1901-1994
Survey of Eighteen Artists and the Met
Dorothy Dehner, Lecture, January 16, 1966
Unexpurgated Memoir of John Graham
Plexiglas Relief for the Great Southwest Industrial Park
David Smith’s Medals for Dishonor
Forward to John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art
As swift as dreamless, sleep-drenched night
My child-hood fled,
Youth too
Unneeding, was I, careless of its worth.
Yet wanting,
Wanting ever, that most satisfying thing.
That brimming cup
That turns the iron to silver
And leaves sullen voids
Re-echoing with joyous sounds.
And now those moments that were hoped for
Have slipped into those channels barred to age.
And grim and unrelenting are the years
That stretch ahead.
* Unheeding???
[1] Dehner Papers: Writings, Reel 1269, Scan 11917, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
(1942-43?)
The snow falls softly, but
Hush! Tiny icy sounds fill the air
Gather the flocks
Prepare the altars
Kneel to the Winter Gods.
(1944-46?)
Black skeletons climb the rocky hill
And skinny hands off leafless birch and maple
Wave and bid goodbye to green and summer gaiety.
So Autumn burned and flamed with promise false
Heralding but sleep and slow long rest
Come silently to silent wood,
Except for falling leaf or some small animal
Scuttling to winter hideaway.
The lonely brook keeps to its song
Plaintive now, and solitary,
Sheltering ferns and grasses now withered, dry.
The sounds of summer fled, the insect hum
The bird trills stilled.
And earth so soon to sleep, awaits its urge
To change once more to Spring’s delights
New buds, new scents, new life.
A man asks of a woman: Daphne, Daphne what am I like?
She sings the answer: You’re like wind when it roars,
Daphne, Daphne, what am I like?
You’re like the rain when it pours.
Daphne, Daphne, what am I like?
Like a tender new-picked flower.
Daphne, Daphne, what am I like?
Like the sun, through a diamond shower.
Daphne, Daphne, what am I like?
Like the dark and murky tide.
Daphne, Daphne, what am I like?
Like the stallion that you ride?
Daphne, Daphne, how do I work?
Like Vulcan, with his fire.
Daphne, Daphne, what will I do?
Stretch me out on your pyre.
Daphne, Daphne, whom do I love?
Julie and me and May.
Daphne, Daphne, whom do I love?
Mary and Kate and Gay,
And Helen, and Meg, and Liz, and Bet,
And a mound of new mown hay.
Daphne, Daphne, what will I do?
Climb till your heart is sore,
Daphne, Daphne, where shall I go?
Always looking for more.
Daphne, Daphne, shall I have rest?
Not till you’re brittle and gray,
Daphne, Daphne, shall I have rest?
Only you can say.
Daphne, Daphne, I don’t want to rest,
I want to straddle the East and West,
I want to wrestle and romp ‘til doom,
And hug to myself tremendous gloom.
I want to roll in a cloud and glide,
I want to shout down the mountain side,
I want to love and have a new bride,
And stop my ears to those who’ve cried.
I want to summon the evening star,
And have no one to say me nay,
I want to wear Orion’s Belt
And a garment made of the Milky Way.
I want to be God, and walk along side
The Sun and the Moon and the roaring Tide
I want to posess [sic] the earth and sea
And climb to the wide blue canopy,
And shout for the world to hear and see,
THIS IS ME, THIS IS ME, THIS IS ME
(ca. 1950-52)
Dainty arthropod, whose chitin fits like some sleek armor
Tailored to your being,
Precision tooled and elegant,
Find your secret grasses or your small soft bodied prey,
Back in summer warmth, your satin garment glistening ochre,
Polished ebony.
Man’s outwardness, forever linked a life span to
Inner being metamorphosized,
While you, small mindless creature shed the outer coats
Until your final stature reached,
Your garment, perfect in size and kind, befits maturity.
(1952-53?)
My feet kick up the dust of years
I am an archaeologist of sorts
I tamper with the past.
Kicking, kicking that dust, oblivious almost
Until a twisted bit of steel, sharp-edged,
A shard of broken glass, still keen
Wounds my foot.
Just a memento of the past
The bloody battles when I died in action.
I asked for no cross at my grave
I made my own, and buried it deep
Six feet down, six feet under.
Not to emerge except as wraiths do,
Fluttering, hovering, but unsubstantial.
But then, there is that dust–
And my degree in archaeology
My sheepskin hides the wolf.
(1954-55)
Great empty shell, hollow, roaring,
Seated with rusted, bent protuberance,
Jagged, glass sharp slashing edges.
Space pierced with pointed wounding sounds,
Ear split fragments, high and terrible to hear,
Centered in tumultuous roar.
Eye, ear, sense and spirit torn,
While curling cuticle shrinks dying,
Unto itself, escapewards.
Emerge but with pain into a
Heavy drumming world, unembracing,
Except with dead and heavy tentacle,
Slime encased and suffocating.
(ca. 1955)
I was the Lady of the Lake,
There did I lie soft green hills,
The deep blue folds of clean-lined Adirondacks
Sharp against the sky,
I was the one who felt the chill
Of cold lake water on my thighs.
And trembled at the icy touch,
But felt however much it conquered me
I loved it still.
Now I am a River Queen
Watching the Hudson as it flows,
Deep and wide with spill of
Many lakes and streams,
Abundant, rich and wise
As like a King with grace it glides,
Knowing the lives it passes.
(Tears and follies are its wisdoms)
Sheltered by gently moving skies.
I occupy my bower and look down,
And throw my scepter in the wake
Of ships that pass, and think
How once I was the Lady of the Lake.
(1974)
Everything looks white
Or maybe it is that the lights are too bright
Everyone is bustling, bustling.
Lying on white, covered by white
And white is the no-color of everything.
But my eyes are half closed because of the glare and because
I cannot bear such vigorous signs of life.
Bodies so busy and so many, making noise
That have no identity.
I fancy that I am going to the moon.
I wonder at my calm. I calmly know that
They are going to cut my heart out.
Alas, I have never stepped in the path of an
On-rushing truck, because of anguish
Or let myself drop into an open manhole, because of dispair [sic],
‘though tempted.
But now I am supine and still, and they will massively invade
My body. And who knows then, what?
I let them, I have asked for it. I want it.
Shall I speak? Can I speak? I will try.
Are you now anesthetizing me? Yes, said gently.
Shall I count backwards from 100? (I have taken this road before)
100.....99.......98...........97.............96...........95....
A voice from a cave says, Do you hear a noise?
Of course I hear a noise, because I am on a huge bright colored
PINWHEEL, thirty feet in diameter
And from the center pin rises a short steel pole which
Pinions me horizontally, in the center of my back.
The pole rises slowly, with me on it.
We start going ‘round and ‘round
The pinwheel whirrs, and the pole buzzes deafeningly
Whilst carnival figures in gaudy garments yell, screech and
Taunt in an unknown tongue. Stunted they are, half animal,
Half human, malevolent, Hieronimous [sic] Bosch Figures. Demonic.
I fear them, but they cannot get at me.
The pole rises high and spins me madly.
As it rises the noise diminishes.
Now I lie far above them, and finally, finally, a kind of peace.
The buzzing stops.
But I cannot say all of that, I just say, it is quiet now.
But do I really say it, or just think it?
I am too tired to explain all this to the voice that asked.
I am almost to the moon now.
But alack, there is no moon. It never comes, nor stars.
Just blackness.
There is now... not even I
Open heart surgery 1974 D. D.
[1] Dehner, Dorothy. Dehner Papers: Writings, Reel 1269, Scan
11925, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
11925, Washington, D.C.
Bolton Landing * New York
David....Today is your birthday...happy birthday
David....creator....genius is the vulgar word...
I watch you make and I watch you do...and I am
filled with wonder...and pride...it is rare to
watch that quality...so few have it...and I
am priviledged. Thank you David. With the creation
of your work comes life to the world...a new
mans new ideas...undefinable in the true sense...
defined they turn into something less than they are.
...you will always keep working David...no
exhortations of the patriots of ART are needed..
my wish for the year for you...work good...
be happy as you can.
D
Skidmore College is showing once more the paintings of Alfrida Storm, a member of the art faculty. The exhibition is open to the public at the Hathorn Gallery at the college through January.
All of the paintings were done within the past year, during which Miss Storm traveled on Sabbatical leave, and some of them reflect in a very abstract way, the atmosphere, the architectural forms and characteristic coloration of the places she visited.
Miss Storm is a watercolorist, but so bold and vibrant is the color, so plastic its use in her work, that the effect is one usually associated with oils, except for the particular fresh clarity only obtainable in water color medium..
Her work stems from Cubism. She has, like other of her contemporaries, developed her own individual and personal style. She uses color and clearly defined planes with equal importance. The forms are sharply delineated not overly complex yet contrived with subtlety. There is movement and depth as plane unfolds upon plane; the rhythms are varied..
As with most contemporary painting, the subject is the point of departure. It neither adds nor subtracts from enjoyment of the paintings to recognize the Romanesque pink and black marble stripes of Italian towers, the gondola forms of Venice or the great pyramids of Egypt.
The soft brown and yellow planes of one painting recall a hundred objects, brown leaves, tree trunks [of] mellowed woods. Sensations of sound are introduced in another. Visually satisfying, the counterpoint of light and dark becomes audible, the color harmonic.
All of Miss Storm’s work reveals a profound concern with the true values of painting, and seems to be the product of a passionate and devoted quest into the nature of art.
[1] Schenectady, New York: Schenectady Gazette, Jan. 25, 1951.
(Courtesy, Schenectady Historical Society.)
In December of 1937, Francis Henry Taylor, head of the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City, said in an article in the Atlantic Monthly, I feel that we must make haste slowly, that art has an almost physiological surge foreward that will not be constrained, and that those of us who are in charge with directing the public taste in the matter of exhibitions and in the acquisition of contemporary works, are obliged to hold a detached and liberal view.[2]
A firm hold on the detached and liberal view prevented the Metropolitan from doing very much about contemporary art until the late summer of 1950, when it announced an out size exhibition of contemporary American art, the pictures to be chosen by an elaborate network of first regional and then national juries. Announcement of eighty five hundred dollars in prizes from the Hearn Fund, bequeathed generations ago, and accruing interest in the vaults ever since, went to eighteen thousand artists. This took in about everybody: professionals, Sunday painters, and amateurs, and they greeted the announcements with varying degrees of cheers and cat calls. Newspapers, art magazines and the interested layman reacting strongly.
Artist’s Equity, which had been consulted about the plan and helped to work it out was, of course, solidly behind it. Equity, a four-year-old organization which attempts to help artists in the way better-known Actor’s Equity helps actors, has a fair cross section of professional artists in its membership, excepting the Eighteen and others following their aesthetic direction. In general the press thought it a good thing, albeit high time. Alfred Frankfurter, editor of Art News, announced editorially that,...the mountain labored and brought forth a dickey bird....the national jury is composed of men who heavily favor right of center to extreme conservatism...(in art). This was putting it very gently indeed. The jury consisted of such staunch defender of the right as Francis Chapin, Howard Cook, Lamarr Dodd, Ogden Pleissner, Millard Sheets and Esther Williams...(not of Hollywood). This jury finally selected one hundred and seventy five paintings from the East, twenty from the South, and thirty nine from the far west and Haiwaii [sic], but not before a shrill cry was heard from the dissidents.
There were only twenty three artists who as an informal group signed a letter protesting the jury and calling for a boycott of the show, and five of these were sculptors, but there were many more who might have signed had they had the opportunity. These protested so strongly that they landed on the front page of all the New York papers and the Times gave them a two column spread which included a resume of events and a transcript of the signed letter which read:
We the undersigned painters, reject the monster national
exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum, and will
not submit any work to its jury.
The organization of the exhibition and the choice of
jurors by Francis Henry Taylor and Robert Beverly Hale,
the Metropolitan’s Director and Associate Curator of American
Art, does not warrant any hope that a just proportion of
advanced art will be included.
We draw to the attention of these gentlemen the historical
fact that for roughly a hundred years, only advanced art has
made any consequential contribution to civilization.
Mr. Taylor, on more than one occasion has publicly declared
his contempt for modern painting; Mr. Hale in accepting a jury
notoriously hostile in advanced art takes his place beside
Mr. Taylor.
We believe that all the advanced artists in America will
join us in our stand.
Just why this should have caused such a stir is anybody’s guess. The uncompromising tone of the letter, the aesthetics and personalities of the artists involved surely had something to do with it, in addition to the fact that the Metropolitan had been under fire for years for its hostility to contemporary art in particular-so much so that Mr. Taylor had found himself characterizing, defensively, these advanced artists as, flat chested pelicans strutting upon the intellectual waste lands.
Twenty five other artists responded with a denunciation of the twenty three. These were modern but not advanced guard, and they included such artists as Milton Avery, Louis Boss, Ruth Gickow, Phillip Evergood and Waldo Pierce. The news magazines of the country picked up the squabble and reported continuously the phases of the battle, and when the show finally opened the fight began again.
Robert Beverly Hale, who arranged the show, described it as the artistic state of the Union. The eighteen would surely have been accepted, but lost in the welter of abstraction. The late Paul Bird’s criticism of the show in his conservative Art Digest said that the wholesale swing to abstraction was cyclical, and he yearned for a return to realism. Most of the critics were quite disenchanted about the show, as they usually are about big shows; but all agreed that the Metropolitan had leaned over backward, being needled to distraction by all the furor, and had rejected Grandma Moses and let in more modern art than anyone had thought they would, and had even given prizes to several abstract and semi-abstract paintings. Beside the eighteen, there were many important omissions. Such notables as Marin and O’Keeffe boycotted the show and others whose work might have raised the general level. This then, became the occasion and the focus of all the ill will the Metropolitan had long been engendering. It accepted he blow by announcing a jumbo sculpture show for 1951, and repentantly invited one of the sculptor signers to serve on its jury. He refused, and most of the original eighteen were angry when another sculptor signer accepted.
For roughly five years the artists of the advanced guard have been a growing force in American art. This group is not a group in any sense except that they mutually oppose the aesthetics of less advanced painters. They have no organization, formal or informal. The eighteen might have been eighteen others several times over, with perhaps a nucleus of five remaining the same. They all say they have little in common with each other. They argue aesthetics among themselves vehemently.
Friendships are constantly being ruptured, and their so-called artist’s club, which is a loose organization, social in purpose, has changed personnel thrice within two years, with only two remaining members. Purportedly, most of them do not wish to be a part of any group. They operate entirely as individuals; nevertheless, practical considerations tend to bring them together. A half dozen, out of a hundred or so galleries in New York, show their work exclusively. They have received a certain sponsorship from the Museum of Modern Art. All but three of the eighteen are in the Museum’s permanent collection now, but as late as 1946 none was represented. In January of 1951, Andrew Ritchie of the Modern Museum put on a show of his own choosing which included all of the eighteen signers and about fifty more artists of the advanced guard. This served as a kind of official and final recognition of their status.
Critic Clement Greenberg of the Nation has been a discoverer and defender of the group. His unorthodox but scholarly and perceptive viewpoint has been important in developing an audience for these men. He has written widely in art publications here and abroad, so provocatively and with such effect that he is quoted as news in Time magazine and Newsweek. Within the last four or five years, colleges in all parts of the country have invited these men to tell of their work and their attitude to art, or to teach. One of this group, Robert Motherwell, has become a kind of spokesman, by nobody’s consent, but it falls to him as he is one of the most vocal and articulate among them. He has, in a pamphlet issued by his gallery, called the group, The School of New York, and given the aesthetics of the trend a kind of form. Most of the artists of the group reject both the title and their inclusion in any group. One thing seems to characterize all these men, and that is that they reject each other, only in a lesser degree than they reject artists whose aesthetics are, to them, beyond the pale.
About half of the group were onetime members of the Artists Union, and The American Artists Congress, both Depression-born organizations. Both grew out of the Federal Arts Project, in the days when the closest kind of unity existed among artists of all schools. They were all young men-this was 1934-1940-none had achieved fame or financial security, and only one group of strictly proletarian painters was brought together under the sponsorship of a single gallery. The rest showed at galleries off and on, without consistent backing from anyone, usually in group shows, put on by the Federal Arts Project or the Artists Congress or shows of W.P.A. art sponsored by the Modern Museum.
The Artists Union, at one time affiliated with the U.C.P.W.A., C.I.O. Local 60, brought the artists together on political lines. Members were largely left of center, not by duress of the Union but because they were left before they went into the Union. Among leftists battles raged between those left or those very left, but it was on the subject of aesthetic that real differences arose. The main battle raged between the so called proletarian painters and the abstractionists. Forums and open discussions took place and threatened to split the organization but their political attitudes and their economic well being held them together. All were members of the Federal Art Project and the existence of the project had to be fought for every hour of the day.
In 1938 a group was formed calling itself The American Abstract Artists. There was much bickering in this group along political lines, most of the artists holding a Trotskyist position and a few holding a Stalinist position, It is hard to see now, in 1952, how important these considerations were at that time. But the mere existence of the Federal Arts Project was a political phenomenon and in this wise, art got tied up with politics. No artist on W.P.A. could ever forget it for a minute. His very livelihood depended upon what happened in Congress from day to day.
Politics were important to people in the Thirties. The artists, unwanted by their society, unable to live by their art, unable to get jobs doing anything else, felt a genuine urge to ally themselves with other Depression victims. Artists of this period supported strikes and demands of working men everywhere, and working men helped support the Artists Union.
The American Abstract Artists grew out of a dissatisfaction with the aesthetic standards of the Union and the Congress. But it was a kind of family quarrel. Unity was needed to keep their jobs. The Art Projects were under constant attack, the F.B.I. investigated every artist on the project, and the W.P.A. itself had spies to check up on the artists to see if they were in their studios working and earning their $17 a week. Under this pressure the Artists Union broke up. Artists resigned from the Project rather than endure the humiliation ensuing from such actions. The Artists Congress, with too much leftist pressure from within and too much rightist pressure from without, lost many members. The abstract group dwindled. It seemed that organization was not a success. Occasionally after this, very loose organizations brought artists together, but always with a purely aesthetic purpose.
The war also provided an out. Many artists got jobs drafting or in operating delicate machinery in war plants. A good many of them served in the Armed Forces, but it may be significant that only one of the eighteen painters who signed the boycott letter served in the Navy, none in the Army. The rest either had war jobs or were 4-F.
About 1942-43 a change occurred in the work of many artists. Up to that time such abstraction as there was followed the School of Paris, and with some variation stayed within the Cubist tradition. This new viewpoint came from the former proletarian painters as well as from the formal abstractionists whose work was based on French Cubism. Gradually the work took on a new character and a new philosophy quite different from the classic Cubism of Picasso and Braque. It was looser, more romantic, more impassioned, more emotional, with a Gothic line and feeling.
A small group of galleries emerged which, as the new movement developed, showed these artists exclusively. Before this if they were sponsored by a gallery, they were stabled with artists not necessarily akin to them aesthetically, but as the work developed, the movement took on a kind of shape despite an almost positive effort on the part of the artists to remain aloof. Certain individuals stood out for one reason or another. Magazines reported their work, sometimes in an unflattering way, as stunt painting. When Life did a spread on Jackson Pollock, the emphasis was not on the artistic value of the paintings, but on the fact that he painted them on the floor. The group of galleries (owned by Betty Parsons, Kootz, Egan, Fried, Hugo, and Willard), showing the work month after month, as well as the sponsorship of the Modern Museum, along with the social sponsorship of the Rockefellers, who have always been generous about buying art-all tended to produce in the public mind the picture of a movement. The artists were supported by some of the more courageous colleges, being asked to speak and teach, and they were found to be highly imaginative and gifted people who could deliver not only startling paintings but a good lecture. Art had come a long way when the schools began to recognize that an artist could teach art better than a teacher who was not an artist.
Before going into the lives of these men, (and one woman) it would be well to list them. Hedda Sterne, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, James Brooks, Weldon Kees, Fritz Bultman, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Richard Warren Pousette D’Art, Clifford Still, Barney Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Vincent Stamos, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hoffman, Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, and William Baziotes were the eighteen painters who signed the petition. Five of the men and Miss Sterne are foreign born, but only Miss Sterne lived abroad after early childhood. The rest were born in the East, West or Middle Western United States, none in the South. The oldest, Hans Hoffman, was born in 1880, the youngest, Vincent Stamos, in 1922. The majority were born about 1910.
Six are college graduates, four have Masters degrees, one has a Ph.D. and one is now ready for a Ph.D. None got his major art training in college, all got it in art schools or from private teachers. All studied art for more than three years. Two were professional writers of some standing, Weldon Kees, and Barnett Newman, before they took up painting. Two came from working class families with an intellectual bent, sixteen from middle class or upper middle class families. Two have small private incomes. The rest teach in such places as the Brooklyn Museum School, The Art Students League, Long Island College, Yale University or have small private classes or are the husbands of working wives. Most of them have had bouts with the commercial art field. None is in it now, excepting Ernst, who does designing for Warner Brothers Film Co.
Their home life is variable. All but two have been married, seven have divorced and been remarried and some have divorced again. Only seven are living with their wives. Since the departed wives usually take the children, it was difficult to count heads accurately; but it can be safely said that they number far less than average-about one sixth of a child to each, and two of these children have the same papa. The wives have all been working wives. Some still are.
Only two of the group mentioned being on the W.P.A. are in dossiers at the Modern Museum, but at least six were on the Project. Nine have traveled extensively, all to Europe, and some to the Near East, Canada, Mexico and into the byways of the United States. Most went on either a scholarship or a shoestring.
In general it can be said that they live and work much as other less advanced artists live and work, but the extremes are greater. They take more chances, aesthetically, and financially. They endure more discomfort for the sake of their work, and they spend more on their work than on their living and comfort. The only ones who own cars live outside the city,
Their interest in politics is theoretical. None of the group now marches in parades or takes part in demonstrations (it is doubtful if such demonstrations take place any more since they were instigated by the artists, usually.) They picketed Hearst’s offices for days, however, when the American Weekly came out with an attack on all Modern Art in 1935. None has any illusions about the sanctity of the American Way or of any other Way. Their talk is of art or art personalities. It is almost impossible to get them to talk about anything else. Few of them have any close family attachments. For the most part, they feel separated by a great gulf of misunderstanding. Only two artists in the group feel any relationship to society or mentioned it in stating their philosophy. One once made an official statement which emphasized the close relationship the artist feels for his society. He vigorously retracts this now. More conservative painters of the same generation are apt to feel differently about this. A good many of them are still organized in what is left of the Committee for the Arts Sciences and Professions, a pro-Roosevelt organization which linked welfare and art.
Clement Greenberg in talking of Hans Hoffman’s work states precisely the case when he says, His painting is all painting. None of it is publicity, mode or literature. It deals with the crucial problem of contemporary painting on its highest level in the most radical and uncompromising way, asserting that painting exists as painting first of all in its medium and must there resolve itself before going on and doing anything else.
Barney Newman says, Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one, Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness, and at his own helplessness before the void. An artist paints so that he will have something to look at, at times he must write so that he may have something to read.
In contrast, one of the sculptor signers, Theodore Rosak states, My work, if it has any meaning at all, must express an inner freedom, an emotional and spiritual condition necessary to both art and life. I believe that all art bears a relationship to society, varying in depth, scope, and intent. In a philosophic sense, the least the artist can do is to supply us with different kinds of aesthetic enjoyment, and perhaps a basis for ethical, social and moral behavior.
They do not speak of religion or of God. Art is the religion. They feel themselves as artists, as people valuable but not valued by the society in which they live. Financially their position is precarious. None is able to live on sales from work. The fickleness of the public toward art, the crowning of a new fair-haired boy every few years makes even teaching jobs less secure than they would be in other fields. Art is viewed as a commodity by the public and must be sold like cornflakes, only with higher class commercials. If an editor of an art magazine, a well known critic, or a museum official sings the commercial, the artist’s position becomes more secure. It is no wonder that if the artists look for support at all they look to their fellow artists and to their student following. Therefore, when the artist speaks out in rebuttal, as in the case of the Metropolitan, he does so because of his own integrity; he has nothing to lose, and usually nothing to gain.
So discouraging are the financial returns from the sale of pictures, that many of the group speak of not showing at all, though this is probably a temporary feeling. Their teaching jobs, and their prestige rest largely on their exhibitions, and, if they didn’t exhibit, their jobs would be soon taken by people who do.
It is true that the public interest in the group is growing and that the interest of the art world is largely focused on the movement this group represents. This is greatly resented and minimized by the out group. The gesture toward the Metropolitan heightened the interest, and will probably be considered a landmark in the persistent struggle of the artist and his relationship to society.
[1]Dorothy Dehner. Survey of Eighteen Artists and the Met. Dehner
Papers, Series 4: Writings, Box 3, Folder 55 (Skidmore College),
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
See Jennifer Meehan. A Finding Aid to the Dorothy Dehner Papers,
1920-1987 (bulk 1951-1987).January 17, 2005.
[2]Survey, 17.
I find myself completely inarticulate when asked to make statements about my work. I guess I need to be primed by questions, or else just to speak of the mundane technical aspects such as my materials or working methods. I work in wax because it so readily translates the images I want to make. It is so direct, and so sensitive to the hand. My work is constructed, the wax is cut and stuck together–very little modeling is used. Right now I have changed a bit, and my newest work, not yet cast, is simpler, the images are larger, the forms not as fragmented and yet it is very much part of all the work I have made previously.[1]
I plan to work in my studio and to continue in the sculptural idiom with which I have been engaged. Because of special problems inherent in the material I use (wax, for bronze casting), I have been frustrated in planning sculpture larger than I now am able, by this method, to make. I do not want to change the material; the use of plaster or clay would entail a radically different aesthetic approach. Like any material, wax has special virtues necessary to my aesthetic concepts.
My work is delicate in structure, and I want to retain that delicacy in large pieces. The sculptor of necessity is forever concerned with gravity; and in my material, in larger pieces, the usual props are not sufficient, nor are they satisfactory, as I want to be able to SEE my work as I make it. I do not make models, first, or drawings. I propose to experiment with waxes, making them more durable, and with “outside armatures,” possibly of welded rod, building a sort of exoskeleton as I go along, within which my sculpture could be built, supplying it with supports, and suspension points, and giving strength and visibility (most important) to the work. Denser material (wood) has not proven to give sufficient visibility. These supports could be removed as the sculpture is cut apart for casting, and the pieces separately cast, being later assembled from diagrams and photographs, for final welding together.
I have found my bronze foundry most co-operative in any experimenting I have done, and would expect them to continue to be interested.
Due to the great expense of bronze casting, I feel it might be possible to make two or three pieces by my proposed method and I would probably make some smaller sculpture during the year, as well.
Any technique I might develop would be made available to any sculptor or other interested person.[1]
The past, the present, my visions, my memories, everything
I know and see, and what is true to my spirit are in my
work. My sculpture is a struggle to capture these thing [sic].
It establishes a dialogue. It is saying in images what I cannot
say in words. It contains contradictions. It is close to me
and it is remote. It speaks to me and it is dumb. It can
reveal myself to me and it can be closed. It is concerned
with my deepest feelings, and it considers the minutiae.
It speaks of what I know and see; what is actually there as
well as the unseen realities. Out of these ingredients new images
are made, and the cycle begins again. Each work gives birth to the
next. In the end no matter what it is, it is what I have to do.[2]
“I have a certain resentment against the idea that everything has to be large to be looked at.”[3]
“I work for my life now...and not for a fickle posterity.”[4]
[1]Dehner, Dorothy. “Plan.” Dehner Papers: Writings, Box 4, Folder 57, (Reel 796, Scan 11846), ca. 1976. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
[2]Dehner, Dorothy. Dehner Papers: Writings, Reel 796 (Scan 11855), ca. 1966, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Also see Judith McCandless. “Life-line in Sculpture,” Independent Study in Art History at Skidmore College, 1974. Archives of American Art, Dehner Papers, Reel 1269, Scan 11966.
[3]Judith McCandless, “Life-line in Sculpture,” Independent Study in Art History at Skidmore College, 1974. (Reel 1269) Scan 11981.
[4]Letter from Dorothy Dehner to David Smith (n.d.) Quoted by Judith McCandless in “Life-line in Sculpture,” Independent Study at Skidmore College, 1974. (Reel 1269) Scan 11986.
An undated document, labeled simply Plan, exists among Dorothy Dehner’s papers in the Archives of American Art.[1] She probably wrote this artist’s statement after she had begun collaborating with her bronze founder Joel Meisner in the mid-1960s.[2] Dehner was the first artist to allow Meisner to use his revolutionary self-venting plaster during the burn-out phase of the lost-wax casting process, an experiment during which she risked losing a unique positive.[3] The success of this process allowed her greater freedom in constructing elaborate bronzes, and her founder a spectacular advance in casting work by other artists, greatly increasing his business opportunities. By 1965 Dehner sought to cast more ambitious bronze sculptures than she had ever dared to design in preparation for her ten-year retrospective at the Jewish Museum.[4]
For the previous decade Dehner had worked on small forms like chess pieces, casting them at the Sculpture Center, then in Manhattan, a not-for-profit workshop and gallery which itself has a proud history.[5] The Center evolved from the Clay Club, the brainchild of Founder Dorothea Denslow (1900-1971), a Brooklyn sculptor who had nurtured other artists in her own studio until the group organized itself loosely in 1928; subsequently, the Club opened a studio and gallery space in an abandoned carriage house on West 8th Street in 1930.[6]
Not until 1944 did the Club rename itself the Sculpture Center and move to another carriage house at 167 East 69th St. in Manhattan. There, Denslow and her associates renovated the space themselves to shape it into a fully functioning resource for three-dimensional artists:[7]
The first floor of the Sculpture Center was devoted to
exhibition space, and the second floor to clay, ceramics,
and stone carving. When a student...was recognized as
being serious she was allowed upstairs to the third floor
to learn to weld and cast metal.[8]
Only during the 1950s, when Dehner moved to the New York City area, did she become such a serious student; events in her rather complicated life intervened before she found this exceptional source of artistic support.
Dehner had felt the urge to sculpt from her youth. From her first day at the Art Students League of New York in 1926, in fact, she had sought sound modernist instruction in sculpture, but never found it until the 1950s. When she was married to David Smith and living in Bolton Landing, she was so intimidated by his powerful artistic presence that she had hidden her few modest waxes in the kitchen icebox or destroyed them lest he discover them.[9]
After Dehner divorced Smith in 1952 and moved to Rockland County, she frequently commuted into the city where she soon discovered Atelier 17 on East 8th Street, the printmaking studio established by Stanley William Hayter. On Dehner’s first day there, she encountered printmaker and sculptor Louise Nevelson who became Dehner’s close friend for decades.[10]
Having developed an exquisite sense of line through years of pen-and-ink drawing, Dehner immediately transferred her drafting skills to engraving with a burin, claiming that the exhilaration she then felt was like driving six white horses.[11] For the next few years, she threw herself into printmaking, establishing another means of self-expression.[12] Dehner’s deep need to sculpt still unsatisfied, by 1955 she and Nevelson had begun working in clay at the Sculpture Center. At first they worked alongside Lin Emery, a contemporary sculptor who, inspired by David Smith’s work, wanted to weld.[13] Nevelson, as a Constructivist working in wood and found objects, probably did not frequent the Center for very long. Dehner and Emery, however, moved as advanced students to the third floor of the Center, where the facilities allowed Emery to weld and Dehner to cast small waxes into bronze.[14]
Dehner’s marriage to Ferdinand Mann in 1955 meant a change of address to 33 Fifth Avenue. This classic six Manhattan apartment afforded her a second bedroom which the artist immediately tuned into a private studio-a luxury she rarely had enjoyed during twenty-five years of making art-and she continued to sculpt small forms.[15] She probably continued to use the Sculpture Center’s foundry. As her dedication remained intense and her productivity increased, she acquired a Union Square studio in 1957, affording her the space she needed to launch a professional career as a sculptor.[16]
Creating increasingly intricate sculptures in softened wax, Dehner faced the intractable problem of stabilizing gravity-defying elements without an internal metal armature. Her aesthetic led her to create delicate forms with attenuations reaching out into space with no visible means of support. Her work-lyrical and often exciting because it was contrary to expectations and to the laws of physics-was a founder’s worst nightmare.[17] She became increasingly frustrated at the limitations of current technology.
Meanwhile, Joel Meisner, who had acquired an MFA from Columbia U., was working part time as a researcher/technician for Avnet-Shaw Casting, a firm mainly interested in large scale commercial production for items such as golf clubs. While experimenting in the company’s lab, Meisner developed a new investment formula for lost-wax casting, basically a self-venting plaster which eliminated the laborious, time consuming method of using a system of sprues and vents to eliminate air and to circulate molten metal during the casting process. Meisner thought that he could cast sculpture, as well as golf clubs, using this material. For a year Avnet-Shaw allowed him to research and perfect the product; then, Meisner left the company his formula for commercial use, but was himself free to use his revolutionary process to develop his own fine-art casting business.[18]
Early in his career as a founder, Meisner began collaborating with Dorothy Dehner; in fact, he acknowledged that she was the first artist who allowed him to experiment with her work. He began to achieve highly professional results, which allowed her to expand the scale of her sculpture in her idiosyncratic personal style. Meisner’s chief casting technician Elliot Gantz was able to take Dehner’s elaborate wax positives and transform them into bronze sculptures.[19] Below is Dorothy Dehner’s artist’s statement detailing issues concerning her artistic production: her method of working; her description of the character of her work; difficulties she encountered with the wax medium and her attempts to overcome them; and her vision for ultimately constructing monumental pieces of sculpture.
PLAN
I plan to work in my studio and to continue in the
sculptural idiom with which I have been engaged.
Because of special problems inherent in the material I
use (wax, for bronze casting), I have been frustrated
in planning sculpture larger than I now am able, by
this method, to make. I do not want to change the
material; the use of plaster or clay would entail a
radically different aesthetic approach. Like any
material, wax has special virtues necessary to my
aesthetic concepts.
My work is delicate in structure, and I want to
retain that delicacy in large pieces. The sculptor of
necessity is forever concerned with gravity; and in my
material, in larger pieces, the usual props are not
sufficient, nor are they satisfactory, as I want to be
able to SEE my work as I make it. I do not make models,
first, or drawings. I propose to experiment with waxes,
making them more durable, and with outside armatures,
possibly of welded rod, building a sort of exoskeleton
as I go along, within which my sculpture could be built,
supplying it with supports, and suspension points, and
giving strength and visibility (most important) to the
work. Denser material (wood) has not proven to give
sufficient visibility. These supports could be removed
as the sculpture is cut apart for casting, and the
pieces separately cast, being later assembled from
diagrams and photographs, for final welding together.
I have found my bronze foundry most co-operative in
any experimenting I have done, and would expect them to
continue to be interested.
Due to the great expense of bronze casting, I feel
it might be possible to make two or three pieces by my
proposed method and I would probably make some smaller
sculpture during the year, as well.
Any technique I might develop would be made
available to any sculptor or other interested person.[20]
Fortunately for Dehner, Meisner and Gantz together had the patience, dedication and technical expertise to help her realize her vision. Also, as Meisner and his team learned more about technique when working with an artist who took extravagant risks, other artists began to have confidence in the new method, allowing Meisner to prosper.[21]
During the mid-1960s, Meisner began making the rounds of artists’ Manhattan studios on Fridays, collecting their work for casting the following week. He always showed up last at Dehner’s, where she would insist that he relax in her wicker chaise while she served hot tea and cookies so they could chat a bit before getting down to business. Then, Dehner would present her wax creations resting on fiberboard (trademarked Masonite) bases about two feet square. She propped up her pieces with dowels, setting them at angles around each piece at particularly vulnerable points to gain as much stability as she could manage in order for them to be transported safely. Meisner could barely carry these constructions down the elevator and get them into the trunk of his compact car. Dehner requested that Meisner take Polaroid photographs of her pieces, a record of her work that he kept on file, along with a collection of their correspondence, for decades.[22]
Dehner and Meisner’s collaboration enabled her to expand her use of space and presentation in ways never possible before, thus freeing her imagination. Dehner’s installation of cast bronze sculpture in her retrospective Dorothy Dehner: Ten Years of Sculpture held at the Jewish Museum, March 11-April 11, consisted of fifty-eight pieces: twenty-three free standing sculptures; eleven wall sculptures; three hanging sculptures; and twenty-one small sculptures. Reviews were generally positive.[23]
Dehner continued to work in wax for the rest of the 1960s, expanding the scale of her pieces-her announced goal.[24]The letter below indicates the size of her sculptures as she envisioned them and also her concern about technical difficulties in constructing them:
Clearly, by 1966 Dehner was dealing with the technicalities of working on a monumental scale, and was uncertain even whether or not to create a maquette for large cast work, probably being fabricated in a shop other than Meisner’s. Her idea that she could create separate segments of a sculpture and then have those elements welded together was coming to fruition more fully than she ever could have imagined.
The title of Dehner’s solo exhibition Dorothy Dehner: Recent Bronzes at the Willard, November 15-December 10, 1966, suggests that the artist was searching for new imagery and new methods of production allowing her to work in an increasingly larger scale.[26] By 1968 Dehner and Meisner were well into production of her Ladder Series, a process in which she was fully engaged:
In 1970 Dehner exhibited her new ambitious works in two solo exhibitions: first at the Bernard M. Baruch Gallery, City University of New York, held in March which was followed by a show at the Willard Gallery, April 21-May 23.[28] Both exhibitions yielded disappointing results, critically as well as financially.
Discouraged from creating bronzes because the process remained expensive and sales at her Willard show were nil, Dehner wrote the following letter to Meisner at a low point in her career:
Continuing to create cast and welded bronzes, like Wellfleet with its segments welded together, Dehner participated mainly in group exhibitions throughout most of the 1970s.[30]
In 1974, Dehner’s beloved husband Ferdinand Ferdie Mann died. Also, she was experiencing severe heart trouble which necessitated open-heart surgery. Out of grief and, no doubt, considerable introspection, Dehner reassessed her sculptural ambitions, especially her arduous method of making sculpture. Instead of continuing to work exclusively in wax, she began working in wood that year, still using constructivist techniques.[31] With wood she was able to build the larger pieces she envisioned at a fraction of the cost, successfully exhibiting her new sculpture, together with drawings, at a solo exhibition at the Parsons-Dreyfuss Gallery from February 20 through March 10,1979.[32] Several years elapsed before she exhibited again, this time at A. Sachs, March 31 through April, 1983.[33]
During the mid-1980s Dehner’s deteriorating eyesight from cataracts and detached retinas, as well as the slow recovery process from eye surgeries, made detailed fitting and assembling of materials extremely difficult. Mildred Constantine, Dehner’s friend from 1934 until the artist’s death almost exactly sixty years commented: It was amazing to me the way she accommodated the blindness...the gradual diminution of sight, so utterly important to an artist...the way she was able to handle that was a source of utter amazement, but an indication of that inner strength....[34] Although Dehner had assembled a combination of cast and welded bronze, through the assistance of a fabricator, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, she only succeeded in creating truly monumental sculpture during the 1980s and early 1990s. At that point she began designing pieces executed in Cor-ten steel and other metals, once again working with the assistance of a fabricator.[35]
Mildred Constantine credited Richard Egan of Twining Galleries with the idea of Dehner’s taking geometric shapes from her Lunar Series of prints, which she executed in 1971-72 at Tamarind Institute of Lithography, and transforming these images into subjects for monumental sculpture.[36] Dehner’s process was typically inventive: she drew large shapes on paper; her fabricator would reproduce these shapes on Styrofoam sheets, cut them out and spray them black; then, he would hold them up to a white wall or against the light and Dehner would indicate how the shapes should be placed in relationship to each other. Retaining an excellent sense of figure/ground relationships, Dehner still could balance positive an negative spaces beautifully; therefore, when she indicated that a shape should be moved even a slight degree, it made a distinct improvement in the aesthetics of a piece, according to Meisner.[37]
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, in addition to being shown by Twining Gallery, Dehner’s large sculptures graced a number of corporate office buildings, minimalist in architectural style. Mildred Constantine, a consultant on art and architectural design during this period, recalled :
I was very ardent in my pursuit and support of her work
over the years. I think I was the person who got her into
one of the first corporate collections. She was in the AT&T
Collection; she was in the Union Camp Collection of New
Jersey and I was always right there looking out for her.[38]
Constantine was in a position to advocate placement of Dehner’s work in public collections throughout the United States and abroad. It was the first time that Dehner ever made a substantial amount of money from her work, and that greater acceptance buoyed her spirits in a difficult time.[39]
Dehner’s large, dramatic pieces are cast bronze, steel or aluminum, sometimes burnished and sometimes painted black.[40] It is fitting that the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, displays Dehner’s Sanctum with Window II (1990-1991) on its front lawn.[41] With this imposing sculpture’s installation, Dehner remains, spiritually and artistically, back in her beloved Adirondacks. Her sculpture’s prominence speaks of this courageous, determined woman at rest, at peace with herself and with her world, her aesthetic vision realized.
By Martha Lockhart Nodine
Dorothy Dehner’s Authorized Biographer
[1] Dehner, Dorothy. Artist’s Statements. Dehner Papers, Box 4, Folder 57, (Reel 1269), 1976. See Jennifer Meehan, A Finding Aid to the Dorothy Dehner Papers, 1920-1987 (bulk 1951-1987), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
[2] Personal Interviews of Dehner’s Founder Joel Meisner. Martha Lockhart Nodine, New York, October 31, 1995 and Boca Raton, Florida, August 2005.
[3] JM Interview. MLN, New York, October 31,1995.
[4] Marter, Joan. Chronology, Dorothy Dehner: Sixty Years of Art. Katonah, New York: Katonah Museum of Art, 1993, 62.
[5] http://www.sculpture-center.org/aboutHistory.htm
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Palmedo, Philip F. Lin Emery. Introduction by John Berendt. Manchester and New York: Hudson Hills Press, 32.
[9] Audiotape Dehner Interviews, MLN, 1994.
[10] Ibid. See link
[11] Ibid. See also http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85339/burin
[12] Ibid. See also Chronology Marter, 62.
[13] P. Palmedo, 138.
[14] P. Palmedo, 33. Note: Photo of Lin Emery working among Sculpture Center colleagues, 35.
[15] Dehner Interviews, MLN, 1994.
[16] J. Marter, Chronology, 62.
[17] JM Interview, MLN, 1995.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid. Also, note: Informal Telephone Interview of Elliot Gantz, (formerly Joel Meisner’s chief casting technician), MLN. Farmingdale, New York, August 2010. Mr. Gantz owns Elliot Gantz & Co., Inc., Fine Art Bronze Sculpture Casting Foundry, Farmingdale, Long Island, New York. Gantz bought Meisner’s foundry in 1995, when the latter retired and moved to Boca Raton. Mr. Gantz’s business has an extensive presence on the Web: http://www.elliotgantz.com
[20] Dehner, Dorothy. Plan. Dehner Dehner Papers, Writings, Box 4, Folder 57, (Reel 1269), 1976. AAA.
[21] JM Interview, MLN, 1995.
[22] Ibid. Note: Laser Copies of Polaroid Photographs and Letters from DD to JM, Dehner File, Joel Meisner & Co. Originals Lent by JM to MLN, October 31, 1995 and returned, November 1995. (Lazer copies of Polaroid images retained by Joan Marter and MLN.)
[23] Reviews and Catalog of Dehner’s 1965 Exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Courtesy of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts and the New York Public Library.
[25] Letter from DD to JM, November 16, 1966. Dehner File, Meisner & Co.
[26] Marter, Joan. Dorothy Dehner: Sixty Years of Art. List of Solo Exhibitions, 63.
[27] Letter from DD to JM, July 24, 1968, Meisner File.
[28] Marter, Joan. List of Solo Exhibitions, 63.
[29] Letter from DD to JM, June 13, 1970, Meisner File.
[30] Marter, J., Selected Group Exhibitions, 63.
[31] Marter, J., Chronology, 62. See also Dehner Chronology, Dehner Website.
[32] Marter, J., Selected Group Exhibitions, 63.
[33] Marter, J., Solo Exhibitions, 62.
[34] Audiotape Interview of Mildred Constantine by MLN, New York October 19, 1995.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid. See Marter, Joan. Dorothy Dehner: Sixty Years of Art, (Figs. 32-44), 38-46.
[37] JM Interview, MLN, 1995.
[38] MC Interview, MLN, 1995.
[39] Marter, J. Dorothy Dehner: Sixty Years of Art, (Figs. 47-59), 48-55.
[40] Ibid., (Fig. 56), 53.
The subject this afternoon is present day [sic] sculpture in America, and it must be plain that the slides we will see are but a small selection, as it would be impossible in one session to attempt to cover what has become an incredibly vast subject.
At the turn of the century there were relatively few sculptors in America, and those we had followed with few changes the tied aesthetic already worn out in Europe a century before. The revolutionary movements in painting, Impressionism, Post Impression [sic] and Cubism had little effect on America [sic] until a much later date. Cubism ignited the world of art, it was laughed at, scorned and finally accepted, but Cubist sculpture...what there was of it, Laurens, Picasso, Giocometti was scarcely known here and had little impact on our own artists. [sic] John Flanagan and Gaston Lechaise [sic] felt the strong wind blowing out of Paris and their work gave fresh life to sculpture in America.
Then French artists broke with academic tradition, painters from all countries flocked to Paris for inspiration and its traditional hospitality to artists, which had always welcomed expatiots [sic] and in this period of change and excitement the word was to be found in Paris and it was spread throughout the world. Not that the Cubist movement became dominant, but it served to break the mold of sugary Victorianism that pervaded French Academy sculpture.
It was not until the thirties [sic] that even a few Americans were working in a way that identified them with the European movements...Constructivists in Russia, Expressionists in Germany and Cubists in France. Alexander Calder began in the late twenties [sic] to construct the first mobiles. He lived in Paris at the time and was greatly influenced by the paintings of Miro. David Smith in the early thirties was a pioneer both aesthetically and in use of materials. His immediate influence came from Gonzales, a Spanish sculpture [sic] living in Paris who worked in forged and welded steel. It was not long before Smith had pushed aside boundaries set by Gonzales, and although he worked doggedly during the thirties and forties, it was not until the middle fifties that he gained recognition on a broad scale. Calder in his early Paris days was known only to other artists, and it is hard to believe that his now famous mobiles gained public acceptance slowly.
The mention of these two artists serves to point up the fact of how slowly the image of American sculpture developed...far slower than that of painting...and an even slower recognition of it by the public...a public that had long since taken Surrealism and Cubism to its bosom as long as it was a foreign import. Not until the fifties did the break come and American artists slowly and finally gained acceptance. Now, New York City is the unchallenged leader of the art world and the influence of its artists is felt in all countries. There is great emphasis now on sculpture, and many former painters are turning to sculpture.
We are creating an image, a visual language out of the spirit of our time. This of course has not been a conscious goal, but it is an inevitable one. This same thing has happened all over the world at different times, that some writers or artists in some geographical location found the words or the plastic expression that best identifies for posterity the presiding spirit of a given age. In our world of unprecedented and supreme scientific progress, a world that has produced atomic fission, a world that had produced the mechanistic civilization in which we live, a world of great and unreconcilable [sic] extremes, we are bound to create an art that anticipates this as well as reacts to it.
Many influences have gone into this art. The European tradition, the knowledge of the art of far places, Egypt, Asia, as well as a full knowledge of Primitive art. Only a generation or so ago our knowledge of primitive art was elementary, if it existed at all. Such objects were valued as curiosities or for their ethnological interest only. Until the Museum of Modern Art put on a show of African Sculpture in the thirties, this marvelous art had never been exhibited for its aesthetic interest. In this century a knowledge of this art is now taken for granted and is now in the main stream of influence along with the paintings of Leonardo and the sculpture of the acropolis. This knowledge has led us into new concepts of beauty that are basic to present day art...subtly, to be sure. Beauty does not have to be an idealization of man or the world in which he lives. Beauty can be found in distortion and in fantasy, and it can be found in a kind of brutality that we see in much of Primitive art. It was the French Cubists who first recognized African and Oceanic sculpture as art, and it was Matisse who found inspiration at an early date in Japanese prints, with their abstract concepts of color, planes, line and composition.
The scene in New York and in American sculpture has been changing and the emphasis has shifted dramatically within the last five years or so. We have had the development of Pop painting and sculpture, Kinetic sculpture, and Optical painting. Pop art is, if you wish, a movement of social comment. It celebrates the banal, the ordinary. It is cynical and anti art [sic], and non-art, with the tongue held well in cheek. Its shock element is essential to its existence. It IS a shock to be confronted by a four foot plastic hamburger, complete with ketchup. It is a shock to come upon a huge, blown-up square from a popular comic strip, with scarcely a change from the original, even to the benday dots of the reproduction process. One is staggered by a room full of Campbell Soup cans all carefully hand stenciled calling itself art. But after the first glance this art holds no interest. The large limp plastic typewriter is merely a gag, and the surprise is but momentary. This Pop attitude brings us close to the realm of theater. Art too, must be entertainment, and this ephemeral quality is essential to the validity of the idea. It represents the values of passing diversion rather than aiming to elevate the beholder. In any case in a world of shifting and uneasy values, this art is probably inevitable. It is difficult to escape the destructive pressures of our time.
As to Kinetic sculpture its chief contribution is the skillful and ingenious methods worked out to allow sculpture to move...usually by wind currents, the hand of the beholder or less frequently by concealed motors. (Calder used all these methods since the twenties and the thirties [sic]. The forms of Kinetic sculpture have offered nothing new. It is marvelously clever and often painted gaily. These new manifestations have been welcomed by museums and public alike, both ready for another smashing novelty.
There are many subdivisions of these art movements and there are many independent artists involved in working and searching for new ways and means within what may be called a classical framework. There is a large and encouraging output of art in America that does not fit into the POP school. We have hundreds of artists working and producing who are nationally and internationally known for original and valid work, and a huge public informed and sophisticated that make up their audience.
With four hundred galleries in New York as against fewer than a hundred only ten years ago, it is quite impossible to get around to see everything. Following major and minor trends is a full time job. Artists and galleries alike emerge, disappear, and sometimes survive. Competition is fierce. The cult of youth, that is pat of the cultural attitude of America makes the new-comer [sic] more than welcome. This has its negative aspects as well as a few positive ones. It used to be that the artist didn’t even want to exhibit his work until he had achieved some maturity, both in age, and in quality of his work. Now many young artists don’t even feel the necessity of attending an art school, and they feel entitled to an exhibition as soon as they have enough picutres [sic] to put on a show... Premature exhibiting can be harmful to the artist in the long run, and it certainly is confusing to the public already awash with much too much. However, it is good to know, when you are a young artist that your struggle is not endless, that there is a possibility of recognition, that you will not have to go the rounds forever with your work and that there is an art public willing to look. The door is much farther open for the young artist than it ever was before.
A detailed understanding of why our present day sculpture looks the way it does, is a question for the art historian, the sociologist as well as the artist to answer. Concepts of worth change with time, new materials that were never before thought of in relation to sculpture, are now commonplace. Welded steel, plastics and new tools to fashion these new materials, have all answered an always present need for change if not advancement. Our time demands that our transportation will not be a Roman chariot or the Viking ship, and so our time demands its art to reflect its age...both in aesthetic concept and its use and working of new materials. Most people who know about art or who respond to it feel that for better or for worse we have caught the spirit of our age, and that the new and daring techniques and equally new and daring concepts have marked this art as unique to our time, and much of it is strong and beautiful.
Because there are so many sculptors today, there will be many omissions in the work that we will see today. I have omitted POP sculpture because I want to emphasize work that I feel has a more permanent value. Also, some slides were not available. But we will see some of my choices, and in looking at this work we are all using what we know of the history of art as our guidepost. We try to achieve a fresh and unprejudiced eye when we see something called contemporary art, that is not yet part of Art History, and we learn that we find a basis for aesthetic preference through familiarity with the art of the past.
We can make choices in the art of the present but scarcely hard and fast judgements, for art, to find its place in time must have art ahead of it as well as behind it. There is of course no necessity for hard and fast judgements, or pressure to hold fixed attitudes. There is a need for a fresh and unprejudiced eye, and for our antennae to be out to feel for an art that has the pulse and rhythm of our time.
Until contemporary times there were never as many directions and new ideas as we can find in contemporary sculpture. Truly it is an age of something for everybody. There is a great quantity of art and happily never as many people willing to look and learn. Whether we like it or reject it, we must view it in a serious spirit, it is related to us in the living present...and it tells the story of our own time.
Calder................Spiny
Campbell................Levitation
Teller................Figure
King................Shirley in a Bikini
Smith................Hudson River Landscape, Tank Totem
Kohn................untitled
Sugarman................ "
Rickey................Homage to Bernini
Lipton................Growing
Nevelson................First Personage
Chinni................Inception
Wilson................untitled
Seley................Louis XIV, The Boys from Avignon
Grippe................Three Musicians
Ferber................Large Roofed Sculpture
Stankiewicz................Little Machine
Albert................Man
de Rivera................untitled
David Smith and I first met John and Elinor Graham in 1929 at the Art Students League. Mrs. Tomas Furlong, Executive Secretary and Mother Superior (Weber as she was called) was about to become a victim of a group at the League, headed by Mildreth Meiere, who wanted Weber out! Friends of the Furlongs and students who were loyal to her came to her defense in a hopeless battle to outmaneuver the ousters, and it was thus that David and I came to know the Grahams as they too were loyal to Weber. Graham and Elinor had been students of [John] Sloan a number of years before and, as ex-students, the Grahams supported her.[2]
Shortly after that David and I were invited to the Grahams’ house uptown for dinner. Their son David was an infant, very Russian looking even at six months or so, golden hair and knowing blue eyes. This was the first of many meetings that lasted through the years of our close friendship. After we went up to Bolton Landing to live all year around, in 1940, we saw little of Graham. David felt somewhat betrayed by him as it was as an abstract artist that Graham interested David, and, when Graham wrote that he was through with abstract art, that Picasso was a charlatan, that the way of salvation was through realism, David felt alienated. Graham had encouraged David from the very beginning, and supported his stand as an abstract artist, and when Ivan withdrew this support, David felt very let down. There was still little support for abstract art at that time…about 1940…. One held one’s beliefs quite alone, with little public encouragement, and held dear the support of one’s friends.
Actually, there were also other reasons that brought our friendship to an end. We lived in Bolton Landing, Graham in N.Y. Graham had married Constance Wellman in 1935, and we never felt as comfortable with Constance as we did with Elinor. I guess we also resented Constance, as we had loved Elinor, and felt that our little quartet was broken up. Another reason was that our relationship was that of master and student to some extent.
Graham was a tremendously educational person in our lives. His knowledge seemed endless, his taste impeccable, his company alive and sparkling, his ideas challenging. Graham’s faculty for leaving his painting to take jaunts to Paris, Yugoslavia etc. dismayed us. He spent months on end, collecting, months without taking up a brush, and months when he seemed to feel that painting was not important. We began to feel that he was not interested in being a painter. That was about equal to a Communist Party member resigning from the Party…in other words, unthinkable.
In any case, after 1940 we had little or no contact with Ivan until in 1952, after I had left Bolton Landing, I met him at Max Granick’s frame shop. A few days before that I had been at Max’s shop and saw a huge crate standing in the middle of the floor. Obviously it was a French made crate, and some of the boys from the frame shop were breaking it open. I watched as they started taking out objects: mirrors, bronze sculptures, African sculptures, other objects d’art and [I] said, Only John Graham could have collected these things. Max was standing there, [and said], Of course. Didn’t you know that John is my partner? Well, of course, I didn’t know it, but a few days later I met Graham there.
We gave each other a big hug and kiss. It was like old times. We went into Max’s office and had a drink, and talked and talked. I told him I had left David and Bolton Landing. He was surprised and saddened. I, too, felt terribly sad and broken apart. About a year later I met Graham on Fifth Ave. He was on his way to Max’s and I to the Willard Gallery. He told me that he had gotten married to Mrs. Souvendero [sic] [Leo] Castelli’s mother-in-law…and added delightedly, She is an old woman but the only sexually satisfactory woman I’ve ever had. I congratulated him and was happy that this remarkable man had such life and gusto and I can still see his smile…tight lips, teeth showing and a diabolic twinkle in his sharp eyes. Sometime later, perhaps two or three years, he told me, when I again met him on Fifth Ave., that his wife had died. He was sad about it, truly grieved, but he brightened when he told me he had inherited her house in Southampton, twenty two rooms, all heated, he said. I guess to a Russian of old Imperial days, when small fires were made in grates or big stoves, 22 rooms in Southampton, centrally heated, seemed pretty fabulous.
That was the last time I saw Graham. He had not seen David for years. I always kept up my friendship with his wife Elinor who lived in Baltimore, and learned from her that she and Ivan had kept up a correspondence till the end.
But the first years of our friendship were perfect. He [Graham] was a tremendous influence in our lives. David and I had bought a farm at Bolton Landing in 1929. The next summer we spent all our weekends there (David was working then for A.G. Spalding), and we worked heroically on the house, painting, plastering and putting what was little more than a totally beaten up, a slightly raffish salt-box into some kind of livable shape. Graham spent that summer [1930] in Paris, and Elinor spent her summer (she was teaching art in N.Y.) at the Furlong’s farm, Golden Heart. Little David Graham had an attack of infantile paralysis and was in a hospital in Baltimore in a cast. Elinor went back and forth to see him.
Elinor painted. She was talented, but Graham didn’t think much of any woman’s painting, or of women either, for that matter. Elinor supported him and the child by her teaching, and Graham added to the income by collecting things in Paris and selling them in N.Y. Elinor was then quite serious about her painting but it was hardly an atmosphere of encouragement that surrounded her. Graham, about that time, was delivering long monologues about the inferiority of women; and, when he tired of that, he delivered a series of short barbs, no less virulent. I found this exceedingly frustrating. I had never in my life heard such out-and-out sharp and nasty remarks. I was only able to listen, if not [to] accept his ideas because they were worded so intriguingly and as if I, or any woman present, was perhaps an exception to his rule.
When summer was at an end, Graham and Elinor took a new apartment at 135th St. and Riverside Drive. Elinor went back to her teaching job and Graham had a few students in his apartment. In the spring [1931] Elinor bought a farm in Bolton. The house was not in as hopeless a condition as ours and there wasn’t a tremendous amount of work to do. Graham painted murals around the dining room over the wallpaper that was there: scenes of Paris, done in an abstract manner, in sort of a Braque style, low-keyed palette, earth colors, and then some clowns, in a more Picassoesque vein. (These were promptly painted over when the Seeleys took over the farm a few years later.)
That was a wonderful summer for us all. David and I spent the whole summer up at Bolton, and the Grahams came every Sunday night for dinner. I loved to cook for Graham as he was most appreciative…and we always had a huge platter of hors d’oeuvres, as well as meat, home grown corn or other vegetables from our garden. Graham was very generous. He gave us two paintings and innumerable objects that he had collected: a huge spur, a huge clock hand, an African knife, a wire head of himself that Calder had made of him, a number of drawings of a horse series he worked on and many other things.
The long summer evenings on the lawn at our farm in Bolton are among my richest memories. The conversation never flagged; it was always stimulating. Graham would go off on wild tangents and Elinor would gently pull him back with her mordant wit and good sense. We would put little David to bed early, roll him in a blanket, and when Ivan picked him up, he would murmur, my little marzipan pig, David all rosy and sleepy and golden haired.
Graham built a pershtubitshka around the [his] house, a Russian idea, built of stones and cement it was to sit on…one’s back leaning against the house. He had a bed built for David, with a hard board bottom and only a quilt as a mattress. This was to help his back, although there were no obvious injuries resulting from David’s bout with polio. Also, there was the idea that a boy should be brought up in a rather Spartan way…no coddling. Graham used to throw him in the cold lake water to harden him.
Graham drew a great deal that summer, sparkling black ink drawings, small, perhaps 8 x 10, and all of the horse, a medieval horse with armor, rearing, prancing, standing. David said, Well, I guess that’s the way I will work, take a subject and exhaust it, then go on to something else. And it was true, from that time on, he did many series [serial] works, but David was not sculpting yet. These ideas applied only to painting thus far.
The next fall David and I went to the Virgin Islands. We wanted to be like Gauguin and find a paradise in a tropical climate. We had just read Noa Noa and were learning more and more about the lives of the artists. Graham and Elinor went back to N.Y. and we didn’t see them until the next summer. Graham had gone to Europe again and had brought back a Gonzales sculpture for us. He had bought three altogether. He said they were 15 dollars each. He gave one to us and one to Elinor. I don’t know what happened to the other one. We traded our Matisse lithograph (our first art purchase) for one of Graham’s paintings, one of his Hat Rack Series–red, blue and black on a white ground.
It was during our stay in the Virgin Islands that David began to sculpt. His first sculpture I still have, a tiny torso of a woman, practically an objet trouve, as he had little carving to do, except to emphasize the forms of breasts and buttocks. His second sculpture was a head of a Negro. This was about five inches tall. He painted it a purplish brown. Thus his concept of painting sculpture came along very early in his experience of carving. When we got back to Bolton Landing in the summer the Grahams were there.
Graham had many copies of Cahiers D’Arts which were freely available to us. The sculpture of Gonzales was pictured. Graham explained how it was made. David said, I can do that. I learned to weld in the Studebaker factory. His [Graham’s] many stories of the Paris art world intrigued us. He knew everybody or so it seemed to us: Andre Breton, Gide, Paul Eluard, Brunel, Picasso (whose exhibition he went to see twice) and many others. David made several sculptures in lead, soldering it. They were small, eight or ten inches [tall]. One, a bird, was a combination of white coral and lead, two others all lead. He gave Graham one, and one he traded with Dr. William Moscowitz of Brooklyn (for medical services). Graham admired these sculptures, which were figurative, though abstract in treatment. Once more he had brought us many gifts from Paris, and once again our long summer was full of the delights of real companionship.
When the Grahams were in town, they took a new place near Lexington Ave., in the Nineties. I believe it was 92nd Street. We stayed at their house while we were trying to find an apt. in Brooklyn Heights. The Heights were then both charming and had low rents. We located at 124 State Street. Our friends, Lucille and Edgar Levy, old friends from the League, artists, lived on Montague Street. They also were involved in the fight at the League over Miss Weber. In fact it was at that time that the Levys met the Grahams, but our close friendship with the Levys really began when we started to live in Brooklyn Heights. Of course we were all together in this friendship.
Graham had gotten a teaching job about this time at Wells College, N.Y. He commuted to this job. They [the Grahams] had many parties and introduced us to Calder at that time, and I particularly remember a French couple, very swank, who had a gallery in Paris and also started one in N.Y. who were friends of Ivan’s. After a year or so, the De Mottes went back to Paris as the Depression was in full blossom then. The atmosphere at [the] Grahams was warm and cordial. We had whiskey despite Prohibition, good meals with Elinor’s Southern cooking: spoon bread, fried chicken, roast pork, etc., spiced with some Russian ideas of Graham’s.
Graham’s teaching experience at Wells was a final chapter in his life with Elinor. He fell in love with a young girl there, a daughter of one of the trustees. I remember telling me how well groomed she was, how pretty. All this was excruciatingly hard on Elinor, for much of that sort of conversation took place in front of her. He had asked her to marry him. This was the last straw for Elinor. They were at our house in Brooklyn, [since] we had a date to go out for dinner in the neighborhood. As we walked along, David and I behind Elinor and Ivan, they began to quarrel, at least Ivan did. Finally, he began to hit her violently, I tried to interfere and David grabbed me and pulled me back forcibly, saying that we shouldn’t interfere. I felt horrible. Elinor was being beaten and we were supposed to look on calmly, or at least like something in a movie. We were close to our house. Elinor was bruised and had a terrible black eye. David went out for some ice; after many hours they left. The next thing I heard was that Elinor decided not to live with him any longer, and had to get a court order to keep Ivan from bothering her.
David and I went to court with Ivan. David and I had no partiality between Elinor and Ivan as friends, but the art bond between David and Graham prevailed. The girl from Wells College refused his proposal. She had better sense about this than he [did]. We saw the letter on pale blue stationery, neatly written in a restrained hand. I wondered at the time how this bourgeois little girl could have kept him interested outside of her good grooming.
Graham was fired from his job at Wells, perhaps over the girl or other reasons. He told us that he had put up a still life in class. A guitar was a central object. One girl protested, Oh, I just can’t draw your old guitar. Graham said, and I quote, ‘You can draw anything, a guitar, a lamp, a bottle or a water closet.’ That did it. The girl stalked out. It was about 1933 or ’34, the new freedom had not arrived, Wells was a conservative college and the little girl was outraged. It all ended by Graham’s being dismissed. The incident of Graham hitting Elinor on the street followed a short trip he made to Europe after his dismissal [from] Wells. He was not painting in this period except for some things he did at the farm the previous summer, and some, a few, at home. Elinor’s decision to leave Graham was made suddenly, although it had probably been simmering for some years.
With the collapse of his romance with the Wells girl, [and] the rejection by Elinor, it was a difficult time that he [Graham] had gotten himself into. Elinor finished out her year at school in N.Y., then went to Baltimore to teach at Bryn Mawr, a prep school in that area. Graham went into what he called the monastery. This was a shabby apt. in a house which I think was in the Twenties which housed a number of old refugee Russian Orthodox monks. It was a mean existence. We felt immensely sorry for Ivan. Things were never the same after that: he was deeply depressed, did not paint, and lived in that horrible place. We visited him there a few times, but mostly it was he who came to Brooklyn to our place, a warm apartment and friendly meals with trusted friends. Once we visited Ivan at his monastery. It was bitter cold, snow was lying for weeks on the streets, frozen like iron. Ivan’s room was unheated. He had a bowl of snow on his chest of drawers…to freshen the air, he said…for the room, a bit lower than the sidewalk was musty and clammy.
It was during this time that the Levys started acquiring African sculpture. Graham’s eye was infallible. I never saw a thing he collected that was not absolutely right. The pieces he sold the Levys were excellent. Graham had been making a collection of African sculpture for Frank Crowninshield in the early Thirties. Crownie wanted it mounted and David did the mounting. This took almost an entire winter. It was marvelous to have all those things in our house. I regretted it deeply and felt deprived when they all had to go back to Mr. Crowninshield.
Graham took us up to Crownie’s apartment for cocktails. He was such a marvelous example of a real American gentleman [of] the old school, an aristocrat with a genuine interest in art. His apartment was full of paintings: Segonzacs all over the place, Marie Laurencins in the bathroom and bedroom, African sculpture on shelves on the living room walls. We had a very good time; Graham [had] brought Gorky and Edgar and Lucille Levy to that party too; and Crowninshield complimented David Boy as he called him [Smith] on the ingenious mountings of his collection. Later we brought several large crates of African sculpture that Graham had brought in Europe when we were there, in on our steamship ticket. Mr. Crowninshield was grateful and gave me a beautiful ivory King’s bracelet from his collection. Graham had previously given me a Prince’s bracelet of ivory because it was small enough to keep on my arm.
We had many interesting evenings at our place on State Street. The Levys were often present and often we went to their house. Graham would deliver himself on all subjects, art, politics–he was becoming quite radical at this time. He was interested in the John Reed Club, Marxist literature, and one night he brought David and me there [to a meeting of the Reed Club]. A discussion was on about abstract versus realistic art. A number of paintings were ranged about the hall of both schools. Typically the proletariat was unrepresented. The artists were mostly refugees from the middle class that they had disowned. One artist got up and said we should paint pictures that taxi drivers could understand. This was wildly contradicted by a vocal minority who [asked] how could the intellectuals ever lead a revolution if the proletariat didn’t understand their works. Gorky got up, cleared his throat and said slowly, Why don’t you just teach them to shoot? This brought down the house, everybody laughed, [and] the meeting broke up.
Graham was still depressed over his break and subsequent divorce from Elinor. At the court hearing previously mentioned, instead of answering the judges’ questions, Graham pulled out a sheet of paper and began to read a statement about …his ten years of happily married life with Elinor…. The judge silenced him before he finished. Since Elinor was through, what was the point? He was a cruel man in many ways. He would say cutting and sarcastic things, often especially to women….designed to wither. He would denigrate a woman’s appearance, her ideas, her very act of breathing. I’m sure it was miserable for Elinor much of the time. Elinor had to work hard to take care of little David, keep house and keep her job at the school and support, for the most part, whatever ménage they had. Once, as we were sitting around, I asked Elinor about her work. She started to describe it, and Graham broke in: Oh, it’s a very easy job. She has nothing to do …., whereupon Elinor broke out, Why do you always underestimate everything I do? It was all conducted in anger. Elinor was absolutely good-natured all of the time, but Graham would pick and pick until he started a fight.
Graham soon acquired a woman friend after Elinor’s departure. He said she was a real nut. She sold material from door to door and that was how he met her, [and she] knitted Ivan socks and sweaters in a fantastic combination of colors. He treated her like a combination idiot and favored slave from darkest Russia.
He also met a woman doctor, a psychiatrist, who gave him some help. He told me many things about his past in Russia; [for example], he told me he was born in a tree, not of human parents. The psychiatrist gave him some intellectual understanding of what his life patterns had been, but essentially he felt, and I agreed with him, that he was untreatable, not a likely candidate for getting his jig-saw puzzle of his life into logical form.
He was more and more taken up with Marxism in his interpretation of world politics. It was a very political time. Artists were searching for answers to the dilemma too. This was a long time before the art boom. Nobody sold anything. Artists either worked at jobs as soda jerks, teachers in settlement houses (respectable schools and colleges had not yet employed artists in residence), and very few people sold any paintings if they were the least bit modern. In those days, no one thought of having a one-man show when they were twenty-five. The market was vastly different then that now. The artist looked for a way out politically.
Graham was a friend of Stuart Davis, Arshille [sic] Gorky and other artists, most of whom had an interest in the abstract movement, at least the modern movement. In those days anything that wasn’t out-and-out academic was modern to a degree. When he met Rothko (then Marcus Rothkowitz) Rothko was painting in a sort of German Expressionist style. Pollack’s painting was influenced by the Mexican School, then very prominent, and well thought of by the MoMA critics and reviewers. Gorky had not found himself in a definitive style. Graham said he copied everybody. David was the only out-and-out abstractionist that was in that group, at least that I knew. When Jean Xceron, whom Ivan had known in Paris, came to N.Y., he was another dedicated abstractionist. Graham had a group of Russian friends that he kept a little separate from his American artist friends. But he did take us to meet Vasilief, and he brought Berluik to our house, and one night at a party at Vasilief’s house, we met Max Granick, who was later to become Graham’s partner.
We spent the summer [of 1935] at Bolton as we often did, and decided to go to Europe in the fall. We told Graham of our decision, which was a big one, since we planned to stay away for nine or ten months. Meanwhile, Graham had met an attractive American girl named Constance Wellman. Connie was rather a conundrum to us all, although we didn’t meet her till we got to Paris. He married her while we were at the farm and they went immediately to Paris.
He [Graham] met us at the station, Gare St. Lazare, smiling, welcoming, and [he] couldn’t wait to begin showing Paris to us. We did all of this the first day–before we went to the hotel. He immediately took us to private collections of African sculpture and to Dr. Jouvet’s house. He had a wonderful collection that included a couple of Acropolis maidens and primitive art as well as modern paintings.
Then, he took us to Feneon’s house. M. Feneon was lying ill in a room completely plastered by African sculpture, which Mme. F. urged us to look at. Other rooms held, what Graham said was, the largest collection of African spindles in the world. The house for many years had been a sort of refuge and dining place for hungry artists. In payment they would leave a painting occasionally. The halls were lined with Braques, Picassos, Des Fresnayes, Legers and others of this period. They, as well as the African sculpture, were for sale too. We were offered a Braque for $500, which, later, was sold to a Canadian museum for many times that sum.
Ivan took us also to the elegant apartments of the former French Premier. It was all done in what is now Classic Modern. The great living rooms were lined with pale pigskin, with pale rugs on the floors and a marvelous collection of French modern painting surround[ing] us at every turn.
Then, we went to his hotel, the Medicale, on the Rue Fourbourg St. Jacques. What a mad house that was! It was originally meant to be a hospital for unorthodox treatment of disease. I understand that medicinal herbs, diet, etc. was the treatment. The doctor was also head of the hospital-hotel. I suppose they didn’t have enough patients to fill up the rooms so they took in strays and oddballs. Graham loved it because the walls were all painted white; therefore, we dispensed with the horror of French wallpaper.
There were large glass balcony windows from ceiling to floor, which provided beautiful light. Campigli and other artists lived there, and, I believe, at one time Stuart Davis had a studio there. The main entrance to the hotel-hospital was filled with an enormous car belonging to the doctor and far too precious to be left on the street. A large open shaft centered the building. From the roof and from beams hung ropes, ladders, and steps crawled up the sides. This was all material for the training of mountain climbing, which was another sideline. The elevator bore a sign ne march pas all the time we were there, hot water was on one hour each day, few of the johns worked and those [were] of the most primitive, squatting kind. It was typical of Graham that he had found such a place. It was a horror, but yet, it was marvelous for our purposes: it had light, air and plain walls and it was well located.
We went up to his studio to meet Constance. She was pretty and pink with lovely blond hair, and she spoke with what Graham called a ruling class accent. She had been a receptionist at Conde Nast publications. She always had a huge vase of American Beauty roses on her desk and was called The Duchess by her colleagues. I never got to know Constance, really. I felt she was always playing a role; and, although she was completely friendly, we never thought she was there, perhaps a harsh judgment prejudiced by our great regard for Elinor.
Graham knew everything about [collecting art in] Paris. He knew who had what, how much it cost, who first owned it and who was trying to buy it. He had a real collector’s zeal, and would go out early in the morning and not come back till evening each day. At that time he was collecting for Frank Crowninshield, as well as buying for himself. The months we were in Paris were busy ones. We were with Graham every day, and every day he would squire us around showing us all sorts of places–not in Baedeker.
At night we would all go out together for dinner. Constance always was dressed elegantly. She wore six or eight African ivory bracelets on her arm and, with great ceremony, would take them all off and put them on the table before she sat down, as she rightly said she couldn’t eat with them on…they were too heavy. She would then divest herself of her fur, [a] neckpiece, small cape or whatever, and plunk it down on her chair to sit on. In this way, she instructed me, you never have to have your furs insured. She was a bird. And I didn’t even have a cat skin.
Graham had become quite a food faddist. He and Constance had a garlic period, when they would each have a small dish of garlic next to their plates and which they would chew through during the course of the meal. They also had an enema period. This was supposed to have some relationship to Zen, and was part of a ritual of cleansing the body. They always made their own yoghurt and small dishes of this were always being cultured in their kitchen.
The art that Graham took us to see was always of great quality. It was thrilling to us to be exposed to so much beauty and majesty and we were very conscious of the privilege of seeing, through Graham, so much that would have been closed to us otherwise. About that time Louis Carre had decided to have an exposition of Benin Bronzes in America. Graham was a friend of his and was helping Carre write the catalogue. Graham’s English, while fluent and quite good, and with a terrific range of vocabulary, was rather out of syntax, but Carre had asked Graham to help his secretary in this job. Mlle. Jingle Bell we called her because of a slight and rather enchanting speech difficulty that give her words a jingle bell sound. She had been well educated at an English university, but, because she was a French woman, neither Carre nor Graham trusted her. So finally we were called in, and we worked in rearranging words and sentences after we assured M. Carre that we had both had college training in America, especially in English. It was a delightful chore. We spent long days looking at Carre’s collection and enjoying his house. It was an apartment built by Le Corbusier on the Rue Nungesser et Coli. Corbu also lived there. It was quite a beautiful building and the apartment was light and airy and everything the usual Paris apartment was not. The elevator, however, held exactly two persons, so we always had to go up in relays.
Being so intimately involved with African sculpture, and [with] an unusually fine collection to boot, I was deeply impressed and moved by this great art. Carre must have had at least fifty Benin Bronze heads. When discussing his American show he and Graham decided on the prices he would ask. They averaged $250 for each head. At that he sold very few and the trip to New York at that time was a dismal disappointment. Of course, he wasn’t selling them in Paris either, or he would never have come to America. The French artists of that period and before, who collected African sculpture, paid very little for it. Graham always said you could buy the very best African sculpture for under a hundred dollars (in 1935).
Later Carre started a gallery in New York, mostly contemporary French painting. David and I went up one afternoon. David brought photographs of his work, some of the things he showed at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery in 1938. Carre was not interested enough to even comment. Moreover, he was cool, and seemed not to remember that we had spent many days in his house working on his catalogue. He gave us an African sculpture at that time, a nice little Belgian Congo piece, but not at all great in any way. It is probably still in David’s estate.
From Paris we went to Brussels. Graham knew of a great collection of African sculpture that was being sold out, the De Hundt Collection. We bought a dozen or so things–all very fine, all rather small. From another collection we bought some African grass cloths, decorated with geometric designs in a dark brown raffia. This man had in his collection a large African head in the round–rather gross we thought–though it was only twenty dollars. Subsequently, we saw it in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum.
From Paris we went to Greece, spending the winter and spring there and didn’t see Graham and Constance until we came back to Paris. At dinner one night, Graham accused Constance of not being a good sport. Elinor, he said, was a good sport, a fine sport, the very best. He taunted Constance this way, before us, a number of times. It was his way. He had done it with Elinor.
We went back to Bolton in the summer and, when we came back to the city, the Grahams had taken an apartment on Grammercy Park. A bit later they moved to Brooklyn Heights on Joralemon Street, near the Levys and near to us. Again we saw quite a bit of each other and there were many pleasant evenings.
During all this period, I do not remember Graham painting at all. He was totally involved with collecting, or so it appeared. After a year or so, Graham moved back to Manhattan, and he and Constance took a very Constance type place near Fifth Ave., uptown, perhaps about the Seventies. It was a parlor floor in a large brownstone, furnished. He and Constance came frequently to Brooklyn during the winter months, but after another move downtown, in Manhattan, things seemed to be going very bad with them and we saw little of them. Finally, Graham told me they were getting a divorce. He accused Constance of smiling at men who gave her a look while they were walking along. It was a dreary business altogether. Constance subsequently married a potentate from Saudi Arabia. As with Graham, she became a left winger (indeed, he had written his biography a couple of years before, entitled From White to Red), so with the Saudi Arabian, she became a Muslim. He was with the U.N. I heard; she had a son and later a divorce, but I never saw her after she left Graham.
The biography Graham wrote was fascinating. I wonder whatever became of it. It was decorated with his own drawings done in colored crayon. I read a few chapters, which began with his being born in a tree, and his early memories of his childhood. In it he described his parents, his relationship to them and his specialness as a small child. He couldn’t get it published then, but perhaps now there would be a demand for it. He spent a great deal of time writing it. As far as I remember it was written in the middle Thirties. His book, Systems and Dialectics of Art was written in the Thirties too. I remember he listed our mutual friend Edgar Levy as an American who had good taste. Indeed it was true: Edgar’s eye was as good as Graham’s, and Ivan meant it as a great compliment when he could attribute that trait to another.
When we were in Greece we decided to go to the Soviet Union for a short visit. We found it impossible to get a boat from Greece, which would take us across the Black Sea and up to Odessa, so we went there by boat from London. Graham had given us a letter and the address of his first wife, Mme. Dubrovsky, so that was one of our first missions–to contact her. We got in touch with her son and Graham’s, Cyril. He was an architect, very charming, very like Graham in appearance and manner. He had lunch with us at our hotel in Moscow and the next day we journeyed on the new subway to go out and meet Mme. and her daughter Maria. As we neared the house, we noticed that a great fanfare had just finished up–a platform, speeches, flags and a band. Mme. D. told us it was a celebration for the naming of a street after her father who was Russia’s most famous mathematician.
Mme. Dubrovsky was an absolutely charming woman. She was about Graham’s age, 55 at that time in 1936. Her daughter Maria looked exactly like David Graham, Elinor’s son. Maria was 18 and studying to be a painter. They lived in the same house that Graham and his wife had occupied before the Revolution.
Mme. D. was a curator of icons at a museum in Moscow. I saw the icons there, but do not remember if it was at the Tretiakov Museum or another just devoted to icons. In any case there were hundreds and hundreds there all beautifully mounted and hung on walls of natural linen. She was an important art historian, although Graham had never told us that.
Though she and Graham had been both members of the petty nobility, apparently they had suffered little hardship. The house was charming, they had plenty of space and certainly both children had been well educated. Maria had brought along a friend who spoke perfect English that she had learned in school, but they all spoke French anyhow and, between us all, we had a lively day. They all asked about Graham. We told them he had married a young girl and that they were living in Paris. Mme. sighed and said, Well, M. Gra-ham always was a brave man. We took dozens of photographs in the handsome courtyard and, in true Russian fashion, had a rather splendid tea with hors d’eourves, and, as we left, Mme. D. said, You know, the children love their father. After all, I have told them only the good things about M. Gra-ham.
I told Ivan how impressed I was with his first wife. As a matter of fact, I guess all his wives were fairly remarkable and all good-looking. He said, Well, I never want to go back to her as she is an old woman now. Of course, he couldn’t go to Russia at all as he was persona non grata there, but he was very happy and very touched to have us contact his family and give him their news. I never met Graham’s other son Nicholas, by his first American wife Vera. Nicholas is now US Naval Attache to Finland.
When David and I went up to Bolton Landing to live permanently in 1940, I wanted to ask Graham and Constance up to spend a short vacation with us, but David preferred not to. He felt quite alienated from Graham and the letters, the few that there were, dwelt mostly on their aesthetic controversy. I regretted our break. I always had a great warm spot in my heart for Ivan despite all difficulties. He would dwell endlessly on the beauty of painting an ear, just as an ear should be painted. This irritated David, who was not concerned with ears, or eyes…only his own personality. Graham had great generosity and a great capacity for friendship…a special kind of friendship.
When John Mayer, who was a friend of Ivan’s and who showed his work in his gallery, phoned me and said Graham had died in a London hospital, he asked me to write something for a memorial pamphlet, I assented immediately. He asked David too, but David wrote to me, I gave my thanks to him when he was alive. I’m not too good at making posthumous bouquets. Apparently, others felt the same, as no pamphlet ever appeared.
[1] Dorothy Dehner. Notes on John Graham (not microfilmed), undated, ca. 1966. Dehner Papers, Writings: Series 4, Box 4, File 76, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. See Jennifer Meehan, A Finding Aid to the Dorothy Dehner Papers, Funding by the Terra Foundation for American Art, January 17, 2005.
[2]This unexpurgated version of Dehner’s memoir of John Graham which was never published was discovered in a unique vertical file at the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. It had not been microfilmed. Dehner wrote the essay on her personalized letterhead stationery using the Manhattan address from her marriage to Ferdinand Mann in 1955 until her death in 1994. All of Dehner’s words remain verbatim, however, paragraph breaks have been inserted when a change of topic suggests them, all emendations made in the interest of readability. MLN
Leonardo
Log No. BD-3
Received 25-10-68 1
Dorothy Dehner[2]
When John Graham died in a London hospital in 1961, I found it hard to believe. So persistent was his vitality, his love of life, so complete his involvement with his many interests, that it seemed he should go on forever. An important segment of my life had been filled by his friendship and the memory of his brilliant, contrary, witty, and sometimes exasperating personality, will always be with me.
It is hard to bring into focus all the many things that Graham was. His sophistication, his knowledge of the larger outlines as well as the minutiae of endless subjects, the pungent comments and individual perceptions delivered with a kind of aristocratic arrogance–all were enlivening.
David Smith and I were studying at the Art Students League in New York when we first met Graham and his wife Elinor in 1929. He came into our lives at exactly the right moment. He was a mature artist, and we were still students, whom he characteristically accepted as his peers. He brought the excitement of the French art world to us, a world he knew well from having lived and painted in Paris. He told us many things about it, through brief sharp comments on the scene. What he said was very much to the point and flavored with a caustic humor. He showed us copies of Cahier des Arts and other French art publications of which we had been unaware. He knew the painters of that time as well as the writers Eluard, Breton and Gide.
Here in America art was emerging with a new vitality and Graham had a sure sense of the artists who were to become an important influence in much that was to follow. His faith and his sensitive response to David’s work was of great importance to his development. He encouraged David constantly, and expressed admiration first for his painting and later for his sculpture. He said from the first that David was the best sculptor in America.
We were influenced by Graham’s knowledge of art history and of the art of the day. He seemed to have an instinct for quality, whether he was anticipating the development of a young artist or buying a Congolese ivory or a Renaissance mirror.
It was at the Graham apartment in the late Twenties that we saw his marvelous collection of African sculpture, which he spoke of informedly [sic] and handled lovingly. At that time in New York, African sculpture had been exhibited at the Museum of Natural History as an ethnic curiosity; only later, in 1935, was there an exhibit of that work at the Museum of Modern Art, which presented it as a valuable aesthetic contribution.
For two summers in the early Thirties John, Elinor, and their son David lived in Bolton Landing, New York. During that time we saw a great deal of them, for their old farmhouse was only a mile or two from our own. Graham had painted prolifically then, as evidenced in part by the murals on their dining room walls. No longer in existence–the subsequent owners of the farm promptly papered the walls with buttercups and daisies–most of the murals, done in subdued earth colors, showed scenes of Paris. These were partly abstract, with a good deal of drawing in black and white over dark brownish washes. Another mural depicted a Picassoesque Harlequin, painted in pale shades of tan, pink and blue. Fortunately, other works of the period have survived, for example the many black ink drawings of his equestrian series, each depicting an armored or otherwise decorated horse, usually standing in profile. In a small area–the paper used was approximately 8 x 10 inches–and with that limited subject matter, he managed to give each separate drawing interest and vitality.
We had always found Graham’s painting stimulating, fresh and exciting. The first of his works that I saw had been painted in Paris in 1930. They were completely non-figurative, consisting of rectangles and squares divided by thin vertical and horizontal lines. The colors were muted: soft browns, tans, whites, grays, pinks and blacks. These pictures were not large, even for that time, perhaps 20 x 30 inches and smaller. Earlier he had developed a concept he called Minimalism. I saw only three examples of this style. The backgrounds were dark brown, achieved, Graham said, by mixing all colors together. Across the background were strewn a few black lines, sometimes, broken. Other lines, less prominent, were in white, broken by occasional flakes of white on the dark background, The lines in the paintings were not mechanical but hand drawn; they had varying thicknesses of paint and soft edges. The quality of the edge was something that Graham spoke about constantly. He stressed the necessity of keeping the paint alive. He wanted his painting to evoke mystery and excitement and to produce emotional overtones–all qualities that he admired in African art. He courted the personal, the handmade, the distinctive touch of the artist. Above all, he wanted to present what he called enigma.
Russian born and bred though he was, Graham had an amazing capacity for fitting himself into what must have been a totally alien environment. He was completely at home in New York, Paris or anywhere else he chose to go, Unlike Tcheltichew, who came from a similar Russian background and who chose as associates the rich, the elegant and the fashionable, Graham gravitated instinctively to the artists rather than the patrons, to the creators rather than the appreciators. Among his friends were Stewart [sic] Davis, Jackson Pollock and David Smith, as well as the artists who had come from Russia such as Gorky [sic, Gorky was Armenian], Burliuk, and Vasilieff. Russia was remote for him in time and place, but in a basic sense he was and would remain very Russian. It was a permanent part of his fiber, something of his past that was always with him in his responses and his actions.
In 1936 David Smith and I went to the Soviet Union, carrying with us Graham’s detailed instructions for locating his family in Moscow, whom he had not seen since his departure. His Russian name had been Ivan Dabrowsky; his name Graham, he had chosen, he told me, because his mother’s name written in Russian, looked like Graham, written in English. When we stepped out of the Metro near the Dabrowsky house, we noted that a platform bright with bunting and flags was being taken down, a band had just dispersed and a crowd was scattering. Mme. Dabrowsky, curator in charge of restoration at the Tretyakov Museum, surveyor of all the icons in the Soviet Union, met us at the door and explained the festivities: her uncle, Russia’s most famous mathematician, had been honored in a ceremony in which he adjacent boulevard had just been named for him. Maria, Graham’s eighteen-year-old daughter and an art student, was there, as was Cyril, his son, a Soviet-trained architect in his twenties. Both children bore a very strong resemblance to Graham. The Dabrowsky house was lovely and old, the same one that Graham had lived in before he left Russia.
We spoke with the family in a combination of French and English, helped over the difficult parts by a friend of Maria’s who spoke English perfectly. The afternoon was lively and interesting, climaxed by a rather grand Russian tea. We gave as full an account as we could of Graham, his state of health, his painting, his collecting, and his new wife, the former Constance Wellman. When we told Mme. Dabrowsky that Constance was only twenty-four years old, she said wryly that M. Graham was always a very brave man.
Graham was a generous friend in so many ways, generous with his knowledge, his praise and his friends. It was through him that we met Avery, Stuart Davis, Gorky, Xceron and Kiesler in the early days of our friendship. He delighted in bringing people together whom he thought might enjoy one another. He always wanted us to share with others experiences that he himself had found valuable.
Part of Graham’s generosity was in giving his time. When we arrived in Paris in 1935, we were surprised to see him waiting to welcome us at the station. Before we had caught our breath, he was whizzing us around Paris in a wild and wonderful journey that took hours. I had lived in Paris previously, but I dared not recognize a thing lest I diminish his pleasure in displaying that city to us. He recited sections of history and art history; he pointed out monuments, cathedrals, museums, bridges, bookstalls, the Opera House and everything else; and that same day he took us to four exhibitions of African art and introduced us to the dealers. We then went to the Medicale, the half-hospital, half-hotel where he had rooms. The drawbacks of the place were many, but there were ideal qualities, too. A ready-made studio, it boasted perfectly plain white walls and a glass-enclosed balcony for every room, letting in beautiful light and air. It was somehow typical of Graham that he had found such a place, a marvel and a horror both; it was also cheap, well located and tolerably comfortable. Many artists had lived there from time to time.
In Paris, Graham took us to visit Louis Carre, who was planning to exhibit his notable collection of Benin bronzes at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. At Graham’s suggestion Carre asked us to help with the catalog which Graham had translated from French to English. Our contribution was limited, mainly a matter of arranging syntax. But it gave us the opportunity of seeing the fine collection of African sculpture, meeting Carre in his Corbusier-designed apartment house.
Although Graham was then constantly collecting African sculpture, he had not abandoned painting, only put it off. He could stay away from it apparently without missing it and of course the collecting and selling provided his living. Occasionally he would become disenchanted with the current art scene and say that thee was nothing left to paint or no new way to paint it, except with some kind of ray. He was further disheartened by the economic problems of the artist in our culture, made even more desperate during the days of the Depression. During those early years in a fit of despondency, he tried to sell his paintings for fifteen or twenty dollars.+
During that time in Paris, Graham showed us his autobiography From White to Red, which he had illustrated with colorful and fanciful crayon drawings. The very first chapter proved it to be a fascinating document. It concerned a dreamlike concept of his infancy and childhood, in part real, in part fantasy. It had Freudian overtones and it evoked Surrealist imagery. It seemed to me to be wrought in rich enamels and embroidery to summon the spirit of Russian icons.
We went with Graham to the Surrealist exhibition at Paul Elaurd’s house, where we saw the fur-lined teacup in its original setting. Although Paris was teeming with Surrealism at that time, Graham maintained that Surrealism was a literary movement not to be adapted to painted images. That he held this view is interesting in light of his painting of the late forties and fifties, much of which had distinctly Surrealist overtones, not to mention actual Surrealist images. But polarities were a part of Graham. He would cling tenaciously to the most arbitrary opinions and attitudes, only to abandon them when they had outlived their usefulness for him.
Back in Paris the following year, Graham continued his collecting of African sculpture and other objects of art. He also turned to a new kind of collecting. He and Constance were very aware of the progress of the Spanish Civil War and were strongly sympathetic, of course, with the Loyalists. As was true in America, many sympathizers collected money for that cause. Graham’s way was both ingenious and profitable. He and Constance would wear their most elegant clothes, frequent the cafes along the Champs Elysees and collect money for “Spain”. Naturally, in that neighborhood, “Spain” meant Franco and the patrons were generous. Graham would then promptly turn over the money to the Loyalists!
Some time after Graham and Constance had returned to America and had settled in Brooklyn Heights, a quieter Greenwich Village in which David Smith and I had also made our home, Graham invited us to a party at Vasilieff’s studio. Graham displayed a portrait that Vasilieff had painted and cited the artist’s ability to paint an eye or an ear exactly as it occurs in nature. He called that kind of painting the supreme achievement. It seemed odd to us at the time that he should make such a statement but we regarded it as one of Graham’s momentary eccentricities. Later, however, when we were living once more in Bolton Landing, Graham’s correspondence with us occasionally repeated the ideas that he had voiced at Vasilieff’s. The same man who in the early forties had organized an exhibition of French and American art which included the work of Picasso and other French artists, as well as abstractions painted by Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, in the mid-forties wrote us, “Picasso is a charlatan. Making abstractions is like making refrigerators, a mechanical process.” He decried as well all the works he had so valiantly supported in the thirties. Mondrian, never a favorite, was a special target, as was Miro–as were all those whose works had been a revelation to us at an earlier period. American artists, of course, shared this fate. Graham’s annotations to his System and Dialectics of Art strike out the list of artists that he had previously admired, David Smith among them. In other ways he made radical changes in his thinking, political as well as aesthetic, and replaced many old friends with new ones. Long before that the letters between us had dwindled to nothing, thereby completing the process begun by physical and aesthetic distance. Perhaps, too, it was time for our close friendship to come to an end, for the teacher had in a sense accomplished his mission. He late said to other artists that he would not continue in his friendship for them if they ever achieved success and acceptance.
His need for friendship and his capacity for giving it were only two of his many engaging qualities. Jack Mayer thought he might publish a pamphlet at the time of Graham’s death, containing tributes from his old friends. The idea was abandoned. Many of the old friends were also dead: Gorky, Pollock and others. Later, David Smith said to me, “I gave him my thanks when he was alive. I’m not good at sending posthumous bouquets.” One of the fine things about our friendship with Graham was our awareness of his genius. It was true: we did give him our thanks while he lived.
[1] Leonardo Editor’s Comment: “Artist living at 33 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. 10003, U.S.A. (Received 25 October 1968) MS. No. 125.” Reprint of Article by Dorothy Dehner, “John Graham: A Memoir,” 1968. Dehner Papers: Writings: Box 4, Folder 70, (Reel 796), Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
[2] Based on Dehner’s “Foreward,” scheduled to be published in 1969 in an edition of John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art by John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland. The proposed publication featured a thorough, scholarly introduction by Marcia Allentuck. Although Leonardo published this shortened version of Dehner’s reflections on Graham, JHUP–after a change in editorship–chose not to publish Dehner’s full remarks, annoying her considerably, according to Dehner’s 1994 interviews. MLN.
Dorothy Dehner*
A few miles west of Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., a very large Industrial Park has been cut out of the wilderness and is being developed with miles of roads, elaborate landscaping and, surprisingly, it is graced by many large sculptures. Instead of an industrial slum, growing just anywhere, deteriorating even as it is born, the Industrial Park is conceived as a centre of industry in terms of reason and beauty. It becomes a place to be admired rather than an unsightly complex to be avoided. Not many buildings are up so far (about thirty) but expansion is rapid and the site is planned to accommodate over two thousand buildings.
My own commission to make a sculpture for this project was given to me with little ceremony. I was asked to make something...material and subject unspecified. I would have a surface about 25 feet long and 18 feet high against which to place my work. It could be a standing piece as large or as small as I chose or it could be a wall sculpture. I was not provided with a blueprint or a layout of the site, both of which I could have used. Most commissions are so heavily supervised by architects and other interested parties that the sculptor or painter is hemmed in on all sides and a lack of spontaneity results. This was definitely not so with the Great Southwest Company’s Park in Georgia where the director is Douglas McAgy.
After a little reflection I decided to make a wall sculpture: a relief. Up to that time all my sculpture had been cast in bronze which for such a sizeable piece would have been too cumbersome and expensive. I also felt a new material with various colours should be used in that setting. I therefore decided to use red, black and white Plexiglas (Perspex). The forms of my relief were to be large because I had been told that there were no sidewalks along the roads and that the workers would approach the factory buildings by car. The work had to be bold to be seen and absorbed easily and quickly.
When a 1/12 scale model I made was accepted, it remained to find out how to approach the actual making of such a piece. The work was to consist of fourteen pieces attached to a pinkish-tan brick wall. All of the shapes were simple geometrical ones except the largest piece, therefore easily enlarged. I made a full-scale drawing of the largest piece, which was 7 feet high by 11 feet long. I made full-size templates of heavy wrapping paper of all shapes according to which the 1 ? inch-thick Plexiglas shapes for architectural use. They had never before worked for a sculptor. Their work was accurate, the cut edges were finally polished and the heavy gummed paper which covers the Plexiglas as it comes from the factory was left intact to protect the surface and prevent scratching. (Plexiglas is rather soft and scratches easily.)
*Artist living at 33 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10003, U.S.A. (Received 23 November 1968.)
Printed in Great Britain: Pergamon Press, 1969. Leonardo, Vol. 2, 171-73.
Tracing the genesis of David Smith’s medallions is like tracing the development of Smith’s own convictions. The ideas that he exploited in that series were germane to his long held attitudes of life and the world around him. The passion behind those attitudes eventually burst out in the complicated and explosive symbolism and imagery of the medallions.
In 1936 Smith lived in Greece for five months, and it was there in the museums of Athens that he studied Greek coins and Sumerian cylinder seals. A few months later in London he encountered a group of satiric W.W.I medals by the German Karl Goetz, who aimed his bitter propaganda at the British and Americans. One medal showed a fantastic craft bearing the head of a monster wearing an Uncle Sam hat. The monster swallowed dollars as the craft, loaded with munitions moved out of the New York harbor. Smith was impressed with the ironic content and the message appealed to him regardless of the chosen target. The two experiences, seeing the medals of Goetz, and studying the Greek coins, coming closely as they did, became the catalyst that produced the series of Smith’s medallions. The German medals were small, perhaps two inches in diameter, and had no elaborate modeling, but they represented the germ of an idea that led to his own large, (10 to 12 inches) medallions that were packed with rich symbolism, a mass of ironic detail and bursting with passionate attitudes and explosive ideas. The Thirties, the decade, which saw the creation of his medals, were [sic] a time of acute and painful awareness. Much like the sixties and seventies, cataclysmic events stripped naked our frailties, hypocracies [sic] and decadence. Of such were [sic] the substance of his medals, all of them dedicated to the dishonor of our time, of our world, and all that is most craven in the human spirit.
The titles ticked off with searing irony the subjects of our shame: Bombing Civilian Populations, Sinking Hospital and Civilian Refugee Ships, Scientific Body Disposal, and all the rest. No one was spared, the War Makers, the Press, the Industrialists, the Clergy, and the and the honored professions. All went into the cauldron of his outrage, but not before each was examined and catalogued, and turned into unforgettable, ages in the significant series of medals, of which Le Roy Davidson said in 1940, “…are the greatest works of art in metal since the Renaissance.”[5]
Naturally concepts and attitudes revealed in the medals did not spring full fledged at the moment he began to develop his ideas for the series. Imagery, and phraseology for the imagery, was a lifetime in the making. Smith was only eight years old when World War I broke out. It is probable that even at that time he became aware of some of the distortions and contradictions of our society. He remembered tales of the Klan, and of lynchings. He remembered Henry Ford, prophet and God of the early automobile culture, swinging wildly from Peace Ship to his own machine gun squads during strikes at Dearborn, and his dissemination of the forged Protocols of Zion. He remembered the war fatalism of the Clergy in sermons he heard in his boyhood. All of these memories and many others merged with the erudition and insight of a gifted adult, the whole adding up to philosophic and intellectual convictions that stayed with Smith all of his life.
It is easy to see, in 1971, the medallions for what they are and to appraise them with the knowledge of Smith’s entire work and its place in art. Smith lived and worked prolifically for twenty-five years after beginning the series of medals, and this work now holds an honored place. Even then, in 1940 when the medals were first shown, most serious critics were impressed and gave them generous space in their reviews. There was occasionally a feeling communicated that the critic was more than a little upset by the content. The late Howard Devree of the New York Times shifted some of the responsibility on the social historians, and said that they, and not the art critics, should interpret them. He ended, a bit lamely, by saying, “They must be seen to be appreciated.” Time magazine wrote a piece that took the medallions more seriously than might be imagined. It gave some history of their creation, quoted the Blake foreward, and some of Smith’s \own explanatory text, but ended up by saying, “David Smith will cast copies of his medals for about $100.00 each, for anybody who wants one’.” The implication being clear that, of course, nobody would. It was a characteristic and neat job of protecting the Time attitude on both flanks.
Art News and Art Digest reviewed the medals favorably. Milton Brown wrote an enthusiastic piece for Parnassus, and Carlyle Burroughs in the Tribune wrote with sensitivity and understanding. But by far the best and most complete piece was written for the Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, by Elizabeth McCausland. Her sympathy for the content of the medals was complete and her admiration for their aesthetic value was unbounded. Clearly she saw that they were art of the first order, and she recognized that they were a document of our time. She wrote of the method of reverse carving and presented Smith’s philosophic convictions that led to the creation of those works. Her piece was the result of an interview that lasted half a day. First, Smith took her to the Terminal Iron Works at the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn where he had his studio. He showed her his sculpture there, gave a welding demonstration and then he brought her to our home on Congress St. There, he showed her every detail of the technical process that he used, as well as notes and sketches and drawings that led to the completed series. He talked to her about his deep involvement with the medals, and what he wanted to say in them and the way he had found to say it. All of this went into her article. Unfortunately, the full page of type and two illustrations had a relatively small audience and that, not in New York where the medals were exhibited. There was no discernable response.
In 1946 Stanley Meltzoff wrote about the Medals on the occasion of Smith’s retrospective exhibition at the Willard and Bucholtz Galleries. Robert Coates wrote a paragraph on the medals that was part of the review of that same exhibition. It was appreciative of all the work and mentioned Smith’s “uncomfortable philosophy”. Mr. Coates spoke of Smith was a Pacifist, which Smith was not. Smith was outspoken in support of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, he supported the revolutionaries in China, and ultimately World War II, although he deplored it, blaming the imperialist powers for getting the world into period holocausts. Putting World War I in the imperialist category, he was against that too.
A number of left wing critics saw in the medallions encouraging support for proletarian art, then much in vogue in the radical press. Coming from an artist heretofore immersed in the abstract, they rejoiced that at last Smith had something The People could understand. At the same time there was some distrust, for the source that had confounded them with blatantly abstract images, now presented them with a surreal language that was equally obscure. After some heated discussions between Smith and the editors of New Masses, they finally settled for reproducing a couple of the medals and reprinting the foreword that William Blake had written for the catalogue. The magazine had originally written an article that was so politically oriented that scant mention was given to the esthetic value involved, and Smith rebelled.
Despite all the writing about medals and the attending publicity, they drew only a small audience. They did have enthusiastic support from other artists as well as the critics mentioned above. No collectors came, or bought. The museums were indecently disinterested. Smith found the reception of his work depressing. The many hours spent working on the medallions developing techniques and pouring out his emotions had not prepared him for the anticlimactic lack of public interest. There were a number of reasons for this of course, one being that people were, by that time, caught up in a war in which they believed.
Smith had begun to make notes and sketches soon after the idea of creating such a series occurred to him, sketching out, more or less roughly, dozens of ideas but I cannot remember that he made really formal drawings of each medal. He merely created the sculptured images from ideas that his drawings gave him, changing them constantly. Starting out as mainly anti-war ideas, other ills of mankind became part of the series. In Europe where he spent the better part of a year he met many refugees from Hitler’s Germany who told him tales of the terrors and horrors of that regime Encountering that personally was a different matter from knowing about it intellectually in relatively insulated America. In New York he had marched in parades to protest Hitler’s dictatorship, and other wrongs. He had picketed the Hearst Press, (the reactionary press was the subject of one of the medals), and had joined protest movements with other artists who in the depths of the Depression dared to challenge the established order. Smith was seasoned in his role as protester, both by political events, and most of all by the quality of his own nature. Always a rebel, always a pioneer, always outspoken, it was not even half a step to move from his avant garde position of an abstract artist employing a welding technique of which he was a pioneer, to stating bold and challenging credos about the ills of the world.
Everywhere he went in Europe he found the same story, a world on the brink of disaster and political ferment. An America, which had suffered the cruelties of the Depression, was matched by a Europe about to be plunged into the chaos of total war, preceded by suffering and despair in all the countries he visited: France, Greece and disenchanted England. He found there too, an art world abounding in Surrealism. A letter of mine of the period states, “We see little of Picasso, some Matisse, but everything else is Surrealism.” And so it was.
Although Smith claimed to dislike Surrealism, it is clear that he was fascinated by its Freudian aspects, which brought him in turn to the punning, and images within images of Joyce, with whom he felt a great bond. Surrealism gave him a free-floating language with which to express the endlessly complicated ideas embodies in the medals, and he used it freely, and with great invention.
In the National Museum in Athens and elsewhere he had been much struck with the collections of ancient coins and Sumerian cylinder seals. He studied them literally for hours, and bought plaster casts of those he most admired. He studied the reverse carving, taking special delight in the delicacy and fine detail made possible by that sculptural method. He recognized instantly that it was possible to incise the most delicate detail in reverse carving, whereas such precision and accuracy would be impossible to attain in material that he modeled. A line made with a sharp tool could be as clean and fine as he wanted it to be. Such a line could simply not be modeled, by building up material. Already brewing in this thoughts were ideas for using this method for something of his own and, after coming upon the German war medals in the British Museum his ideas started to take form. He spoke of this freely, and as he talked his ideas developed. There was an [sic] urgency in his feeling about the medals that he was about to start, both for their content and for the new technique he was about to learn and master.
Back in New York, about a year later, he experimented with casting disks of plaster ten or twelve inches in diameter, and learned slowly and painfully how to carve in reverse, or negative. There were many failures after weeks of trying, the plaster broke and crumbled, his tools were clumsy and shattered the plaster. Hardest of all he had to learn to “see” the desired sculptured image as a positive, the while he was actually working in reverse, or negative. Finally as a result of a conversation with his dentist, he tried a super hard dental stone, and with some apprehension also bought a dentist’s electric drill and an endless supply of different sized burrs, grinders and polishers, provided by his friend Laslo Schwartz. To these he added some jeweler’s hand tools. From then on the technical problems were solved as far as that first step was concerned. Only after long weeks of work was he able to master thoroughly the use of reverse carving.
The production of Smith’s abstract sculpture went on apace with the growing series of medallions. Days were consumed at the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn, creating his abstract work much of it non-objective, nights and Sundays were reserved for the medals. As he worked, drilling and scraping and proving what he had carved with plasticene pressed into the carving, in order to see the image as a positive, his ideas flowed. For eighteen hours a day he was totally immersed in his work. Sculpture flew out of his hands, ideas for more and more sculpture came even faster. Dozens and dozens of works from his being and nights up to twelve and one o’clock heard the dentist’s drill whirring away in the studio room on Congress Street in Brooklyn, during the three years it took to complete the series of fifteen. Always a prodigious worker with a monumental store of energy and stamina, the arduous work seemed not to touch him. Rather it was a stimulus and a catharsis.
Smith’s first exhibition in 1938 at Marian Willard’s East River Gallery offered few hints of the imagery that was to be revealed in the medals, and that subsequently in the work of the forties, was to become a major part of his sculptural language, although the production of the medallions and his abstract work went on simultaneously. Smith had always thought of himself as an heir of the Cubist movement, particularly inspired by the work of Picasso, Gonzales, Gargallo, and others Much of his sculpture at that time and up to the middle of the fifties bore definite but abstract relationships to people, landscapes, or objects found in the natural world. Many, like “Bent Blade Plane,” “Construction with Points,” (a work made for the W.P.A.) were totally non-objective, but it is possible to see a great deal of Surrealism in works that came after the medallions. He incorporated, after that series, his new language, a new way of working. He invented this as he went along, and it flowed with ever deepening richness. “Spectre of Mother,” “Reliquary House,” “Jurassic Bird” and others of that period attest to this. In addition Smith made several “War Spectres,” as well as a series of small bronze works on war themes, and a number of etchings using the same theme.
All of his resentments and passions flowed into this work, which became a repository for the bitterness and despair he bore for the ills of mankind, his recoil at Fascism, Hitler, Mussolini, and the soon to be victorious Franco. His insights into one area of enlightened vision leading into another, the possibilities for extending the series of medallions seemed endless and let to inspired prophecy. “Scientific Body Disposal,” one of the first medals to be conceived, was made before Hitler’s ovens were known to the world. “Food Trust” depicting the destruction of food whilst people starved anticipated the massive dumping of wheat and other grain, and the huge stockpiles of surplus foods, denied to the hungry.
Marian Willard, sympathetic and enthusiastic about Smith’s work from the first, was equally impressed by the medals. While they were being created, Smith had another exhibition at the Neuman-Willard Gallery in 1940. Because the medals were both an esthetic and technical departure, and would follow on the heels of the preceding exhibition, it was agreed that the medals should probably be shown at another gallery. A quick canvas of possible galleries and a quicker series of rejections from galleries as well as from the Museum of Modern Art, convinced him to show them at Willard, by that time located at 32 East 57 Street.
The first edition of the medallions had been beautifully cast from the master series, (made from the dental plaster positives, by Emile, a jewelry caster working in Lower Manhattan.) After that came the tedious process of tooling and polishing and giving them rich patinas of golden or dark brown, light green or bright green, and one was cast in silver, provided by family treasures, an old silver mesh bag, great grandmother’s soup and punch ladles, and even my First Communion rosary.
Finally, Smith affixed each medallion to a backboard, appropriately toned and waxed, and then they were finished.
He had felt that a foreword to the catalogue and some explanatory text was necessary. He cast about thinking of a possible writer. At first thought a journalistic approach seemed the right one. It is not remembered whether George Seldes, the writer and editor who published the little paper “In Fact,” was actually approached, though he was Smith’s first choice at the time. But later, the more he thought of it the less the journalistic approach appealed to him. Finally one morning he made a few notes himself, and saying that he wanted to have them typed at once he called upon a friend and fellow artist who was a Brooklyn Heights neighbor, Lucille Corcos [Levy]. She set up her typewriter and Smith began to dictate. Instead of sticking to the notes, outpoured stream of consciousness poetry, straight from the source that created his art. A poet friend, Alter Brody was present and he stated afterwards his amazement at Smith’s performance. Those brief introductory statements served as captions for the purpose, using as they did a verbal language that matched the spirit and content of the visual images. But still, Smith wanted a Foreword for the catalogue.
It was late spring [1940]; Smith was “off” the W.P.A. Project and the farm at Bolton Landing was about to become a permanent home instead of a summer retreat. The medals were carefully packed, and brought to the farm for the summer to be returned for their debut at the Willard gallery in November 1940.
A friend and fellow artist, John Xceron, wrote out some words and comments that appear on the medallions. Smith wanted them to be in “coffee pot” Greek…as a kind of wry twist of the classical Greek he saw on the Greek coins and medals. On the medallions, “War Exempt Sons of the Rich,” is a slang word meaning soft cookies. Smith ate and enjoyed these small, soft, custardy pastries in Athens, and it seemed an ideal word to express his thoughts on the subject.
Still to be resolved was the question of the Foreword. An episode in a book called “The World Is Mine” by William Blake, that I was then reading, described a series of etchings, made by an artist character in the book, on certain abuses of the Church, so graphically, that the parallel with the medals was apparent, and Blake became immediately the desired choice. A letter, telling of the medallions went along with photographs to Blake’s publisher, which after many forwardings [sic] found Blake and his wife Christina Stead at a New Jersey summer place. Almost immediately after getting Smith’s letter, an enthusiastic reply came back, in which Blake said that they were both so inspired by Smith’s ideas, that they were both writing forewords. Blake wrote, “Use Christina’s, my lady is an artist.” But Smith thought they were both so good he could not bear to abandon either, and just so did they appear in the catalogue, along with photographs of seven of the medals and Smith’s own poetic, descriptive remarks. Reproduced on the cover of the catalogue was a drawing of Smith’s, showing soldier skeletons carrying missiles and the instruments of war.
The Museum of Modern Art exhibited one of the medals of the Dishonor series in 1957 when Smith had an exhibition of his work there. In 1948 the entire series was shown at the Allen Hyte Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. A number of the medallions were exhibited at the Albany Institute of History and Art, in 1943. Most of the time, when I was there they were stored on the rafters of his Bolton Landing studio. In the ten years following their initial exhibition, one was sold, one given by the artist at an auction to benefit Loyalist Spain, one presented to William Blake and Christina Stead, and one to Marian Willard.
Smith said he had shot his bolt on the subject matter of the metals except for the aforementioned war specters, the small bronzes and a few etchings. Specifically he thought and said that all of his work was his contribution to mankind. That he used other means and other images to do that was natural for him. Never one to cling to ways that he had mastered he chafed at the confinement of his art to any one specific way. His way was all ways. Whatever served his purpose, he used. The intellectual point of view and the philosophic one, as well, he kept as long as I was in touch with him. He indicated this in conversations and formal interviews.
The technique of reverse carving was later used in making a number of pieces of jewelry during he forties. Thomas Hess commissioned Smith to make an award medallion for Art News amateur contests. He also made one or two abstract reliefs using that technique, as well as the “Chicago” medallion exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1957 exhibition.
Smith’s contempt and disgust for the world’s dishonor remained and was not softened. But he felt that his main battle was with himself and his increasingly non- objective work. Constantly he used the word battle to express his relationship with the world, but it had now become a private battle. He had already said his piece in social terms, more boldly, more succinctly and with more esthetic brilliance than could be found in the whole spectrum of so-called proletarian art. Not since Daumier had the pomposities and hypocrisies been given such a show. Not since Goya had war been seen in art for the monstrous thing it was. The acid truth was felt in the impact of Smith’s “Bombing Civilian Populations,” with its bomb in the high chair, and baby, dead, on the bomb.
The Medals for Dishonor say in clear tones, “This is my world.” The great challenging steel figures, stark in the Bolton meadows, say, “This is my world.” Both are David Smith.[6]
Finis
[4]Dorothy Dehner. “The Fifteen Medallions of David Smith. Dehner Papers” (Series 4: Box 4: Writings, 1920, 1951-1987), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
N.B. Jennifer Meehan compiled “A Finding Aid to the Dorothy Dehner Papers, 1920-1987 (bulk 1951-1987), in the Archives of American Art” which was funded by the Terra Foundation, January 17, 2005. Contact Information: Reference Department, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560. www.aaa.si.edu/askus
[5]Dehner probably was referring to Joseph Leroy Davidson, who studied at NYC during the late 1930s, and upon receiving his Ph.D. from Yale, became assistant director and curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1939 to 1943. In 1941 Smith’s Medals for Dishonor were exhibited at the Walker Art Center from November-December according to Karen Wilkin’s “Chronology,” in David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Draftsman. New York: George Braziller, in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 42. Joseph Leroy Davidson, Art: Los Angeles (1908-1980), Professor of Art History, Emeritus, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1908. He received his undergraduate education at Harvard, graduating in 1930. His master’s degree came from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1936, and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1951. Professor Davidson had a distinguished career in art before he accepted a teaching post at UCLA in 1961. See “University of California: In Memoriam, 1980.” calisphere: http://texts.cdlib.org
[6]Dorothy Dehner, “The Fifteen Medallions of David Smith,” Dehner Papers: Writings, 1920, 1951-1987 (Series 4: Box 4,), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
When Jack Mayer, art dealer and close friend of John Graham, called me in 1961 and told me that Graham had died in a London hospital, I found it hard to believe. So persistent was his vitality, his love of life, so complete his involvement with his many interests, that it seemed he should go on forever. Although it had been several years since I had seen him and many years since the time of our close friendship, I experienced a great sense of loss and sadness at hearing that news. An important segment of my life had been filled by my friendship with John, and the memory of his brilliant, contrary, witty, insightful and sometimes exasperating personality will always be with me.
It is hard to bring into focus all the many things that John was. His sophistication, his knowledge of the larger outlines as well as the minutiae of endless subjects, his pungent comments and individual perceptions delivered with a kind of aristocratic arrogance–all were enlivening. He was great fun to be with, excellent company, certainly never a bore. David Smith and I were studying at the Art Students League in New York when we first met John and his wife Elinor in 1929. Graham came into our lives at exactly the right moment. He was a mature artist, and we were all students, members of the group of young artists whom he characteristically accepted as his peers, and we were immediately stimulated by him. He brought the excitement of the French art world to us, a world he knew well from having lived and painted in Paris. He told us many things about that scene in brief sharp comments. What he said was very much to the point, profound, flavored with caustic humor. He showed us copies of Cahiers d’art and other French art publications of which we had been unaware. He knew the painters of that time, and the writers Elaurd, Breton, Gide, and others were his friends.
Here in America art was emerging with a great new vitality, and Graham had a sure sense of the artists who were to become important influences in much that was to follow. Graham’s faith in David’s work and his sensitive response to it were of great importance to his development. He encouraged David constantly, and his admiration first for David’s painting and later for his sculpture was unstinting. He said from the beginning that David was the best sculptor in America.
We were influenced by Graham in a very general way. His knowledge of art history and his familiarity with art–past and present–were impressive. His instinct for quality was infallible, whether he was discovering a young artist whose work conveyed to him a sense of power and future greatness or buying a Congolese ivory or a Renaissance mirror. It was at the Graham apartment in the late twenties that we saw his marvelous collection of African sculpture, which he spoke of informedly [sic] and handled lovingly. In New York at that time, African sculpture had been exhibited at the Museum of Natural History as an ethnic curiosity; only later, in 1935, was there an exhibit of such work, at the Museum of Modern Art, which presented it as a valuable aesthetic contribution. Graham had a deep emotional involvement with African sculpture and sometimes spoke of it as the greatest of all arts.
Graham had been buying African sculpture for the noted collector Frank Crowninshield for some years and continued to add fetishes and masks to the collection until it was sold in 1939. In the very early thirties, at Graham’s suggestion, Crowninshield asked David to mount the sculpture. David’s acceptance of the proposal led to an unforgettable experience, highlighted by our having several hundred pieces in our apartment at one juncture. Graham took great satisfaction and pleasure both in the work on the bases and in our response to the sculpture. When the mounts were finished he induced Crowninshield to give a small party at which the sculpture was the main entertainment.
For two summers in the early thirties John, Elinor, and their son David lived in Bolton Landing, New York. During that time we saw a great deal of them, for their old farmhouse was only a mile or two from our own. Graham was painting prolifically then, as evidenced in part by the murals on his dining room walls. No longer in existence–the subsequent owners of the farm promptly papered the walls with buttercups and daisies–most of the murals, done in subdued earth colors showed scenes of Paris. These were partly abstract, with a good deal of drawing in black and white over dark brownish washes. One mural depicted a Picassoesque harlequin, painted in pale shades of tan, pink and blue. It is a pity that the murals have not survived. Fortunately, other works of the period have not met the same fate: for example, the many black ink drawings of his equestrian series, each depicting an armored or otherwise decorated horse, usually standing in profile. Within a small space–the paper used was approximately 8 by 10 inches–and that limited subject matter, he managed to give each separate drawing interest and vitality. His blacks crackled and sparkled; all of the drawings were filled with life.
We had always found Graham’s painting stimulating, fresh and existing. The first of his works that I saw had been painted in Paris in 1930. They were completely non-objective, consisting of rectangles and squares divided by thin vertical and horizontal lines. The colors were muted–soft browns, tans, whites, grays, pinks and blacks. These pictures were not large, even for that time, perhaps 20 by 30 inches or smaller. Earlier, he had developed a concept he called minimalism. I saw only three of the paintings which reflected that concept. The backgrounds in all cases were dark brown, achieved, John said, by mixing all colors together. Across the background were strewn a few black lines, sometimes broken. Other lines, less prominent, were in white broken by occasional flakes of white, on the dark background. The lines in the paintings were not mechanical but very much hand-made; they had varying thicknesses of paint and soft edges. Surface tension was heightened by texture. The touch of the hand was important in all these works. The quality of the edge was something that Graham spoke about constantly. He greatly admired the edge in Milton Avery’s painting and often spoke of it. He stressed the necessity of keeping the paint alive. He wanted his painting to evoke mystery and excitement and to produce emotional overtones–all qualities that he admired in African art. He courted the personal, the hand-made, the distinctive touch of the artist. Above all, he wanted to present what he called enigma.
Russian born and bred though he was, Graham had an amazing capacity for fitting himself into what must have been an environment totally alien to the life he had led in Russia. He was completely at home in New York, Paris or anywhere else he chose to go. Unlike Tchelitchew, who came from a similar aristocratic Russian background and who chose as associates the rich, the elegant, and the fashionable, Graham gravitated instinctively to the artists rather than the patrons, to the creators rather than the appreciators. Among his friends were Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith, as well as the artists who had come from Russia, Arshile Gorky, David Burliuk, and Vasilief among them.
Russia was remote from him in time and place, but in a basic sense he was and would remain very Russian. It was a permanent part of his being, something of his past that was always with him in his responses and his actions. Throughout the time that I knew him, he kept a small, framed photograph of Czar Nicolas on his desk (his second son was named Nicholas). He wanted his children to be baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church, and when he spoke of his first wife and their children in Moscow, it was with fond remembrance. His Russian name was Ivan Dabrowsky; his later use of the name Graham was dictated he told me, by the fact that his mother’s name, written in Russian, looked like Graham, written in English.
Although the political attitudes derived from his aristocratic status served Graham well in Russia, they underwent considerable modification when he came to America, particularly as the country entered the Great Depression. Allying and identifying himself with other struggling artists, Graham found himself sympathetic to the ideals of the Russian Revolution, and in the years when we knew him best, he sustained his interest in political events in his native country. Although this interest is apparent in System and Dialectics of Art, his later annotations to the book reflect still another shift in his attitudes: he deleted his references to Marx and Marxism and separated his opinions concerning art and creativity from those concerning politics.
Graham’s life in Russia as a member of the Czar’s Guards had given him a crisp military bearing and an athletic suppleness. He was educated as a lawyer at the University of Kiev, and while he was a member of the Guards, he was sent annually, as was the custom in Russia with officers of his academic background, to faraway hamlets in remote parts of the country to hold court, listen to the grievances of the peasantry, and mete out judgments in local cases. Occasionally he spoke of his horsemanship and of his training in the Guards. He certainly was able to handle horses with great ease and familiarity. Once at a livery stable in Bolton Landing someone questioned the age of a horse. Graham grasped the bridle, opened the horse’s mouth, viewed and felt the teeth, and said casually, Oh, he’s about seven years old. His son Nicholas tells of an experience in Paris, when he and his father were horseback riding in the Bois. Graham, who was already advanced in age, demonstrated the horsemanship and training that he had learned in the Guards. To Nicholas’ astonishment, Graham did somersaults in the saddle, flipped himself from head to tail, stood in the saddle, and performed other death-defying stunts, the horse in full gallop and undoubtedly as astonished as Nicholas.
Graham was extremely depressed after his separation and subsequent divorce from Elinor in 1934. He moved out of his apartment and entered what he referred to, accenting the second syllable, as the monastery. I do not know whether the men who shared this institution were refugees from a Russian Orthodox monastery or if theirs was a separate and different sect, but in any case they lived in dire poverty. An old brownstone housed them in a shabby section of New York. They begged for food in neighborhood markets and lived a suffering and spartan life. One Easter Sunday we visited Ivan there. Knowing that the day is especially celebrated by Russians, we brought him a number of delicacies: cakes, chocolates, cavier [sic], and hard-boiled eggs on which I had painted our portraits and peasant decorations. He was touchingly grateful and said, This makes me feel human. A huge bowl of snow was on his table that day, to freshen the air, he said. I did not need to understand the law of physics he had in mind to note that the room was both bare and freezing and that the snow was not melting. He told us about the monastery and spoke of the holiness of the men, the self-sacrifice involved in their rugged life and work. They were then digging out the cellar a couple of feet down to make that area habitable. Ivan said that they put the earth in paper bags and left it in nearby gutters to be picked up by the sanitation department! All in all, it was a most unlikely existence for him to choose, but it suited him for the moment. Fortunately it did not last long, a few months only. Perhaps it can be said that the Russian flavor of the place somehow provided Graham a kind of home, a degree of solace.
In 1936 David and I went to the Soviet Union, carrying with us Graham’s detailed instructions for locating his Russian family, whom he had not seen since his departure from Moscow. When we stepped our of the Metro near the Dabrowsky hoiuse, we noted that a platform bright with bunting and flags was being taken down, a band had just dispersed, and a crowd was scattering. Mme. Dabrowsky, curator in charge of restoration at the Byzantine Museum and surveyor of all the icons in the Soviet Union, met us at the door and explained the festivities: her uncle, Russia’s most famous mathematician, had just been honored in a ceremony in which the adjacent boulevard had been named for him. Maria, Graham’s eighteen-year-old daughter and an art student, was there, as was his son Cyril, in his twenties, a Soviet-trained architect and later a film producer. Both children bore a very strong resemblance to Graham. The Dabrowsky house was lovely and old, the one that Graham had occupied with his family before he left Russia. It was made of cut stone, one of a series built around a huge cobbled courtyard, something out of Anna Karenina.
We spoke with the family in a combination of French and English, helped over the difficult parts by a friend of Maria’s who spoke English perfectly. The afternoon was lively and interesting with its climax a rather grand Russian tea. We gave as full an account as we could of Graham–his state of health, his painting, his collecting, and his new wife, the former Constance Wellman. When we told Mme. Dabrowsky that Constance was only twenty-four years old, she said wryly that M. Gra-ham had always been a very brave man. Finally, we took a great many pictures in the courtyard so that we could give Ivan tangible evidence of our visit, along with all the warm wishes and greetings that his family sent. (Graham later devoured, and was deeply and truly touched by, the details of our visit, which we told and retold at his insistence.) As we left, Mme. Dabrowsky said, The children love their father. I have always told them all the good things about him.
Graham was a generous friend in so many ways, generous with his knowledge, his praise, and his friends. It was through him that we met [Milton] Avery, Stuart Davis, [Arshile] Gorky, [Jean] Xceron, Friedrich Kiesler, and others in the early days of our friendship. He delighted in bringing people together who he thought might enjoy one another. He always wanted to share with others experiences that he himself had found valuable. Another part of Graham’s generosity was in his time. When we arrived in Paris in 1935, we were surprised to see him waiting to welcome us at the station. Before we had caught our breath, he was whizzing us around Paris in a wild and wonderful journey that took hours. I had lived in Paris before, but I dared not recognize a thing lest I diminish his pleasure in displaying the city to us. He recited bits of history and art history; he pointed out monuments, cathedrals, museums, bridges, bookstalls, the Opera, and everything else; that same day he took us to four exhibitions of African art and introduced us to the dealers. We then went to the Medicale, the half-hospital, half-hotel where he had rooms. The drawbacks of the place were many, but there were advantages too. A ready-made studio, it boasted perfectly plain white walls and a glass-enclosed balcony outside every room, letting in beautiful light and air. It was somehow typical of Graham that he had found such a place, a marvel and a horror both; it was also cheap, well-located, and tolerably comfortable. Many artists had lived there from time to time.
In Paris Graham took us to visit Louis Carre, who was planning to exhibit his notable collection of Benin bronzes at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. At Graham’s suggestion Carre asked us to help with the catalogue, which Graham had translated from French to English. Our contribution was limited, mainly a matter of arranging syntax, but our real enjoyment was in seeing the marvelous collection of African sculpture, meeting Carre, and seeing the apartment house in which he lived–our first look at a building designed by Corbusier.
Graham fulfilled the terms of his agreement with Frank Crowninshield and constantly added to his own collection of African sculpture as well. Every day he would go out buying or looking, and we very often went with him. For him collecting was a fine art; he was an inspired collector, he seemed to know everyone who owned important works and everything he bought was acquired by a sure hand and an informed intelligence. His practical nature asserted itself, too. He knew who owned what, what it cost, what it was worth, and what it would sell for. Later, back in the United States, these skills were to lead to the acquisition of fine pieces of African sculpture by Graham’s artist-neighbors, Adolph Gottlieb, Lucile Corcos, and Edgar Levy among them.
Involved as he was with collecting Graham had not abandoned painting, only put it off. Apparently he could stay away from it without missing it, and of course the collecting and selling provided his living. Occasionally he would become disenchanted with the current art scene and say that there was nothing left to paint or no new way to paint it, except with some kind of ray. He was further disheartened by the economic problems of the artist in our culture, made even more desperate during the days of the Depression. During those early years, in a fit of despondency, he tried to sell his paintings for fifteen or twenty dollars. Even at the lowest ebb of his spirits, however, he was always deeply involved with art. He kept up his friendships with the French artists and poets whenever he was in Paris, which was almost every year. When we were together there, he wanted to introduce us to Picasso, but David felt he had nothing to say to him because he could not speak French. Also, Graham had told him to address Picasso as Maitre, and David was not about to call another artist Master. During that time in Paris Graham showed us his autobiography, From White to Red, which he had illustrated with colorful and fanciful crayon drawings. The very first chapter proved it to be a fascinating document. It presented a dreamlike concept of his infancy and childhood, in part real, in part fantasy. It had Freudian overtones and evoked surrealist imagery. It seemed to me to be wrought in rich enamels and embroidery, to summon up the spirit of Russian icons.
We went with Graham to the surrealist exhibition at Paul Eluard’s house, where we saw the fur-lined teacup in its original settings. Although Paris was teeming with surrealism at that time, Graham maintained that it was a literary movement, not to be adapted to painted images. That he held this view is interesting in the light of his painting of the late forties and fifties, much of which had distinctly surrealist overtones, not to mention actual surrealist images. But polarities were a part of Graham. He would cling tenaciously to the most arbitrary opinions and attitudes, only to abandon them when they had outlived their usefulness for him. Such intellectual and emotional leaps were made with grace and assurance.
Back in Paris the following year, Graham continued his collecting of African sculpture and other objects of art. He also turned to a new kind of collection. He and Constance were very much interested in the progress of the Spanish Civil War and were strongly sympathetic, of course, with the Loyalists. As was true in America, many sympathizers collected money for that cause. Ivan’s way was both ingenious and profitable. He and Constance would wear their most elegant clothes, frequent the cafes along the Champs Elysees, and collect donations for Spain. Naturally, in that neighborhood, Spain meant Franco, and the patrons were generous. Ivan would then promptly turn over the money to the Loyalists.
Some time after Graham and Constance had returned to this country and had settled in Brooklyn Heights, a quieter Greenwich Village in which David and I had also made our home, Graham invited us to a party at Vasilieff’s studio. Graham displayed a portrait that Vasilieff had painted and cited the artists’ ability to paint an eye or an ear exactly as it occurs in nature. He called that kind of painting the supreme achievement. It seemed odd to us at the time that he should make such a statement, but we regarded it as one of his momentary eccentricities. Later, however, when David and I were living once more in Bolton Landing, Graham in letters to us occasionally repeated the ideas that he had voiced at Vasilief’s. The same man who in the early forties had organized an exhibition of French and American art which included the work of Picasso and other French artists, as well as abstractions painted by Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, in the mid-forties wrote us, Picasso is a charlatan. Making abstractions is like making refrigerators…mechanical process. He decried as well all the works he had so valiantly supported in the thirties. Mondrian, never a favorite of Graham’s, was a special target, as was Miro–and all those whose work had been a revelation to us at an earlier period. American artists, of course, shared this fate. In his annotations to System and Dialectics of Art Graham struck out the names of artists whom he had previously admired, David Smith among them.
In other ways he made radical changes in his thinking, political as well as aesthetic, and replaced many old friends with new ones, but long before that the letters between us had dwindled to nothing, thereby completing the process begun by physical and aesthetic distance. Then, too, perhaps it was time for our close friendship to come to an end, for the teacher had in a sense accomplished his mission. He later said to other artists that he would not continue in his friendship for them if they ever achieved success and acceptance. I met John three times in the fifties: once just after I had unhesitatingly identified as items which only John Graham could have collected, the contents of a huge French crate being unpacked in the frame shop of Max Granick, his partner; a second time after his marriage to Mariane Strate; and, finally, after her death, when, despite his loneliness, he said that he was doing the best painting of his life.
Experiences shared over a number of years and in a variety of places made the relationship with Graham a rich one. There had been closeness during joyous moments as well as during times of despair. His need for friendship and his capacity for giving it were only two of his many engaging qualities. Jack Mayer thought he might publish a pamphlet at the time of Graham’s death, containing tributes from his old friends. The idea was abandoned. Many of the old friends were also dead–Gorky, Pollock, and others. Later, David Smith said to me, I gave him my thanks when he was alive. I’m not good at sending posthumous bouquets. One of the fine things about our friendship with Graham was our awareness of his genius. It was true: we did give him our thanks while he lived.
Dorothy Dehner
[1] Dehner, Dorothy. Forward to System and Dialectics of Art by John Graham. (Annotated from unpublished writings with a Critical introduction by Marcia Epstein Allentuck.) Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.
As a pharmacist and political activist, Dorothy Dehner’s father Edward Dehner had little time for frivolity; however, Dorothy recalled a loving gesture by him, perhaps insignificant to an adult but full of meaning to a child:
My father, seeing the snow wet and large-flaked [sic] drew his handkerchief from his pocket and tucked it into the space between my neck and my black velvet collar. I knew then that he loved me. To me it meant he loved me. When I got home the handkerchief was wet with snow. In its corner was a finely embroidered red seal, round and red, with initials carefully wrought in the center in white. The seal was coming away from the surrounding linen, so heavily and closely had it been worked it needed only slight
pressure to have it loose altogether. And then it lay in my hand, a Valentine, a red wound, and mine. If the seal were lifted from my hand surely my palm would bear the stigmata [sic] of my father’s love. It must be kept in a safe place. Tucked into my black ribbed stocking in the little hollow just below and to the left of the knee-cap. The handkerchief was forgotten, but the red seal, my Valentine, was carried around with me all day under my stocking. I, now, was also a favorite. My sister was there, but I was too. And I was warmed by his love and by life.[1]
On February 10, 1912, at the age of 52, Edward Dehner died from lobar pneumonia after being ill and under the care of his physician for only ten days.[2] Dorothy was traumatized. In her prose reminiscences, Of Life and Death, she wrote:
I sat miserable and small that February night, huddled in a quilt. In the bedroom the priest, the doctor, and my dying father, and my mother praying, my father’s maiden sisters, and my sister old enough to pray and to watch, and I, banished to the sofa in the adjoining room, old enough to pray, old enough to be told to pray, but not old enough to watch the dying of my father, dying in his thick pneumonia jacket, dying in the room with snow coming in the window, open for fresh air, thought to be helpful to the still living. The nurse had told me, that in his delirium, he had wanted me to have a party and to invite all the children. I chose to believe it was not delirium.[3]
Edward Dehner was buried in the St. Francis de Sales Cemetery in his hometown of Cincinnati rather than in Cleveland. Dorothy’s realization of her extended family’s brokenness and bitterness, even during the rituals of grief, surfaces:
My [traveling] hat was fur, warm and soft and brown. From heaven knows what forgotten Maypole dance, I had salvaged a wreath of silken rosebuds. It fit exactly around the crown of my hat, my crepe, my funeral hat. My father lowered into his cold February grave, the horses hitched to little black carriages, creaking, protesting the cold, hedged into the frozen ruts, the priest intoning at the grave, the family feuds perversely blooming in the winter air, harsh, tight-lipped and cruel, even at the grave-side. So I am talking about death, but not about dying. It is just too hard. I could not live it if I could bear to imagine it.[4]
At about sixteen years of age, Dorothy’s sheltered life widened to include boys and she attended a house party one evening at which her Aunt Flo chaperoned. In the following narrative Dehner relives a crucial moment when she almost broke out of her painful and bewildering isolation from boys and men, only to be rescued by her guardian:
My dress is pink, satin with net over it, wide and crisp like a ballerina’s. My body moist and supple, with a strange new liveliness and heat that was new to me. I was drugged with joy and dancing and boys. One of them took my hand and led me into the California garden, so like a scene on an old-fashioned candy box. A boy, a girl, the moon lighting up the heavy scented, heavy headed pink roses on the trellis. We stood for a moment under the soft sky, looking up, hearing the music of the dance, and then he put his hands about my waist moving them ever so gently. Then he touched my hair and bent my head backwards, and my Aunt came screaming out of the night after me, the party chaperone, my guardian angel. She grabbed my hand and suddenly, painfully, her maledictions ringing in my ears, she drew me to the house. What a thief she was to steal that gift from me: a kind of death, a part of my life.[5]
When Dorothy Dehner was not yet twenty, she cried out for freedom from convention, her elders’ restrictions, and even the limitations of time and space in the following journal entry:
How long is life. The world is such a big place. I want to see all of it. I want to live in all of it. I want to know everything. I want to speak the language of the French and the Italians and of the Chinese. Of the birds and the beasts, of the herbs and the trees. Is there time for all that [sic]. I want to paint, I want to write, to act, to dance, oh please explain the Einstein theory to me. Is there time for all that [isic]. How can there be time if I am running all over the world trying to see it, trying to live in it, grasping hands of many colors, looking into eyes of many shapes, studying all those languages. I must learn about love too. I must learn it well, and from many, and I must find my true love also. I want to hold my child and put my lips to his soft neck and feet and smell his sweetness, and close my hands upon his thighs. Is there time for all that. [sic] I imagine that everything I learn will be beautiful. Everything. It will all lead someplace to a Nirvana of my own making. I will make my life and it ill be beautiful, and when I find my true love it will be perfect. I am not yet twenty, but what wisdom I have! All my troubles have come from the life that others have made for me, the restraints, the patterns, the most pinnacles presented for my aspiration. I know that if I make my own life it will be exactly the way I want it. As high as the sky, as deep as the sea, and as wide as the ends of all spaces....[6]
As soon as Dehner became financially independent through her deceased mother’s bequest, she left southern California for New York City. There, she took acting lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Art and landed a few small parts in off-Broadway productions. Disappointed in her theatrical prospects, Dehner decided to go to Europe. Although she traveled alone, she had made friends with a young woman she had met in New York whose parents lived in Florence, Italy.[7] So off she went to Florence, writing the following about her arrival at an Italian train station:
Abandoned by the porter, who served also as ticket seller, train flagger, tender of wayside garden, vendor of sweets and waters, father of three who straggled after him up and down the tracks, I struggled with suitcases, trying to find a vacant seat in a second class carriage. A head, with an eye like that of a curious bird poked out of a window. The owner of the eye jumped out of the train, flew down the platform to me, flapping his wings. As I cursed my suitcases he smiled and tossed them into a compartment. We both followed them, and sweeping the floor with an imaginary plumbed hat, he batted his eyes outrageously, and addressed me, Bella Signoria, Viva Cristoforo Columbo! They sat there, the others, he like blocky granite, she fat, like a loaf of bread that runs over the pan. They batted not an eye. They viewed with alarm my suitcases, which if not disposed of, could hamper the movements of their feet and [they] spoke harshly to one another in a bitter and unknown tongue. I am in ITALY. I am in ITALY. Viva Cristoforo Columbo! And that was life!
I have been emboldened to try many things. I now speak the language of the French and the Italians, if not the Chinese! I am painting, I am dancing and I am writing poems while listening to the nightingales in the rose garden in Assisi. Yes, there is even a rose garden. My head is a jumbled file cabinet labeled Renaissance. I have a box of herbs on my window sill, and when my face is buried in the rough perfume of their leaves, I learn their language.
I am learning the secrets of my body too. Not without a struggle, not without a backward glance at my guardian angel, but I am learning from my dear Fredrigo, who buys me a Strega each evening at the local café: he doesn’t know about the history of painting but he knows other and perhaps more important things. My troublesome metabolism? It is so perfect I cannot think of having it tested. My ‘indigestion of loneliness’? Ah, that is for old people only who eat bad food.[8]
After Dorothy Dehner met David Smith in 1926 and married him the following year, they embarked upon an adventuresome and unorthodox lifestyle, traveling occasionally and staying abroad for extended periods of time. Editor Mara Witzling’s anthology of women artist/writers includes Dehner’s “Memory of St. Thomas, #1 and #2”:
We went to St. Thomas, V.I. in 1931 for almost a year, long before it had become it had become a tourist trap. This was a typically romantic concept of ours, to live in a tropical Paradise. We would have preferred the South Seas, like Gauguin, but they were too far away and we had heard that St. Thomas was perfect from a friend who had had a shark factory there. A questionable enterprise that had ended in disaster...not from JAWS but because the barracuda ate the sharks before they could be pulled aboard.
We wanted to live a simple far-away life, paint, swim, fish, take pictures and spend days with sun and sea. This series of pictures was painted about ten years after our V.I. adventure, and when we lived there we both were painting abstractions. We finally felt we wanted to paint on our own, no more classes, and our last year at the League with Jan Matulka had given us new ideas to follow.
Back at Bolton we yearned sometimes amid the snow, for our days spent on the island. It was there that David made his very first sculpture. He carved the head of a Negro from a chunk of white coral, and painted it a dark purplish brown. Then he carved a female torso, partly objet trouve and partly his handiwork. When we returned we brought boxes of shells, coral and other beach combings to Bolton, and David continued to use these materials along with brass rods, some painted, sheets of lead, which he soldered, and used with great invention. The winter scene shows a fantasy of shells and coral set against our snow bound barns. The other was done during our stay in Schenectady. My hand holds a St. Thomas shrimp (we often went shrimping). The blue Caribbean is the backdrop. It was good to recall those happy days in St. Thomas when we were housed in grim and war-time Schenectady.[9]
Dehner celebrated the happiest years of her married life with David Smith in bucolic paintings inspired by her beloved Adirondack mountain home. In the descriptive passage below, she offers the context for this series of works she executed during the early 1940s.
I had just returned from California and a visit to my Aunt with whom I had lived much of my life. It was mid-summer and out there all was sere and brown except for the miracle of imported water for lawns and gardens. The mountains were covered with dry brush, the desert quality of that region at that season at its most insistent. Bolton Landing was almost a shocking surprise, green, green, all shades of green, all textures. My beloved country...it was like living in a great salad bowl. There were the newly planted trees of our orchard, there was Lake George, there was Edgecomb Pond, there were the animals, and there was our own tiny house and dear companionship. All of it a deep full breath of new life as well as regret in leaving my aging Aunt alone. But Bolton was my home, my closest tie was there. The row upon row of green hills, and finally the misty blue ranges of the Adirondacks, a backdrop of our meadows and pastures and woods.
“Pastoral“ was my expression of that tie and the final picture of the Life on the Farm series.[10]
Years later, in mid-life, a close friend’s painful, lingering death caused Dehner to ruminate about the process of dying and her friend’s terror of it. Her deep empathy with another’s facing the finality of death perhaps mirrored her own fear.
My friend and I are not old, but we are not young either. Why doesn’t anybody write about dying [sic]. About death before and after, much has been said, but not about dying itself. All sorts of things can be imagined by writers or by anybody, but the process of dying itself, is left for each one to live through, to die through, no imagination needed. My friend and I are not old, but we are not young either. We now taste life with great savoring, as a child does the last of his vanishing portion of ice cream. She looks at me as I hold her hand, and I know she is dying. Her eyes burrow deep into mine. The look comes from deep inside her, and burrows deep inside of me. I wish momentarily that the look would move out the back of my head and be gone. But it does not. It stops only when it reaches into my heart. It says, what do you know, what do you know about me. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. That is part of what I know about her dying. Her own agony, her own bottomless terror, the soundless flapping wings of her black fear, her body’s wretchedness and pain, how can I imagine that? I can paste words upon the word of dying and make an image from that collage. A small pain can give me a clue, but that big pain, that fading light [sic] that finality.... [11]
But all is not simple, I have learned this now. Time is not simple, it has proven to be full of tricks. My friend is dead for a very long time. Her loss, her going, is a soft red wound that lies incurable within my body, because it is also my death, and that of my friends. Who shall comfort whom, first and when [sic]. It takes a long time, a life time to learn about this one.[12]
Dehner‚s vivid description of a vagrant, despised by the larger society, expresses her empathy for the destitute. Admonishing her fellow citizens for their lack of compassion, she notes the disparity in value between a master artist’s inanimate painting and a living human being.
That old man on the corner. His long white hair is whipped in the wind and he is reeking with filth, and foulness and vomit. But he wants only more alcohol, he will again lie in filth, and he will again vomit and befoul himself. Our local newspaper is leading a campaign. It is supported by those whose pockets are comfortably heavy. The campaign says, vanish! You are a blight upon this lovely neighborhood! But the poor do not vanish. They stay, because some whose pockets jingle give a little, and where a little is given, it is enough for these old waifs, and so they stay. This makes the campaigners wild. They would have us wear buttons. The buttons would say, WE DO NOT GIVE. What a proud slogan. WE DO NOT GIVE. My window frames this old man. If only he were a Rembrandt instead of a living old man, the cultured could not get enough of him. He is lost now, but Death will find him.[13]
In old age Dehner reviews the arc of her life―one lived deeply and broadly—and reflects upon the difference between the ideal existence she had envisioned in her youth and the difficult reality she has experienced as an adult. In a series of rhetorical questions, she seeks to elicit meaning from her struggle and its fundamental lesson.
Where is the beauty of my life, the perfect life I was to make for myself [sic]. My life would not stay beautiful. The sickness of the world creeps in. Creeps in? It charges in, it bounds, it leaps, it comes in battle dress. I am surrounded by it, pervaded by it. But where oh where is that beautiful life [sic]. I have ceased to think of it. Long since. It is only when I remember what I was that I remember about that. And I have learned that what I thought I wanted was not only beauty, but living. All of it. [14]
[1] Dehner, D. Witzling, Mara R. Ed. Voicing Today‚s Visions: Writings by Contemporary Women Artists. New York: Universe, 1994, “Of Life and Death,” 25.
[2] “Edward Dehner Certificate of Death, ” Registration District No. 8116, Registration No. 990, File No. 7389, State of Ohio, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Columbus, Ohio.
[3] Dehner, D. Witzling, M., ed. “Of Life and Death, ” 26.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Dehner, Op.cit., 27.
[7] Dehner, Dorothy. Audiotape Interviews by Martha Lockhart Nodine, 1995.
[8] Dehner, Op.cit., 26-27.
[9] Op. cit., 32-33.
[10] Ibid., 33.
[11] Op.cit., 25.
[12] Op.cit., 27.
[13] Op.cit., 27-28.
[14] Op.cit., 28.
I painted these small works in the early forties to record
My life on the farm in Bolton Landing, on Lake George, N.Y.
David Smith and I had bought the farm in 1929, the second year
of our marriage, and lived there intermittently until 1940, when
we made it our permanent home.
There was much beauty in our lives in that unspoiled country-
side, both in the way of life and the setting around it. Our
common ordinary chores went on apace with David’s great out-
pouring of his abstract sculpture, and my own involvement in
abstract painting.
The daily life included the usual cooking, cleaning, planting,
harvesting and preserving; for we raised most of our food and
kept it for future use by canning, drying, smoking both pork and
fish and salting down gallons of corn. It was a busy life, new
and exciting to us, as city people and we rather quickly became
country people. Survival depended partly on information learned
from Department of Agriculture pamphlets, of which we had a
great store. One, most useful gave instructions for making a
man’s overcoat. Sewing and knitting went on constantly, wool,
provided by neighboring sheep, was then sent to be washed
carded and spun.
The seasons of the year and their special activities were re-
corded, depicting visiting friends, such as Marian Willard
planting trees with David. Our neighbors sometimes helped with
the slaughtering of pigs, lumbering, sawing wood, (for that was
our heat) and other chores. On picture shows a visit to our friends
in the immediate area.
Three scenes in which we do not appear show our visit to the old
Saratoga burying ground. One shows young Jamie Dodge, who stayed
with me when his father and David took a trip to New York. The
winter still-life with tropical shells and coral, was a memento of
our year in the Virgin Islands.
The idea to paint the days and seasons of our lives came from
The French 15th c. Book of the Hours, Les tres Riches Heures du
Duc De Perry, which David had given me at that time.
The temptation to record the beauty of that life in the country,
was not to be put aside, but to be celebrated by rendering that
life and those times in these small paintings.
1976
David Smith and I came to know Jan Matulka as a teacher in the Art Students League before we knew him as a painter. Among the large number of students who passed through his class, we considered ourselves part of a core group consisting of Richard Abernathy, Lucille Corcos (Levy), Francis Criss, Burgoyne Diller, Alfred Kraemer, Bella (Anne) Kroll, Edgar Levy, Mary Lorene, George McNeil, Irene Rice Pereira, Jim Robertson, and Peter Sekaer. As a group, we were tremendously dedicated. Matulka gave us that extra feeling of confidence in ourselves which acknowledged our serious intent to become professional artists. And all of us–that is, the core of the class–in one way or another realized this ambition. With the possible exception of Sekaer, who became a documentary photographer, we all worked and defined ourselves as painters though certain of our group supported themselves in advertising and illustration. Matulka’s dedication to his own painting was passed on to us. An awareness of what it meant to live the life of an artist and accept the responsibilities of one’s work.
There were no dilettantes in Matulka’s class, which was officially a drawing class held two nights a week. We paid between eleven and thirteen dollars a month for the class. Most of us supported ourselves by working at full-time jobs during the day. In class we drew from a model, who took various poses during each session. Job Goodman was the class monitor. Although Matulka instructed only two nights a week, we were free, like all students of the League, to work on our own in the classrooms at certain times. We also painted furiously at home on Saturdays Sundays, or whenever we could grab a minute. We brought our canvases to Matulka for criticism, which he would give during the model’s rest periods, and he also stayed after the class for an hour or so to give critiques and hold general discussions. Often our girl friends or boy friends would join these sessions and later we would all go out for coffee. Matulka’s thoughtful and serious attitude, coupled with an awareness of our growth, made for a fine and unusual comradeship between students and teacher.
Ordinarily a rather shy and introverted man, Matulka blossomed in the atmosphere of the classroom. In return for the respect and admiration that we gave him, he showed a deep and concerned interest in us. He never failed to impart his passionate feelings about art. The very fact that an artist like Matulka taught at the League was a tribute to the openness of mind and spirit that characterized the institution. At the League there were no marks, no one was looking for credits; indeed, we scorned the academic life. Those days were long before artists-in-residence took over classes in colleges. At the League no one took roll and students could change classes at the end of their month if they preferred to study with another artist. There was no boss to consult or to keep us in line, only a monitor to time the model and perform a few studio duties. Discipline had to come from within, and only the sufficiently motivated stayed on.
Despite the freedom that we enjoyed at the League and the fact that its artist-teachers originally had been dissenters from the National Academy of Design, abstract painting had not been represented there except for a brief period when Max Weber taught in 1920-21. New ideas and a break from past tradition were entering the academic art world, and those new ways were to be taught by the rebellious escapees from the painting taught in the academies....
The teaching by the League artists was a very far cry from the conservative National Academy tradition. Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Kuhn, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Kimon Nicolaides, John Sloan, and many others were all teachers there at the time I attended. Yet except for the aforementioned period when Max Weber taught, no abstraction, no cubistic approach, and certainly no nonobjective painting had been introduced. Matulka, both as a painter and a teacher, was for that period a very avant-garde figure. He was bold in his concept, unique in his palette, and unshakable in his convictions....
Matulka taught us in many ways. Constantly recommending the work of other interesting artists to us, he aimed to give us as broad a view as possible of the entire spectrum of art, past and present. We had first encountered his work at the Whitney Studio Club and Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery on West Thirteenth Street, where Matulka’s lithographs were displayed along with paintings by Stuart Davis. Each Saturday we visited the galleries, of which there were relatively few in those days, to see the works that Matulka had mentioned to us....Now, when New York has everything, it I hard to imagine a city with so little avant-garde work to be seen. In those days avant-garde meant Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Juan Gris, other cubists, and the German expressionists. Even post-impressionist works were rarely to be seen. A few years later this was no longer true. Suddenly, it seemed, America had become art conscious, willing to look at the new as well as the old. The new work was shown in the late 1930s by such hardy pioneers as Rose Fried, who exhibited Kasimir Malevich’s white-on-white work. Marion Willard, at her East River Gallery and later at Neumann-Willard, introduced Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Loren MacIver, and David Smith.
As I remember I was the only one in the class who had been to Europe, and it was nourishing and engrossing to hear Matulka speak of his firsthand knowledge of cubism, dadaism, and surrealism. He spoke of all the arts, as he was interested in music and literature also. He spoke to us of the Bauhaus, German expressionism, and the new architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Eric Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, and others. Because Matulka had lived in Europe and had had a studio in Paris and made friends among the artists there, his words carried a special authority.
We were devastated when we learned in 1931 that Matulka would not be able to continue at the League. The reason given was that his enrollment was not sufficient to keep him on. With only thirteen or fourteen registered students, his class did not meet the minimum requirement of an enrollment of seventeen. Our despair was short-lived. It turned into action when Matulka got together with us to create a special private class. This project was discussed at many meetings, mostly with Matulka present. We found studio space on West Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eight Avenues. A large proportion of the students were part of this effort: Lucille Corcos (Levy), Burgoyne Diller, Al Kraemer, Edgar Levy, Mary Lorenc, Irene Rice Pereira, and Jim Robertson were especially active. Romana Javits, head of the Picture Department at the New York Public Library, where Lorenc worked, helped with her advice. We found secondhand easels, stools, and studio equipment. David and I provided a table and collected items for still-life paintings. Anticipating pop art, we bought boxes of soap flakes, labeled canned goods, and a fruit dish for subject matter. Two tables were brought for the still lifes, and a white plaster head of Voltaire completed our assort of still-life elements. As a group we cleaned and organized the place. Though it was summertime and the League spring sessions were finished, many of Matulka’s students kept on with the private class; Matulka’s teaching was want we wanted....
Thinking back on particular members of the group, I remember that Burgoyne Diller was the first one to want to have a one-man show. Although we all believed without question that someday we would all have solo shows, it amazed us that he would have had that much confidence at the time. Lucille Corcos (Levy) was our group’s first success; in 1938 she had a work included in a show at the Whitney Museum, and it was purchased by the museum....Irene Rice Pereira was the first one in the group to make really big paintings. As she was quite short, we would watch her huge pictures with two small feet beneath them proceed up the stairs to the top floor where Matulka’s class was held....I was the last one to have a solo show in New York City. It was held at [the] Rose Fried Gallery in 1952, although I had had solo shows elsewhere and had exhibited at the Whitney and many museums throughout the country previously....
The last time I saw Matulka was in the mid-1960s when he was quite ill. Lucille Corcos [Levy], Edgar Levy, and I drove out to Jackson Heights to visit him. He embraced us with great affection, delighted to see us and to know that we had not forgotten him. Despite his deafness, we had no difficulty communicating. We were all almost unbearably touched. The old respect and affection had endured, even though it had been more than thirty years since our classes with him. To this day, when I am in contact with the few classmates who are still around, there are memories of the great spirit of art and comradeship that Matulka’s class gave us. We continue to say, Thank you, Mr. Matulka.
[1] Dehner, Dorothy. Memories of Jan Matulka. Exhibition Catalog accompanying the artist’s retrospective Jan Matulka (1890-1972), mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980. Published in the National Collection of Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1980, 77-80.