Cezanne who finally got rid of his cube, his cone and his square and even his obsession with planes. He never earned his sensations nor his beautiful blondness of color. These among other things were his gifts. One doesn’t really work at problems but through them to that other shore from the banks of which the world looks quite different. By worrying about those preoccupations that in the end only seem to amount to nothing one finds that one has been standing on one’s head or looking at an hour glass upside down. I have often felt that the young Cezanne would have held the old Cezanne in contempt and that the old Cezanne meeting the young Cezanne and hearing him speak of what he wanted to do would have looked at him in silence and shrugged his shoulders. (October 15, 1965)

The death of Hans Hofmann brought on one of Holty’s longest reminiscences:

Hofmann, despite a belated build up that presents him as a star of stars from the very beginning was no youth genius, neither as an artist nor as a scientist. As far as his scientific achievements went, they were entirely confined to the idea or project stage and consisted of certain notions, the realization of which were possible but hardly probable or if probable highly impractical. I remember Karl Heidenreich telling me of an electric light bulb Hofmann tinkered with some fifty years ago for which the current was to be produced by manual frattage (rubbing of the hands). After a good deal of rubbing, a faint light appeared only to fade out again immediately. I certainly do not intend to put Hofmann down for not being another Edison. Such conceits of universality are not uncommon in gifted specialists who have a certain measure of versatility and a natural breadth of interests. But Hofmann was . . . a professional in his field, while his earlier pre-modern work, what there is left of it reveals a modest rather than an outstanding talent it certainly proclaims the able professional from the start. A portrait of his wife painted in the Munich style at the beginning of this century in a manner somewhere between that of Leibl and that of Hugo von Habermann is clear in execution and a good likeness of the subject as is an early Parisian picture, a sef portrait with Panama hat painted in the pointillist manner. These two pictures are about all that is left of those early days. The rest of the youth work is either destroyed, dispersed or lost. I am sure that Hofmann, later in life, did all he could to find other work of that time for as he became famous and more famous embarrassing questions were asked about the long period (over twenty years) when Hofmann did no work of his own. It seemed highly inconsistent for an artist whose creative ebullience and gushing spirits had become a trademark, to have so successfully repressed this geyser of inspiration for so long a time or to have channeled all this energy into the arduous but confining limits of teaching, correcting and theorizing. That, however, is exactly what he did and there is nothing wrong with it excepting that it somewhat cramped the romantic style of his biographers and the many who hero worshipped him and gave adverse critics and professional rivals (painting artists) an excuse to put him down and try to keep him in the category of a teacher, denying him the status of a creative person. I recall only too well the time when Hofmann’s name was proposed for membership in the American Abstract Artists group and the opposition of those who maintained that he was not an artist at all only a teacher. His name was rejected and I know that he was exceedingly bitter about it. On the occasion of the group’s first exhibition Hofmann passed from painting to painting muttering all the while “dead, lifeless, dead.” This could not have been an objective opinion but who could blame him for his resentment. I have written elsewhere, I believe, about the early days of my acquaintance with Hofmann at Munich during the mid-1920’s, either in these notes or in a memorandum for Mr. Seitz of the Museum of Modern Art and to repeat those things would make little sense here where other problems should be dealt with, i.e., a just estimate of his life and work both as a teacher and as a painter. Let me only say, or if I have said it, repeat that in those days at the school in the Georgen Strasse, I was the only one of his American students who could speak German fluently and who also had a historical knowledge of the Munich tradition in which Hofmann had grown up and to which, despite his greater appreciation for French art, he maintained a loyalty, and bore a deep affection. (March 30, 1966)

In the years when Hofmann was shuttling back and forth from his teaching engagements in the United States and his European vacations I was living in Paris and often met with the Hofmanns there, Hofmann on his way to or from the United States, his wife meeting him there or parting from him there because she did not get to America until 1939, quite a while after Hofmann had settled in New York. Our meetings were amicable and social. I believe that Hofmann had written me off as a member of his intimate team, as a Hofmann “schueler” of the inner group because I had gone my own way into abstract painting via decorative cubism a style he categorized at that time as “form impressionism” a curious but not inept estimate of the effort. There was no break between us and he seemed content enough with the fact that I, with his help in the short time I was his classroom student, had broken away from representation to a·plastic manner of seeing and working. He assured me that he knew that I could never return to the superficial habits of the uninitiated. He had had some portrait photos made of himself that summer of 1931, I imagine for publicity purposes and he gave one to me and one to Vaclav Vytlacil one of his earliest American students, also a Paris resident at the time and he had autographed them for us. The photo he gave me was “to his friend Carl Holty” the one he gave Vyt had written on it “To our common (same) goal.” Whether these different inscriptions were studied and calculated to be meaningful or whether Hofmann felt it proper not to write exactly the same words, I wouldn’t know. He and Vytlacil did have a common goal: to carry the message of Hofmann’s teaching and theories over the ocean to America and I certainly was not involved in that program so the inscription to an old disciple and interference runner was meaningful enough and I was a friend, no doubt but no help in the crusade so whichever way one cares to interpret the inscriptions on the photos, they make sense.

At that time I had become friendly with Robert Delaunay a former associate of Hofmann and we all met together on at least one occasion. Perhaps there were others but I can’t recall them now. Years later in New York Hofmann complained to me about Delaunay as a man who had not realized his promise and he told me that he bitterly regretted that he had wasted so much time as a mentor on so “superficial” a personality. When Hofmann made this remark, rather out of the blue, he himself found his career in the doldrums which I imagine accounted for his discontent. This was in the mid thirties when he was bogged down running his art school during the wintertime and just about breaking even. He earned most of his sustenance in his summer school at Provincetown but the winter school was a must to keep the enterprise in everyone’s mind. To close the not very lucrative school on 8th Street would have been bad for the summer school where swimming, boating and possible romance were added attractions to a vacation time at least partly devoted to art studies.

One of the facts of life, the teacher of a private art school must accept is that he cannot expect a student to contract for more than one month’s tuition at a time. The private teacher has nothing to offer but instruction, no planned curriculum, and no assurance that the student can benefit materially through what he learns at his school. The school may have some official recognition which only means that the students will get some credit if they transfer to a municipal or state school but that is all. In general this means that the master can never tell beforehand what his income will be and he lives more or less from hand to mouth.

The free student is not the most dependable person to deal with. Many of them balk at the first difficulties they encounter and take themselves off to other instructors where they hope matters will be different. The young student, always still rather wet behind the ears, is prone to wander from instructor to instructor believing perhaps that there is safety in numbers and an advantage to be gained by changing the point of view. One has only to note how many students at the Art Students’ League, a school of individual studios, wander from class to class until they find what they want or until they find out that it isn’t the best thing to do to so invite confusion and come to the realization that art is acquired by learning rather than by teaching.

By the time Hofmann had set up his private schools or studios in New York, he was already well known and celebrated as a teacher at the Art Students’ League. The word had gone around that he had much to say and a good deal to give and some advanced students and professional artists studied with him for a month or two because it was the thing to do, but they rarely benefited by his instruction, being already too set in their habits and few of these if any spent much time in his school. So Hofmann spent the winters marking time but doing better and better in summers where at least half of the students contracted to work for the season. Besides summer tuitions are expected to be higher and there was the camaraderie of the outdoor and seaside life to cement the personal relations between the students and between the students and the tea her who as a quasi-vacationist was much more one of them than in good-bye and on your way life in the city.

Nevertheless it was the G.I. school bill after World War II that got things going for Hofmann. The government did not permit its charges to go from school to school and as Hofmann’s school was accredited, his reputation solid he now had an average of sixty students enrolled in his classes for the winter terms and his earnings became rewarding and summer school also grew apace and the classes became so large that at formal teaching (correcting the work was Hofmann’s method), gave way more and more to general criticism of the students’ work at the weekly concourse and at the end of his school career (before Hofmann closed his school) he proclaimed himself as a critic (a technical critic of course) and no longer called himself a teacher. This was true only of the summer school, the last to close. As far as I recall Hofmann still corrected the students’ drawing in the New York school each and every day. He had developed his analytical method of objects or figures in space to such a system that the correcting of the work was child’s play. He did brag a bit to me once when he told me that he often. made fifty corrections a day “and some of them are masterpieces.”

Although Hofmann, especially when he taught in Munich, intimated to his most devoted students, Worth Ryder of California, Ernest Thurn who discovered the Hofmann school for the Americans and Vaclav Vitlacil, that his aim was to have a large effective school in America to be run by himself and his disciples, nothing came of this and Hofmann always insisted on running the show himself. Even younger and newer students became stars for a time only to be shunted aside rather ruthlessly in favor of even later comers. In his first years in the new country Hofmann did share a school with Thurn at Gloucester but they parted on bad terms and never patched up their differences.

The only man Hofmann acknowledged as having helped him was Worth Ryder who died ten or more years ago and thus did not have to be rewarded. All the rest and all he owed them was forgotten for the simple reason that gratitude and generosity were not Hofmann’s virtues. He was ungrateful and stingy anbd ruthlessly egotistic. The discovery of these deplorable traits by those who had elevated him at one time or another to the status of a demigod led to considerable disappointment and heartbreak among the disciples. Those, especially writers and collectors who later celebrated the master did so at no cost to themselves. In fact to join in the Greek chorus of praise was more likely to benefit the celebrants for they had hitched their wagons to a star. The friends of earlier days had a harder job getting that shining light off the ground and into stellar space and their virtue was indeed its own and only reward.

Having said the worst one can say of the person of Hans Hofmann, and I feel that it had to be said, it will be pleasanter indeed to report what was his positive and affirmative achievement as a teacher and as a mentor and one realizes immediately that even those of his deserving students who suffered his ingratitude did not come off entirely empty handed from having known him for he taught them most of what they learned and he opened their eyes to vistas they might never have seen without his inspiring guidance. His claim to being of those exalted people who “awakened the artist” in his students may be a bit pretentious and not always quite true but he did open many eyes that had been shut and he was the rare kind of teacher who could know not only the abilities of his students but could also judge their characters and their personalities and so could foresee to a considerable extent in what manner and how fast they could learn and develop as students and as artists. The odd ones did not necessarily disconcert him or leave him at a loss and he could certainly tell the difference between the able student, the kind who never goes much farther than sheer ability will carry him and the one who betrays, even in his worst periods of ineptitude and confusion, that the mark of the chosen is upon him. In the case of the latter Hofmann always allowed for the caprice of fate and he might say “That one will do great things I expect—unless life overwhelms him with catastrophe.”

What impressed the Hofmann student most was that Hofmann was never vague in his teaching. He was the thorough German in this respect, the kind who refuses to rely upon the subjective, or on hit and miss chance, His method was always demonstrably clear even if his concepts and theories were not always so. Of the latter it must be said that they were subject to change and to a fairly consistent development. I am referring now to Hofmann as he taught in Munich when glass clear drawing was his aim before all else, color, brio or painterly qualities. Nourished by the artists of the German renaissance, Durer, Cranach, and Grunewald, Giotto and in modern times Cezanne, Van Gogh and Matisse, he was partial to the small picture and was inevocably against all that appeared unstable and adventurous, born only of the mind without reliance upon visual experience (erlebnis) which was the control of controls for him. He recognized the power of intuitive inspiration but mistrusted it and warned his students against it, advising us to work from nature as it lay before us (“in all its glory”).

This is a far cry from the beliefs and concepts of his old age when he believed one could draw more out of the materials used, the unique and indefinable plastic logic of color itself in short from the creative act without reference to the outside world, than one could bring to art through logical thought and premeditation.

I have every reason to believe that the complete reversal of Hofmann’s conception caused him much concern and did not come about without great inner struggles and doubts. At one time I thought otherwise and attributed Hofmann’s switch over to his later way of thinking to a certain desperation on his part at the time he took up his own painting once more in the late thirties. Like all teachers of methods Hofmann found himself forced to paint and draw ihs way through all of his theories and in those days the school teacher was still much in evidence in his painting. Interiors a la Matisse were bound to be minus-Matisse, the still lives, minus Bracque or minus Cezanne, the Provincetown land and seascapes-minus Fauves. Hofmann’s critical sense must have left him both dissatisfied and dismayed as he studied and deliberated this first work of his rebirth as a painter. He made one curious remark to me at that time that I am bound never to forget. He said “I must really take the work more seriously than I seem to have done so far.” (“Ich meiss doch die sache etwas ernster velumen”) were the exact words.

I did not see Hofmann’s painting after that for about three years though I visited him in New York Hospital where he had undergone an operation for an old hernia and there were watercolors in the making on the floor and on stools surrounding the chair he was sitting in. These were all abstract and there was one large square gouache or watercolor with one large blue stain that spread out into delicate tentacles of color. I asked Hofmann whether he had poured this one and he grinned and shook his head in denial obviously pleased at my puzzlement so I refrained from asking him just how he did make it. Then at the end of the war I visited Hofmann in his new studio on the corner or Mercer and 8th Street. It was filled with new paintings all non-objective, quite colorful but with the colors running to blue, blue violet and greens. The paintings were on plywood and seemed to weigh a ton. Nevertheless Hofmann juggled them around as though they were feather light. Some were painted on both sides of the panel and Hofmann said that the panels could, if necessary, be cut into two sheets. Curiously enough he had his easel set way back in a corner with the corner windows behind his back, the full light of the day smack on the canvas or board before him. There were tables with huge quantities of paint, mixed colors, white, some half dry, others quite fresh.

Talking about his new work Hofmann was quite frank about his mixed feelings. He said that he sometimes held his head, wondering at what he was doing but that he was guided by a conviction that what he did was right. My first reaction to what I saw was that I felt Hofmann had given up the plan to paint the object as he had hoped to do and that he was settling for less, that he had looked at the calendar and come to the realization that there was not time enough left to go through with the big program and that he could best salvage the pieces of his interrupted career as a painter through abstract expressionism. He had always admired Kandinsky in a rather guilty sort of way and he, more than any other artist, knew Kandinsky’s earliest abstract painting, especially the large improvisations and compositions from before World War I as these had been stored in one of Hofmann’s Munich studios and for years Hofmann and he alone had seen and perused these pictures. It was a long time before I changed my mind on this subject, but as Hofmann’s painting career unfolded I realized that this rebirth was not frivolously nor easily come by and Hofmann’s late painting underwent a change and a development as the years rolled along. And then there were other bits of testimony that caused me to consider that Hofmann’s break through to the work of his old age had been prepared at least in thought and that he ultimately gave himself over to an effort that he had long had in mind. During the time that I taught a summer session a Berkeley I had several conversations with the retired head of the Art Department there, a German painter named Neuhaus, a tree of a man, somewhat overbearing and hated by his former colleagues. He was no friend of Hofmann’s and he must have resented Hofmann’s two summers in residence there more than twenty years before my visit in 1951. Neuhaus, a conventional but able painter of landscapes, told me that he and Hofmann had indulged in considerable arguments about art and on one occasion Hofmann had walked up to an easel where a drawing board was fixed at about eye level, pounded it with his fist and said “Eigentlich musste man so au das bild heran gehen, frei fon allen auderan gedanken ure ein krieger in die schlacht” (actually this is the way one ought to attack a canvas, free of all thoughts other than to create as a warrior goes into battle.) I must conclude then that Hofmann’s dramatic demonstration that Neuhaus reenacted for me was made at least ten years before my first look at the work on Mercer Street and twenty years before my visit to Berkeley. That day at Mercer Street Hofmann had talked in a similar vein saying that sketches were like skirmishes related to but not in themselves a blueprint or blueprints for the larger battle of the picture. But Hofmann was not yet too sure even then about a whole­ hearted reliance upon the purely intuitive and so physical approach. For a long time he was at a loss as to what to do with the analytical drawing equipment he had acquired through thirty years of sustained effort. What was to become of this knowledge? Was all that work for nothing and the ability, if not worthless at least useless? Was it a pure waste of time? No, it wasn’t. All that practicing at transposing the object from the world outside to the two dimensional world of the picture surface he probably could not have attained without working so long at the double problem seeing the object in its voluminous character without being seduced by its literal appearance and then translating these volumes into planes and areas as counterposed in tension and equilibrium that the world of the picture becomes an equivalent of the world we live in and sense.

This knowledge did not come to Hofmann without great efforts on his part. There was a time I can remember in Munich when Hofmann was not as yet clear of the means and when he worked with too many simulated volume constructions on the surface and was confronted by an imbalance between what was to describe the object or objects and the painful flatness of the negative spaces. When the volume is produced by too literal (faulty) means the flat areas cannot be brought into the proper relationship and appear as dead surfaces. Years later when Hofmann was discussing his methods of that time he admitted that there was an over emphasis of the three dimensional in his approach. When flat, and what is to appear round, are both created from the same means and limitations (the flat two dimensional nature of the surface provides the key to the means) then there is projection indeed but what is not projected is no longer flat but becomes space, not the unlimited aerial space of nature, but a space that is controlled within the stipulated limits of the rectangle itself. Degas once said that the air that we sense in a picture is not the air we breathe and he might have added that the space we see in a picture is not the space in which we live and move.

In time as Hofmann became more deeply involved with his new painting, I am sure that he no longer felt out of pocket about knowledge acquired that could not be put to use, i.e., certainly not all of it. One gains at a loss in art as in all else. At the beginnings of change this can be painful indeed but when the gains become evident, the losses are easily enough dismissed and finally forgotten. One has only to think of Titian and the brilliant skills he manifested in the works of his early years and later abandoned so that the works of his old age appear so simply and roughly done that one feels that anyone, perhaps, could have painted these—if they could have arrived conceptually at so simple a solution. Or one could ·study Velasquez’ development from the over strong three dimensional illusion of his “watercarrier” to the late great paintings of the master, so flat in the means, so full and deep in artistic realization as reality replaced the factual. And neither of these masters, nor any other master did this as the result of a flash of inspiration but rather in the slow process of doing and undoing that consumes the greater part of artistic endeavor.

In those art epochs where the skills and crafts in painting were highly developed and prized by the art lover and art buyer, masters who chose to abjure such skills to follow the more profound concepts of their minds and their hearts were hardly encouraged to do so and were often enough severely criticized for leaving the path of their accomplishment for the thornier roads that beckoned their restless souls. The later and greatly roughly painted Rembrandt portraits were held in less esteem than the highly polished and smoothly executed pictures of his early years and led to a loss of popularity and patronage for the artist himself. How Titian might have fared when he divested himself of his early harmonies and more conventional compositions we can never know because he had as a friend of his art the most powerful protector and client imaginable — Charles V who approved of whatever his master painted. Here Hans Hofmann was luckier than these men of another time than his because his own development from the analytical and planned paintings to the freer manner that is calculated to liberate the emotional statement in art moved apace of the public appetite for such a development. Not all of the public applauded or approved indeed and it is somewhat ironical that he met the greatest opposition from museums dedicated to the advancement of modern painting and from the self-appointed apologists of modernism. But he had an ever growing group of admirers and their enthusiasm for and pleasure in his work encouraged him to continue in his chosen path. One might almost say, facetiously indeed, that Hofmann rolled with the caresses and filled his artistic lungs with the aromatic essence of the incense burnt upon his altar. Hofmann became so accustomed to having his work accepted without question that one could not criticize the placement of even the smallest spot on one of his canvases. I tried it once about ten years ago and got an art appreciation lesson from him on the subject on his complete organization of the canvas and I never spoke about his work to him again. I am still convinced that that small spot I pointed out to him was where another picture had rubbed against it which is what I dared to say before he rose so vehemently in the defense of his “orchestration.”

One time when Hofmann and I were discussing conceptions in painting he said that he worked in ten(?) different concepts of space. I was rather shocked at this remark because it smacked of the advanced art student and the school teacher and argued that Hofmann the painter was serving himself with the means others had invented because in a classical and even more in a romantic sense no one could have more than one overlap conception — his own, subject to change and development, even to replacement but the guide lines of his artistic purpose nevertheless and allowing for no defection or abjuration in a willful sense.

An artist’s conception is his world and aesthetically speaking this is reflected in the spatial relations of his pictures. It is in fact the space itself and it derives from his subconscious as much as from his conscious effort. Conscious efforts and study contribute to free the unique space of each individual personality but its origins and essential character lie far below the surface of the thought and the will. One will observe that even when powerful styles such as the Baroque govern the works of all the artists within the style by a space seemingly agreed upon, each artist reveals his own particular spatial concept within the overall style of his time.

If Buffon is correct when he says “the style is the man” that would indicate that the framework of the style, particularly, was the man in essence.

But, if the Twentieth Century has done anything to our minds at all, it is most certain that one of its major achievements in so doing has been to loosen and unbolt some of our most firmly attached philosophical notions. Perhaps only the words that define have been switched but then is probably more involved than this. For certain the “absolutes” have disappeared as such and conclusions based on older premises no longer hold true. Essences remain, but are found in other places than those in which we had held they were firmly anchored.

Artists have been known to have undergone sterile periods but Hofmann’s long period of self-enforced idleness from what has always been known as creative work, i.e., painting pictures if we speak of a painter, some twenty-five years of his life, would, in any other century but our own have exposed him to critical censure even to dismissal as an artist to be taken seriously at all. To have proceeded, as he did, as a student and only as a student, gradually attaining clarity (he once told us that his mind was getting closer and even clearer as he sought out and taught better methods of working) through deliberate cerebral experiment and practice without the commitment of his entire person to his art was something unheard of in the past. Even the dire necessity of having to earn his living by teaching would not have explained such a method of going about his artistic affairs.

But in our century, unheard of dislocations have taken place before the threat and in the wake of political storms that have shaken the entire world for all but the first fourteen years of it and the creative men like anyone else have suffered the vicissitudes of the age and yet often enough managed to adjust themselves and their efforts and most of them have come off victors over destiny—at least those that managed to live long enough.

Hofmann, certainly displaced in his career by the First World War and exiled from Europe to some extent by the second one (it is a moot question whether he could have remained in the United States had there been no Adolph Hitler) is one of those who survived and I believe truly exploited the topsy turviness of the age to arrive at the maximum potential of his talents. The matter of his cavalier attitude toward spatial concepts is directly involved here for he found his essence not in the classical sense before mentioned but in a romantic sense indeed in that he staked all on the expression of his unusually robust temperament and on an almost mystic faith in the material substance of the act of painting itself. Politically Hofmann was a 19th Century liberal, against all oppression of the spirit and for justice for all men but his belief in the artist as· seminal of and for social as well as cultural good, reveals him as singular, especially today when so many of the distinguished masters feel that their art and they themselves are outmoded and powerless to affect anything excepting perhaps the booming art markets of the world.

It has been said of Hofmann that he had no style, that he tried everything and anything and that his work was rather a matter of surface rhetoric than of something more profound. I feel we will have to wait awhile before we can arrive at a just and true estimate of Hofmann’s painting and what it really spells out, at least until we have seen a well-edited retrospective of the work, perhaps even longer to that time when future artists related to his spirit cast that afterglow upon his art as is at present the case with Turner. One cannot say that the verdict of history — at a distance — is just for it so often seems not to be the case. But at least it is complete for only history enables us to see an artist’s work completely, from its origins, in its establishment and in or through its effect.

Harold Rosenberg in his eulogy delivered at Hofmann’s funeral refers to Hofmann’s unswerving belief that an artist could draw vigor from the act of creation rather than expending himself on it. Here, perhaps, is the key to the mystery of Hofmann’s art, mystifying as all the “Art d’autre” of our time. I would say that he aimed at resolving the ambivalence between conception in its dream state and the almost crass material substance of the materials accomplishing a feat (at times) not unlike that of auto-levitation.

When he spoke of color as a function (it was he said a two dimensional element) it was sheer nonsense and he treated colors as though they all had identical properties and scope. (To quote Kandinsky, “There is unfortunately no dark yellow.’’) He liked to speak of colors in their reaction to chords in music — well enough said if one is speaking poetically but completely false if one is referring to painting. Chords exist in time but not in space. He used to say — “Man kaun quarten und quinter schlageri genau wie in der music. I’m sorry — aper man kaun das nicht.”

Of course he didn’t practice such foolishness in his painting but he often fell into the trap of heavy lightless painting by refusing to admit that at the dark extreme of the scale the greens, yellows and reds deteriorate into the secondary colors and when applied heavily as Hofmann usually applied them, would appear unbelievably dense and unrelated to the “Jubilo” and “Halleluiah” of his pretention. It isn’t that Hofmann didn’t know of light in a painting or that he was ignorant of what the French mean when they use the word “blonde” to praise the light in a painting. He knew all about that. He just ignored such things, to be true, I suppose, to a concept he held more important for his own painting.

Hofmann had seen much and he had studied well what he had seen and so it appears the height of irony to me that he did not understand what he was doing in the painting of his last years. I am referring to those quasi-geometric planes of heavy pure colors he plastered into or onto his paintings. For more than a dozen years Hofmann’s painting was broad, splashy, a series of tours de force that were based on spontaneity and verve. Often large areas of the canvas were left in pristine whiteness, washes alternated with thick and pastose slashes and streamers of color. Whatever one might have said about them, these pictures were singularly free and fresh and the great open spaces allowed the artist to range from blacks, dark blues and greens to the brightest of colors, the large areas of the surface white that peeped through them acting as intervals. The titles in general augmented in spirit the general breezy freshness of the painting. There was no attempt on Hofmann’s part, or so it seemed, to hold any direction or line of development. It was as though the artist was continually clearing his throat in sonorous and pleasant manner and these paintings were always bright spots in the Whitney annual exhibits where most of his better known contemporaries seemed to cling a bit too tenaciously to their individual styles. Some of Hofmann’s oldest students found it a bit difficult to follow their former teacher’s development and there was much pro and con in their discussions of him. One of them maintained that Hofmann was really not an abstract expressionist at all but an old fashioned German expressionist who ripped open the space in a classical manner, i.e., the traditional manner of the expressionists but did nothing to resolve the gesture—just tore up the surface but put nothing decisive in it or on it and so evaded the major part of the problem. Another, the late Carl Heidenreich partly agreed with the general appraisal but found it not wanting and rather a step in the right direction. How Hofmann felt about it, I don’t know. But it is natural to assume that he hoped to progress and ultimately arrive at something precise sooner or later and perhaps it was this, the normal ambition of every· serious artist that ultimately led him to the introduction of precisely defined shapes. I should say here that Hofmann never revealed any particular ability to invent shapes or forms such as Joan Miro has invented, those known as free forms. When he did not work from the object in space, Hofmann always worked best as a tachist. I don’t know just what inspired Hofmann to employ the floating rectangle, perhaps seeing the works of De Stael, perhaps something that came up in his own discoveries, but in relation to the way he started his paintings that rectangle had the appearance of an after thought, some sort of re­pensamento that did not spring from his vaunted spontaneity but acted instead as a response to what he had put on the canvas earlier and had not figured at as in first calculations or if that word is wrong, in his first approaches. It is not impossible to conceive of a free swinging painting plus the shapes while seeming to arrest it rather flow with it but I cannot believe that Hofmann began these pictures with all the batteries firing salvos from the very beginning as Hofmann said should be the case (“mit allen kaunonen sofort los schiessen”) simply because the observer is not convinced that this is so, at least this observer isn’t. The colored rectangles in the earlier attempts appear to me like salvage operations or tentative and not very successful essais and as Hofmann filled his pictures with more and more of these brick profiles the proportion of free space and circumscribed shapes went all out of kilter with the result that that part of the canvas was not covered with these postage stamp like areas appeared cramped, gritty and dank. Whatever I feel about these last works, some critecs approved of them and Hofmann must have also or he would not have made so many of these pictures. Perhaps he felt he had finally come upon his definite style and considered the airlessness of the canvases something he wanted and needed for the orchestration of his bright if somewhat brash color. If he varied the translucent or transparent with densities in his broad sweeping statements, he never did so in the flat rectangles of color. These are always opaque in appearance and of course pigment application. I know that Hofmann was wary of falling into the traps of color moods as such, arrangements of colors that were more harmonious than equilibrated. He used to warn us of what he called a “Farben strimmings topf,” i.e., a sort of color mood sauce that would hold together a badly conceivved composition as certain brown burnt flour gravies disguise the taste of inferior ingredients in a cooked dish. And to continue with Hofmann’s comparisons of painting with the culinary arts he said frequently that he wanted or wished his paintings to look like fresh baken bread.

Perhaps Hofmann was not as modern a painter as some of his admirers thought him to be but that doesn’t mean as much as those admirers think it does. One cannot be born and re-born indefinitely—certainly not in one lifetime and one cannot deal with all the problems that a century as rich as ours in the inventiveness of painting and the diversity of approaches poses. I know how reluctantly Hofmann relinquished the idea of transaction in art, of taking nature as we see it, not its underlying forces as inspiration and guide. He took his time about arriving at two dimensional painting such as Mondrian practiced and his understanding of it came late in life. In the Munich days he denied all such art emphatically and was anything but adventurous. He had, as I said, seen much and understood it well but· I do not believe that he understood the nature of the work of these last years. Perhaps age had caught up with him after all and a creative fatigue had set in while he still appeared to be full of physical energy. It has not been my aim here or elsewhere to cut down or amputate in any way Hofmann’s achievements as a painter nor do I care to argue with those who hold his work in higher esteem than I do. I would if I could try to place him in a sympathetic but proper perspective but of course, as I have said, it is too soon to be able to do that. I feel that he ended on a weaker note though others perhaps do not agree. When an artist has done any real good work it shouldn’t make any difference whether the last efforts are up to standard or not, nevertheless in a historical sense this does affect the artist’s posthumous reputation perhaps because ending on a strong note tends to illuminate all the past even to the point of vindicating or at least making understandable the incomplete works of the artist. This is the case of Van Gogh, whose last work makes even pictures like the “potato eaters” with its heavy colors look good to us. Whistler was not so fortunate, and the weakness of the work of his last years (the etchings excepted), so fraught with misfortunes and ill health, makes it more difficult to see the real grandeur of the paintings he did twenty or more years before his death. It is a task today to get past those say-nothing watercolors with the marvelous titles (opal and silver, etc.) that fall short of what they purport to be and the rather wishy­ washy pastels in which Whistler sought, but with little success, to emulate the Japanese spirit before one can recall once more the master who painted the portraits of Carlyle and the girl in white. Fame itself is a peculiar thing having little or nothing to do with notoriety or an immediate popular success. In many ways it is a secret guarded jealously among themselves by artists and true lovers of an artist’s work and it is born of itself and exists in accord with its own laws. (March 30, 1966)

I went to see the first Hofmann memorial show at the Emmerich Gallery last week, and I must say that the work is displayed beautifully and to its best advantage. But there my approval ends.

The exhibition consists entirely of the last type of Hofmann’s paintings. Flat rectangles of fairly bright color almost cover the otherwise patchy fruit and vegetable colored surfaces, juxtaposed or over lapped. The color range, I believe, calculated to be neither tonal nor tinted, in other words, color that is physically visible as a color alone. There is no harmony and no crescendo of colors that lead to a magical climate as we see it in Klee’s magic squares or incomparable arrangements of colors in the middle period of Delaunay’s work (between the Eiffel Tower pictures and the disk paintings of his later years.)

Despite the forthright statements of the colors, rose, red, orange, green, yellow and blue, the colors in the Hofmanns do not speak with the strength of their chromatic intensities as do the colors in a Mondrian. This is because there are not enough neutrals or non-color intervals, gray, white, or black to oppose them.

What I feel here is a contradiction between disparate conceptions. The rectangles, rigid in themselves, impose a certain abstract nature rather than character upon a coloristic of heightened nature colors (like fruit in a basket) and appear intensely realistic as a result of what I can only see as a split objective on the part of the artist.

It appears to me that Hofmann disregarded the scale and proportion (in the number of these wilfully-imposed rectangles) between rectangular forms and the taschist surface of the picture though there are one or two canvases in which only isolated rectangles are suspended in the painterly surface that dominates the canvas. I am thinking of a vertical canvas that is largely mars violet with a grass-green vertical rectangle in the lower righthand area and an orange one at the top just right of center.

One must admit that the willful use of these rectangles that remain just what they are and that do not make the whole greater than the sum of its parts provides a certain physicality that acts as a foil to the illusion (designed composition) and this is arresting and moving. It is probably this effect alone that impresses Hofmann’s admirers because so much emphasis is put upon such shock value today. To many contemporary art lovers this element is the only element of value in a painting, perhaps because it is the only one that they can respond to wholeheartedly.

One cannot condemn willfulness in art as such, which, by the way, is what Hofmann the teacher did and that most vociferously in his Munich days. It is often the willful act that is called for to break up the brittleness of the mind when some earlier conception has reached the stage of crystallization and progress in the work would be impossible without violence of some sort.

I am not objecting to Hofmann’s willfulness that led him to the forceful imposition of those colored rectangles as we see them in this last long series of pictures. What I find fault with is that he failed to make the most of this and that the pictures reveal the schoolmaster and not the artist. I see those canvases as brilliant demonstrations of procedure in the creative process. I do not liken such a demonstration to one of the classroom kind in which the teacher demonstrates construction but rather as the gesture of a man of genius lighting the way for others, a guiding star — without talent.

At this point I could reverse my stand and become a Devil’s Advocate, but I do so without conviction and only digress a bit in the name of critical fairness.

Hofmann, in the years I studied with him when he exhorted us to concentrate on the problems of drawing and postpone our rendezvous with painting until these problems had been conquered (“herrn sie kommen um die konstruktion nicht herum”) did speak to us of painting and glowingly of a heretofore unknown and untried use of color. Hofmann maintained at that time that colors, once freed, could be used in the same way as a composer might use tonalities, choosing chords such as thirds, fourths, or fifths to create harmonies, chords and discords as yet unheard of (in this analogy, of course, chords as yet not seem). To us, grappling with the problems of drawing as we were exhorted to do by our teacher, these dream pictures of a future as yet not permitted us did not mean much more than words, but I believe we all remembered what was said. I certainly do, and it is indeed possible that Hofmann, thinking pro demo, was really thinking of chords and color unities as related to harmonicas and color forces as we are accustomed to think of them. If this is so, then perhaps these pictures of which I write are new in concept, new in their unity, and the fault is mine that I do not understand them or, perhaps better said, fail to appreciate them. that they relate to known chromatic and harmonious structures no more than music based on atonal scales relates to orders of an entirely different kind and that these paintings represent a new and completely realized unity that my limited faculties cannot grasp. I could say this, but as I have noted my humility here is half-hearted, and I don’t believe this, the above, is true.

I should probably not have given all this as much as thought as I have as I have but for two conversations, both brief and both interrupted, with Mr Clement Greenberg, one of Hans Hofmann’s greatest admirers and champions. I don’t know how we got onto the subject of the possible deleterious effects of too much teaching on the creative efforts of an artist, but it was Mr. Greenberg who brought the name of Hans Hofmann into our talk. He felt that, in all probability, Hofmann had suffered from giving too much of his efforts to teaching. I can’t say here that I know just what Greenberg felt Hofmann had lost by this, whether it was time only or creative energy as well. He didn’t say, probably because I interrupted him to say that Hofmann had said things to me that would indicate his discontent with the double activity of his life.

Hofmann and I were speaking of Courbet and at sometime during our chat, Hofmann said that he wished he had been born like Courbet for one purpose alone—to paint, without giving thought to anything else. History, falsified, likes to show us Courbet as a sort of simpleton with golden hands and country manners, which is not true at all. Courbet was a powerful intellect and a brilliant theoretician as well as a virtuoso who sang as naturally as the birds do. (Unfortunately, like so many artists, he was naive about politics.) That is about as far as we got with that conversation.

I should say here that from a long acquaintance with Hofmann as a man and as a teacher, and having watched his development within his artistic career for more than 40 years, that he has gained as much from his teaching as he had given it in time and effort, and I mean that he had gained as an artist through that teaching and through his contact with his many talented and exuberant students.

In the early years of his teaching, Hofmann was pedantic. Before his eyes were the masters of his own and previous generations he was not then capable of drawing inspiration from the work of the young. Later in life he changed and his eyes were directed forwards. The advantages a good teacher can gain from· his affinity with the young stand to reason. Numerous persons come upon more discoveries than any one person does and the young student through intuition, and often enough through sheer animal drive, turns up many an artistic golden nugget and rarely, unless he is uncommonly contemplative, knows what to do with it. It is not, as might be implied, a case of the blind chicken finding a corn. The student is not blind, but he wishes to see too much and often fails to recognize the value of any one thing he does see. Besides, he is probably so intent in looking for something (his vision, valuable as it may be in the beginning is already there to lead him and to blind him) particular that he fails to take note of what he does find.

The teacher if he is a good one and a good artist besides, will know what to do with at least some of the discoveries the student makes, and here lies his gain. It is as simple as that. Of course if the teacher is a pedant, that is what he will remain and the rising sun will not interest him unless it comes out of the east at the right time and at the proper angle at that. There was a time when Hofmann was so pedantic and emphasized one sort of structure (Cubism) to the neglect of anything else. He even went so far as to advise us to forget about painting, at least for the time being. and to deny all such things as automatism and willfulness, and he did so in no uncertain terms. Perhaps his basic faith in beautiful painting never wavered, but he was rigid in all matters of method and dismissed the work of such artists as Mondrian and Miro out of hand. At that time in the mid 1920’s, Hofmann’s life was that of a provincial which may have had something to do with his artistic conceptions. Munich, where Hofmann’s school was located, was a city that had seen better artistic days. At that time the lively artists of the pre-World War I days had left the place and the city was out of touch with the big world of art. Hofmann’s life was one of material struggle that did not change much from year to year. The long winters were followed by swnmer schools which Hofmann conducted in such places as Ragusa, Capri, and St. Tropez, beautiful places indeed but hardly art centers, and Hofmann’s short early autumn visits to Paris were barely a relief to the monotony of his modest everyday life. The attendance at the school had to be built up again each autumn to provide a livelihood and Hofmann had little contact with the local artists who rather resented his known preference for the French modernists and who only recognized his teaching activity as another way of making a living. It was well known that he was not painting himself, at that time, another mark against him in the judgment of the local artists. That old wives’ tale about “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” was devoutly believed in everywhere, and whenever theory or theories were discussed at length, someone, at least in German-Speaking” countries, was bound to come up with the platitudinous advice, “Maler! Male” (painter, paint).

I no longer lived in Munich when the project of a Hofmann trip to America was suggested by one of his first American students, Professor Worth Ryder of the University of California at Berkeley. But I did visit Munich from time to time when I went to Bavaria to see my father and I was well enough advised of the gradually maturing project. Of course Hofmann hardly dared think that all this was really going to happen. I am sure there were times before the official invitation to come as a visiting summer professor to Berkeley arrived, that Hofmann felt that nothing would really come of the grand plan. Artists are promised much in a lifetime, admirers often letting their enthusiasm run away with their real capacity to do anything, so artists are perhaps more often disappointed than most people and they believe and don’t believe in possible good fortune coming up one and the same time.

Then it finally did happen and Hofmann went to California in the summer of 1929 or 1930, and he went back the following year to do a repeat performance at the University there, and later, while teaching at the Art Students’ League, decided to remain in the United States. For a few years he still visited in Europe, at first in the wintertime because his California assignments only covered the two summer sessions, and later in the summertime (I can’t remember how often because, I believe, he only started a summer school on the Cape several years after he began his teaching at the Art Students’ League.

I believe the more unruly and perhaps more enthusiastic of his American students (on their native soil) exerted a progressive influence on Hofmann which his visiting American students in Munich certainly did not do. One shouldn’t forget that the New York art student of 1930 had a far greater interest and knowledge about the whole modern movement than the pilgrims to Europe had in the 1920’s. Furthermore, in the 1920’s the American art students interested in Modern Art did not go to Munich. They went to Paris and studied with Andre L’hote, a far lesser teacher but he was a very involved and confused intellectual and an even more confused, not to say inept, master.

Nevertheless he had a huge following and was very popular with his students. He was very articulate and opinionated, took a stand for or against this or that modern artist and expressed himself in an outspoken way, and generally conducted himself in class (he had sessions in which he demonstrated how one should go at making a modern painting) in a way the beginning student could and did appreciate. L’hote also was given to teach some technical methods that approached the instructional level of the schools of arts and crafts. I can only call them gimmicks, and Hofmann never descended to that level at any time I can remember. He confined his teaching to dealing with principles only, though his corrections of the students’ work (and he corrected every student’s work every day) were often technically brilliant.

I believe I have noted elsewhere the shortcomings and virtues of his teaching at that time. I don’t believe he ever altered those methods. He changed his goals of his teaching gradually, eschewing the determination of the object in space to the determination of the space itself.

When I say that his later students inspired him to the work he undertook when he returned to painting himself, I do not in any way wish to imply that they plotted the nature of his work for him. They did not. When I myself taught at Berkeley in the summer of 1951, I had a long conversation with the former head of the Art Department there. Professor Neuhaus, a German who before his retirement had been a most controversial figure at the University, where he had some admirers and a legion of deadly enemies. One visit with this man, strong as an ox, tall, erect, and positive in his likes and dislikes, and one could understand and believe all the tales told of him. Neuhaus was no friend of Hofmann indeed, but his versions of conversations with Hofmann were credible and interesting. The reason I mention him and confrontations with Hofmann that he told me about is that Hofmann in his arguments about art as he understood it and the creative approach as he believed it to be stated his beliefs in the same words he used over 30 years later. Neuhaus who had a good memory told me with a certain horror, that Hofmann told him that an artist should assault the canvas as though he were a boxer in the ring and that it was the artist’s task to subdue the recalcitrant material he worked with until he had subjugated it to the will of his creative impulse. To support what he had said, Hofmann, so Neuhaus told me, struck a drawing board on the easel with his fist. (Neuhaus repeated the gesture for me with the proper vehemence, also using a drawing board as a punching bag.) I told Professor Neuhaus that I was impressed by what he told me as I was an intimate witness to the later developments and I filled him in as well as I could about Hofmann’s struggle to get to what he was already doing at that time when America was already hearing of Hofmann as a painter, though his reputation as well as his work was still in the bud and those for and against him as a painter were beginning to line up on whatever side they had chosen for themselves. I must say that Professor Neuhaus was an able painter of academic landscapes of a period I understood well enough for in my early student years our instructors painted in a like manner but not as well as he did. At the time of our conversations he had mellowed considerably, if in no personal way, in his attitude towards Modern Art. He showed me some of his studio accidents, paint dripped on old canvas board (unintentionally, I am sure), and admitted that he had become intrigued with the curious plastic effects he saw there and said something about, “if he had to do it all over again, he probably would.”

But Hofmann gained a great deal from his teaching. In the first place, his appreciative students from America took him away from the provincial Munich (it may no longer be that and it certainly wasn’t always that, but it was provincial in the period I write of) and out into the world and exposed him to the artistic activity of the time as he had once before been exposed to it in Paris before the First World War.

Later in his struggle to free himself from his analytical studies and what had become the useless lumber of his teaching years, his students, influenced by younger contemporaries, because his companions and their daring certainly encouraged him to take the steps to liberate his effort from his very own doubts. (I should say that Hofmann always treated the work of his able students respectfully and with the proper admiration.) His financial independence stems from his earnings as a teacher and through the happy intervention of the G.I. Bill that kept his private school filled with students all winter and relieved him from the insecurity of the month-to-month enrollment most private schools have to suffer, and Hofmann certainly did suffer such insecurity for at least 29 of his teaching career. This independence enabled him to buy paint and canvas in quantity and to be profligate with his efforts, often completing a work at the moment of the first realization which is as it should be when there is really nothing more to be done that would improve it. Dore Ashton once wrote of Hofmann that his real strength lay in his control and that control came from teaching. A teacher is forced to solve all the problems the student’s work presents. He cannot procrastinate, but must bite into all of the sour apples whether he wishes to do so or not, and Hofmann was a very conscientious and responsible teacher. (January 7, 1967)

Last Sunday’s “Bravo Picasso” program via Telstar from Paris, as such, was not to my taste. To me this backstairs romance of the artist’s life is abhorrent and vulgar. To interpret each expressive effort as the immediate response to events in Picasso’s life is as false as it is revolting. It is as though the advent of each new woman, each encounter, every event political or social, were like the pushing of an electric light button and, abracadabra—presto, the master dashes off a series of pictures. After all, an artist is not exactly like a jack-in­ the-box. Of course there is a connection between an artist’s experiences and his work, but it is not this connection that makes the work good or bad. It is the quality of the imagination, not the triggering of it, that is important. Unhappily, Picasso’s exhibitionism and his vanity have caused him to more than tacitly support this gossip columnist’s emphasis on the miracle man rather than on the miracle artist. The two, by the way, are not readily interchangeable and do not always collaborate to the master’s advantage.

I am not one of those who think that Picasso has lived too long and that one can forget the work of the last 30 or 40 years, but that does not mean that I think his life’s work reveals an unbroken crescendo that is still without end and that the last or most flamboyant work of his is necessarily his best. For a good many years Picasso has devoted himself to pictorializing what was already plastically established by him or by the artists he loves to interpret for us—Duccio, Velasquez, Cranach, David, and rather unhappily Delacroix in which case Picasso is supposed to have admitted his failure to realize what he intended to accomplish.

Picasso like others has lived many lives, and I am not thinking of his periods. Actually, his early works of the beggars, mostly in gray colors, his clowns and circus people in blues, and his rose pictures are all from one early life though they are classified differently. That early life in which empathy seems to be the guiding light is remarkable because despite all the sentiment in those paintings, they are free from the maudlin and the sensational. I wonder whether those pictures that strike one as bizarre and grotesque, beginning with the Guernica canvas and still being painted, will one day reveal the same sovereign detachment from what moves the observer too easily and melodramatically and take their place as paintings without the obvious reference to subject matter so evident at this time. Probably they will. Probably they will. Picasso is a sort of god, like Titian, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt, and gods don’t cry or shriek.

The Telestar interpreters of Picasso, Mons, Montand, Mrs. Saarinen, and the gentleman from Texas with the curiously sepulchral voice will have us believe in a way that Picasso is more intensely organized, that he feels as we do about love, unhappiness, justice, sorrow and humanity, but that he has the power to express forcefully and immediately the rather common-place feelings we all share and that makes him one of us. our champion indeed, but one of us and like us just the same. This is not true. The resemblance between genius and the ordinary human being is purely phenomenal like his outer physical makeup, but there the relationship, and let it be said the understanding ends.

We will not participate with genius on the level of life and we will not understand thoroughly what we see illustrated but only by seeing what that genius has created for us to wonder at, not to understand because there is no understanding what we see for the first time. Rembrandt’s old man exists only in his painting, not in the model he used, and Picasso’s creations, despite their advertised relationships to life and to the artist’s response to it, exist for the first and only time in the work itself. (January 7, 1967)

News in the Times this morning; Barnett Newman died of a heart attack on Friday. One doesn’t know what to say; first, Rothko, now Newman and another of those two artist movements has gone with the life of its avatars. It isn’t really that simple or even true. They were quite different in their work and time will prove that. They had one, to me, rather disagreeable trait in common, at least in their utterances, a posturing of humanism and concern for suffering humanity. Was this Jewish or simply a verbal device to give the world something to talk about? One couldn’t talk about their pictures; one could only look at them, enjoy them or reject them. Personally I feel that Rothko painted a number of pictures (not the large “overwhelming” ones) that deserve the admiration of posterity and that definitely. As to Newman’s work, I see no value at all in what he did. They are large and empty and the titles are pretentious, misleading, and cunning. I will never forget a huge blue surface Barney painted, one that had a narrow vertical nile-green stripe up or down the middle of it. It was entitled “Blue and Peppermint.” Peppermint has no color though it is often green, but just as often white. The title I feel was calculated to make the observer ponder a bit and thus remember what he might easily forget if he just went by what his eyes saw. Newman, if I remember correctly, had a love for getting involved in lawsuits. He once sued his friend Ad Reinhardt for holding him up to ridicule in one of Reinhardt’s sweeping statements about lecturing artists he likened to snake-oil salesmen and backers of nostrums. He quarreled with Erwin Panofsky about a Latin title he had given one of his paintings. Panofsky said it wasn’t Latin; Newman claimed it was. The quarrel, of course, was conducted on the printed page. Were the lawsuits and the quarrels adjuncts to personal publicity or not? No one will care now and besides “de mortuis”—. Personally I liked Newman well enough though he did present an air of pomposity in these later years of his notoriety. Newman, like Reinhardt, came from the past decade in art, the one loathed and despised by the younger generation but, curiously, both artists have been acclaimed as prototypes of what is going on (Stella, Noland and Judd) by the new artists. The accolade that comes for influencing later generations is usually not accorded the prototype artists as soon as this, but then everything is being speeded up so perhaps this honor is in order. (July 5, 1970)

I go to art shows so rarely that I feel lucky to have seen the large Rothko exhibit at the Marlborough Galleries two days before it closed. There were many beautiful paintings, some unsuccessful ones, and enough pictures from different years to illustrate his development. I was not interested in the last black and gray canvases, but they did support in a way a feeling I have had for some time that the painterly and mystic painters of our time are all masked landscape painters who have a strong affinity with artists of the nineteenth century and that the valiant attempt to disguise the fact is because they wish to transcend that affinity and add, God willing, a new and spiritual dimension to old subject or object matter.

This, then, would be the other way to further abstraction from nature representation. The cubism of the early part of the century, an approach carried to its logical conclusion by Mondrian, implied a looking through nature to its structural essence. Our way involves a search, not directly from nature but through the pictorial imagery of some of our predecessors, Turner, some of Constable, Whistler and even lesser masters such as Inness. Our difficulty is to find a corroboration of our philosophy either through some direct visual experience from a moment in nature or in seeing anew something we have not yet noticed or seen in the works of art that more readily inspire us. It is rare for the natural phenomena to be such that we can perceive them frontally as we desire to do. Occasionally we do see a body of water (the sea), a cloud or a pillar of smoke as we have need of such, a fragment of the outer world unified in one single plane.

This need for our immediate experience is so much an integral part of vision that no artist can do without it.

I remember pressing the late Ad Reinhardt on this point. Some ten years ago when one could find a cross (dark) in the dead center of his paintings, I asked him where he had seen such a thing. At first he demurred and said the device was just a logical development in his work, but finally he did remember being moved by the sight of a huge black cross he had seen in some obscure monastery .in Greece. The cross was the sculptural center of a dimly lit chapel and was barely discernible in the dim but artificially blue light of the room. Such a confrontation is like seeing your artistic soul in a dark mirror that seems to confirm its, the soul’s, existence.

As our work progresses aesthetically, it becomes more difficult to experience that contact with the commonplace and so we seek to find it in the experience of others already distilled or in that oldest of inspirational sources, the stain on the wall or on any other surface, the accident in the natural world that has so often animated the creative process. (December 7, 1970)

My colleague and co-author of the star-crossed book “The Painter’s Mind” had a large retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art and he is now one of America’s successful artists, much sought after by those who devour avidly all celebrities. I hope he can turn all that association into ventures and sales profitable to him, and that he will not be too much molested by all those socially-minded souls who want him to donate his work (posters and other designs) free to serve all the noble purposes they represent.

Though not secretive by nature, Romie [Bearden] can keep his counsel when necessary, but when I chided him rather gently about some of his involvements he did say that I had no ideas of the pressures but upon him. But I have an idea all right and while I am confident that he can handle and defend himself well enough, I hope he doesn’t believe all of the legend that is growing around and upon him. At times I feel that he has lost some of his perspective. I can’t agree with him, for instance, that the big motor of his creative activity is the Black experience. All of that experience was his when he painted his first pictures. What has distinguished his new accomplishment is his intellectual probing into the aesthetics of picture making, his ability to exploit his artistic information and certain almost universal devices born of Modern Art, especially cubism and the collage. He has the temperament and the ability to sustain his style and to made it serve all his artistic purposes, especially those that are illustrated in nature.

At least Bearden is now on his way to a success he should have been accorded long ago and he will be free of material worries and should do fine work in the years still ahead of him. I also hope that he will one day be recognized for the splendid humor of his comic cartoons. Perhaps this is not necessary, but like the cherry in the cocktail it would be very nice. He has a wealth of excruciatingly funny ideas in his comic cartoons—more, I am convinced, than all the rest of the comic drawers in America combined. Years ago he used to sell these ideas to the New Yorker Magazine, whose own drawers were commissioned to execute them. His own drawing style, quite as good as that of the regular staff, was not considered in line with what was considered to be stylish. It’s curious, but anti-art and anti-individual America persists in its ploy and art doctoring which probably accounts for the ever lower water level of whole-hearted appreciation and even acceptable taste. Perhaps a good look at our postage stamps ever more pedestrian and blatantly literal in their photographic decalcomania will do to support my claim that we are manoeuvred into creative passivity both as artists and as participants. (May 28, 1871)

I am not absolutely sure, but I believe it was in the summer of 1947 that Miro came to work at our Harlem studio [other artists who occupied several studios alongside Holty in this tenement building, on the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and 119th Street, were David Slivka, Andre Rasz, Jose Alonzo, Yammarino, Frank Nagy, Ralph Nelson, and Alice Mason]. He had come to the United States to be present at his first post-World War II exhibit at Pierre Matisse gallery and to execute a mural painting for a new luxury hotel in Cincinnati. The canvas was to be some 32-feet long and 9-feet or less in height, and when it was finished it was to be mounted on the walls of a round penthouse bar and restaurant, covering one fourth or one fifth of the total wall space. I never saw it in its cuff-like state for it was painted on a flat surface and it has been returned to that now that it is in the museum at Cincinnati. It was also exhibited as a flat wall picture for a short time at the Museum of Modern Art after it left the studio and before it was shipped to Ohio.

Miro arrived in New York in May and he seemed to be in no great hurry to begin his mural. After he visited us in that squalid barn in Harlem, he seemed even more reluctant to get started. The weather was pleasant and gave no warning of the hot summer to come. But we New Yorkers knew only too well what a turn could come about and in no time at all. I remember urging Miro to begin. He turned to Pierre Matisse and asked him when one could expect hot weather, and Matisse told him “tomorrow or even this afternoon; it comes and can come without much notice or forewarning.”

The commission for the mural, as I have been given to understand, was arranged between James Johnson Sweeney and Phillip Adams, Director of the Cincinnati Museum; and the price was fixed at $15,000.00, half of which went to Miro and half to be divided between Pierre Matisse and Pierre Loeb of Paris, the two owners of the contract with Joan Miro who at that time received a monthly stipend from these merchants in return for Mire’s entire annual production.

This being a special case, a commission, the artist was permitted to retain one half of the fee paid. The commissioners of the mural also agreed to pay for all the materials—canvas, stretcher, and paint—but not for any studio rent Miro would have to pay.

I will never be able to understand why Mire’s admirers and influential friends at the Museum of Modern Art could not have furnished him with a space to work commensurate with his ability to pay or, better still, a space in one of the unfinished buildings in Rockefeller Center, gratis. But no effort of this kind was made and the available studio spaces in regular artist studios, where adequate space could be found, were not only expensive but were to be rented only for long terms of six or twelve months for a job that would only take the artist a short two months to complete.

I must add here that Miro at that time was if not in financial straits, certainly not well off. He had been allowed to live unmolested in Franco’s Spain (Miro had supported the Republican cause) during most of the second World War, largely I suspect because he was not a competitor to other Spanish artists. His output went to France and to the United States and was paid for in foreign currency. He, Miro, his wife and daughter who accompanied him on his visit here, needed as much money as they could salvage from his share of that mural, and a two­thousand dollar studio rental would have taken quite a chunk out of his earnings. When Sam Kootz suggested that I let Miro work in my place I consented, partly out of feelings of respect for the artist and partly because I felt the need to be hospitable and of help where others, who should have been so, were not. Why in one studio complex did it have to be my studio? Because it was the only clearly rectangular space in the building big enough to hold the giant canvas. As it was, we had to remove the coal stove from its central location temporarily, but that was no great chore and at that time of year certainly no sacrifice, and it was easy to move my gear into the studio next door, the one Ralph Nelson was quitting for the summer.

Preparing the canvas for that mural turned out to be a rather elaborate affair. Workmen, and I believe they were employees of the Museum of Modern Art’s custodial staff, came and built a huge wall of plywood, nailed to a frame of 2 x 4 wooden strips. This heavy and cumbersome piece of rough carpentry was made to stand by wooden supports attached to the rear in the manner in which one constructs a retaining wall and the canvas was stretched, or rather tacked onto this wooden surface. There was some point in having a rigid surface under the cloth. No canvas that size stretched on an open frame could have resisted the humidity and the cloth would have sagged and flapped without this support. But the wall was set upright before the canvas was attached to it and so it was impossible to attach it or tack it properly from all four sides. One could hardly hammer from the floor upwards and only the top and sides of the cloth were tacked. Nevertheless the sheer weight of the canvas sufficed to hold it in place, and the extra cloth at the bottom was tucked under in the space created by the 2 by 4’s on which the frame was supported and the floor itself. As far as I was concerned, it was a lousy job. However, the workmen hung around and asked Miro to give them a signed sketch of some sort as a tip for their services. He drew a few lines on some paper that was handy, signed it and gave it to them and they left.

They were lucky to find Miro at the studio at all. It was only by chance that he appeared just as they finished their work, the general supervision of the construction having been delegated to me by Pierre Matisse who phoned and asked me to keep an eye on the proceedings and to determine the spot where this monster was to be placed in the studio. Since the length of the stretcher was almost that of the studio we set it at a slight angle, south to north, from the western wall of the room so that Alonzo could get to the door that led to his place behind it. The two top skylights gave off sufficient light and the light problem was solved. There was to be another one but it did not arise for a couple of weeks when Miro revealed that the canvas, while proper in width was a foot higher than it was supposed to be. In the meantime he had painted a ground of cerulean blue over the whole canvas, taking an entire day to do so. I loaned him a house brush (about 3 inches wide and fairly new) that belonged to my wife and he brushed in and rubbed in an irregular surface that, in its original state, was highly suggestive to him and meaningful as an inspiration for his composition and he allowed two weeks for a thorough drying out before he went to work.

By then it was July and the hot season had arrived. The regular denizens of that igloo wore shorts and sneakers and nothing else, but Miro showed up more properly attired as befits an artist and a Spaniard. He had a knitted T-shirt and denim pants and had a rope about his middle instead of a belt. Not too long after, he was to adopt the less formal costume of the house because the heat was relentless and though Miro was an early riser and often began work at six or seven in the morning it made little difference where the temperature was concerned. No night was long enough to cool off that studio.

Miro had assembled all his materials, his paints and the various cans in which he mixed his colors, thick or thin (he told me that he hadn’t used a palette in 25 years), his favorite brushes, charcoal and a working sketch for the picture, and then he showed up with the architect’s exact dimensions for the canvas and said that he couldn’t work on what was there until the proportions of the surface were exact. I offered to draw a horizontal line that would cut away the extra surface and suggested that Jose Alonzo help me to do this; Miro just shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the place. Alonzo, who was present at the conference, said that Miro was a typical Spanish artist who just would not start working until all the conditions were proper. So we drew a long charcoal line (no mean feat to get it and keep it straight) and we blew fixative on it so that it couldn’t be rubbed off, and the last obstacle in Miro’s path to his work had been removed.

In an article on the creative process that I wrote for a special number of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist some time ago, I gave a pretty accurate play-by-play account of how that mural was painted from beginning to end so I shall not do so here, but I shall try to tell the story of all the events of interest to me that occurred during the time Miro was with us, the filming of the mural’s progress by Thomas Bouchard and the visits to the studio that were inspired by the artist’s presence and the curiosity of persons, artists, and those Bill Baziotes used to call “culture vultures,” and of our social life during that summer.

At first Miro was uncomfortable in his role of goldfish in a bowl. He did not like the idea of neighbors looking in on him while he was at work, but he got used to people passing his open door and to Alonzo’s walking through the studio to get to his place, and after a while he realized that no one was spying on him and that everyone had business and concerns of their own. He was mildly amused by Andre Racz’ fiery­red beard, not a common sight in those days, and he referred to him as “la barbe,” but admitted that Andre drew well. When Miro first came to the building and was introduced to the other tenants, Andre was the only non-Latin in the house who addressed him in Spanish, which pleased him. Had Andre addressed him in Catalan, it would have pleased him more because Miro was very much a Catalan patriot. Once when he was speaking to his daughter Dolores in what sounded like Spanish but wasn’t, he turned to me (this was in the Miro apartment on 59th Street) and said, “In this house we speak Catalan.”

There were a lot of artists in New York, especially around Hayter’s engraving school, who knew Miro was at work, but they did not come around for a while, very much respecting his need for some privacy and only after the painting had progressed to the point of putting in or on the final touches, did the artists begin to come up for a look at it. On such occasions Miro who knew there would be visitors, usually absented himself from the studio.

He was not and is not a very social person and prefers to be left alone with his work. When one thinks of his effortless production and the great progress he has made in his art, one can understand why he acts as he does. Once he told me that if it weren’t for his wife, a jolly outgoing Spanish woman who liked to entertain friends in their Barcelona apartment, he would have no social life at all. He admitted quite frankly that he had only one passion—the passion to be working. He was fond of sports and Romare Bearden and I took him to baseball games that he seemed to enjoy, and we also took him to a pre-season professional football game at Yankee Stadium between the New York Yankees football team and some other club in a league that no longer exists.

Miro was always astonished at the number of people in New York who could speak other languages than English. On one occasion at the Polo Grounds where we went to see the Giants play the St. Louis Cardinals, Miro left his seat to buy us all some Coca Cola. (It was, he said, his turn to get the cokes.) He asked me in French just how to get to the drink stand and I pointed the way. As he sidled along in the ever moving line, one of the seat ushers yelled to another, “Regard, ilya de type ici que parle Francais.” Miro could never quite get over that.

Romare Bearden had his studio on 125th Street at that time right next to the Apollo Theater, and he came over to my studio almost daily. He had part-time work, or at least work that left him free part of the time, as a welfare investigator so that he drew and painted as much as the rest of us did. He was, of course, the perfect guide to the eating places of the neighborhood and he, Miro and I got to know seafood places and other establishments we frequented for early suppers that we might not have found for ourselves without Bearden’s know-where. The neighborhood was a conglomerate of nationalities and races. Below 116th Street there were Italians; west of upper Park Avenue began negro Harlem, north of us was an Irish enclave, and then a residue of Germans around 125th Street where there was a wonderful old-fashioned icecream parlor (Zundblooms) with fine pastries and special icecream, and classical decor of such places—much wood, many mirrors, chairs made of heavy wire and, of course, the floor was of tile and ornately designed. There were also two blocks of houses tenanted by Scandinavians, with immaculate tiny front lawns and scrubbed steps and doors, uncontaminated by the general blight of the neighborhood.

Lexington Avenue, our street, was to become one of the mainstems of the Puerto Rican immigration, just beginning at about the time of which I am writing. The influx was of such magnitude that one couldn’t help noticing it and also noticing the reactions of the local inhabitants. They did not like their new neighbors and whatever hostility exists today regarding the Puerto Rican population of the city can be traced back to the beginning of these events. I remember well a huge electric signboard depicting a Catalina flying boat on the roof of one of the neighborhood travel agencies, lights flashing on and off and exhorting those who were already here to fly their relatives at bargain prices from San Juan to LaGuardia immediately, and the sometime residents from Puerto Rico vied with one another for positions of political influence among the new and later comers. One, the grocer on our corner at 119th Street, a surly loud-mouth, was most offensive in his curbside speeches and pleas for support among his compatriots. If I remember correctly, his grocery store in which tons of salted codfish were stacked behind grimy windows, was only a front for the cock-fights conducted in the basement of his establishment. When Tom Bouchard, as part of his film on Miro in Harlem, was shooting a scene in which some street urchins he had hired were drawing on the sidewalk with Miro, always enchanted by the art of children, watching them, our grocer complained that we were damaging the image of all the Puerto Ricans by having the children depicted as dirtying and defiling the city streets. He was quite vocal about it until Andre told him to shut up or we would call the police.

The visitors to Miro’s studio, whoever they were, just came and left again, but when Tom Bouchard moved in his filming equipment it caused quite a stir and, for us all, a change of status in the eyes of the neighbors.

Bouchard’s plan was to film Mire’s mural as it developed day by day, but the filming took place at night. Until then the activities of the artists at 149 East 119th Street were conducted within its four walls and the neighbors, with the occasional exception of prowling boys who sneaked into the building to peek at us and satisfy their normal curiosity about strange secrets, were unaware of what went on in the studios. But at night the bearers of light, engendered by the powerful Kleig lights, shot upwards through the studio skylights and resembled more than anything else the light beams of anti-aircraft establishments that periodically swept the night skies during the war years. In this dark part of the city, far from the electrical fireworks of Times Square, this was surprising as well as unusual and the curiosity of the neighbors and also of the police was aroused. Fortunately the war was over and the police called but once to find out just what was going on. The explanation given them was accepted and there was no harassment. After a few days no one bothered about us and the filming continued uneventfully as far as the neighborhood was concerned.

But before the filming could begin, Bouchard arranged to have powerful electric cables run into the building and there was much activity connected with the purely mechanical side of the affair. But once the preparations had been completed, the snags connected with Bouchard’s plan began to accumulate.

Tom Bouchard, or Thomas as Miro called him, with the accent on the last syllable, was an old acquaintance of Miro’s and of mine from the Paris days of the 20’s and 30’s. At that time he was the complete Bohemian, close friend of the surrealists, but apparently a man with no fixed career or endeavor. A talented drawer he had become more and more a photographer, a field not alien to him because he had once been a Hollywood camera man in the silent movie days. . . .

Bouchard’s plan was to make a Miro film, and the mural painting he was working at was to be the core of the epic. Bouchard had already filmed Miro as a printmaker in Hayter’s studio in the Village, and he was later to add to the film a sequence of Miro as a potter and creator of enamel wall paintings and objects in the company of his fellow countryman Artegas. This last was filmed in Spain and when the film was finally shown, there was a most interesting musical accompaniment in a night scene of a Spanish festive procession by Edgar Varese.

In recent years Bouchard had made a number of art documentary films, one of Ferdinand Leger, a friend and then a studio neighbor of his, and also one of the works of Kurt Seligman. There were others and all had merit of a kind although, as I recall it, the Leger film had didactic overtones and one or two paintings were over explanatory of Leger’s methods of working, the finished pictures reflecting the system he employed as he worked. There were, however, photos of Leger as he drew from nature (Central Park) that revealed the surety and ruthlessness of his stylizing procedure when drawing from the natural model—tree trunks, branches and leaves.

Tom had no such aim or purpose in mind here and he knew that a major effort of the kind he essayed would also have to reckon with film wastage and the discarding of sequences that detached rather than supported his film portrait of the master at work. He wanted to get as much into the film material as possible and, much to Miro’s horror, suggested that Miro be filmed while painting a portrait of his daughter Dolores. The idea was rejected out of hand and happily so. Miro worked very deliberately in a controlled sequence of procedures, but it would have been artistically entirely out of character for him to have made a “demonstration” canvas.

The mural was rather well along before Bouchard started filming. The drawing had been completed and all the significant black shapes (the ones Miro depended upon to equilibrate the whole composition) had been filled in. That left the other colored areas, the green, the red, the white, the orange and the yellow to be painted and when all these were taken care of there were the finishing touches, some slender black lines and asterisks to be put in. What Bouchard the script director hoped for was to film Miro as he simulated the act of putting in what he had already accomplished on any given day. Miro worked only in the daytime and film photography under the very strong and very hot lights took place at night.

Like Picasso, Miro had a flare for acting and for the art of pantomime, but he felt rather silly walking before the canvas, brush in hand, stepping forward and backward and walking to the right and left without ever putting the brush to the picture. He tried hard enough to act out in a commedia del arte manner what he had already done and it confused him to try and repeat a sequence of physical gestures he had never been conscious of in the first place and, if so, had forgotten by now. Once, during a pause in the procedures, he walked over to where I was standing and in what was almost a whisper said that he didn’t know what he was doing or what he was supposed to do.

One of Miro’s conceits, probably in deference to the surrealist ethos, was that he “liked not to think.” But in effect his working habit was orderly and he was extremely methodical, but his thinking was confident and unfettered by apprehension as he went straight to his goal. He did have second thoughts but they always seemed to come at the right time and when he could deal with them effectively. I remember a small canvas he worked on (he painted several smaller pictures while working on the large canvas) that when he took it away appeared complete and unalterable, but when I saw that canvas in an exhibition a year or so later he had added an ornament of considerable importance and one had the feeling that it had been there from the beginning.

During the filming there were usually other people in the studio, Tom Bouchard of course and his daughter and on occasion Miro’s wife Pilar and his beautiful daughter Dolores, the English-speaking member of the family.

I have forgotten just how long the charade part of the film continued, but the progress of the painting was dutifully recorded and regularly so; then one day everything came to its inevitable end and the large canvas was allowed to dry out thoroughly and visitors came to see it. (July 11, 1971)

From the time the canvas was finished until it was taken to the Museum of Modern Art where it was exhibited for about a month before being sent to Cincinnati, the number of visitors to the studio in Harlem was considerable. All the modern artists came up for a look and all seemed to be pleased by what Miro had done. Only Gorky said that he was disappointed because, as he said, he had heard that there were only three forms on the entire canvas and that all of them were black. I wonder who told him that or if anyone had told him at all. It was not beyond Gorky to invent such a story to be entertaining and amusing and he could be that. There were also visitors from the world of art who were not artists but otherwise connected with it, persons who adored celebrity as such and who, under favorable circumstances brought other celebrities, actors and poets to peek and to attend this unusual vernissage. I remember one collector who brought the moving picture actor Eddie Albert with him. Miro was present on this occasion and I was telling him about the football game we were going to on the following Sunday where he would see a great Negro player named Buddy Young. Albert, who did not speak French, said that the name Buddy Young rang a bell in his mind because “He crossed us up a few years ago in a Rose Bowl game.” (Young, then at the University of Illinois, had indeed crossed up the West Coast team, USC or UCLA, and had been the star for the winning invaders of the West Coast.)

Of other visitors, I recall only the French photographer Cartier Bresson, and the man who had commissioned the mural, Mr. Emery from Cincinnati.

I have no memory of Mr. Bresson’s visit except that it took place. After the customary introduction Bresson never addressed me again and spoke only and very softly with Miro at the other end of the studio. I had the feeling that Bresson was arrogant, but his colleague Brassai to whom I mentioned this a few years later when he visited New York said that I was probably wrong and that Bresson was a shy and retiring individual and probably behaved no differently to me than he did whenever he was among strangers.

Miro’s desire for privacy and his fear of being bedeviled and harassed in this strange land was somewhat exaggerated, not perhaps his desire for privacy but his fear of being recognized as a VIP. No one, certainly no one in our corner of Spanish Harlem knew who he was and none would have recognized him on the street. This fact was brought home to him emphatically on the day the movie actor Eddie Albert came to the studio. After the visit, I believe it was on a Sunday afternoon, Mr. Albert, Miro and I left the studio at the same time. On the way to find a taxi Albert was besieged by a legion of youngsters that appeared from nowhere at all. They wanted his autograph. Miro who at first thought this demonstration of homage was meant for him was indeed astonished when he found that it wasn’t. He asked me in an aside just who that young man was and I told him that he was a well-known motion picture actor and that his face was known to everyone. Miro was conscious of the fact that he was a stranger here and he was determined not to offend anyone. As a Spaniard he was of course asked about the brutal bullfights and whether he, like the bleeding hearts that questioned him, didn’t disapprove of them. Miro fielded these questions very well without committing himself, but he admitted to me that he felt the spectacle of the bullring was “superb”—but then, he knew that I had no axe to grind in the matter. Once, and once only, did Miro remark about the seamy side of our ghetto up in Harlem. Someone at the Museum of Modern Art had directed him to take the A train (quite the other side of 119th Street) to get to the studio and he had to take the long walk crosstown on 119th Street, then, and perhaps still, one of the most squalid of slum streets, with street urchins setting fire to the trash baskets so that they might light the ends of sticks and barrel staves, the weapons they used against each other in sham battles and fights in the street. I was standing on the roof of our building trying for a breath of air when I saw Miro approach. He came up onto the roof from which he loved to watch the kites youngsters were flying from nearby roofs, the tails writhing in beautiful shapes and arabesques. Knowing quite well what Miro had seen on his walk, I asked him whether he had enjoyed the stroll; he just looked at me, shrugged his shoulders, and said “comme meme,” implying a good deal.

On the day Mr. Emery came to the studio, Miro asked me to represent him because, as he said, he didn’t know how to talk on such occasions or how to answer the questions he was sure he would be asked. I knew little of Mr. Emery except that he had repaired the somewhat battered family fortunes and that he was an important figure in Cincinnati’s real estate development and had recently built its most modern hotel, the one that the mural had been painted for. My acquaintance with some of the mid-West captains of industry (they liked to be called that) was not profound and I had in mind a sort of composite image of middle-aged men, a bit paunchy, with rounded faces, and the inscrutable look of the athletic club poker or gin rummy player—the type of American man’s face that tells you little at a glance. I was in for a surprise and a pleasant one, for into the studio walked a tall, spare man with the face of a hawk. He was polite and must have been instructed of the fact that I, not Miro, would be the man who would show him his new and as yet far from finished property.

The painting had been designed but there was little that was painted, only the large black shapes had been defined. The rest of it was still a huge field of cerulean blue.

I wouldn’t say that Mr. Emery was enthusiastic about what he saw, but he did say that he thought it would be all right when all of the colors were put in. It was hard for me to talk about that because even I didn’t know what these would be and how much or how many colors Miro intended to introduce. The only sketch for the mural I had seen was no picture at all, but a lengthy piece or colored cardboard with notations in a few colors, red, black and green to establish the compositional grouping of the forms, but the forms themselves (those in the sketch or rather the model) were not developed and bore little or no relationship to those drawn in charcoal on the canvas itself.

It is true that at time there were but three large black shapes and it is possible that Mr. Emery told someone of this and that his observation had in the mysterious manner of the artistic grapevine found its way to Gorky’s consciousness and that his observation was based on this slender fact and not just something he had invented when he made the remark I have previously noted.

Mr. Emery did reveal that this kind of painting was somewhat beyond his capacity to appreciate and he let drop the remark that he had hoped the commission would come to me. He seemed to know my work which surprised me somewhat though I could see how it would be easier for him to understand what I was painting at that time because one could tell if one tried hard enough to identify from life the shapes and forms in my pictures, the stylized knights, horses, and ball players. I hastened to assure him that he had been very well advised in the choice of Miro if for no other reason than that I had never dreamed of composing a canvas of such length in relation to its height and would have had no end of difficulty grappling with it, also that I was in a stage or state of transition in which my work was very complicated rather than complex and the result would have been a great disappointment for all. I could and did say this in all sincerity and I think Mr. Emery believed me. Realizing that Mr. Emery was intelligent, I explained the problem in terms of practicality, emphasizing that in a more normally proportioned canvas, shapes were grouped generally in three complexes and handling these was a routine affair in the breakup of the surface. Here, due to the greater length of the surface, it was necessary to add a fourth group as Miro had done. I used the “Guernica” mural of Picasso to demonstrate more graphically what I meant because of the recognizability of the objects portrayed with the group around the bull on the extreme lift, the horse in all its agony toward the center, the surging figure kneeling and facing the bull and horse next in going from left to right, and the figure in the burning house on the extreme right of the canvas. The symbols Miro employed, though very real to him, were not so easy to read for one not initiated in the language of Miro. I myself asked him later on what each symbol was and was a bit flabbergasted by his explanation of what this and that form represented and I was instructed though, and I admit it, not enlightened by his explanation. But he insisted on the imagery and emphasized that he was not in the least interested in the decorative aspects of his pictures.

I enjoyed the visit with Mr. Emery and I believe Miro would have enjoyed meeting the man. Only recently I have found out more about Mr. Emery which explains to me why he did not at all fit into the mold of the image I had in mind before I met him. A long and laudatory article about him appeared recently in the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper from Cincinnati that sketched, though briefly, a curriculum vitae of the man that presented him to me in a quite different light. Apparently the business career was a necessity, and not his first choice in life. He was on the way to becoming a scholar and man of letters when he was called home from residence in New York to restore to financial health the family enterprise. He was married to the daughter of the great American popular illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, whom I met once when I was very young and who impressed me as a person in the few minutes of my acquaintance. (I was introduced to him on the street before Carnegie Hall, where he had a studio, by a teacher of mine, Mr. Howard Giles, also an illustrator and an acquaintance of Mr. Gibson’s.) . . .

Just what I learned from Miro it would be difficult to define accurately. I was no longer, as I once had been, in love with his particular idiom and so what I got from watching him was not technical knowledge but I realized that I was in the presence of a man completely convinced of what he was doing and one who, unlike an American of the period, did not feel that he had to defend his art against the critical attacks of those who didn’t love him or his work to begin with. I was also impressed and enlightened· by his graceful flexibility about work in progress. One afternoon we were cooling off on the roof of the building and Miro was fascinated, not to say enchanted by the tails of kites as these ribbons undulated in the wind. Since he was working on a horizontal canvas those vertical kitetails could hardly be added to the composition in a literal manner but he would not deny himself the inspiration, and so he drew and painted them in the lower right-hand area where there was still room—horizontally. His triumph here was that he could use the forms within the framework he had established even though they contributed little to the overall established composition. I also watched him appropriate for his use a Klee-like figure (“the little foal in trance”) consciously or unconsciously, and then transform, not disguise, the “loan” from another master into a beautiful and significant form—illustrating succinctly the process of impression and expression in the work of an artist.

I know that Miro did not regard this mural painting as one of his best. Without denigrating the painting, he did say that he had never before encountered such problems in size and proportion and the technical problems did keep him on the cooler side of his inspirational approach, and certainly his subsequent mural-sized canvases (especially the one in the Museum of Modern Art) surpass it by far, but Miro is a realist and a practical methodical man who wastes no time on bemoaning what this or that canvas might have been. Once he realized that he had gone as far here as he could go, he set about finishing it as rapidly as possible. Finishing his painting was a matter of adding the small linear accents, stars, asterisks or dots, and he did all this in one day and that was the end of the work and also the end of his work in Harlem. Certain smaller canvases he had begun there were finished in his apartment on 59th Street. He did come up to greet visitors on a few occasions, but to all intents and purposes he withdrew from our scene. We went to a few baseball games and one football fame and we socialized a bit. He visited Bearden’s studio and was much impressed by the latter’s ballpoint pen drawings of Byzantine and Greek figures in a modern style, remarking how very talented the artist was. (August 11, 1971)

My memories of the years in the Harlem studio make it irresistible to make certain comparisons with other places in the city, such as where my studio is located at the present time. I have, I believe, described the place and my feelings about it at length elsewhere, but I would like to note here how the general ambiance of the Soho District compares with that in which the studio, in what was them and is now even more so Puerto Rican Harlem, stood. Curiously enough the Spanish language is as prevalent in Soho as it was on upper Lexington Avenue. I dare say that the hard-working laborers in· what is still an industrial neighborhood, despite the artists’ lofts hidden behind the prison-like facades of the buildings, have their residences in the neighborhood I have been writing about, but the street life in Harlem was warm and lively which is not true of the downtown area. There the life is all sweat, moving and unloading of heavy merchandise, and when evening comes the workers disappear and only a handful of persons, mostly vinos from the brewery, roam the streets.

The restaurants and bars, mostly Italian (as they were up in Harlem) lie to the west of Mercer Street and reflect more the street life of Greenwich Village nearby than that of the Soho district itself where the permanent tenants, mostly artists, stay behind their respective doors. The one exception to this pattern is Fanelli’s corner restaurant on Mercer and Prince streets where artists and workmen and building superintendents, as well as certain art gallery owners, meet for lunch at midday (but only from Monday to Friday) and huddle at the bar later in the day. Here the best spaghetti in New York is served with meat balls or Italian sausages, but on Saturdays all one can get is a sandwich and on Sundays the establishment is closed. As far as street crime and robbery are concerned, the two neighborhoods could, if they chose, vie with each other for a city championship. But for me, as well as for other artists, the spaciousness of the studios is the redeeming feature as is a certain anonymity in one’s tenancy there. No one really knows, unless told, just who lives there and where. During the time that the carpenters on the floor below me were specializing in the manufacture of stretchers, legions of artists were customers and on occasion one or the other (mostly unknown to because of their youth) would drive up with a panel truck to call for their framework, but where they took it and where they lived remained a mystery to me.

Perhaps the large gallery on the corner of Prince and Mercer streets, the Palley Gallery, best expresses the impersonality of the neighborhood. When this gallery was first installed, the owner or owners did not know or even seem to care about what artists work they would exhibit. Such stock as as to be seen standing around on the floors, street level and basement, remnants of earlier gallery ventures elsewhere, was deplorable, bad paintings of no direction or, if you will, of every direction, just tradesman’s rubbish. Then one Sunday afternoon about a year ago the gallery opened with an exhibition of huge empty pictures, all of which I was told were sold. It is easy to describe them. The young artist whose name I never knew exhibited large canvases that consisted of panels about one foot in width and eight to ten feet long, joined together to add up to horizontal and vertical pictures of from 10 by 12 by 16 feet in total size. Whoever made these stretchers was a master cabinet maker. They were true and fit together perfectly. The lines, vertical or horizontal, established where the panels were joined provided the only structure and in a way it saved the pictorial day for whatever it was. The painting itself was done by airbrush and the color which was like lemon, orange and pistachio icecream was sprayed over each painting, undulating and slightly modulated like cloud spray or carnival sugar-spun candy. So there were lemon colored surfaces, greenish surfaces or orange surfaces to be seen broken up only by the lines between the panels and what met the eye was fresh, clean and completely empty.

Whoever ran the public relations of the gallery certainly knew his business because on that Sunday afternoon the streets of the neighborhood were crowded with expensive and chauffeur-driven autos, and the crowd in attendance represented very well all those who go to public events more to be seen than to see and among those I recognized were bankers and politicians, including the ubiquitous Senator Javitts. In a way it was the perfect opening, with all those prominent ones (gli prominente) drinking champagne that burbled from a fountain and chatting happily before the perfect background of paintings no one had to look at because there was nothing to see and whose sole function was to be there on the walls.

I don’t know whether the work of that artist was exhibited again in that particular gallery, but I doubt it because from what I have seen there the idea of building a stable of artists is far from the mind or intentions of the owner. I have seen other exhibits there, huge monochrome shaped canvases, dull and uninspiring, and one riotous in its coloration that combined various styles of hard edge abstract painting and resembled in a way the huge and imitative (of her husband) wall pictures by Sonia Delaunay. I understand, or have been told that this particular exhibition by one of the younger staff members of the Brooklyn College Art Department was sold out, most of it going to those Texas collectors that commissioned the chapel murals by Mark Rothko. And I say at that gallery a large architectural exhibit by one of those fantasists who dreams of endless cities perfectly engineered, to house and I should think crush the souls from its denizens at some future time. Since I am neither an engineer not an architect, I could appreciate what was shown only as the phenomenon presented, a series of structural concoctions, marvelously rendered, that looked like the plans or models for some sort of new combustion engine. Whatever is shown there has nothing in common with whatever else is exhibited unless we think that the planlessness is accidental. I am beginning to see that this is not the case. This gallery is a novelty store that presents what it hopes will be taken for daring and innovative and, above all, will sell well. I know that the proprietor has seen the work of many of the artists in the neighborhood and why he will choose this one rather than that one I believe is not determined by a connoisseur but by a salesman both cautious and deliberate, with the market and only the market in mind.

What goes on here is of little concern to me except as I make use of it because the venture, and it is the biggest venture in the neighborhood, so well expressed the spirit or lack of it in any artistic sense of the place, its inhabitants and this moment in time. It does and always did take more than a beard, long hair, and bohemian trappings to leave a footprint in the sand. The general hair culture of today, foppish rather than revolutionary, is that of a hundred years ago in that Paris Boheme from which a handful of artists remain in memory and who left their sartorial contemporaries of no other distinction than that of their dress and their political convictions to oblivion. The young artists I see and some I know have all passed the age of thirty, their deadline (not mine) for storming the artistic heights and one way or another these people did not make it. Their admiration for the few contemporaries that managed to attract some attention has already soured and turned to envy and to a bitterness one senses.

My own position among them is as I would have it be. With so many generations between our ages, there is no such thing as a generation gap in the usual sense, and we nod to each other and go our separate ways. To a few who are a bit closer to me, I am the old painter and admired in a curious way because they know quite well that I have not realized the success dreams they themselves think of as all that could possibly count. I think their admiration is due to the fact that they cannot possibly understand how anyone as dead as I ought to be can keep on going about his business at all and seem to be so unconcerned about it to boot.

Up in Harlem in the late 1940’s the situation was entirely different. In the first place, there was only that one studio building in which each of us pursued what we thought was worthwhile in art. There were no art galleries in the vicinity and no places anywhere at that time except in a few cafeterias in Greenwich Village where artists gathered to complain about their lot and the United States and New York City had not yet entered into the spirit of modern art. A thousand dollars paid for a painting by a living American artist was a rarity and galleries devoted to selling modern (perhaps “abstract” is the better work here) art, such as Koetz, Putzel, and Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery of the 20th Century, were indeed novelties and more food for gossip than for anything else. Those of us who were under contract to paint for dealers were few and envied by the many who were under contract to paint for dealers were few and envied by the many who were not so fortunate. The big boom in art was to come later (in the 1950’s) not unrelated in the least to the first stirring of inflation. The great blight in the art market that began in the depression years was still with us but tax deduction buying, a very new thing, gradually began to make itself felt as it raised artists’ incomes and hopes.

As far as my residence in these two very different neighborhoods is concerned, I feel definitely something other than a geographic and sociological difference. The years in between my presence in Harlem and in the Soho district reveal another and rather important polarization as far as our local art history is concerned. The time of the Harlem residence marks the period before the American art boom, and all of our art booms must include the objective American because each successful group of avant gardists marches to glory wrapped in the American flag (the school of New York business is secondary as a generic term for what transpired) and the present moment when the surge had ebbed and the show is over.

Because the quest for artistic realization is above and beyond temporal considerations there will always be artists for each generation and art begins with their presence on the scene, but here, I am afraid, it will be some time before we can recognize them as events have driven them into hiding. It is the over-exposure of artists in our time, the instant star system and subsequent neglect of yesterday’s heros that has driven them to an ivory tower, a refuge to which no one really goes willingly. (September 8, 1971)

Today marks Picasso’s 90th birthday. I wonder whether all other occasions for commemoration are marked by so many irrelevant statements by generally unqualified persons and off-the-cuff criticisms and evaluations of an artist’s life and work by the Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the critical fraternity as this one seems to be. Admitted there are unusual circumstances—the living legend of the man, his gargantuan production, his ever increasing interest in the erotic and his Spanish Siamese twin complex, about the joy of life and the ritual of death and dying. But why do all concerned insist on rushing to judgment, or the artists, interviewed in today’s New York Times, stumble over their feet in search of something profound and pregnant to say when they have no real urge to do so?

Perhaps the living legend business is all nonsense. It is asking of the one honored that for the day he pose as his own corpse, or like Charles the Fifth of Spain, hiding behind a balcony curtain, review the rehearsal of his own funeral. Considering the enormous and so varied achievement of Picasso, it will be a far day before anyone can arrive at a truly circumspect view of his achievement of Picasso, let alone a single judgment that will approximate a truth. Time, in judging art, does not tell all as people seem to think. At each future date in history, another climate of the mind will reflect heavily on current judgment and even the measure or the standard by which one seeks to measure will change and frustrate any attempt to arrive at a definitive and reasonable judgment that will stand up and hold against or with the values of another time.

It is critically fashionable today to regard Picasso’s cubist period as the high point of his artistic achievement and all that followed as of little if any value. Included in this latter day lumber or junk as most of the current criticism would have us believe it is, are the Guernica., The Charnel House, the Minotaurornachia and a world of jubilant pictures, portraits as great as were ever painted, and fabulous pictorial inventions, to say nothing of the excellent and penetrating studies of the work of other masters. To those dilettanti and artistic barbarians who consider these studies and transpositions as the time­ killing exercises of a master who has run out of inspirational fuel, let it be said that an artist’s curiosity about how others before him, or even contemporary with him, created their works is as much a part of his own artistic process as is the pursuit of his particular creative vision.

If, however, criticism, right or wrong, will have it that Picasso’s cubist paintings establish the apogee of his artistic existence, then why would the same not be true of Mondrian. His cubist paintings equal Picasso’s or Braque’s in excellence. Not only are these to be ranked with the best works of the time, but they are independent of the general cubist formula, a fact that was immediately recognized by no less an authority on cubism than Guillaume Apollinaire who remarked of this at the time they were first exhibited.

But Mondrian in his neo-plasticism not only goes beyond cubism (whatever that means) but also away from cubism as he sought the liberation of the human spirit in the great ornamental late paintings of his life.

Mondrian’s Taoist attitude toward life was indeed incompatible with Picasso’s need for drama because the nature of drama is oppressive and requires pictorial references Mondrian felt had been overcome in cubism. The fact that Mondrian entitled his last painting “Victory Boogie Woogie,” and there is hardly anything more dramatic than the notion of victory, means little. Non-representational paintings require no title, but the title is a way of fixing in the mind an object we wish to remember and can identify to one another, and numbered compositions are far too neutral to help us. Besides, the free world had just won a military victory, or rather the painting of it, coincided happily with the event.

Perhaps we will arrive at a better understanding of cubism if we are willing to admit that there is a difference between the technical apparatus of cubist picture making and the ideological content of cubism as we know it in the 20th century. The methods of cubist structure are as old as painting and drawing: the overlaying of flat planes to achieve space instead of a method that depends on a fixed perspective that establishes a boxed-in or hollowed-out space in which forms and volumes are related to one another as the preconceived space permits.

The placing of flat planes above one or over one another does less violence to the dignity of the picture plane because each plane reflects the whole surface for what it is and the deep space, sooner or later, involves us in illusions of both mechanical and aerial perspectives.

Historically, the deep space concept has frequently evolved from the flat space, often gradually, but when the reverse is true the break comes about abruptly because the methods we speak of are inextricably related to the subject matter and ideologies each seeks to express. Thus the flat space we associate with the Renaissance, and in the ensuing Baroque period we witness the destruction of the picture plane itself as painting and its sister arts, sculpture and architecture, arrived at an all enveloping, all surrounding space that rivals that of nature itself. Although the Baroque style dissolved the boundaries of space, it did not destroy the solidity of volumes and so there remained a continuity of the classical though not enough of it to satisfy the neo-classicists who sought to return to the concepts of Raphael as far as the form was concerned and to the Roman concepts of virtue in its subject matter.

The 19th century witnessed a further degeneration of a positive sculptural form. Although the realism of a Courbet seemed to bring the decline of the old formal aspects to a temporary halt, its pleinairism brought about a concern with aerial perspective and the light of the real world as it was reflected in the works of the impressionists, and bit by bit the old formal structure was lost or had become disoriented beyond repair. With the advent of cubism, the flat space abandoned as inadequate five centuries ago was to emerge triumphant once more. (October 25, 1971)

What I have tried to tell in two short paragraphs about the historic inversion of the two space concepts, i.e., the flat and the depth space concepts of the picture plane, is indeed too briefly sketched and will require considerable expansion, but I believe that this is not the proper place for it. A proper treatment of the subject requires a particular essay because it will involve a discussion and comparison of styles to prove, as I hope to be able to do, that while there is such a thing as a purity of style, the Romanesque, the Gothic and the overwhelming one of the Baroque, there is no such purity of style in modern painting, not in cubism or its derivative manners nor in the various fashions of abstraction, abstract expressionism, or surrealism.

The improvisational nature of the modern effort, along with the faith in pictorial destruction as a most essential part of the creative process, makes stylistic purity impossible and the attempt to find such purity by isolating certain periods or excerpts from the overall production is nonsensical and leads to misconception and embarrassment. This is not to say that all the manifestations of modern art are of equal importance. Certainly cubism is the strongest thrust and the most significant of stylistic efforts in our time, perhaps because it is the least subjective and because it relates to a pictorial approach reflecting a great tradition understood but not imitated. Furthermore, cubism has provided the modern artist with a rudder to guide it, something that cannot be said of the more subjective painting styles of expressionism or even of impressionism which by their nature and aims tend to isolate the artist completely within his physical and artistic limitations or require that he turn to literature (surrealism) or psychology for motivation. (December 27, 1971)

The thing that happened for me, indeed the pleasurable highlight of the month, was a gift I received from Mr. Jeffrey Hoffeld, one of the studio visitors I mentioned. I had given him a small panel of recent vintage and he sent me a Metropolitan Museum publication, a facsimile in reproduction of the Cloisters’ “Apocalypse,” with a translation of the Latin text and introductory notes. I was so pleased and on several accounts: first, of course, by the generosity and courtesy of Mr. Hoffeld, but also because the manuscript style, so close to that of the illustrations and frescoes of the Arthurian legend in Medieval art, is one I truly appreciate. I have studied and copied this style which to me is one of the perfect styles of western art. Here the abstract pictorial means express perfectly the intentions and subject matter involved. All is described, the movements, the rising and the falling, the battle gestures and the voyaging, and there is no attempt at illusion let alone verisimilitude.

To lovers of the Renaissance, such as Walter Scott, this style is but a crude form of art, a “horror” before the dawn of the greatest of all periods of all time. Actually the tradition of planary art, descriptive and not object or illusion oriented, is in the oldest and greatest of traditions in the east as well as in the west, and modern art or modern artists have in a way rediscovered it. Cubism stumbled and staggered its way to the great plane and abstract art, linear or vague, could not exist without consciousness of it. The mystery is on the surface, not hidden in the corners of obscure, and being right there in front of our noses confounds those who cannot imagine such to be possible or, if so, unattractive to them since they are given to confuse the complex with that which is complicated and they are preferential to the latter. To me, the discovery of the romanesque styles, for there are more than one, was like breathing very fresh air. The book Hoffeld sent me is one I shall look at again and again because the freshness of the art causes it to appear forever new. It has the newness and freshness of that art that has been forever or so it would seem. (January 29, 1972)

I met with my students at Brooklyn in the opening session of the spring semester that, traditionally, is only a talk session between the students and the teacher in which the teacher tries to outline the course and its objectives. The students in the graduate session are of course considerably farther along than the undergraduates and their interest is deeper. One of the students in the History of Art workshop asked me about reading matter that they might consult. I recommended the book “The Painter’s Mind” because it derives from experience such as teaching that very course provided me with, and I could think of nothing else. Most of the know-how books are so bad that reading them can only contaminate and confuse the mind of the novice. When I got home that night, I found a book on my desk that I shall certainly recommend at our next session. My wife had that day purchased a copy of the newly­published notebooks of the late Stuart Davis whose articles on the abstract in art are excellent, the best perhaps written in our time. Along with these articles there is a brief autobiographical sketch, actual notes for work in progress, and an over-long section dealing with Davis, political and politico-art battles with the authorities and especially with the role, one is tempted to say “the Judas role” of George Biddle, painter and wasp politician in the worst and most succinct interpretation of all that four-letter word implies.

Davis, always a battler and a wit, comes off very well in all of these polemics. Unfortunately the battles around the WPA are over and dated. One can say that the situation has hardly improved in the struggle between independent artists and officialdom, but the focus is elsewhere than where it was then and I doubt that too many people, not present at that time, will be interested in this part of the book.

There is a rather disappointing memoir about Davis’ acquaintance with Mondrian. Their relationship was more interesting than Davis writes about it and often ludicrously funny because of the stubborn nature of both artists. I will never forget the argument over whether Dali’s art was plastic or not. Mondrian claimed it was; Davis claimed it wasn’t. Davis said Dali was no more plastic in his painting than Norman Rockwell and Mondrian wanted to know who Norman Rockwell was. In this argument the two protagonists were not facing each other but were seated side by side at a small dining table and at no time during the dispute did one or the other turn his head to look at the other, so both projected their remarks at no one in particular. Like two actors in a stylized play they spoke their lines at the world.

Unfortunately, much of Davis’ pungent and ready wit was not written but spoken by him in ordinary conversations and only those who were present heard what he had to say, and not all who heard him speak and many of his associates are no longer alive.

I spoke to his widow Roselle yesterday, mainly to congratulate her on getting this small excerpt of his writings into print and even she could not remember, at least not offhand some of Davis’ most apt and biting comments. Speaking of Ben Shahn, Davis said that he, Shahn, was against modern art while helping himself to huge spoonsful of it and when asked about Edward Hopper, he said that Hopper made the commonplace more commonplace than it was in the first commonplace. And in connection with Kurt Seligman, Davis spoke of his extreme annoyance at Meyer Shapiro’s interference in artistic affairs. There was a time when Shapiro had a great deal of influence on the artists of the Artists’ Union and those of the Artists’ Congress and he was over-ready with both advice and admonition. Davis then said that when persons like Meyer Shapiro came into the presence of practicing artists the only thing for them to do was to stand silently, hat in hand, and wait until they were spoken to. Seligman, who was friendly with Shapiro, said, “But Stuart, Shapiro paints himself,” and Davis creating the perfect image of his contempt for the Professor, responded “Yes, yes, I have seen his watercolors dangling on the wall.”

Despite his presence of mind and ready wit, Davis refused to speak extemporaneously. When occasion presented itself and he was called on to address a group of people, he would carefully prepare his speech in writing and he would read his paper to his audience. He was certainly not a fearful man, but he always wished to know what he was in for and what he was facing and he conducted himself accordingly. He had considerable political ability but he misread completely the minds of his left-wing associates, and the defeat of his ideas on the occasion of the Congress breakup over the question of aid to Finland was a great blow to him. I was with him before that meeting and he told me of his confidence in a favorable outcome. His defeat that night was overwhelming, the Party using every dirty trick and device in its repertoire to bring it about. He never really recovered from what happened that night which marked the end of his political involvement. I believe the most bitter part of it was when he realized fully the scope of the ingratitude of those he had done so much for in their struggles to keep their heads above water. He told me some time later that on the day after the meeting he and his wife had spent the day visiting the collection at the Cloisters, washing away the distasteful memories of the present disappointments in the soothing atmosphere of an art, no longer bound to the vicissitudes of the time in which it was created.

Davis, unlike myself, truly believed in his time, in progress, and in a social Nirvana via modern art much as Mondrian did, but being so much involved in the politics of his time he was hurt as Mondrian was not. Piet had, in the last years of his life, a good number of reservations about the brave new world and turned against, as he put it, “all that levels.” Since he took no public position on such issues or revealed any changes of mind to any but his friends, and then only in passing, there was no conflict. An avowed Taoist, Mondrian believed in letting evil wither. But Stuart Davis did live to experience a measure of worldly success, belatedly it is true, and Mondrian died a relatively poor man whose worldly success began only after his death. He was supremely confident of his true importance and he was concerned about his image, but he was willing to have the laurel leaves placed on the brow of his memory and let it go at that. I don’t believe that Davis was much concerned with glory and he appreciated prestige only as a tool to be used, but he had spent years in grinding poverty and he had fathered a son late in life, all of which gave sweetness to the material success that came so late to him but nevertheless in the nick of time. (February 4, 1972)

Davis’s painting, its value and worth, has been much debated and while at this moment the Art World appears to be concerned with other luminaries, I feel that there will be more said and more to say about Davis’s position in the history of modern art. As a very young artist he seems to have attracted a good deal of attention as a sort of enfant terrible, and then for years on end as a fool or a knave trying to put something over on his compatriots, Davis’s stay in Paris, a time well spent in the clarifying of his formal concepts was hardly noted as such by the critics and contemporary artists. It must be said here that none of the leading art critics of the time were in the least qualified to pass judgment of any kind in matters of cubist and post-cubist art. I am inclined to include here the more generous Henry McBride because of his status as a professional admirer of French art. To them all modern artists looked alike; the calendar told them who or which was older or first in the world-wide movements of the time and they hurled the charge of derivation indiscriminately. This, they felt, proclaimed them as knowledgeable in the matter and the public, equally ignorant but no more so than its advisors, believed them and took them at their word. The American cult of originality and auto didactism supported these critics in their bias that would have all the great artists of the world as bastards which might give a reflective person some idea of the breadth of their culture.

When the Stuart Davis of the egg-beater series was seen, not as a solo joker but part of a movement, he was immediately attacked as a derivative of the School of Paris, of Ferdinand Leger in particular, but of others as well. Davis’s attempt to keep together a class at the Art Students League failed for lack of the requisite attendance. As he once said, “I just couldn’t attract enough students.”

I met Davis in the years of his political activity, as editor of the Art Union’s paper and as secretary of the Artists’ Congress. I have often wondered whether Davis approved of or even recognized the cynicism of the Party’s executive committee’s appointment of himself to the leading position of the Congress. As a man, always sympathetic to left­ wingers, if not of their programs, Davis might even have relished the cunning involved in choosing him for the role of the innocuous aesthete as the front man. If the party was against war and Fascism, so was he and the means to the end were as always justified. I do know this, however; when the end of that love affair came to pass, Davis was not happy. Moreover, he, who had put his own work in the background for years in which he served both his colleagues as an able defender of their interests as well as his political friends, now had to find his way back to his real commitment—his art—and it was not an easy task.

As far as communicating with the world was concerned, Davis did derive from his role as an art politician one singular advantage. The pages of the Art Front provided him with the opportunity of publishing his ideas about art and of propagandizing those matters that interested him. He wrote exceedingly well, with pugnacity as a polemicist and with clarity as an essayist and the name Davis acquired prestige through his writing. He became a personality to be reckoned with in the American art world. His opinions carried weight and those who cared to debate him in print were careful not to do so in an off-hand manner. Years later his younger colleague, Ad Reinhardt, was to have a similar career in art, attracting attention for his painting much later.

Perhaps Davis over reacted to the charge of being nothing but an epigone of the School of Paris by his insistence on his Americanism, both in the choice of the objects he chose to paint such as gas pumps and barber poles. as well as in the hot topical and not always apt challenge of his picture titles. He was certainly sincere in his belief that an artist at any given time must say yes to the time and the surrounding world in certain terms. Personally, I felt that he overdid it a bit. However that may be, when the time was appropriate and some years after Davis had died, a young school of artists—the Pop generation—adopted Davis as a sort of forerunner, a patron saint of themselves and their aims. The claim is a bit beside the point, but it was made. When Davis’s worldly ship came in, however, the shouting was for another artist, Jackson Pollock, whop certainly added a typically American element to our art, one perhaps closer to the prayer meeting idea of a direct confrontation with God, in this instance with art itself, and Davis arrived not as the signal guest of honor but as another American artist who would become an implacable figure in our history. I don’t know how Davis felt about his silver medal of honor but he painted· a canvas at about this time a picture that consisted of the lettered word “Champion” on a banner unfurled. There is a certain enigma about this picture. It was certainly not an advertisement for spark plugs, but what it really meant I do not know. Peggy Burlin, the widow of the late Paul Burlin, a friend of Davis, said that she thought Stuart had painted it in defiance of the advent of new stars and heroes. In her charming southern accent she interpreted the canvas as being like the boxing announcer’s verdict of a title match—“The winnah and still champion.” Perhaps this was so. While Davis was a realist and was ready to admit that his success was a matter of luck, I am sure he did not think that it was undeserved, and it wasn’t, of course.

When Davis had attained his full maturity, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of being sandwiched between two factions hostile to his personality as an artist. On one side there were the anecdotal painters of the American school, many his personal friends but professional adversaries, and younger group of purity-directed abstract painters, the avant garde of those who had adopted Mondrian as their champion and considered him an artist deriving from cubism but only in a decorative way, a painter of agreeable pictures that might someday find their place on the walls of a lady’s boudoir, without force, weight, strength or real significance. I recall John Balcombe Greene, at that time a champion of the non-objective abstracty surface, as referring to Davis as a good average painter and that was the verdict, more or less, of the younger man.

It is true that Davis in those years before and during World War II had not exhibited in an important way, showing a canvas or two at the Whitney annual exhibits, so any judgment of his work was based on a rather abstruse version of his image. With his show at the Downtown Gallery in 1943 and the large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the picture changed and he became a fixture of the scene not to be further denied. But to those who felt Davis’s work to be uniformly agreeable, let it be said that this is anything but true. At sometime during the Second World War, John von Wicht and I had the chore of hanging a charity exhibition of abstract painting and we had the greatest difficulty placing the Davis paintings. It is no insult to say of an artist that he is a bad neighbor on the wall and Davis was just that. Pleasing colors or no there was an unbridled force, even a violence one had not suspected, but it was and is there and Davis looks at his best when seen by himself either in a single canvas with lots of room around the canvas or in the company of its own brothers and sisters. The pleasing colors, the flow of the calligraphy, and the order of the forms in Davis’ work are what everyone sees at a glance; the force of the personality must be discovered and once seen can no longer be dismissed. One knows of Davis’s artist parents, but when looking at his work I think of when he spoke of his coach-designer and builder grandfather and his friends as sturdy men with chests like “oaken” barrels. (February 5, 1972)

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