PDF Transcript - 1972 February 5

Interview of Ivan Le Lorraine Albright
Conducted by Paul Cummings
February 5, 1972
TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH IVAN LE LORRAINE ALBRIGHT
IN HIS STUDIO:
47 ELM STREET, WOODSTOCK, VERMONT
FEBRUARY 5, 1972
INTERVIEWER:
PC
Paul Cummings
IA
Ivan Albright
PAUL CUMMI?-.TGS
(born Feb. 20, 1897 in North Harvey, Illinois)
PC
Let me say it's February 5, 1972 - Paul Cummings talking to Ivan Albright
in his studio in Woodstock, Vermont. That gives us a good level. Could
we just start with some family background.
IA
Well, yes, I imagine one starts with "I was born" and I am going to die;
those things are positive anyhow in this world. I was born a twin, an
identical twin. My dad, Adam Emory Albright, was an artist. I don't think
he made more than fifteen dollars a month in those days, if that much. But
they did have a little girl to take care of us. One twin had a red ribb.o n
around his wri s t and the other one had a blue ribbon. '!'his is a fact. T
always accuse my dad of having wanted to throw us in a drainage canal; but
he denied it. What happened was that one day one ate more and one slept
more. This little girl wasn't very smart (the way I am) and she got us mixed
up and I'm sure I have my brother's name and he has mine. So if anything
happens I can lay it on my brother, don't you know. My dad painted children
and so forth. At the age of about two months I began posing for him. My
brother and I posed for him from about the age of six years to about twelve.
We started drawing I think at about the age of six or seven.
PC
Did you start drawing by yoursel f ?
IA
Well, no. We were very silly; we even had a model; we'd hire a model for
a little bit and draw in charcoal for an hour a day from the time I was about
seven years old. We should have started drawing casts. Later on we drew
casts for a summer or two. All the time up until I was about twenty-one,
until World War I, T was drawing every summer.
PC
Were these formal classes with your father?
IA
No, no, my dad didnwt teach us; at least he didn't say anything. Which was
good. And I didn't know anything. So the combination made perfectly zero.
Except that I did know what charcoal was and we did meet all the contemporary
artists of Chicago. We used to go to the Chicago Art Tnstitute from the
time T was three or four on. So I was acquainted with American artists
mostly. I knew the names of all the artists, knew about the work, the
exhibitions, where each one showed, all the grievances of getting in, being
kicked out, and so on. So that by the time I did become an artist there
wasn't anything to it. It was just the same as if Twas a butcher. There
was no glamour to it at all; it was just a matter of a lot of work and
trying to make a thing better and better.
PC
Were you interested in your father's paintings? - because they were around.
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IA
I knew this much: I called him a short-term artist; most of them are that.
He was after sales. Like N. c. Wyeth and so forth - well, Childe Hassam or
Gari Melchers, or Tarbell, the whole crowd was trying to paint pictures. I
figured I'd go to the University of Illinois and become an architect or a
chemical engineer. I found out that there was too much math involved. Then
in World War I I was in service for a year in France. When I came back I
went to the University. During the summer I worked for an architectural
firm - Perkins, Howells, and Hamilton, school architects. One of the firm,
an old chap of about eighty was out selling. The engineer was putting in
plumbing and wiring and so forth. The architectural chaps would follow and
drill a scroll on a chimney and that was design. And that was it. I
realized that it took a great deal of money and a great deal of salesmanship
to put up a million dollar building and then there wouldn't be any art in it
at all. So I figured that if I was any good I could make a little canvas
two by three feet and it wouldn't cost much.
PC
What got you interested in architecture?
IA
Because naturally I wanted to get away from painting. Painting was the last
thing in the world T wanted to do. I had lived with it all my life. So I
was trying to get away from it. But, you see, I couldn't; I mean it was just
impossible. I saw that the other field was sort of a hollow name. But I did
figure I wanted to be a long-term artist. I wasn't going to make a thing
fast and sell it. I don't care much if a picture is hanging on a wall. To
me it's more a bit of philosophy the same as a writer who writes a book,
unless it's Christie or somebody. A painting should be a bit of your philosophy and that's what I've been working for. It's rather hard to make a
living that way. My brother was a sculptor. He and I started out by building
a few houses and getting our revenue from that and not prostituting our art.
We showed in all the shows. My brother later became a painter. But we never
prostituted our art for money. I worked ten years on The Door you see. One
time for a belt I had a rope around my waist and some society people from
Chicago came out to the studio. They didn't look at the pictures much but
when they went back they said, "Ivan had a rope around his waist for a belt."
PC
You said you were trying to get away from art because you grew up with it.
Why was that?
IA
Well, one Spring we had twenty-two club women out at the studio and they'd
all say, "Little boy, you're going to be an artist, you're going to follow
in your father's footsteps." And I said, "No! No! No!" It was pretty bad.
They 1 d have their sandwiches and coffee and look at art and say, "Isn't
that adorable!" "Isn't that nice!" "Isn't that sweet!" You see, my father
painted children, country children. They'd say, "We have children too,
something in common, a common denominator." My father painted children and
they had real children so they had something in common. All this was very
distasteful to me.
PC
How did you like modeling for your father all these years?
IA
Well, I didn't like it. My father used to have a few bags of old clothes;
when he'd find something that he thought he could use he'd pick it up, say,
an old pair of pants, or a colored hat; for a girl a sunbonnet and so on.
(Unlike Hollywood where they'd buy the clothes and make them up.) Every
-3little boy that he ' d try to get to pose the mother would wash his face
and put a clean shirt on him, such as he probably hadn ' t had on for a
week, and fix him up so nobody could paint him. Except J. D. Brown, who
you probably don't remember.
PC
Yes, sure, polished.
IA
He painted children. This wasn't any rebellion against my father; it was
against the attitude of the people in general and wh at they liked . I
think finally you accept it and go ahead and figure out you ' d better do
what you want to do.
PC
Did your father have a lot of artist friends that came around?
IA
Oh, yes, there was that whole crowd in Chicago. There was Stacey, Jurgens,
Recker, Pauline Palmer. And a New York artist , Who was that chap who
wrote those fabulous kid stories? - he ' s more famous as a writer than as
a painter . He painted woods . I can't think of his name right now. He ' s
very famous. We ' d meet all kinds of artists in a crowd. Dad wore his hair
a little long which was more or less original at that time , Elbert Hubbard
used to come out, He had the Raycroft Shop in East Aurora, New York . He
had long hair, too . Long-haired people were very scarce in those days.
Now we're just getting over the hippie period where we ' ve had five million
people with long hair.
PC
Right.
1A
Mostly art . Every summer we'd go away. We've been to Annisquam, to
Williamsfield , to Noank, to Millheim, Pennsylvania and Birmingham, all
through Pennsylvania and through to Connecticut and to near Gloucester,
Massachusetts, Falmouth Cove. Charles Grafly, the sculptor, was up there .
He was a classmate of my father ' s. I guess he was the best known. My
father studied under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia for four years. He was
the monitor there. And he went to Paris . To be an artist then you had to
go to Europe, He studied in Paris and then in Munich under Carl Marr from
Milwaukee who was president of the Royal Academy, you see , For instance ,
when Whi s tler brought back the portrait of his mother he couldn ' t sell it
for $500 in Chicago to Potter Palmer or to anybody - when he came back at
the time of the Chicago World ' s Fair in 1933 they had a million dollar price
tag on it. It ' s just a case of demand. The same picture only his mother had
gotten older .
PC
Did you paint in these summer trips around?
IA
Oh, yes, I want to mention that when I was about twenty or so we went down
to South America and I painted. 1 thought I was an artis t . I didn ' t
realize how bad I was. I didn ' t go to art school really until after World
War T,
PC
Rut your father never gave you criticism?
IA
No. He made one of the worst teachers in the world, But the only good
thing was he didn ' t criticize so you were on your own. Unless you have a
good teacher it's much better not to be taught at all, for the simple reason
At home was there interest in music or literature?
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that they teach you all the bad things and you've got to throw them out
later on . Whi ch you should do anyhow . The trouble is that in life we ' re
taught so many things which are wrong and you constantly have to destroy
and then build up on your own . You know, like Buckminster Fuller. He
destroys and builds up and really this is a good principle . You have to
do it constantly . And when you're painting the minute your picture begins
to look good just forget it; it ' s getting bad . And that means you ' re
losing your sense of judgment .
PC
What do you mean ''when it begins to look good?"
TA
Well, if you ' re happy with it or anything. I've seen so many artists walk
back and forth and have a martini and look at their picture and paint and
think: my r.od , this picture is coming fine. But they don't know which way
they ' re going and either they're copying some other artist or what they
think they want or are making something pretty bad.
PC
Were there any special artists that you were interested in as a young painter?
rA
Nobody at all .
PC
Old Masters?
TA
No . No. And then at school I had Leopold Seyffert and different teachers
but I didn ' t pay any attention . I mean the ones who would let you alone
would be the main thing; you might learn something from other students.
I mean they were equally bad so you could understand them.
PC
How did you pick the university to go to?
IA
Which one?
PC
The first one - what? - Northwestern?
IA
Northwestern . We lived in Humphrey Woods which is right nearby. And they
had a bunch of beautiful girls and everything . It was very nice. I got
on the Daily Northwestern and I worked so much on it that I got kicked out
of Northwestern University . I didn't go back there again until - gosh , I
don ' t know - i n 1951 or 1952 when they had a Northwestern Centennial. They
had present nine governors and Adlai Stevenson and a whole bunch of senators
and different people. They gave me a certificate of award. I'm sure I'm
the only one who ever got kicked out of there that was called . They didn't
realize it - when they first put it out they were delighted . I said to the
chap ahead of me - Adams , I think it was, from the University of Illinois,
I said , "It ' s too bad they don ' t give us a degree." He said, "Oh, what
do you want a degree for? I ' ve got thirty-five now . " They gave us a little
book with a seal on it. He said, "This is much better." I thought to myself: it's not so hot. Being Albright I was second in line. The chap
ahead of me was a big lawyer, I don't know what law firm he was with, and ·
he tipped his mortarboard. I said: brother, I ' m not doing that. So the
others followed me. (You ' re not supposed to tip it . )
PC
How did you like the University?
T
despised them all.
1 didn't care for any of them .
None of them?
-5-
IA
We went to the Illinois School of Architecture. We were in some town in
Pennsylvania - I forget where - oh, it was Tiodesta, Pennsylvania. I
remember when my dad got the notice from Northwestern saying that I was
bounced out he was sad but it didn ' t bother me any. My brother and I
tossed a coin, a pe nny, to see whether we ' d take up chemical engineering
or architecture . The coin came down for architecture. Either one would
have suited me. In chemistry I wanted to look for an element . I thought
if I could find a new element I'd be happy . At that time they had ninetysix; now I think probably they've got to a hundred and ten. I wanted
something of that sort. I didn ' t want to join a powder company . I wanted
to do research mostly .
PC
It ' s interesting there ' s always that kind of - I get the feeling you're
always looking for something .
IA
I ' ve been looking for something. My brother wanted to be an inventor .
When he was in high school he spent most of his time working on a perpetual motion machine. We didn't have any brains between us but I think we
were divided, cut in two, and he has all the mechanical ability and invention. He could think of all the things that came out about six months
ahead of time and would have made a great inventor. He thought of the
zipper six months ahead. I said, "Oh, that's crazy . " Now take gardening.
He said why plant each little seed separately; why not put the seeds on a
kind of filament that will decay and get ten yards or five yards or ten
feet or two feet; why go around like a bird pecking in the seeds. We both
lacked a little math although our family goes back direct to Kepler, the
astronomer . I guess he took it all with him when he died .
PC
You know, I'm very interested in the whole background because in one of
the exhibition catalogues there's a great description of your family background going back to the Revolution.
IA
Yes. On my father's side of the family they were gunsmiths in Pennsylvania.
The family name was Millheim. They must have been Pennsylvania Dutch. My,
let's see, great-grandfather who made these guns was a pretty good shot
out there. They made what is called the Daniel Boone gun. In Kentucky
they never made a gun. They just shot them; they shot the bull, too, but
they didn't make any guns. These were Pennsylvania guns. They had a long
bore about - well, six feet almost, and very heavy. In the other building
here we have the first double-barreled gun that was made in this country
by an Albright. You can twist it around, you see. My great-grandfather, as
I said, was a good shot. He'd go to these meetings, fairs, exhibitions.
If the prize was a horse he'd take a halter with him. If the prize was a
turkey he'd take a basket to put the turkey in. He knew how to shoot so
he ' d take the prize. Naturally he was n't very popular. He was a typical
Albright. Finally they banned him. But he had an assistant who went with
him and they couldn ' t stop him . He taught the assistant how to pack the
gun, how to get the direction and velocity of the wind, how crooked the gun
would shoot. So they still carried these halters and stuff. And that was
an Albright.
PC
Was it double-barrele d an over under?
IA
Yes.
As I said, I have it in the other building here .
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PC
IA
That's fantastic.
They used to engrave them in gold and silver. Dad had a chance to buy
a good gun with gold away back in about 1908 but he didn't want to pay
$150 for it so we didn't get it. We got one with just silver mounting.
They'd be worth about a span of horses mostly, you know, or whatever else
they had. They were craftsmen, you see. On my mother's side the family
name was Carpenter and Wilson. My grandfather (I never saw him) was a
Scotchman. He lived down in Missouri. Besides being a country doctor
he spent his whole life writing an encyclopedia. He didn't want to be a
doctor. He had to get up at four in the morning in a blizzard to go out
eight miles to visit patients. It wasn't too much fun. He was married
to a girl named Carpenter. The family came from Rhode Island in about
1632 I believe. They shifted around. My grandmother Carpenter went to
college in Ohio. She was born in about 1842. She died in Ohio. My mother
went to college in Lawrence, Kansas. She took a year or two off to teach.
When she was a freshman in college she was teaching the seniors Latin.
She had eight years of Latin and six years of r.reek. T think my dad had
about one term in school, about three years in grade school. He was a
good salesman. When he was nineteen years old they wanted to make him
cashier of a bank but he didn't know how to add. He had an older brother
John who was a sharpshooter in the Civil War. My dad was born in 1862.
When he was just a little boy his older brother came home. Let's see, John
was born in 1842 so he'd be twenty-one years old. He didn't say a word.
He could just hit a squirrel right in the eye at any distance. He was a
little chap just about my size. The next brother of my dad's, Sam, was
twelve years older than Dad, He sounds like a typical Californian; he
could sell anything. I don't know what Twas going to say now; well, let's
skip it for a while. Sam had a general store. Once when my dad was about
nineteen he went down to Missouri. During the summer my dad was going to
work for him doing some selling. They had one of these wooden pumps outside. My dad went outside for a minute, looking around I suppose for
customers. Four horsemen with blood on their hands came galloping along.
They said to my dad, "Pump some water on our hands." And he did. The men
threw him a silver dollar. They were the James brothers. They never
robbed any banks down in that section because they had a hideout rigged
up nearby.
PC
Wild Americans.
IA
Well, no. The James brothers were very polite and everything. They were
more gentlemen than a lot of the people they robbed I guess. Now robbers
don't think of robbing a few little banks in Missouri; they rob millions.
PC
Right.
IA
Yes,
PC
Was that by choice?
IA
Oh, yes. We enlisted. Our older brother enlisted and we thought we would.
Everybody was talking about the war. Before we did, however, we worked
down at Standard Forging Company for a couple of months. I didn't like the
work. My brother wasn't too bad at turning out artillery wheels but I was
What about World War I? - because you were in the Army - right?
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bad. I was making a gun bore test and I went off and got a newspaper and
sat in the corner reading it for two hours. The foreman came around. I had
drilled not only through one gun but through about four of them I guess .
So we enl isted. The whole state of mind emotionally at that time wasn't
bad . We all more or less were patriotic . It was a real not a phony war .
It wasn't a political thing where you were sent over to k ill somebody you
didn ' t know who had never touched you . When some foreign nation invades
us we don ' t mind fighting but going around the world and being a general
policeman isn ' t to my taste . We were in service for about a year . I
made medical drawings when I was in service.
PC
1A
How did you get into medical drawings?
Because I didn ' t want to dig a ditch . I was a buck private and I either
had to clean latrines , dig a ditch or something . This was in a medical corps.
We were supposed to be in a base hospital up at the front. They put us on
a freight train and we went south . We got out near Nantes. You had
thirty doctors who were officers and who didn ' t know which direction the
war was anyhow. Some were good and some were bad - but in a general hospital
we had thirty to fifty of them. They knew 1 could draw. In Des Moines in
the X-ray department some of them knew my dad's name . I think Dr . Osler ' s
outfit was there . He was a famous Chicago surgeon and was a friend of my
dad . We got in this outfit. We were in Des Moines for about six weeks
and then went overseas I think in July of 1918. I was overpaid; I got
thirty dollars a month ; I got three dollars for overseas; I was buying
$10,000 insurance; I bought two Stars and Stripes; so I was getting five
francs a month for my service overseas . Don't you think that was pretty
noble! That's equal to a dollar . I'm sure the government wasn't losing
any money on me no matter how dumb I was. Well, I decided that I'd draw.
In France I made a few sketches of the town for these doctors of mine for
five dollars, ten dollars, or even less, so T'd have something with which
to buy a little wine or something . That kind of started it. One day T was
in the operating room and Captain Flannery came in. He sa;i.d , "Oh , Albright,
do you want to make a drawing of this operation? We ' re going to have an
aneurysm of the neck." I said, "Sure." I had a watercolor tablet and
water colors along. I stood there. The nurse was cutting away and I made
this drawing . The blood was flowing out and everything. You know it's
against the medical code sort of - or they don't like to have a person die
while they're working on him - if you get him outside the operating room
it's not so bad. So finally they shoved t his guy out pretty fast. (They
had busted the thing, you know.) That was the first medical drawing I
made. Then they said, "We'll put you on guard duty" - they were threatening
me with that because I wasn't working much, doing this, you see. So I
took it upon myself to go to one of the ward s . I located the worst case
of shrapnel where they were using these vaseline pads and dacon tubes, as
they did in those days, and I told the nurse I was going to make a drawing.
While I was doing this the captain came by and said, "Albright, you ' re in
here. That's great!" So from then on I was my own boss. Actually I was
trying to get a promotion. I think this calls for a captain or a major.
I was the only one in the A. E. F. making these drawings . Then about two
weeks later I ' d make another drawing of that shrapnel wound showing how
it healed; I worked on the X-rays which showed where the shrapnel was and
if there was a broken tibia or anything; and then my drawings would show
how the wound healed. T did six or eight books of these. By the time the
-8 --
war was over I ended up with a little office with a desk making copies
of these books. When the evacuation outfit came in I had this nice
polished desk and the major had a soapbox . They ' d come and try to get
my desk for the major . I ' m just · a buck private . After two or three days
this poor major said , "You know how it is . " I said , "Yes . Sorry, Sir.
No luck." So I sat at this polished desk making watercolor drawings and
the maj or sat on the soapbox for the rest of the time we were there.
Actually I retained two of the books. On the way back to this country my
barrack bags were stolen; I think the Merchant Marine took them. But I
carried these two myself all over France and came home with them , Senator
Benton called up last night and said they ' re going to be given to the
Medical Center of the University of Chicago. Isn ' t that something?
PC
That ' s great .
You went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes at one point?
IA
Oh, really that was hooey - let ' s put it down - let ' s cancel that . I went
two days and two nights . I thought I could draw; that ' s the period when
I thought I was an artist, you see. Well, they had little kids there six
years old . Finally , I was sitting back with all these little ones . That's
where you think you ' re an artist and you find that you ' re not . Believe me,
I wasn't any good . I just thought I could draw. But I thought the name
sounded good and that I might as well get something besides the dollar a
month from the government, so I added that on.
PC
You did some other drawings for a doctor?
IA
Oh, yes. But first to finish up on the drawings I did in the Army: What
I was doing in this office was making copies of these drawings for the
doctors . Each doctor - Captain Flaµnery particularly - wanted to have all
the drawings. Then other doctors wanted all of them : Doctor Schia , who was
head of all the tuberculosis cases; the doctor in charge of all the fractures
go t a book; and a chap named Dr . Dobeler got a book or two . I don ' t know
where he is; he may be dead . There was a Southerner named Alexander in
the hospital. A very nice chap . He came back from the front shot up . He
liked my drawings, He said, "I'm going to take one of those books . " Well,
he stole one and, bless his soul, he ' s got i t somewhere down in Virginia
or wherever he came from. So I had only two books. But I met a Dr . Sylvester, a brain surgeon from Oak Park, Illinois. In the summer following
my return from the war I made about twenty eighteen by twenty-four illustrations for Dr . Sylvester . Me was planning to put out a hook of big
colored reproductions on brain surgery. I don ' t know whether it ever came
out or not, I drew tumors of the brain and God knows what, I had books
in German and other languages with these color reproductions and I made
these things that big . They weren ' t so bad . I think I got five dollars
apiece for them . I wasn ' t overpaid for them because I had to pay for
my transportation to Oak Park and back .
PC
Did you ever make drawings while Dr. Sylvester was operating?
IA
No, he wouldn ' t operate. I made these drawings from these books. The
only drawings I did in operating rooms were the ones I made in France:
The one of the aneurysm of the neck and I think I did a drawing of an
amputation, I'm not sure: But that's about all. The other drawings I did
in different wards, We had twenty wards in this hospital, twenty different
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buildings, little barracks and each barrack had about fifty wounded men .
I would pick out the most interesting cases, the one who had, say, the
most shots. I drew one chap who had a hundred and t h irty - six pieces of
shrapnel in him; they weren ' t too big, from the size of your thumbnail to
maybe four times that size, but all over; he just got shot . Oh, he got
well. The worst cases would be head or chest . They didn ' t bring these
cases back from the front much . I made one drawing of a head wound . The
worst cases they left . We didn ' t get those . We ' d get amputations and so
forth.
PC
But it ' s all kind of background .
IA
Well , if you want background: In the hospital they tried to get me to
sterilize the surgical tools . I said, "Absolutely not!" They had a bunch
of medical students there . I said , "Give that job to your own bunch who
are interested in medicine . I ' m not that kind of a fool . " They said, "Oh,
we ' ll get you . " Well, they didn ' t get me because I got out; I wouldn't do
it . One morning before an operation I was in the washroom just outside the
operating room and there was a hand sticking out of the wa s te paper basket .
You know, you ' d bury those later . But you get used to that .
PC
When you came out of the Army did you have any particular thing you wanted
to do?
IA
Yes, that summer I worked for Perkins, Howells & Hamilton . I was going
back to the University to be an architect . My brother worked with Oliver
& Root that summer . After working there we realized more or less what the
situation was: That you ' d have to have a lot of financial backing and
everything and there wouldn ' t be much of what I like about architecture,
which is designing . It was mostly plumbing and plans and square feet and
location and how many stories . It wasn ' t really what I call architecture,
not the type I ' d want to do anyhow .
PC
What did you really want to do?
IA
Well, I didn't know . Maybe create my own buildings, don ' t you see . But
I didn ' t realize that you have to have money to create your own buildings .
They haven ' t created any here anyhow except lately . I came in whe r e they
still made crisscrosses on bank windows and where they believed in the
five orders - don ' t think of a new one, don't you know . I know my brother
said, "How about putting a dome on? 11 And the teacher said, "Oh, no. Wait
until you ' re a sophomore and you go to the library and look it up." That
kind of stuff . They hadn ' t become creative. Frank Lloyd Wright was still
nailing his chairs down in the buildings in Chicago . You know, so they
couldn ' t move them. And Wright was not an architect . He never passed the
examination; he couldn ' t . So he had a partne r who had a right legally to
practice architecture . It was like David Adler - not David - who was the
decorator in Chicago who had to have a partner, too. But generally those
chaps are the ones who have more artistic feeling than the ones who can
pass examinations but can ' t do anything else. Don ' t you know lots of times
it ' s so. Well, you see, the period of Frank Lloyd Wright hadn ' t come on
at all . It was the worst period in the world; they were just changing, or
I should say ready to change. It was an awful period. One of my classmates, an old man, put up the St. Clair Hotel in Chicago and another building
I mean what kind of architecture?
- 10-
and they still had the old feeling . Another chap, Louis Somno, put up a
theater building. But there wasn ' t anything that came out of there,
though Illinois did have one of the best architectural schools . I think
Yale had a good one. And a few others . But the time wasn't right for
architecture yet. Not that I knew that.
PC
Did you continue painting at this point?
IA
I started painting. I started going to art school . I had four years after
that. I went to the Chicago Art Institute School for four years . Then I
went to the Pennsylvania Academy. Later I went to the National Academy .
That was for Hawthorne. Bellows was in Europe . The only one I wanted was
Bellows, or Hawthorne; I preferred Bellows at the time .
PC
How was the Chicago Art Institute School?
IA
Who I studied with didn ' t amount to anything. I was free. I started right
out painting . I didn ' t go through the drawing part. Again I thought I
knew that. I was monitor in two or three c l asses. Then I went to the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia. You had to make a charcoal drawing to
pass no matter how much previous training you ' d had. In Chicago all I
inherited was a whole crowd of my dad ' s enemies. The Institute had a few
scholarships for study in Europe. I was making full-length painted figures
in one afternoon . I couldn't compete for these scholarships. I mean
they ' d eliminate me. There were too many enemies. When I first got there
I ' d see them walking through the halls with banners saying "Stop Albright"
- my dad, you see. And here I was in there. Well, the last year I decided
I ' d enter the competition. I didn't put my name on my entry . I got up to
the finals and then when they found out there was an Albright 1 was automatically out . Then when I went to the Pennsylvania Academy they had
twenty Cresson scholarships, but I couldn ' t compete for this because you
have to be there for about two or three years . So I was out of luck there.
It ' s just as well .
PC
What was the problem in Chicago?
IA
Well , they didn't like my dad so they took it out on me .
PC
Were there any students at the Institute in Chicago who were special friends
or who you were particularly interested in?
IA
I was in painting classes . My twin brother studied sculpture under Polasek,
who was a figure for four years . There were a few chaps in the painting
clas ses that were pretty smart . One was Lubin. He was very talented. He
went back to Israel after about four years. I think his family was pretty
well off . There was another student named Chapman who tried out for the
Tribune mural . They had a competition for the mural in the Tribune building
in 1924 when they were getting through . The jury awarded the competition
to Chapman, but he didn ' t get it. The Tribune wanted someone else , a Sunday
commercial chap who worked at night, you know, with a magnifying glass, one
of these typical fairly goo d commercial artists . The Tribune saw that this
other chap got the job . I don ' t know whether they ever painted it or not .
So the two students I remember best are T.ubin and Chapman. T.ubin was very
brilliant and talented . He disappeared . He went to Tel Aviv in 1924 .
Who did you study with there?
-11-
About three years ago we were in Israel and we saw Lubin. We flew overnight from Iran where they were just having a celebration - I don ' t know
what - the coronation of the queen or something. All the streets in Iran
were lined with roses and so forth . The planes wouldn't fly through; they
were breaking down. Finally, we took off and arrived at Tel Aviv about
5:30 in the morning . There were flowers around . Since it was morning
the re was n o use going to bed . I went down to the basement of the hotel
where we we r e staying . I looked around at antiques they had there. I
said to the man there, "Is there a chap by the name of Lubin around here?"
I handed him the phone book saying, "You can read this script better than
I can." So he called up and said, "Yes, he lives in the apartment house
right across the street from here." So I telephoned Lubin; I said, "Hey!
Remember me? I'm Ivan. How are you, Leo?" I invited him to come over
and have a cocktail. So that evening at five over he came. Well, it was
quite a shock. I mean time ages one. After fifty years to see a white haired little guy come in when the last time you saw him he was young and
had black hair • •• I imagine I looked the same way to him. Stouter and
stammering and walking crooked - here were two contradictory old guys
sitting down with a martini jiggling in our hands. In a way Time is wonderful.
Anyhow, it gets rid of everybody eventually, good or bad. Well, that ' s that.
The Institute was all right. I kept studying. I think it was in about my
third or fourth year I started to try to think for myself and realized that
there was such a thing as stars and such a thing as this and that. I
didn ' t learn much from my teachers. I avoided them because they were more
or less pals or contemporaries of my dad ' s but not quite as successful. I
didn ' t listen to anyone much . Finally I started to analyze and take notes.
I got notebooks and started to write down what I was trying to think and
what I was going for. I was going for form. In those days everything was
color . They didn ' t know what form was. I kept asking. Th:ey'd say, "You
don't know what you ' re talking about. Why don't you just copy the model."
But I wouldn ' t go for that .
PC
What kind of color? - and what kind of interest?
IA
Color, for instance, without any relationship to anything . What I mean is
that they didn't know - for instance , say, J 1 m talking about a model now .
First there's a body and then there ' s light on that body and then there ' s
individual color on the body . But they were confusing the form of the body
and the color of the body and the light on the body all together . There
wasn't anyone at that time - Prendergast - little notes - Henri would paint
thirty or forty pictures a summer and would have one of two that were
su ccessful . I mean he was highly admired at that period but he knew nothing
about composition. He had amputation here, amputation there, the legs were
cut off, the arms were cut off . If by accident he got the figure in so
that it looked pretty good , why that was successful. They weren ' t great
students then. One chap came on - I wanted him - Academy of Rome - Stickroff
like Eugene Savage. I even thought of trying out for the Academy of Rome.
In those days it was supposed to be an honor . But to try out for it I
would have had to go to Yale. (It must be like professional politics; you
had to get in with a crowd.) I could have gone to Yale and entered under
Eugene Savage who was a former American Academy of Rome man . If I did that
the chances were I ' d have the possibility of really competing and might get
it. In Chicago they wouldn't let me have anything . But studying under a
-12-
former Academy of Rome man and then doing a good job I ' d have a chance.
Al so I could have had a Yale degree. What can you do with any degree?
You can't live on i t, you can't use it. But it sounds fine . 'J'hat ' s why
people go to Harvard and Yale; it sounds fine . Every lawyer in the country
comes from Harvard or some place like that; but there are very few good
lawyers. The point is that T didn't go to Yale . Also after World War I,
Thad a chance to go to the University of Chicago. They didn ' t have any
GI Bill of Rights there . I didn ' t get anything over there; T didn't get
anything after I came back; not a penny , you see. But the Institute by
the time T got ou t I was on the way to thinking of studying, of thinking
outside of making a picture . Then I went to the Pennsylvania Academy. It
had a fairly good bunch of teachers like Daniel Garber, Charles Grafly,
and other ones . I should mention that in Chicago I did take up heads
under Polasek, the s culptor .
PC
IA
Is that when you started sculpture? - in Chicago.
Well, no. All these terms are cra zy, they mean nothing. I mean anything
is not hard; anything is not easy. Those two words should go out completely. Whether we ' re speaking of watercolor or lithograph or etching
or sculpture we say, "Is that harder?" Well, that ' s crazy because they
are all more or less the same . If you eliminate the word "hard" everything disappears . If I teach anyone I say, "Eliminate that first." But
in sculpture I think there ' s a sense of approaching a thing and you can
come up to the surface and then stop . If you're making a stone sculpture
you stop because you can't go into it. If you're making something that's
fleshy, a woman or a man, your finger can sink in like it can sink into a
pillow. Then you get gradations of shading and modeling . And all that a
shadow is, is the opposite side without the light hitting it; but it's
underneath; you've got to make the form underneath and then you want to
shade on top; you go through it delicately to reach that. But all that any
shading means is that you've got uphill and downhill; you've got a mountain
and a valley. If you didn't have that you'd have a sheer cliff or a big
flat mesa, a plane. I never use artificial light . The strongest and best
light is light from the sky when it's cloudy , because there you've got
like a reflector with the white clouds with the light pouring down.
Leonardo knew that . If you take a small chamber like outdoors and run to
the top, say, twenty or thirty feet, inside you'll have the purest light.
The minute you put up a glass, a skylight, you diminish the strength of
your light; you diminish the strength of your form. So you have to put
more work into building it up into a beautiful form. For instance, here in
Woodstock , Vermont is fine. Up in Canada the light is better . T went up
there on the border the other day . It ' s better light . If an artist ~wants
to really model and see things correctly he should go as far north as he
can. He might be uncomfortable but the farther up he goes the better
light he gets. It's a white light and it ' s a beautiful light because it
shows the form of things, that is, if you're looking for the form. I'm
not talking about abstraction. Everything is abstract anyhow . As far as
that goes who knows what anything is? The more abstract you want it should
be based only on nature. Nature is abstract. You don't create a nightmare
or a dream. You don ' t have to. It's right here. Also in our thinking I
think we have too much of identifying things. We say, "I am I." "You are
you." "That's a stand." "That's a chair." "That's a table." That doesn't
e xist. It gives all the names. Say you just came to this earth as a
-13 ·
visitor for five minutes and you look at things and you don ' t know the
names of the persons or the things, it would be wonderful. What happens
then is this: you ' re arriving at the truth; it ' s all one. We kind of
separate: We say here this is this . And that isn ' t so. As I sit here
this is one; including myself it ' s iust one thing . And that ' s where
people get lost . With their little knowledge they ' re confusing their
minds and making a lack of knowledge. The Greeks in a good deal of their
sculpture had what is called unity . Unity would be looking at the top
and bottom of a figure and seeing it as a unit . If you look at sections
you see a section and then you ' d have to join them all together to make a
unity. My brother is trying to make a thing like the Greeks did top t o
bottom. I thought I'd break away and make mine through repetition. A
person can count up to seven and you put eleven things down it ' s confusing;
you ' d have to guess . If you put down twenty-two things nobody can guess,
It ' s just how good are you at guessing . You don ' t know. Now if you put a
thousand things down you come on repetition by which again you arrive at
unity but in a different way. We have a hundred billion stars yet we say
we have a unit, you see, But if you try to encompass all those together
then in one way it sort of rounds the thing out into a unity .
Now it's a question of what is one driving for: In one picture you could
drive for unity, in another picture you could drive for separation, and in
another one for motion, or of force , If you want power, how much power do
you want . What does power mean? We haven't changed the position at all .
Now suppose we take a canvas, a square like a canvas, the ultimate of two
squares put together and you start repeating, So your whole limit of size
is two squares. It's very simple. So what are you going to do about it,
you see .
PC
IA
It just goes on and on and on .
That ' s right. The height of what you can do is in two squares . Now when
we think in dimension we have two eyes, Physicists and so forth say that
there's a third dimension. I don't believe that at all. I do believe in
an absolute dimension . We have two eyes . I think that space varies with
the individual . Rodin had widely-separated eyes and could see. The King
and the Queen of England have eyes that are right together almost on the
same spot; they probably have never seen any space. The further apart the
eyes are the bigger your vision or the bigger your space and your sense of
space . Therefore a person with eyes widely separated can see form more
easily . For example, let ' s take an apple . If your eyes are, say, normal
you'll see it this way. If they ' re wide apart you ' ll see around it more.
In other words, it' l l draw the apple closer to you. I mean you ' ll feel
both sides and the front more. If the eyes are very close together all
you ' ll have is a sort of narrow shape like a lemon sque ezed toge ther as if
you squashed the thing, you see. There ' s nothing wrong with the
but they ' re totally different. But for a painter it's pretty nice to have
more force, more vision for the simple reason that he can create more
easily the thing he ' s trying to create. T walk around things. I'm probably
the first artist who ever found out he had a pair of legs . Rembrandt sat
down. Holbein, the whole bunch , sat down . They didn ' t move. And they
didn't want t he model to move. Now T take a number of positions and
join them toge ther. If you can conceive of looking at an apple from every
viewpoint at the same time you ' ll find that your mind cannot entertain it
-14-
and it'll go outside; you see, the mind doesn't want to have that. If
you put that same apple in full light you won't have any form; you
wouldn't see it. 1f you put it in full darkness you don't see it. We've
gone from full dar~ness to full light. What we want is light in between,
one light. If you have two lights you've got two apples with overlapping
light, you see. I mean I have one skylight . Whereas in motion pictures
they take a big aluminum panel or tint and throw it on the model, they
throw it on the face of a girl , or they throw it on part of her dress.
They are composing with a whole bunch of lights, you see. Which is all
right. There is an absolute dimension. I have to involve science in
this thing. We'll ju st keep on with the apple. Put it on the table
there. It has a million shapes . Tt has a mill ion viewpoints. It gets
small up to where it could disappear. It'll come up to you. You have no
sense of measurement. Mow take a man made scale, put, say, a yard
measure or a foot measure in front of you; that is not any check for that
thing changes too with your eyes. You have no check except what you think.
You can say this is a check but it isn't.
Now with this sense of the two eyes there's a curvature. Everything has
to curve slightly according to your eye r For instance, take two tracks
running down . They don't go in straight lines. In architecture they
have perspective; there are about three different types. They're all
wrong. But they constantly curve. For instance, you take a wall twenty
feet high and you're looking at this upright, say your eye is half way
up - ten feet. Say it's a column. It has to slant, get smaller and it
doesn't zigzag up there; it curves up there. And also it has to curve
down below. In other words, it's part of a great, great arc, about two
degrees varying with the separation of your eyes. It has to be that, you
see. So here's what happens. Through seeing (we're told of this doggone
third dimension which doesn't exist), a person who doesn't know anything
sees more or less correctlyo Van Gogh saw correctly. In the painting of
the floor in the bedroom scene with the red pil l ow or whatever it was he
tipped the thing up for the simple reason that it does tip up. The fact
that I can see the floor here means that it's raised up. But we're told
that it's flat, that this is upright, this is flat here. Which is all
fallacy. What actually happens: This tips up and that tips up and that
is built by construction on it, that has to lean forward and the other
thing comes down. The Greeks early had an understanding of this sight.
For example, when they built the Parthenon from a certain viewpoint they
had the pediment curve about two degrees. I got a book out of the library
once on The Refinements of Architecture which mentions this curvature but
they didn't know what i t meant . When I was a student in Philadelphia there
were a few bank buildings along Broad Street that had a pediment. Walking
along just with pure uncontrolled vision the sensitive eye will observe
that the base of the pediment sags. If you make a thing straight by construction it will sag. What one should do from the position you're going
to look at it and from the height of the person, you make it curve a
little bit and then it will come down to be perfectly straight. Which is
what you want. That's very important. People don't understand that.
And that's true with everything. That's why on my "Door" I took an
arbitrary line about three-and-a-half feet above - like at the doorknob
and said: this is my axis across here, then an upright; therefore from here
it cannot stay the same. The only way it'll stay the same is if you run
-15-
your eyes up and down that thing .
END OF TAPE I - Side 1
Do you want to stop?
-16 -
TAPE I - Side 2
PC
Let me say this is Side 2.
IA
I got sidetracked.
PC
That's okay.
IA
I might as well get back to the Pennsylvania Academy.
to me.
PC
How did you pick that school to go to?
IA
Because my dad went there. And at that time it was supposed to be almost
a hundred percent just fine arts. They had about 350 students. From its
inception it had been noted for being about the best art school, not commercial at all. The Institute in Chicago at the time I was there had about
4,000 students and taught everything from knitting to weaving to hand
printing; they would have taught finger painting if there was such a thing
in those days. The Pennsylvania Academy was noted as being strictly fine
arts. They had a few other schools on Broad Street. They claim that
Robert Henri went to the Academy but got kicked out. But he never did go
there; he went to a commercial art school up on Broad Street. Thomas
Eakins was at the Academy and after him there was Anshutz. At the time
I was there Grafly was teaching, and Daniel Garber, Arthur Carles (who you
may not know but he has a certain name), and, oh, Mccarter who was a classmate of my dad's. He lied a little about his age; he was about four or
five years older than he said he was. Then he went to France and knew
Toulouse-Lautrec. At the time I was at the Academy he taught composition.
He was a classmate of Charles Grafly but they hated each other. At that
time Grafly was known as the best portrait man in sculpture in this
country; and he was a realist. And Mccarter was talking about the abstract.
And they did not click anymore than they do nowadays, more or less.
It doesn't matter
We had a composition class on Fridays. There were about eight or ten
students in this class and we talked about this and that. I remember one
Friday I made a little still-life. The way it was set up they had a stilllife building in the Academy off a ways. I put my canvas on the floor and
painted this still-life to make it flat. I wanted to have the things rise
up. I thought: This vase is sitting on a table, it's not laying down
flat on the table, it rises up. So I put my canvas on the floor and
painted the thing rising up . When it came time for Mccarter to give us a
criticism he went around and looked at each one's work. When he came to
mine I said, "This is supposed to be flat on the floor." He said, "You' re
not painting a rug." I said, "I know I'm not painting a rug." He said,
"You don't put it on the floor or the ceiling." And he shook his head.
The next Friday when he came around he said, "You're a real modernist."
He said, "I've been thinking it over. That's all right." It wasn't a
very good painting but the idea, you see. Now we always have our canvases
upright when we hang them. Isn't that great? Now why in hell should they
be upright? There's no reason in the world for it except that it's a fad.
In the last few weeks I've been thinking that we paint pictures at every
angle, so why do we make all these darn upright pictures. What's the matter
with us? We don't see things upright. Actually we're standing upside down
on this earth so why in hell do we always have pictures standing upright.
-17It's silly, ridiculous. We should kill that idea. Everybody is taught
the wrong thing all the time. Let's make them at angles; let's make them
upside down. If they don't like it, okay. They can stand on their head
if they have to. But we're too much with one philosophy which is wrong.
It's not right. If everything were upside down it would be wrong too.
Let's give everything a fair chance; divide the pie equally.
PC
Who did you study with that you f ound congenial at the Academy?
IA
I liked Mack (Mccarter) pretty well. I mean his philosophy. What I ' d
really been looking for was what's back of painting as far as artists
are like, I mean good ones, whether it's Bellini or Velazquez, El Greco,
Michelangelo, Raphael, (Raphael is a little sweet). You keep changing.
Which you should do. I think you should admire a great numbe r of them
at different periods but I don't think you should copy them or be influenced by them. After all, they enjoyed what they were doing. As I
say, you have one enemy and one friend. You have one competition only
and that's yourself. Only one. Forget the others. The span of success
of anything in the world isn't any thicker than a sheet of the thinnest
paper. Failure is just as good as the greatest success that ever lived;
just about; it's that close. But it's hard to work. Everyone could do
much better than he does. We're lazy; at least I am. Just making
another thing like an I . B.M. machine is of no interest to me. You should
be able to improve on what you've done and to repeat and make one after
the other.
Everything T've done anyhow has been slow growth. I started out making
motion one little thing. In an early picture I did - the Chicago Art
Institute has it now - it 9 s called Flesh; I had a bowl in it. I tried
to turn the water upside down because actually what is a glass bowl? It's
only through knowledge - or experience we call it - walking up to the bowl,
feeling it, putting your hand inside it (which is no proof that that thing
is hollow). So I pretended it was just the opposite. And it works just
the same. There were a few flowers in it. I turned it around the other
way. And then the next fime I painted Ida, I had a handkerchief - I
tipped it over a platform where I had the model and it hung down. I
painted Ida that way. It wasn't flat on the floor. And on The Door I
painted acorner of a door, made a piece of wood, painted it black like
the corner and then reversed the thing on it. These things are very
subtle. They only show a trifle. I put a key in the door. I painted it
from the opposite angle from what I looked and naturally it follows your
eye. And people say: isn't it amazing that that follows your eye. I'd
say, "I didn't notice that before." Well, I changed my position on the
roses in the wreath. I think I had twelve roses. I painted each one from
a different level. I painted one rose in it. I remember thinking of
Christ. I'm not very religious - I believe in God though. I remember
thinking of Christ all the time and it looked sweeter than the others.
Now if you can take any object and paint it with a feeling of hunger - of
course you don't want to take a pottery plate and think of hunger because
you couldn't eat it if you were hungry - say you took a roll in that case
and you didn't eat for a few days, I mean you can't build up hunger, you
can't make a false hunger, you'd have to just not eat for four or five
days, or eat so little that it would look good to you; it would have a
-18-
different feeling. Now what changes? Does your shape change? No. But
something changes. Now love can change things. I don't think that you
can paint hate. Hate would just destroy it. You can paint - if you were
thirsty and painted a rose it probably would have moisture on it or tend
to have that. It would not have a dry feeling I guarantee you if you
really were thirsty; if you kept to the stage where you really were thirsty
you're bound to have some of that feeling. You're not changing the shape;
you're not changing the color. You're putting something else in it which
it has, you see. That means that when we paint a picture and stuff we
think we're not putting anything in it much. Or we're mixing all our
emotions, see. We're well fed, we drink well, you do this. What are you
putting in it? And that's wrong. You should be thinking.
Now if you want to be subtle and you're trying to get some texture you
almost ought to sandpaper the ends of your fingers. How about a guy
opening a safe? He sandpapers them. Why? To be more sensitive. How
about the artist? He should sandpaper his fingers all the time to get
form because the minute you approach it you can almost have an extension
feeler. I love form, I mean sculpture. You should feel it. You don't
want to go through it, you don't want to go in it unless youvre trying to
make a certain curvature. Now that makes a thing. Now you take all these
things. So you want to have absolute accuracy. ~o have accuracy I pinpoint my pictures by putting on dots of white or whatever other colors.
With one you have nothing. Take these violet costumes in my paintings.
I had dots all over them. I don't want to keep spending my time trying
to see where I looked before. Like you get off in New York or Chicago or
San Francisco and wonder "where am I?" - when you can call it like three
little dots. So I put down two, which gives only a line; it doesn't give
any sense of space, I mean of area. So, as a rule, I put down three dots.
And then if I keep on putting them down I'll start out with white, and
then use yellow or blue or whatever the material so the dots will show.
Then I can identify. Then you look at the thing you're making and maybe
you want love. You have cloth; you want separation; you want movement.
You're playing with motion instead of designing with area. The way it's
painted first without doing anything T call the thing "static". Now if
T want to move around T'll have a certain thing curve around without
changing anything. I don't mean by a drastic motion. I'll get on the
other side and pull it this way. And then if I want it to stop T'll pull
on the other side. Or if you want to, you can make it go faster. You
play around with that. When you walk around an object you're doing the
same thing whether you know it or not.
PC
You walk around a setup frequently rather than just looking at it from,
say, behind a canvas, don't you?
IA
Yes. Here - let me show you something.
There's a position.
PC
Oh, I see.
IA
There's my position, for
damn thing . This is for
That's too complicated.
made of Senator Benton.
Here is my plan for The Window.
God's sake. And I worked twenty years on this
The Window here. Let me get the picture out.
It won't make any difference. The small one I
This is the sixteenth -- you haven't seen that.
-19'T'here's The Cornfield. The scene is Georgia. Here's my plan. Down in
Georgia I covered an acre walking. I took a bunch of old white shirts
or sheets and tore them into rags and tied these cornstalks all around
here. And this is my motion, my movement walking around, you see.
PC
It's a real map.
IA
It is a map, yes. You're darn right it's a map and if you donvt follow
it right you're out of luck. Now here's my motion. Here you are, see:
"Place canvas on left side. Place canvas on right side on bottom of
easel" all around here, see. Now here, take a look at those clouds.
Notice what feeling you get. I painted them upside down. A thing painted
upside down has to roll over. I'm just getting it so I know what I'm
doing and so forth. They have to. The light's true and everything what's wrong? Now here. My oldest son saw this and said that it looks
like a battlefield (which irritated me). Now look here, there's motion
all over the darn thing, see; although in places it's static. Look at
the thing. But they're all drawn realistically, all drawn possible;
they're drawn from standing here it's true; they're all true ; People talk
about abstraction - and it's all right here. We've got this, see.
PC
I see.
IA
But it has to be done subtly; you can't make a crude thing of it or
you'll have nothing. It's hard enough with realism. Therefore, the
easiest thing you can do is a round thing; otherwise it'll be like Saturn
with a ring around it. If you turn this table top around you'll have an
outside area, you'll have an inside area, and then you'll have the main
core which is solid. So something that approaches a solid core is easiest
to turn around because you've got all the body inside of that. Now here,
I walked from here across the Ottauquechee River on this thing. And it
creates a wonderful feeling. Then I drew this all correctly. In other
words, I'm making the observer look exactly where I want him to look.
And it's an amazing thing: this thing hates to be confined; nature does
not like to be told how you handle it; it fights all the time. Now if
you put that against a conservative painting -- I get into both abstract
and realistic shows because I am abstract. I'm not just making a pattern
like a Persian abstraction or like - I don't have to make Homage to the
Square like Albers. That's a silly little abstraction that doesn't do
anything. T'm working with nature, with what nature does. Now here where's this other one? I'll explain this with a picture. This thing
here. I'd better give you the picture, otherwise you'll be confused.
I didn't know that then. This one I used it in more or less.
PC
What's the title of that?
IA
Wherefore Now Ariseth The Illusion of the Third Dimension. When I first
started finding out about it. Now here's a still-life. It's lace with
these objects on a bureau. This would show actually. I did this in
about 1931. I walked around this table. T' ll go around this way. These
apples are painted here; these gloves are here, this apple is there; and
I took a round object. Now here I made a conflict by painting this this
way, this way, that way; and they want to separate. And then this is
here. _ And the result is that you go around.
-20PC
What started you to move around?
IA
Well, because I was fascinated. I thought: why am I standing still?
What's the matter? I mean I said: I've got legs. 'Ibis apple or whatever it is has a viewpoint on the other side. Why do T just confine
myself to one part of it? Why don't T explain it more? We had all
this talk about Cezanne and other artists getting space but I couldn't
see where the hell the space was. I found out that what Cezanne did was
he used a set palette. You know what a set palette is, don't you?
PC
What is it?
IA
Well, suppose we take red, yellow and blue and you put a little red in
the blue and a little yellow in the blue and vice versa with each color.
And if you had all the colors you'd do the same thing. So what you would
have - first, we'll say we have just ~he same amount, just a little bit of
each; or you'll have a harmony without working. Upstairs T have this
painting I did of the Man in Georgia. Say you wanted to make up a different set palette we'll say more artistic and in a certain way like
The Fisherman, and wanted to run toward a yellow, he had this yellow
slicker on and everything, I could balance it all running towards the
yellow or greens and mute it down up to the full extent. I could mix
them all together and make them tertiary and do it two or three times
until the thing has to be in tone, T suppose you'd say. Not only that
but you could run it any way you want it up to the nth degree. Cezanne
did that a little bit; you see he mixed them up. T mixed up a set for
a picture of mine and, my God, T found out it's just like Cezanne; all
the poor guy did was have a set palette. So that's nothing mysterious.
That's just that. Now this came slowly.
I was interested in doing some of these things in The Door. In that
painting I kept changing things around. J had moldings on The Door this
way and I had so much time I'd twist it around this way. All you have to
work with is light falling on an object. So on the molding I had the
light falling on one thing. I thought: why couldn't the light fall on
the other side? Why do I always work the whole thing as if the light I mean, heck, I'm just dealing with a fantasy, anyhow, or a vision. So
I made certain sections with the light falling on the opposite side. And
all you get then is a reverse thing. But that makes the other part
stronger. And also it takes it away from being like a Van Dyck or a
Velazquez, like something which is static. These things are static;
they have no movement. Rembrandt did have great atmosphere but all his
figures are just like a frozen dummy like in a wax museum. Let me get
this one picture. 'l'urn that --- until J: was finishing '!'he Window and I thought "I know what I'm doing"
and they can have it now because I didn't want to have it copied. r
pretended T was just dumb and didn't know why these things happened.
I had this at Carnegie Institute years ago. Some artist said he'd give
anything to know what I was thinking about. I said, "Aw, nuts!" Well,
because you have imitators before -- Come over to a better light. On
The Door, which I worked on for about ten years - I first spent about
a yeardrawing it. On The Window, which I worked on for about nineteen
or twenty years T spent about a year and a half drawing it first. I got
-21-
married during that time and moved down to Chicago. I made a brick wall
for The Window. I went to Aurora, Illinois and spent three days picking
out the brick. 'they had a pile of old bricks. T think they must have
thought I was nuts. I'd say, "This is a pretty brick." "This one isn't
so good." Some of the bricks were burned where they had got too near
fire and there was a glaze like lava, yellow and green running down the
sides. I'd say, "'that's a fine brick. It's beautiful." If anyone had
heard me muttering I'm sure they would have gotten a strait jacket right
away. I picked out about 500 or 600 or maybe 800 bricks . It took me
most of a week. Then I carted them down to Warrenville. For The Window
I looked around for the sill or frame. T couldn't find anything I
wanted so I made one. I got old parts and put them together trying to
make up a portion a little bit narrower than usual so it would have a
little character outside of mine. For background I got a not very good
rug for the floor and I got an old bureau and put a lamp on it and so
forth. Here - we'll start with the lamp. No - I ' ll start with this
thing here. 'T'his is my general plan. I use it all the time .
PC
How did you decide to use a window as the main -- ?
IA
I had painted The Door and had painted wood for ten years and I didn't
want to see any more wood as long as I lived . Refore that I had painted
a fat man, I mean a strong laborer - I called this painting Room 203 He posed for me for thirteen months. He had a derby on his head. He had
been a bartender, he had been a labor leader; during Prohibition he used
to have an iron chain in the back of his truck that he would let down
and swing at the cops who followed him and knock them off the road. He
was that sort of chap. He was about sixty years old. He had white hair.
And he thought he was good-looking. He used to drive horses into Chicago
and bring in freight. He told me, "You know, those horses are smart. I
can get drunk and they'll take me right home." I heard horse talk all the
time. I painted that guy. Well, after painting him for thirteen months
I didn't want to see any flesh. So I painted The Door. When I got
through with The Door - well, say, you ate eggs for ten years in a row
you'd get tired of eggs. The same with fish. If you had it at every
meal you'd get tired of it. So why did I paint brick? I wanted to get
away from wood. When I got through with brick I didn 1 t want to ever see
a brick again. So that's about it.
PC
Constantly changing.
IA
Some people get tired of their wives after ten years or twenty years.
Some don't. It's just a matter of that. Now here's this thing. By this
time I was beginning to understand what motion was. I laid this out.
Now I'll explain this: "F" means front side. "L" means left side; by
that I mean I put the picture on the left side. Now here: "Right side"
I put it this way.
PC
The canvas keeps turning then?
IA
Oh, yes, sure. But you've got to compose it so that it will do something
when it turns. You don't want to have all your motion go outside. I'm
trying to contain the motion inside the picture, have the motion control
your emotions as well as the picture. But I'm going to make the picture
-22-
as realistic as I can and follow minutely what nature does and forget
about whether it's realistic or not. If the hair has hairs on it I
want to put the hairs on the hair, you see
When I studied at the
Chicago Art Institute some chap said, "Don't put a hair on. It's the
worst thing you can do." Okayo People are afraid of photographs
because they can't reach it. A photograph is false anyhow. If you're
afraid of anything ••• '!'hey used to talk about feeling. Now feeling is
just unanalyzed knowledge. The minute you figure out what that thing
is there's always feeling ahead. You don't have to be afraid of getting
so much knowledge that you won't have feeling. Most of the artists go
by feeling, which is just bunk; if you go by feeling you're going by
lack of knowledge. Now here - this is the front side. T'll demonstrate
. from my diagram: "Left side" - that means I stand as is first. "Back" I get back of the object. Say, I'm painting you; instead of painting
here I get back of you. Now here your hand is placed upside down. "LS"
place canvas under the other (that's repetition). "H" is front view
looking directly at object. You can look a certain way; looking up at
object, looking down at objecto You see, you can look down and so
forth. "M' ' is looking and moving around object; you see, you give it
a swing. Now here wevll take this object here; that's a flask. Here I
have "B" - what the hell is that? I have to look myself - this is the
"back" - the window was here and I got back of it. I put my easel in
back on this other side and not in front. Look, there you are. That's
normal, see. Look here, look what it does: it wants to fold. Let me
show you: now we'll take the lamp. 'The lamp is "Back RS" - that means
place on the right side. And I looked left. You see, here I get in
back of the thingo I put the canvas on the right side and I look to the
left, not right in front. Now here we are; it's on the right side, I'm
in back of my setup and I'm looking to the left this way, not that way.
Now you see what this has: it has a tendency of falling. See this
thing here, see how that is; there's a tendency to roll down. It's upside
down.
0
PC
I see.
TA
See, this is upside down.
PC
The picture - right?
IA
Yes, the picture is going to roll. Now these three things here, I use
these --- the objects mean nothing except that you don't want to have
something fancy that doesn't fit it; otherwise the objects are immaterial.
PC
Do you collect all the objects for a particular reason?
IA
Well, yes. Just so they fit in. I use this old thing here; I don't want
to have a new Tiffany pitcher, for God's sake, or one from Spalding.
(I don't like that new polished stuff anyhow.) Here - these are three
beer bottles. This is more or less like the center of that job I did with
the lemons where I had three apples in that bowl. Now here I have these
three and the result is rather amazing. This one here is standing in back,
that means T have the canvas way around in the back - "HU" means front
view and looking directly at object. And it's upside down. Now here:
this is the way I looked at it; see that; it's back looking right at it.
Look here, it's going to roll.
-23-
Now look at the object - have I got a finished one of it? - wait a
minute - no - I'll show you the picture. Here : you ' re looking at this
one, see: see it standing there? see how it stands up nicely?
PC
IA
Right.
Now I'm in the back looking at it that way. Now here you are - where is
the darn thing? Here, see - see what that does: it's falling; it has
to fall. Now these others I put in opposite as a foil. This thing here
is left side and so forth. Where the heck am I looking? - this way and
this way. See this one. So they fight, you see. I have those three.
Now I'm pretending that I'm in the center there, looking at these. You
understand? I don't want to sound too nutty. I could do it another way;
I could stand outside this way and look this way and look that way and
then they'd crowd in on each other. Now if I had an area like this where
they want to expand, next to it, , if I wanted to, I could have a thing
pushed in . That's only where the composition comes in, whether I want it.
Now this thing is upside down more or less . See, that ' s falling . This
thing here is upside down. Now look at this thing here -- this is back
right side upside down - no - what's "R"? - right side back. '!'here.
Now look at that crazy thing, see. Tt looks like it wants to roll over.
It looks like it wants to fall off . It canvt stay in that position. You
see, it cannot stay in this position although they were in that position.
If you took an apple and painted it from three positions i t says: look,
you can only look at me from one place; don ' t you dare look at me from
another; I don't like it. So this thing is unhappy and fighting itself
all over . Now I had an awful time with this chair, darn it. I painted
it from three directions; I had this way, that way and that way. Now
this picture frame back here I got way in the back with my canvas, my
setup was about halfway from here to there bigger than that . It took up
quite an area. I gave the thing to the Institute. They have my setup .
I still have a few of the props, the chair and a few things; they didn ' t
want them . I ' d rather give them a diagram but they ' d never accept it .
You see, for this thing I got way over against that wall with my canvas,
the picture is hanging there; and, you see, I did this on the thing. And
all the way through. Now along the window sill it may not look like anything but I had that as if Twas walking along this way, this way, and
this way.
PC
Did you make all these decisions about points of view after you built this?
IA
Well , I made these somewhat knowing what I was going to do. It took me
a month or so to arrange the thing. You see, I don ' t make a thing fast.
Once I arrange it and the scale I just start drawing. When T painted
'T'he Door I drew it. I painted just once. on it - I did so much a day I knew just where I was going - I didn ' t go over and repaint at all;
hell , I knew what I was doing. That was it. A definite statement. And
the same way with The Window. I had a little trouble becau se I moved out
from Warrenville. I put tape on each one of the bricks and marked each
one , say, "Brick 108 is a fine brick" and so on. When I moved I thought
I could use the drawing I had worked on for a year. I had to draw the
whole damn thing over: T lost a lot of time. The drawing was okay. But
the mortar would be different. What's the use? I was kidding myself.
Jt was just impossible. T couldn't do it. T mean I had to have this
-24-
definite statement. Now this tree, which is very important - I put that
and I had each of these on a platform. I could move it out. I made that
so it twists, was a spiral, kept turning it around and drawing around, you
see. So it isn't a static tree. The hell with it! I knew what a branch
looks like; I could paint it like a branch; pardon me, like Andy Wyeth if
I wanted to. But I mean I'd walk around that thing. You see, if this
tree has all those viewpoints, why the hell cheat it? Now here's where I
was picking out a pretty brick, you know, the glaze and so forth. I
even got burned bricks. I've got some up her yet from the thing. I
didn't finish - this thing is in charcoal, which is all right, I think.
It's kind of nice to leave a little piece that way so they can see how you
work. And all the way through there's motion in this darn brick here.
I had "less wide, wide, wider, widest, wider, wide, less wide, narrow, more
narrow," and so on down. In other words, this is my center, my axis. Like
in looking at anything I've got to know - I'm here at Woodstock, I'm not
at Hanover, New Hampshire. So I pinpointed it this way and that. It's
arbitrary. It doesn 't mean anything. But if you don't do that your eye
would run up and down this thing and what the hell would you have. You
wouldn't have anything. In other words, you'd be making a thousand statements without knowing what you're doing. I'm making one statement, right
or wrong. I'm tieing myself here; I don't say it's the best view; and then
I tie myself in space there that way; and so forth. ~ow this drapery I
painted from the back side, some here and some here to turn it. That
window - that was a son of a gun! I had this window - where is it? it
looks pretty -- I tried to paint through it the w~y it is. It was impossible. So I took the window --- I painted all the brick first. Then I
had to put the window over it, because the other way it wasn't accurate
enough, it wasn't accurate and I'd be just kidding. So I had to paint the
building all in and then turn that thing. That was painted backwards from
here. But it has enough truth in it that you'd call it realism, wouldn't
you? Yet it isn't realism at all . It's variety is emotional.
PC
One of the things that intrigues me is the fact that there are so many
objects in this picture.
IA
That doesn 1 t make any difference. I mean if I had a simple object - let
me just show you -- I don't make drawings much, you know. We 've been
doing some remodeling here, the bathroom and so on. They started working
on December 10th and are still working. Putting in a bathroom and other
little changes. This studio had shelves; I had them taken out and put in
panels. And they are going to raise the skylight. So I made a drawing up
from above. Would you like to see it?
PC
Yes.
IA
I didn't intend to do much. This will show you a little something. I've
only made one other drawing that I did years ago of a figure of a girl.
That's in Israel. I gave it to Jack Weinberg a few years ago to give to
the museum there. Have you ever been there?
PC
No.
IA
They have a beautiful museum. It has about eight levels. They have a
building for sculpture. They have Velazquez and so on. They wanted
-25-
something of mine so T gave him a lithograph and a drawing to give to
them. He can take it off. T couldn't.
PC
Oh, this is the view out --?
IA
Yes, from the bathroom where you'll be. This took three weeks. ~ow here,
we have the thing standing up where you can see the things. Can you see
it all right there? Well, I'll explain: This thing here - "one half
right side" - actually the tree would look like that otherwise. "One
half right side" I bent it there. 'J'his one I made "one half left side"
so they'll fight. I showed it to my wife when I had it about half done.
She said, "That's terrible." You see first winding around. Now I built
this snow. This here is normal right here. But this is all different
so I could pile it down. Now I made this thing here "one half right
side." Let me show you what happens there: It has a tendency to fall.
I make my things move by direction; do you see that? And the river, I
had some of it upside down and everything. It was kind of fun. Here
T swung the things around - I'll just show you - "one half left side,
one half left, one eighth right side, one eighth left side, one eighth
le ft side, and one half le ft side." And the bridge here is "one half
left side, one half right side." So I turn the road around like this.
Actually it comes down like that. I swung this around like this and that
so I can turn it this way and turn that around that way and you get much
more feeling out of it.
PC
Well, before you did that drawing you made this chart - right1
IA
No. As I was going along I started on this tree and I figured that if
I'd have this tree bend this way - I wanted full action so then I made
that go the other way. This one forces that more there. Then r pull it
together by having this static or normal which makes this more evident
yet. You want some normal positions. Come out here and you can look
out there. Tt's static. It isn 1 t anything. You look at the bridge.
What does it mean? I moved this thing around so I have quite a lot of
motion in that, you see. This goes this way and that way and so forth.
PC
No, I was just trying to get the relationship between the finished
drawing and the --
TA
Well, I 1 m showing you this, which is fascinating; it's easier to see just
what I do. You see this bridge? Now Byron Thomas made one like this.
The thing looks close to a photograph, for God's sake. Now the truth is
there's no reason in the world why I can't walk over there and see this
in that position. When I was making these outdoors in Georgia I walked
around from that viewpoint and tied it together. Take this tree over
here, say I made it from here, I mean, say, I started from here, I'd
make the first five feet from here, then I'd go over there and continue
up each five feet from a true thing, we'll say the same distance apart,
so you keep the same size (otherwise you'd run into trouble), I'd have
a true thing. And yet the conception of it is totally different. You
understand that more?
PC
Right.
-26TA
Now if you're dealing with a picture you've got color too, you've got
light and color. Say you take a red you shadow to light again. It's
like morning and evening. You run around the whole ••• I made a thing
one time later -- does that make any sense to you?
PC
Yes.
IA
That's a watercolor.
PC
What's the title of that one?
IA
Ah God - Herrings, Buoys, the Glittering Sea. I made this in Philadelphia. It was awarded the top prize in Philadelphia. A two hundred
dollar thing. But what I did with this: It was too bright to look at.
I happened to have an old mirror and I painted this in reverse, painted
it backwards. See here, if you were a sailor you'd know that; this
rope is just opposite from the way it looks. That's your proof, you
see. It's all painted in reverse. If I put a mirror up and you looked
at it then you'd see it correctly.
PC
That's fantastic.
IA
PC
See this, it's all backward. Everybody wouldn't know it. But, you see,
it was too strong the other way. I worked all summer on it. And this
was in color, this was sunlight. This was a harbor in Korea. This was
green, this was yellow. I haven't got a mirror - yes, I have. But that
wasn't intentional. And that was not a - almost a set palette - no.
Now in this shadow if you look at anything - I'm pretending it's in a
brighter light - all you have to do when it's in a duller light is to look
at it longer and you get the same result. It doesn't make any difference,
you see. If I put it in full sunlight it's one thing - okay, one minute
in full sunlight or maybe half an hour in a dull light is the same idea.
So put that in. Your eye is an instrument and gets tired and when it
gets tired - everything in nature is looking for a balance. A stream
never runs uphill; it runs downhill. Beauty is the line of least resistance. It has to be that. A stream runs downhill, water falls down Raphael - if you make a curve (if I knew more about mathematics it would
probably be a hyperbolic curve or something) - you would have what they
call the line of greatest beauty where there aren't any interruptions.
The minute you have an interruption it will change the flow. Suppose you
look at the color of the vermilion hat for ten minutes. Your eyes will
become saturated with the color and then will start to see the opposite
color. So you close your eyes and you get the de f inite opposite color.
You don't want any imagination; we're not going for theory; we're not
going for anything except proof. So I take these sticks here that were
made as far back as when I was in Hollywood, and I look at any of these
in strong light for about three minutes and close my eyes and I'll get
what the opposite is. Or with shapes. So I'm using quite a bit of that
method on this. It's the first one I've used it on all the way through.
It creates an illusion of there being a lot of color. Which it doesn't
have. So that's a whole thing I'm working out.
Did you make those sticks or wands?
-27IA
I had them made in Hollywood (or I made them in Hollywood.)
all. I'll tell you how I started on this thing
I made them
PC
Were they different shapes? - were they round and square and triangles?
IA
Yes, they were different shapes, round and square. And, you understand,
the same thing would hold with a pattern. I haven't gone into that yet.
You see, if you look at this thing under strong light, say, three minutes
(until your eye is fatigued a little), then you close your eyes, the eye
will throw the opposite. That's balance. And earlier I also figured out:
I think that to create more form, I mean more color or more illusion of
space, one eye sees warm and the other sees cool a little bit. It has
to; because it wouldn't be sensible for God to make man with both eyes
with the same thing. They're constantly shifting. That gives you an idea
of form. For example, if a man with one eye walks up to a wire he will
constantly hit himself. You know that. With two eyes you constantly
shift the warm color and the cool color. That creates more of a sense of
form too - the color. Am I boring you with all this?
PC
No, i t's fascinating.
IA
Very slowly. T did it in Bollywood. When T was painting The Picture of
Dorian Gray I had a junior kleig light on it. It was so intense and
everything - the reason I used the junior kleig light (they were hard to
get) was: I thought that if I paint this picture without any lights on
it and they will show it under light, I ' m a fool, you see. So I painted
my picture under the kleig light. Therefore, the colors were corre c t
for artificial light.
PC
So you had the light on the canvas .
TA
So I painted it so it would be right when they got through. I didn ' t
know much but T didn't get caught that way. So that's how I started it
there; that ' s the way it started.
PC
I see . Well, the color pattern on those wands - are they the same?
do you change them?
IA
Well, for instance, I was making a 1 ittle thing the other day •••• Well,
if I were painting this coat I'd match the color. 'T'he green or whatever
T happen to be painting . Or the chair. And of course the duller the
color of the object, say, the chair, the longer it takes to react. 1'hen
I put these afterimages in the shadow for the simple reason that I don't
want to make it too conspicuous. See, that enhances the other color.
And then you have a second and a third thing that appears . So maybe I ' ll
play with the second afterimage, not the first; or the third even. Then,
again , I ' m playing not with feeling but with what happens. I don ' t give
a damn what I feel - I don ' t know - I don ' t feel anything except that I
want to have it accurate. Now this thing here --
PC
But the thing you want to be accurate becomes the distance traveled?
IA
Oh, yes. I want it to work. I have a diagram on all kinds of things.
Let me see if I can find a notebook. I haven't had a chance to work on
How did you develop that?
or
-28-
this for quite a while. I work on it for two or three months, then I
get tired and fed up, then we generally go away and when we come back
I can see what I want to do. You may think you're wasting time doing
this but really you aren't; you're working all the time. It's just that
it starts to get dull. I have all these notebooks. This is The Vermonter.
I
I 11 get a piece that you can see. You know, you can get good ideas but
they don't always work. (sound of leafing through notebooks) Here are
two sleeves. (moving easel or something)
- ~-
PC
I love that easel.
IA
Don't you love that easel! I have to watch my fingers, I'm a little bit
scary about getting them pinched. 'l'his is done in chalk, it isn't painted
yet.
PC
Do you use the chalk as --?
IA
Well, I'll tell you: I started this thing on canvas and I worked on it
for six months and I noticed the darn weave was going to show. So I lost
six months on it, I got this Masonite and put it on that, So in this
one I can compose more as I go along - the first one I can - because the
one on c ~nvas was more or less definite. This will be a column; this
thing here is going to be, look, up here see this - do you know what that
is? That's an apple corer.
PC
Oh, right.
IA
They have twenty kinds. Come here, I'll show you what I'm going to do
here on this thing: Start from here and come around here, you see like
this right at you and then around here I'm putting this thing in some
place yet. You see this color?
PC
Oh, I see.
IA
Now here, this thing here look I 1 m going to have it hit you right in the
eye there. Come around this side . I turn around and turn this way, see.
So it can't exist and yet it's true. I mean this is true from this angle;
that is true from that angle. But you have to combine them intelligently
enough so they don't be ridiculous. This thing is upside down, see. Then
I 1 ll paint this column, which I haven't started yet, more or less static
to tie things together; and these will have more force yet.
PC
Right.
IA
And this goes up here and then I'll have to make this dark back here and
so forth. Around this spot you're getting a few afterimages. Now here,
this sleeve, look at the dang thing! "Shirt, place canvas on left side;"
I went all the way around; I went around like here and then that way. I
don't know - you'd have to study it for about half a day to see - to find
out just what I did. I tried to get reverse motion. Now when I get to
this thing here - I haven't started it yet - I'll try to swing it around
here. The coattails go down there, see, the red will come down here and
swing it around like that. Well then, I can't turn his head; I can't play
Right.
-29-
with the head yet because if I distorted it people will know. Say I
want to turn him that way; see, I have him here; I'll make the motion
go around this way more; more than it is. Not oniy will I get the form
of the thing, but I mean I want it to turn . Say I want it to turn here well then, to make it turn more here I'll turn this column this way, you
see, so I'll have that coming this way and this turning that way. I'll
get a confounded movement going, you see. And then over here to get
space I'll probably slant planes down like at this angle, see, in there
to get distance. But it's fun. It makes fun out of it.
PC
Yes.
IA
Yes. And you don ' t realize there ' s that much motion or what it really is
until you put it next to, say, a Van Dyck. People say this thing starts
wiggling and moving. It drives them nuts. You know what I mean? Because
this thing turns ; --
PC
What are these little highlights that you've just mentioned?
IA
Those are the afterimages of these colors next to it. For instance, this
pipe was painted upside down. That ' s the way it's supposed to go. It
doesn't like the position it has now. See, that's up, down. In here I
have his shirt open (this is not finished), you ' ll notice he's wearing a
chain with a cross attached. (He wouldn't carry either. ) I want to
open the shirt; now how do I open it? I'll work from this side around
here, then I'll work from this side on that side. Possibly you can open
it more than you could by just painting the thing, you see. It should
open some. And then I've learned this -- Then I'll write down what I
should do. (Looking for something in a notebook)
PC
Do you make a lot of notes like this on everything?
IA
It's active - all those things.
Oh, yes.
I have two or three notebooks. I made notes all along on !he
sure. Now here, here's the cross. I have notes on the whole
thing. "Bottom first chain links normal" and so forth. Yes, I have
notes. I have to have. The cross is upside down . Here I think I've
found out how I can twist the chain with this motion , see. It's a gold
chain. Now I don't care much what the object is. Look over here: I ' m
using a heavy chain because it's easier to handle. It doesn't matter to
me whether it's as big as a chain that you'd pull a log with. I think I
can make it spin and twist. Actually there ' s no object in making it
twist but I like to see if I can make it twist. You know what I mean?
So the first section I'll have normal; the second, left side; the third,
upside down; the fourth, right side; the fifth, normal . And doggone it,
I think I can make that thing twist. I ' ll try. What will happen is the
light will keep changing on it like shadow and light. We have two squares
in anything: We have light to shade and shade to light. That's all we
have in the doggone thing. And the other is just color, see. I have
notes on all of this. (Turning pages in notebook) Regarding the lamp I
was studying that doggone thing and I get this (this is Metro-GoldwynMayer paper) - about afterimages. Where the hell is it? - I have one
little thing I want to show you. I have it fairly well down. I've been
working on it long enough. I'm gradually beginning to understand what the
~indow,
-30-
other dimension is, you might say. It would take a' long lifetime to
master this. Now here's a thing I've figured out: if it's placed on
the left side an object rises to the right about ninety degrees; if you
place it on the right side it falls to the left about ninety degrees;
about I mean. Now upside down reverse the position of area end to end
180 degrees object becomes or area upside down. One half left side
rises to right forty-five degrees, one half right, and so on. See, this
is what happened; the left side goes this way here. Then, you see, I
have this diagram here of this darn man, of a position. Here's your
man there. We'll say this is normal position, this is that way, that
way, that way. I tip it around like that, see.
PC
I see.
IA
And then finally you get what they do and then you've got to play with
those darn movements. Then is how well you can handle it. Well, like
the old-fashioned composing with areas. Naturally you compose with
areas too. Rut you'll probably get more force this way than you can the
other way.
PC
I see.
IA
Oh! It drives you nuts sometimes. Without those diagrams T wouldn't
be able to do anything with that thing. Tf T lost this diagram I couldn't
work. Tf T went away for half a year how in hell could I come back and
work on it!
PC
Does the diagram develop as you're working?
IA
Well - on this thing here it's developing more, see. I've had a rest
from painting on this. This is going to be very amusing. I want to paint
around here - let me show you this thing. This is an old one - it means
nothing. I can explain it to you anyhow. I try constantly to figure
which way I want to move. I don't want to move all in the one direction.
! want to swing stuff this way and then that way. Tf it gets too violent
T1 ll tame it down with a few static things or opposite things. Let me
see whether I've got it in here. Just a minute.
PC
Why don't we stop now.
It's very condensed because it's only a little --
END OF TAPE I - Side 2
TAPE-RECORDED I"TTERVIEW WITH TVAN LE LORRAINE ALRRIGHT - 'TAPE TI
IN HIS S'T'UDIO IN WOODS'l'OCK, VERMONT
FEBRUARY 5, 1972
INTERVIEWER:
PC
Paul Cummings
IA
Ivan Albright
PAUL
CUMMI~GS
PC
This is Tape 2, Side 1.
IA
It's fairly static, isn't it?
PC
Right.
IA
Look here at this
PC
'This is The Window.
IA
This is The Window. It's fairly static, look here, here, hereo I had a
girl pose for that hand for about six months at the end but to start
with I used this plaster case of a hand. Rut, look, what the hell are
you going to do with that? - not much. I have drawings here of all the
different positions; I have to, to know what 1'm looking at to handle an
area. Let's see now, have T got the right one "here?
PC
What starts an idea for a painting? - do you know?
IA
Well, it generally takes me - when I'm through with this and if I wanted
to start another serious painting, if I need a model the first thing I'd
have to think about is: can I get a model; then will the model stay with
me. I don't want to get one that will die or become incapacitated or
won't pose or is too fussy. T mean, say, T want to make a figure piece,
that would be the first thing to consider. Of course, if I want to make
a still-life I'm on my own and they can't stop me. Then I try to run
through my head some subject which might be of value to somebody philosophically, some conception other than painting something like, say, a
Childe Hassam - a fish and a bowl of grapes, for God's sake. I mean to
try to have something that will pertain to some phase of life that might
have a little more meaning if possible. Then I'd go on from that. This
chap - I haven't got - I mean what can you do with a man without company?
What are you going to do with the old bird? I don 't know.
PC
I've always been curious about how you would accumulate all the objects
that you use.
IA
Once I know what I want - well, with The Door I kept collecting thingso
For instance, the doorstep was a tombstone. I got it in Naperville for
thirty-five cents. My study of architecture came in handy here. I knew
I'd have to have a threshold
I went down to the junkyard and finally
found a nice brass thing that looked paintable , old, battered, not true,
that I put down there. Then I thought a girl's hand would give it a little
human interest. If you get a human being into a thing you have something
0
0
-32closer - a piece of wood is not your roommate or your bedmate. I think
it 1 s better if you can tie it up somewhat with a person. So I got a girl
with a small hand and posed the hand leaning - symbolism - a funeral
wreath, it could be anything. My mother had a very fine handkerchief of
allover lace that probably belonged to her grandmother. It was very
silly in size, unusable, it was white and I dyed it blue; I don't know
why except that I didn't want to paint a white handkerchief . I supp ose
I thought white would stand out too much there, that it would be too
important . The brass key was from the door of my old studio which I had
built. I found an old door at a junkyard in Chicago . I didn't want to
have an ordinary outside stock door three feet by seven feet made of white
pine. I looked around until I found an old door that looked kind of drab
like an Adams or from a ghos t house, one that would have a little character
in itself, that had been painted and had started to fade. You want to pick
something which looks as if it's lived its life, possibly like everything
goes from finish down to dust and from dust down to finish with a little
life of its own . The funeral wreath - I got a cheap one so it wouldn ' t
look like a gangster ' s funeral or a rich person ' s . I had to replace
those calla lilies three or four times. The wires last only so long;
you see, they're made for you to die and then be buried, not to have someone look at them for ten years. When I sent the painting to the Carnegie
Institute I made a frame for it. I l didn't have it finished, I had it
curved, so I made a curved molding for it. It was terribly hard work. I
wanted to line it with casket lining. T had to get a permit from the undertaker in Naperville to go to the casket company to buy that. Did you know
that they ' re really unionized? At the casket company I bought that drab
black c loth. I asked , "How would you put that onto a frame?" The man
said, "Well, what we use is library paste. They only want it for two or
three weeks anyhow." Then I got fuzzy stuff for this frame, this curve.
They had two or three kinds that were very nice; it looks like a whole row
of caterpillars only one color. I carved it like the h andle of a casket.
I know how to carve. I had always carved all the frames for my dad and for
ourselves for years. I started at the base of the canvas and made them
eight inches tall, and then six inches, and then about four-and-a-half
inches to throw the frame in perspective, you see. 1 made writhing figures
and laid them in silver leaf and put it on. I sent the painting to the
Carnegie Institute and the critics wrote more about my frame than they did
about the painting. So that ' s the way it goes. The next time the painting
was shown T put an ordinary frame on it and it got a prize. T sent that
picture to the Artists for Victory in New York in - what? - 1941 or 1942,
wasn't it?
PC
Yes, it was 1942 or 1941.
TA
They had ten thousand entries. They accepted it. There were seven or
nine art museum directors on the jury. When Dan Rich came back I thanked
him. He said, "Don't thank me. You got seven firsts." I got every first
in the jurying. Well, I did not compete for the prizes because by that
time I had a hundred thousand dollars on this Door. The prize was $3,500.
I had worked on it for ten years. I don't know what they thought I was.
So they had to change everything . They didn ' t change it with money. They
gave me the first medal. So Curry had to take his 3,500 bucks and the
-33-
Metropolitan had to hang that up. But mine was first. That's how that
started me on the road of publicity you might say. The prize for The
Door was in 1941-1942. Then it got the Temple gold medal in Philadelphia .
Then the Harris medal in Chicago. And so forth. And, oh, yes, in Chicago
through a friend of mine I met a nice girl, a Cabot. I said "Oh I
'
don I t know who the Cabots are." "Oh, you know, the lighthouse
in ' Boston
and at Harvard." I said, "I never heard of Cabot Lodge or anybody."
Anyhow, she said, "Oh, Ivan, I've heard by remote control that Campbell,
the New York undertaker, (where they buried Valentino and that crowd) had
offered $26, 000 for !_he Door.• " Why don 1 t you hang i t there? When I 'm
down in New York shopping I'd love to stop in at Campbell's and rest in
those chairs." I said, "No dice, kid, no dice." So T took my tin medal.
And that was it. But the picture is hanging there still. That's a true
story.
PC
What kind of reaction did you get from people?
TA
Oh, I don't know. I didn 't go into that. nut I had The Door out in
Hollywood in 1945. I sent some pictures on. Our director, Albert Lewin,
was a wonderful chap. He had it in his office in the administration
building for a while. After it had hung there for about four days he
said, "Tvan, take that damn picture out. 'rhey don't look at me anymore.
'l'hey come in to look at 'l'he Door. T can't stand it." So I took it out and
hung it up in my studio on the lot. We had a big studio there right over --
PC
How did that whole Hollywood experience come about?
IA
They wrote to me. I mean Albert Lewin wrote to me about how Metro Goldwyn
Mayer ••• I thought it was a phony letter. The Moon and Sixpence happened
to be playing in neighboring Naperville. I went to the theatre to make
sure and there his name was on 'T'he Moon and Sixpence. It was true. He
came all the way out from Hollywood in a big limousine about as long as
this room. So that's what happened there. As I said, I had 'T'he Door
hanging in my studio on the lot for a while. One day someone came up and
said, "What 1 s back of The Door?" I said, "Wait just a minute, I' 11 open
The Door and you can take a look and find out for yourself." Well, you
have to give smart answers to people who ask questions like "what's back
of The Door." His guess is as good as mine. And then another couple came
up there - Al Lewin's wife and somebody else, I won't mention her name,
she's a writer, a very well-known woman, she's still alive. Ber husband
was terribly sick. She had a boy friend who was stopping there, one of
the top publicity guys in the country staying at her place. You know , the
title of 'l'he Door is That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do. Well,
after she left I got a phone call from Santa Monica wanting to know if T
could put this man up for the night; he was headed back to New York. So
it did do me some good. Sometimes you wonder what pictures do. Tn this
case it did some good, maybe - I don't know. It may have made him unhappy.
I mean it depends on what you call good. Tf happiness is good why it did;
if morality is good why it did good.
PC
How did the long titles develop?
IA
Well, T'll tell you, my dad and all the artists of that early period -
-34I'm talking about from 1903 up through 1912-14 - used titles such as:
Boy with Sunflower, Sunbonnet, Man Standing by River. Even Cezanne had
titles like Apples, or Apples and Napkin. And I thought, my Lord •••
And I would have loved to have been able to write. When I was a student
at Northwestern University T tried to write. T got kicked out. I
thought, well, here I not only have a chance to paint but if I make the
titles long enough I can write. In those days I was writing poetry. Do
you want to hear a poem?
PC
Sure.
Do you still do it?
IA
No, I haven't done it for many years.
PC
When did you stop writing them?
IA
Oh, more or less after I got married. I used to write a lot in Hollywood
under the piano when I got drunk. Well, you see, there was Albert Lewin
there. We were located in Santa Monica right down on producers' row.
Every Saturday and Sunday they had these big cocktail parties. They never
had writers there. They never had actors there. You know, if they had
actors they might try to get a job; for instance, once George Sanders
did go there and tried to get a job; he made an ass of himself. So it
was mostly producers like Loew and Jean Renoir, Anita Loos, people of
that type. Al Lewin was a little guy, my size or smaller. And he could
talk. He was professor of English at Harvard at one time. He had a good
sense of amusement. He'd get up and tell story ·~ a fter story. He ' d get up
on a chair. Maybe there ' d be about thirty people present. And Herb
Staud was there. He was a musical chap; he had seventeen hits on Broadway.
He'd get at tµe piano. Well, after, say, the nth drink I used to think:
what the hell can I do? So I only had to take my paper and pencil and
crawl under the piano and come up with a piece of poetry all in forty
seconds or half a minute or a minute. Al Lewin would look at my poem
and say, "Damn it! It's pretty good anyhow." Well, anyhow, here's a poem
I wrote, oh, many years ago: (reading)
But I have about 300 poems.
"A painter am I of all things
An artist who sees a door and chair
And sees them smooth things a flaw there
And sees them round things a hollow there
And colors are to him but the form within
He knows not but that the world is colored and strong
With light and shadow and forms that intertwine
And the sky is not blue to him as it runs over the meadows and trees
And the river is not held within its banks
As the colors swim over the land
And the tree is not a tree to him
But a song of beauty in the sky
And color is not just colors to him
But each a dream and a fantasy that makes unreal this world of
yours to him to this painter man."
(sound of pages turning) Let's see what T've got here. I'll condense
this line of information. I had never given a speech in my life. But
last year I got caught at Dartmouth. I got up there anyhow and had to
-35-
talk for a few minutes. And in Chicago the Ameri can Broadcasting Company
did a film on me. I had nothing to do with it. They got me involved.
The first time they called me and asked me to do it I was too timid and
afraid and I said no. And my wife said, "Don't you do it. You'll make
an ass of yourself." The next time they asked me my wife was in New York.
I felt in a good mood and I said, "Sure, come on." So the next day I
had four guys: a cameraman, a director, sound, and so on. So we got
started. Half way through this vice-president of broadcasting got fired
or something. So this other chap kept it going. There ' s a half hour
film in color done on me. For it I walked up and down the streets of
Chicago feeling good with them panning me up and down; I went through
buildings, you know , like all these guys mysterious and all this junk.
Now this is just a very condensed thing that I wrote for the catalogue.
Once in a whil e if I get in the right mood maybe I can write a little.
My spelling is bad and the tenses may not be right. But it's not bad.
Here I'll read this: (reading)
"The simplest things confound us. We look for the explanation but never
find it. There is no limit to the division of things. There is no
limit to the size of things. 'T'he answer is not in the eye nor in reason.
They make of the really abstract and the mind gropes in the subconscious
for an unanswerable answer. Put everything in total darkness and you see
nothing. Put everything in full powerful, brilliant light and you see
nothing. We are workers, seers in a twilight world of shadow. In painting
what do I have to work with? Darkness and light fused in the twilight and
shadow movement and emotionless. In a room if I move all things move with
me. If I stir they stir. If I stand arrested all things become motionless.
But on canvas, a single plane, I cannot paint motion. So all the things
around me are deadly still, so still they hurt the eye, still and flat,
and only the light from the sun that half enters turns and wheels them about
bringing to them new facets and forms. The sun becomes the mover , the
disrupter of the deadliness of the quiet. I have tried in a small way
to enter the principle that is implied in motion on my flat area pictures.
Motion is merely the change of position, of size, of angle, causing a
change of color and change of light with resultant change of shadow.
These effects I achieve in my canvas by walking around my objects and
painting them from numerous angl e s. I walk about and put things at different
positions to break up the deadness of their eternal death. I like to see
dust move and crawl over an object like a film. I like to see the objects
scream and work against their positions, against their size. Our world
of sight is built around a world of very slow motion. If everything
rolled around a room you would see nothing, just as a flywheel becomes a
mass of light, formless and light. For a moment before you reach high
speed you would discern objects through the speeding light, then on
faster motion nothing but light. We live in a land of shadow and sorrow
and blinding light. Our efforts are as weak as our shadows. We exist in
a clouded sphere of doubt, of uncertainty. Through this haze no clear
thoughts, no clear perceptions can penetrate far. In this eternal smogland of ours if the real truth appeared it would blind us, it would
incinerate us as the sun would blind and incinerate us on close approach.
We are shadows of the real but not the real. We live by half truths and
half facts. We live in a two-dimensional world with a perception of space
granted to each individual according to the distance set between his eyes.
His space consciousness is no more or no less than the width of the bridge
-36-
of his nose. Each man carries his own space with him. The sight sense
we use in our shadowy, slow-m6ving, half-human world in which we gropingly
strive. Mortally we cannot get out. Knowledgeably we do not know how we
got in. We expect the part we haven't seen, the soul, to get us out . But
did the soul have a part in getting us in?"
PC
That was written when, roughly?
IA
That last one was written in 1967.
PC
The one you ' re going to read?
IA
Yes. It's somewhat like the one I just read, which was written for the
catalogue in 1967. This was written in 1971, I'll just say what it is.
This is part of a little talk I gave at Dartmouth. I just wrote out a
few notes - I had a few notes and a few poems and so forth just to kill
time. I put on dark glasses so I wouldn ' t see the audience and they
wouldn ' t see me. I'm so short I didn ' t stand over the pulpit so that's
all right. These are reflections on artists that were written last year,
in 1971. (reading)
This end one here was written in 1971.
"We are t he captured, tormented victims in a world of shadow, motionless
and dead. Our world is a world of illusion and falsehood. We have not
one sure thing to hang reason on and knowing nothing realize not that we
know nothing. We are subject to pain but how much pain can man take?
Too much and he blacks out. We are a weak machine made to do weak things
in a weak way . The body is our tomb. Shake the dust from our soul and
maybe there lies the answer. For without this planetary body, without
eyes, a light would not hurt. Without flesh the pain would not hurt.
Without legs our motion might accelerate . Without endless restrictions
our freedom greater, our slavery less . Without examples all around us our
originality migh t be different. Without a body we might be men."
I started making notes in little notebooks at the time I got out of the
Chicago Art Institute. I ' ve done it continuously since then and am still
doing it. Whenever I start out to make a new picture first I ' ll start
thinking and writing notes. I begin thinking about the idea of what I
want to achieve. I ' m not looking for a model yet. I'm looking to know:
shall I make motion? shall I make illusion? shall I make things transparent? shall I make them heavier than they are? shall I make them go
faster? The philos ophy comes first. And then if it ' s going to be a
human being I pick out a model. I ask: will you live until I get
through? Having that answer I take my own chances. T look him over, I
look at his teeth, I look at his eyes, I send him to his doctor, and so
forth. 'T'hen I ask him: are you reliable? are you going to sit still?
you won't talk too much, so I won ' t have to hear about horses hour after
hour, or about your girl friends, and so on. Then if you can pick out a
fairly dumb model (and most of them have been fairly dumb) you know you
can enjoy yourself; you can make sure that they won't talk constantly.
Some days you don't feel like listening to them. On the other hand, if
they don't talk at all they begin to look like a poker player, no expression at all. I don ' t want to paint a poker player. T like to have
a little emotion. The poor little thing can't get much expression
-37-
anyhow. Once in California, in Oceanside, I painted a monk. The poor
chap was about eighty-two or three and I was yelling at him, "Can't you
feel more religious?" He'd say, "I'm doing the best I can." Well, he'd
been a baker in the outfit for thirty, forty, or fifty years. When we'd
stop for a rest period all I can remember his doing is he would take me
outdoors and show me the vault they were going to put him in, the third
vault from the ground on the left-hand side. He thought he'd like to give
me some wine to drink. But it was sacramental wine and he couldn't do
that. He said, "I can get you some milk." I thought, well, hell, I can
do without milk. I s uppose that was the milk of human kindness he offered
me.
PC
Have you found it difficult to find models who have the time and everything?
IA
Well, in the city it's very easy. In a small town, here as well as others,
there aren't any young people. Most of the old people I've painted here
but I wouldn't care to paint them. There are lots of people I wouldn't
care to paint either including the president of the United States.
PC
You haven't done very many portrait commissions, have you?
IA
Oh, I'm a figure painter essentially; I mean hell I love the figure. I
painted a nude girl once years ago. It was a seven-foot canvas. But I
never finished it. I worked for ten months on the drawing. She told me
she was eighteen. After I had it drawn she grew an inch and a half. I
thought, my God, I can't be that far off. I measured her. She was sixteen
when she came. And eleven months after she came she got married. That was
the end of that. I had a wonderful drawing plus a little painting of the
face and a chair in it. So you really have to pick your model carefully.
If you only need them for a short period, say a month or two, it's pretty
easy. But on this painting I've worked for two years just on the head and
hands. And then I bought his clothes, even his underwear - no - I think
I got the type of underwear he wore and bought it at the store.
PC
What will that painting be called? - do you know yet - the one you're
working on?
IA
No. I have a working title - The Vermonter - which means nothing. Only
when I have it finished I'll look at it for two or three weeks and I'll
write out maybe fifty titles in which I'll try to convey eventually some
meaning and philosophy in that title. You see, after all, a painting
can't talk. A lot of people won't even bother - They'll just say:
"It's a fish." "It's an apple." "It's a man." "It's a woman." "They're
swimming." After seven years working on it I haven't gotten it far enough
along to have a title. I had some suggested titles written on the back of
it somewhere. I thought I had a title one time (unable to find it). But
when I get through as a rule I will take an opposite if I have to. Like ·
I had Ida; I call that painting Into the World There Came a Soul Called
Ida. !""thought people might say:~she1s ugly and is a -prostitute and all
that stuff. She is twenty years old, married, and a very decent, nice
girl. Human nature - especially when looking at art work - is such that
the layman who doesn't know much about art will look and if the face isn't
-38-
painted like a beautiful polished, smooth pie ce of pottery, they won't
like it; they'll think it's bad. Of course if they understood that when
you look in a mirror you see only one-fourth of one's actual area - you
see, if they had a mirror which would show their face as big as it is
they would never talk about how ugly anything is because they'd find that
they don't have to go far from home or from their room or the mirror to
see it.
PC
You've been working on this for - what?
two years?
IA
For seven years.
PC
Will you do other paintings along with it?
IA
When I go away I will. This is just the one T'm working on now. If you
have two you will be running from one to the other; at least I will. 1
tried that with ~he Door . I had that and I had the Showcase Doll or
something started. I worked on one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I had these two setups. For the Showcase Doll I had a case made
as if it were in a store with the doll and i"ice8"nd different stuff all
around, not like dolls. This was a certain type and I put different
things in that would be this and that. And I found that I was running
back and forth from one to the other. The light would get good over one,
say, The Door and I'd run over and work on it. Then I 'd run back to the
other one. Finally I said to myself: for gosh sakes, Albright, make up
your mind: it's got to be one or the other; now which one? Having no
one else to decide for me I chose The Door. I w~rked on it for ten years.
The other one is still a drawing, one of the few drawings I have; a
drawing with just a little bit on the face. That's the way it is. Now
if I had two of these and the light got good for the other one then I'd
run there and I 'd run back and forth. You waste a lot of time doing that.
Anyhow one is enough to work on and get finished.
Rut it'll move along pretty fast now.
PC
What about the lithographs you've done?
IA
T made one of the Showcase .Doll, T made one of The Fisherman; T've made
about five.
PC
But they're after the paintings, aren't they?
TA
Yes, they're after the paintings. I've never made any of the other.
Let me read just at random some notes. These are notes that can pertain
to art, to philosophy, to anything. One will say one thing, and the
other just the opposite. It doesn't make any difference. But they go
along. I'll start. I have filled about forty notebooks. 1 don't know
what year this was written. This is recent. (reading)
"A cold sound as of a breeze whistling, a spirit ••• Before art was man;
man is art ••• A life is a life and dedication is dedication ••• Every minute
and every hour has to bend to the element force of your full integrity
and devotion. What prophet says 'Maybe I believe?' - To succeed consider
oneself nothing and the motive or object everything and go at it from
that basis disregarding all personal feelings, likes or dislikes ••• The
-39-
shortest distance between two points is a curved line."
I have written - this is about the mirror: (reading)
Then further on
"A mirror shows you about a quarter of your area; it diminishes all blemishes
and is considered wonderful . Do not paint like a mirror. But if you do you
too will be a liar and a flatterer." How do I separate these thoughts? just put down a dash each time?
PC
All right.
IA
(continues reading) "Our mind is incapable of judging exactly . Everything
must be judged in motion. Every thought is motion . There isn ' t such a
thing as complete rest, inactivity . Everything is changing constantly or
there is not any motion but a series of changes.-- A straight line is a
fragment of a circle. Where two lines meet there is an explosion. When
two airplanes meet there is death • •• Compose with your eyes shut and your
mind open • . • In painting when your work begins to l ook good it is bad • ••
That which is at your feet at a distance becomes a horizon • • • The side of
a skyscraper walled curve light pushes wall in a darker wall comes out •• •
On a moving train clouds keep lifting • • • Every color influences every other
color ••• There is no sorrow like existence ••• Light is time •• • A solid is
spread out plane • • • A fast motion looks like a sol id and one that is square
can be perpendicular to but one eye . "
That kind of stuff. "Notes on a portrait of a man, any man, the painting.
Put all the hurt feelings of humanity in it (that ' s what T should use ).
Does it breathe? Make it . Does it think? Make it . Does it pray? Make
it . Alive? Make it. Eternal? Make it . The creator keeps quiet. Let
the man move . Let it rise. Let it rest on top of ideals and ideas. For
a split second of a second let it live and do untold good . "
You see, I will write notes - and it ' s not about this picture which is a
bit of philosophy and stuff - but about - what will I do with this? I have
to love this. I have to do this, I have to push this back and do this and
so forth . It ' s all a case not of painting (which is nothing, the technique
is simple ) ; it's what I'll do, Now look at this chain here. This is upside
down; so it twists this way and that way, up and down . So the minute you
get a thing that way it ' s angry and unhappy. So next to it I put something
static . That ' s all there is to it. And color the same way.
This guy can ' t talk . So you've got to talk for him . And a picture isn't
anything; I mean what are you going to do with a picture when you get
through with it. I put it aside; I never hang my pictures . You see these
white spots around here? - that's to identify the positions I painted.
I ' ll rub them out . All over and so forth . Now what do you want?
PC
I ' m interested in the whole idea of the philosophy behind these things .
IA
Well - would it be worth a hoot?
PC
Is this a privately-developed philosophy or one that you --?
IA
Oh, yes, the motion - that's my own .
I mean the movement of different
positions that's all my own. I don ' t think anyone else has eve r attempted
it or even thought about it; they wouldn't know what to do with it. Unless
you ' re very realistic it wouldn ' t work; it couldn't work. If I take an
object, see - this thing here, I'm going to have to incorporate that thing
and tie it together so it will work , for God's sake . And without thinking
about it from one thing to the other you couldn ' t possibly do it because
one wouldn ' t know what he was doing. Also if I tie that together T've
got to leave this and have it - look, I want this pillow when I get to it
to push this body away .
PC
Right.
IA
Then I want this arm to push toward the pillow. Then I ' ve got to leave
space to get in there. You see, so that the whole thing will work. My
ideas don't always work; some of them do. But I hope that enough work so
that when I get through it will look like an entity and simple, and all
that people will say is, "Do I know that man? What's his name?" Well,
his name is Atwood . He ' s a native of Bridgewater here. He was seventysix years old when I started on this; now he ' s eighty-three or four.
PC
But the whole idea. Say, the philosophy behind the picture. Are you
interested in philosophy in general? Or are you interested -- ?
IA
No. The philosophy I use more or less goes with space and nature. I
mean another man ' s philosophy wouldn't do me any good and probably did the
other man a lot of good, don ' t you see. I can ' t use the other man ' s
philosophy. As a matter of fact, I'm not interested in his philosophy any
more than he ' d be interested in mine . It wouldn ' t do him any good. As
long as I have a painting it wouldn't help him a bit maybe. But if I can
turn an object and make it go up and down then I can create more a feeling
of motion t han the other ones and with the feeling of motion it will take
on a new dimension. 'T'hey can use this in movies or anything. Which, sadly,
they haven ' t done . When I was in Hollywood they had me shoot my Picture of
Dorian Gr.2_Y . They gave me a crew and said, "Ivan, you ' re going down and- shoot that tomorrow." I said, "I am not . I won't do it." They said, "Oh,
yes, you are . " They decided I was; they had a whole camera crew for me,
about eight guys. I didn't know what to do; I had never shot anything . So
I took my picture down and I panned on Dorian's stomach . You know what
panning is? I put the floodlights on his stomach and I modeled with the
lights all over. I built the stomach rounder and sticking out and so forth .
And then I had to light it, to try to create some motion in it, you see. I
know that - not Pan Berman, he was the producer - but his partner was a
woman - I forget her name now - she went over the rushes five times and
didn't even change it for the movies. I was playing with the light to model,
you see. What they do is throw the light on but they throw it in the wrong
place. I was handling light like a sculptor or a painter building with it.
You build with light and with shadow. I said, "I have a wonderful idea.
I'll have the light on and then turn it off back and forth." And Al Lewin
said, "r,ee, that's • •• " So we were there one day and Mrs . Lewin and Mrs.
Loew came there. Al said, "I have a terrific idea." He took my idea and
used it on George Sanders and Hurd Hatfield, for the love of Mike. That's
the way they do it. 1 said, "You're putting it on my picture. That ' s my
idea." Of course that's the way they go. Great stuff, you see. So you can
build with light. I think in movies they have too much action. I think
-41-
they should have the light move around and change things instead of having
the actors jump around too much. You can do wonders with light, have
things grow and disappear . They have the light on the same man solidly
all the time . You can play with light, have the thing solid for a while
and then have it dematerialize. Flowers on the table or food or stilllife or anything 9 you can have come out and be reality and then have it be
not reality almost. It depends on the mood of the picture. You could have
a number of things changing all the time instead of having just light, light,
light. Light without your knowing what you're doing with it isn't so hot
It ' s like if you put this whole room in light you have light; but wnat does
it mean? You ask me: what ' s my philosophy? I say: do what you want with
it; what do you want to do with it? It depends on your theme . If you want
a happy thing you can make it happy, build with light. You won 1 t have to
talk; nobody would have to talko Or you could have it sorrowful. Or you
could have it racing along by having all the lights going this way so darn
fast and you wouldn ' t have to have a lot of people doing things
They make
it common , make it ordinary. They think ordinaryo
0
0
PC
Did you like working in Hollywood?
IA
No. It was fun for a while, you understand. But I mean you wouldn 't do
good work. It takes too long and I ' m not interested in it . It was fun for
a while, for this one picture. If I wasn't a painter and wanted to make a
movie I ' d like to deal with lights. Just to see what I could get out of
them. Let me put it this way: I ' d want to treat the whole movie as a
picture with a philosophy without talking . I wouldn ' t want to have the
actors talk; I'd like to have the light make them talk almost, if I had to
get involved with their acting, their t hrowing around the way they do.
What ' s that got to do with real emotion? You've got their reaction, not
the reaction of art. It's the reaction of each man . They aren ' t knib
together, tied together. Say, if I ' m making a big picture with five figures
I'm making them all do something, but in Hollywood each one is a separate
actor doing some little thing . It isn ' t re l ated even. What they need is
a set palette.
PC
But just to kind of go back to doing the Picture of~orian Gray, I ran into
somebody a few weeks ago who said he ' d seen your studio out there at that
time and how the whole thing was set up. How did you find working with a
kind of schedule in fact?
IA
Well, I never work - - I'll tell you what : I didn ' t read the book The-1'._~ct~
£}_Dorian G~2J until we actually got to Hollywood. My brother came along
wi th me . We got a big studio ab out four times this big . Then we figured
the first thing we'll do to get in the mood is fix it upo So we got props
and rugs and vases. They had to take out the two skylights. They put the
stuff in the studio on the second floor . Then we had too much stuff . They
had to take half of it out. Jn that way it was comfortable. I had specified
previously that I had to have two or three dummies dressed up like Dorian
r,ray . I figured these actors would not always be available when I needed
them; well, Hurd Hatfield was sick for a while . I didn ' t need him anyhow .
I didn ' t care whether it looked like Hurd Hatfield or Wallace Beery or
George Sanders; I didn ' t have any interest. The thing was the phone was
ringing all the time and people were corning up . You see, we were the only
-42-
ones on the whole lot who could have drinks. We were independent; the
others, say, Gene Kelly, Spencer Tracy, any of them, they wouldn ' t let
in the studio because they might get a drink. So we did have a lot of
fun and a lot of contact . It was all spontaneous. We just made the thing
and that was all there was to it . I did learn about using the kleig light
under the painting . You see , violet would turn gray; if you painted violet
and then put it under the light without anything, you would have gray, all
your colors would be wrong. So I made use of that . That's about it. I
wouldn ' t want to do any more work in Hollywood.
PC
You also did another Hollywood project?
IA
Well , yes , I did one . I wasn ' t really involved in that too much . I introduced Sidney Janis - you know who he is? - to Albert Lewin . I was getting
a little too hot . A few weeks after I introduced them Al was going to
make a movie on The Temptation of Saint Anthoni and was going to have me
paint the picture . Janis said, "Oh, let 9 s have an international competition
instead . " The jury consisted of Janis, Duchamp and Alfred Barr. They had
about eight guys - what ' s this other guy ' s name? - this American who's in
Paris now - I can ' t think of his name - not Berman - but he's well known;
they were all well known . Well, I got second. Dali got about seven I
think. But later Al told me that the guy that kept me down was my friend
Jan is. He gave me third vote. Duchamp and the others gave me up there.
It was Sidney Janis who kept me from getting it . But I had part of the
world take separately ; they didn't know about that. But the damn movie
was more or less a flop. I had part of the world take or I wouldn't have
entered the competition . It didn ' t pay off . I guess The Moon ~nd ~i29:'en~
paid very well. But T don't know how good it was . That' s a small part of
the thing . And I made lithographs and I made s ome sculpture.
PC
How about the sculpture?
When did you start that?
IA
I don ' t know - years ago I did a piece; my dad posed for it . He had a
pretty good-looking face anyhow. He said, "Ivan, I ' ll take a club • • •
I said , "I'll make just half your head. Both sides are supposed to be the
same, aren ' t they?" nh, he was f urious . I said, "Why should I make the
other side? Aren't they equal?" That was the first sculpture I made.
It's in the Chicago Art Institute now in bronze . Then I made a head of
my wife he r e, or a case ; the thing fell down and the nose got broken.
Maybe I ought to do like Rodin did and have it cast as "woman with broken
no s e . " But I have that - I'm going to make a head here . I have a model.
PC
Have you made many pieces of sculpture?
IA
A couple . I ' ve made these two . Jo posed for me one whole summer out in
Wyoming where I made this head . Jo didn ' t like the head ; and her sister
said, "That's cause for divorce . " I didn ' t say anything. I had it in
plaster. T had it shipped home to Chicago. And T had it cast. Then I got
a quantity of powdered metal, you know, iron - did you know you c an buy
powdered iron? well, you can . And then T used some dry color - yellow
ochre burnt sienna and a few colors and T put that over it to make it
'
look antique
. Then ' on the bottom T put a sheet of lead for a base so you
cou l d lift it. So I had it looking antique with a patina . r placed it in
-43the entrance hall of our place in Chicago. One time we had about a dozen
people over and during the course of the evening after they'd had a
cocktail someone said, "Ivan, where did you get this wonderful head! It's
beautiful." And then Jo came out and s aid, "r.ee, that's a nice head."
She didn't know that I had
(inaudible)
Well, the Institute has it now. You've seen it, haven't you? You probably
have. Let me show you this one. I have a model for this head here.
PC
'T'he big one you're working on?
IA
Yes. Would you like to see the model?
Milan - it's been there for
three or four hundred years. These spots here - it was in a tube with a
silver lining and other lining. Jt caught fire two or three hundred years
ago and burned the spots down here, see. Christ was five feet eleven
inches according to this shroud. T have books on it. When the camera came
into use - you know, Tommy Eakins worked with Malbridge. Malbridge - they
developed the first motion picture with the camera, you know?
PC
Right.
IA
Now I'm not too sure about this but I think in 1897 or 1898, along in there,
an Italian photographer was allowed to photograph the Shroud. Tt's only
displayed once in a while. The negative was in reverse. So when he
photographed it he got the reverse, This clotted part up here is dried
blood. This was measured. His nose was broken. You know how all artists
picture Christ with the nails in the palm of the hand. Well, that's impossible. Anyone would pull it off. You'd have to put the nails here at
the wrist to hold. Tt's silly; you might as well put a nail in the end of
the little finger and expect it to hold a body up. It can't hold. So the
nails were put in between there. And the Crown of Thorns was not like the
artists make it. It was knit (plaited) crisscross. I've got a band - it
was like these lemon - let me show you something - can you see this up here?
PC
Oh, yes, right.
IA
That's a lemon, In Jerusalem they had a thing about like that. And the
Roman soldiers had a thing like a policeman's club with two or three leather
thongs with little things like a dumbbell of lead on the end. With this
they beat Christ. He had some 150 or some odd wounds - bruises on his body
which showed, You see that rush? Then around here they put that on his
head, it was plaited. They knocked him with these clubs and then they put
this plaited wreath or crown around here. I have other photographs of it.
They ran that around his forehead and plaited it. He had a tremendous,
beautiful head. He doesn't look like a man; he's not a man; he's God.
Look, I have this man Atwood, flesh, a pound of meat, a pound of meat! Just
a pound of meat. And look at that, a man like no man. This shows the whole
figure. I'm making it this size. I'm going to make it in the round, I
don't know how I'll get it cast. I had this stand made, I'm going to make
it in the round, His beard comes down here. He had a pigtail; did you
know that? Let me show you the back. You've never seen this?
PC
No, I haven't seen this.
PC
I'm Episcopalian somewhat.
The dean of St. James Cathedral in Chicago died
-44-
and his widow gave me these books about five years ago. I've been starting
work on this ever since, about. I had a head started. This is the back.
See now here this is all dried blood. These are the marks of the whips.
They broke his nose. If you get way back you can see how the head went.
Isn't that amazing! I have some definite measurements. He was five feet
ten . This is blood. The hair came down here like that. Now here ' s
something which is amazing. They don't know how it happened but the blood
came - I thought of it after I had this for a while - the blood is white.
From a photographic standpoint I ' d have to get the reverse - another one I had this photograph made in Chicago - because then the blood would go at
this angle from the head. The face is right but the blood is all wrong.
Isn ' t that something!
PC
That's strange.
IA
And I got the book - a doctor wrote about this - maybe I have one here; I
have four or five books on it. It's really something. Then half the
artists in this century couldn ' t paint this; Holbein or no artist could
possibly paint this, couldn ' t possibly touch it. Here's the figure. And
this is blood; look here; see down here. Here is his hand; here ' s where
the nail was, see. Look. See that . This is blood. See down here. That's
amazing! Now I ' m going to make - I've got some bigger ones here - I mean
detail diagrams of this. This is one the same scale as mine. Now let's
see, wait a minute - I'm going to put that up there. T think if I put this
light out when it ' s dark it will be easier to see. You feel the force of
that face. My Lord!
PC
How long have you been working on this now?
IA
I started it thre e or four years ago: First I made a head about this big.
Then I thought I'd make a bigger one. Then I thought if I made it that
big it ' ll weigh five hundred pounds and I won ' t be able to move it. So
now I'm thinking. I ' ve had all these photographs made and everything. T'm
wondering whether I shouldn ' t make it a size T can have cast. I can ' t
handle that size I'm afraid.
PC
Well, it wouldn't be that heavy if it's hollow.
TA
Wouldn ' t it?
PC
Probably the thing would weigh a couple hundred pounds in the round; not
solid though .
IA
No, no, you don't make things solid. But 1 mean - I don ' t know. Look at
that! Isn't that terrific! When it gets just about dusk or a little
darker it looks as if the eyes open . It sends thrills up and down your
spine I tell you. Isn't that a great head!
PC
That's fantastic.
IA
Isn't that great!
PC
The head?
Yes.
T'm going to make this my next job after this.
-45-
IA
I've gotten that stand made - I haven't had a chance - we 've been away.
I'll work on this and when I get tired of this I'm going to work on that .
These are my two things.
PC
Speaking of being away, do you do much work when you travel?
TA
We go to China in three weeks. I'll get a little tablet and about two
dozen colored crayons, that's about all I can do. On a tour what can you
do? There's always someone peeking over your shoulder. When I was in
Georgia for three weeks I made a head like I showed you. And I made that
corn thing. And I made some other ones. He re's another one I made in
Georgia. (sound of turning pages) Here's that lifesize figure. I have
one other one here. Where is that damn thing? Here it is - The Swamp.
There you are. Now here ' s The Swamp in the same size; see, cypress. If
you look at it in color it brings this out more. Do you know the cypress
tree?
PC
I know what they are.
IA
You know they have a thing called "knees" like shoots coming up that high.
These things - where are they? That's a knee, that's a knee, that ' s a
knee . I made the reflection for the thing and the thing for the reflection.
I t's thoroughly confusing; I confuse myself. I had a diagram fo r this. See,
these would come here, these knees are reflection or no t reflection. I do
some of those things there. 'T'hat was that. Here ' s a thing I made out in
Wyoming and I walked all around the whole damn area,
PC
Do you still go out to Wyoming?
IA
Not too much.
PC
How did you come to go there in the first place?
IA
My wife went there first. (turning pages) This is another one. T have a
diagram of almost all of these. There wasn't any of The Fat Man. This
one here, that's a son of a gun.
PC
What 's the name of that one?
TA
T don't know - I forget what I call it.
I didn ' t have that in my one-man
show. This is a watercolor about that big, a gouache. You haven't seen
that I don't think. I had it at Carnegie one time. I painted that ba ckground. Look at that wire. I put blue spots, say, five or seven, on a big
area, and then T put yellow dots and still I couldn't tell where I was
looking. How can you? And then I'd have vermilion dots and green and
white. I wouldn't know. How would you? This is deep blue and so forth. ·
I have a number of positions on this, too. And T wove that leather rope.
This is pale blue here and this is deep blue. Vou'd like that; that's a
very handsome --
PC
Tt has spurs in it, too.
IA
nh, yes.
I haven't been out there in a couple of years.
And about everything I had in there belonged to some gangster.
-46-
PC
nh, really?
IA
I ' ve got Butch Cassidy ' s gun in one of these darn things.
PC
Is that a Western one?
IA
No - yes. They found his gun out there.
even find him.
PC
He's there.
IA
Oh, yes. I ' m going to hang it right here for the party. Don ' t you think
it would be good? I can use two of these spotlights on it, don't you see .
And I ' ll push all this stuff out. I mean the couch is all right but I'll
take off these blankets and just have it where they can sit. I ' ll shove
this stuff in corners wherever I can. I don ' t want to show them this thing;
they wouldn ' t know anything about that, for r.od's sake; they never heard of
Christ.
PC
That ' s going to be fantastic though.
IA
I ' m glad you like it.
Where is it? - where is he?
Okay.
I can't
I think it ' ll be good too because I ' ll try to make
it
pr.
They found it --
I'm going to have to turn this tape over.
END nF TAPE II - Side 1
-47-
TAPE II - Side 2
PC
This is Tape 2, Side 2.
IA
That ' s a pocketb ook my dad had when he went out in 1882: look, stamped.
This is all he had, He had a hard pencil and a soft pencil. He was a
farm boy from Iowa and had ten cents to buy them. He left home at eighteen.
Through a magazine he sent to New Vork for a mole stick. It cost about a
nickel. He got it and sawed it in three pieces. He had an uncle Hugh out
there who had two or three farms, His dad didn ' t have a nickel. ~e said,
"There goes Adam out to make a living in Chicago." And this was his little
sewing kit. He had this thing too. He had this and that and two pencils
and nothing else , T have this little tintype of my mother . I thought of
putting that up there. This is a little family - ~ (I don ' t do this very
often).
PC
Family painting.
IA
Family tradition. The weal thy Al brights. Lo.ok at them! Tsn' t that something! My mother was a Carpenter. You see I improvise. I get things like
this that I got at some junk place. Tf I had room or if it would help any
I'd take a thing like that - I don ' t like this, it's too damn light - but
T might rip that off and find something - and I might put it in this oval;
anything which develops --
PC.
Jt's interesting that you always use real objects.
TA
Well, T don't want to - it ' s so easy to use -- what do you think of that?
- that 's a milk jar that came from Ethiopia. Here are my notebooks along
there for the poetry. I've got this little thing here. tf t have a little
time going down to Georgia I might take a few o f these things along - I
don't know.
pr.
Where do you go in r..eorgia ?
IA
My wife's sister had a place down there right on the St. Mary's River near
the Florida border about thirty-five miles north of Jacksonville. Look, I
found this little thing. Isn't that beautiful. Look at this. Well, okay,
it doesn't matter what the thing is as long as it has sentiment one way or
another. This little shoe you wonder whether the little kid who kicked it
off was a boy or a girl. It doesn ' t make any difference. I think everything should be done to this extent with the possibility of not having a
final answer. Like in The Window, I used a little jewelry, see, and made
sure I hid half of it so they couldn ' t tell how much more there is. The
minute they have a definite answer they're through. In everything don't
give a full answer.
PC
Just an indication,
IA
Yes. This little jug here or whatever the object is -- If I were painting
this stuff here I wouldn ' t ever show the whole thing; I'd hide some so
they'll want to know: how much more is there? Don't you think that's true?
PC
So there's always a question then.
Yes.
Yes.
-48-
IA
Yes. And then if you make an answer ••. If I put in anything here I would
want to have an illusion of more. If I open this up and show something
they want to see more. Here's a pipe stem; it doesn ' t mean anything. I'll
get this sleeve and turn it around and gradually I'll get what I want. Well,
that's enough talking. The different shape of the head more.
PC
How did you come to do the Portrait of Mrs. Block?
IA
She came to me, rather came to my wife and wanted me to paint her. T
thought it over and decided T didn ' t want to, But between them they finally
talked me into it . Mary Block was a very good model. She posed five times
a week.
She came to my studio which was then on ngden Avenue up in the near
North Side of Chicago about two bl ocks from the Lake. Her chauffeur drove
her over in the afternoons . She sat very good. Once she told me that she
didn ' t like to pose too well. T said, "Well, T don ' t like to paint you,
I'd rather dig a cesspool." She said, "'T'hat ' s not much of a c ompliment."
I said, "I didn ' t intend it for one." She posed for two years. And then
Leigh Block - he ' s now president of the Chicago Art Institute - said, "Ivan,
what we want: we want your portrait and we want to know Mary Block." You
know the picture, don ' t you?
PC
Yes.
IA
So I put in the background lace. I said, from rags to riches or riches to
rags. I mean I put that for the background. She made a very excellent
model. And not only that, she didn't criticize. Let me show you what I
have over here ( sound of rustling papers) and I can tell you more about it.
On this still-life next - don ' t you like white roses? I put them in anywhere
I can. This is on a little monk mount stool. That cigarette case - you
can't see it here - with twenty diamonds. And T put that on, it's just a
little watch I got when I was there. And I made this like that, you see .
I use movement on that part. Now this lace here ••• that's the back of The
Wind~; I just pulled my brick wall, turned i t around and put it back ofher, you see. So that gave me the background. I don ' t know what the
connection is; T don't know that there has to be a connection. Although I
think the old lace and stuff probably makes it look richer and more glamorous
than if I added some silly rich drapery back there. It ' s a foil anyhow. And
this necklace, this diamond - I said to Leigh "How about insuring it?" He
said, "Oh, it ' s worth fifteen thousand." But I made a little piece of wood
construction and put black velvet on it like they do in jewelry stores I
guess - I don ' t know - and hung that on it so that I could work when Mrs.
Block was not there. When she first came she wore - oh, I don ' t know
enough about clothes - but she wore some fluffy thing like the ladies wore
in Gainsborough paintings, you know, tulle that fluffs around, waves around
like a veil kind of thing. I said, "Cut that out. I ' m not painting that
stuff. I want something so that in fifty years you ' ll sti l l be dressed in
style." The bare arms and this part never will go out of style. So she
wore a creation in red and black velvet that she got in Paris. She will
never hear this, will she?
PC
I doubt it.
IA
You doubt it?
-49 -
IA
You doubt i t ?
PC
She'd have to have permission to.
IA
Well , okay, then. But she couldn't get this dress on
She lived two
blocks away on Astor Street - she couldn't get it on but once or twice.
I took this outfit, this dress, out to Wyoming. Then I thought, my God,
how will I fix it so the mice don't eat it. I had a little studio there.
There were a lot of mice - we'd catch about five a day for a while;
winter drives them indoors. I made a platform, arrange d it with pulleys
so I could pull the dress up in the air. And as I ' ve mentioned before,
when I ' m painting, say, old clothes I put a spot of white, maybe a triangle of white or any color, to identify the direction I ' m looking at
the position I'm looking where I want to paint. Then I put the same
mark on the canvas the identical spot as near as I can guess. But in this
case I didn ' t want to put white paint or anything on her dress. So I used
a lot of pins. The fabric of her dress was the best ventilated thing you
ever saw. She didn ' t know this. I worked two years on her portrait. And
when I got through - have you ever seen her collection?
PC
No, but I know of it.
IA
0
It ' s fabulous ! Just fabulous! She has it in a big room with white curtains,
the whole second floor of her - not the second floor - I mean her apartment.
She h as two or three Van Goghs: the man with the ear cut off, and that one
with the laundry out in front of the house. She's got Gauguins, hundreds
of Cezannes. And Picassoso And all French; no Americans, not one American.
So I thought: I can't let these Frenchmen beat me. I worked hard to paint
this . In this big room where her collection is there ' s a door here and a
door there. And from the place of honor where there was a Van Gogh or
something hanging she took that down and hung my portrait there. When she
was out in Arizona staying at the Camelback Leigh Block came over. He told
me that she had a birthday coming up and he wanted to get a fr ame for the
portrait. I said, "What's the most expensive frame you have?" He said it ' s
one on a Van Gogh. I said, "Get a better one to put on thiso" So he called
up Loewy 1 s in New York and got a frame that cost $1500. I said, "That's
all right. I ' m not going to have a cheaper frame than Van Gogh has. If
I ' m going to hang with your crowd I ' ve got to have at least as good or
better." This doesn't help much about that
Then she threw a big party
and had us there in honor of this portrait. I met some psychiatrist I think
from Hart Schaffner and Marx - I forget his name now - He said he ' d known
her all his life. He said, "You know more about Mary Block than I do." I
acted smart - I asked her to bring me her nail polish and I copied that on
my palette. I thought: I ' m not going to stand there and try to copy that
each time; I'd be a fo©l, an idiot. So I smeared some of the polish on my
palette and mixed up the identical stuff. You can tell what brand it is by
my copy. Also I asked her for her lipstick. She wore a kind of cerise
purp~ e blue "' ' I Cion ~t know.
I did the same thing with that. Then all I had
to do was put white with it or in a shadow a little ultramarine blue and I
had her lipstick
And the same with her face powder; I copied it identically.
It was rather ghastly in a way; it looks so close that it's kind of scary.
One day she said, "Ivan, do you think I have too much jewelry on?" I said,
"Not for you, dear." I don ' t know whether she got the point. It was all
0
-50-
right; she wears that much. And it didn't look as if she wore too much.
She's a big woman, you know. This portrait belongs to the Chicago Art
Institute now. And it's non-loanable. Even she can ' t borrow it. Katharine Kuh told me that. I mean even the Blocks can't borrow it. And
The_ Door is non-loanable. A couple of years ago there was a show of all
the Block Collection in Boston. And I was hurt because they didn't even
have this one in it. Do you know why? - because I ' m not French. I wouldn't
mind being a transplpnted Frenchman. So that's Mary Block. That was the
end of that. Oh, I made one poor artist mad in connection with doing this
portrait. Francis Chapin, the artist, was a good friend of mine. He was
a nice chap, six feet four and a half inches. He ' s dead now. He came out
of the Institute a little earlier. He was ten years younger than I was .
He was always a type that liked to stand out. He had a big easel. He ' d
just as soon have a whole crowd watching him paint; the more people that
watched him the better he could paint. Without a crowd he couldn't paint.
He had a studio within a block and a half from me. He used to say, "Ivan,
what are you doing?" I ' d say, "Oh, I ' m sweeping out the studio." Or I ' d
say, "Oh, I'm just loafing." Or "I'm getting a cup of coffee." This went
on for two years. Then when the portrait was done and they had a reception
downtown he heard Peter Pollack and Fred Sweet coming around and saying,
"Oh, Ivan, that's a magnificent portrait that you just did of Mary Block."
Well, Chapin was so mad at me he almost passed out. I was supposed to have
been loafing for two years . But all of a sudden he found out that T wasn't
loafing.
PC
Have you done many other portraits like that?
IA
No. That was the only one of that type I ' ve ever made; probably the only
one. She wanted it. She didn't criticize. Tf you painted the ordinary
woman that knew nothing about art you'd have something for the book. Look
who painted the Queen of England lately which I saw in some magazine - some
little guy named Xane or Colcain or something. In this country he does the
candy box cover. If you painted her the way she looks they conldn't take
it, you see. Vou ' d have a fat, puffy, thin face with eyes too close together
and so on. Look at what Goy a did when he painted the royal family. He made
them all look right but here ' s what he did : he made them like pigeontoed, you see. Like, say, a bluejay or a crow - we used to have a pet crow
that would come up and pull the cat's tail and then look out as if he didn ' t
know anything about it. Well, you know, Goya did that sort of thing very
cleverly: he'd do it every time. Or if he made the family straight on
he ' d make them look so dumb that everybody in the world would know it except
this family. I think Mary Block has a heck of a lot of personality which is
shown, too. She ' s a strong woman and it shows. Oh, I painted my father-inlaw (Captain Joseph Medill Patterson) . That was painted from a photograph.
I only saw him once. Have you ever seen that?
PC
The painting?
IA
(Showing some things and talking inaudibly.)
PC
Is that the only other time you ' ve used a photograph?
TA
The only time I used a photograph.
I don't think so.
Since he was dead I had to use a photo-
-51-
graph. But I don ' t work from photographs on anything. I know that a lot
of artists do but I don't. I don't like it. That's hanging in the
Institute. I saw my father-in-law once; and I had what few photographs
the Tribune had; but they didn't have much. He never posed much. All
they had was this one here . I knew his size. I got a white shirt and this
coat about like what he wore. That couch was painted from Wyoming. It
belonged to his si s ter so I thought it would have some relationship. He
looks pretty well sp n tted .
PC
Do you feel that there are symboli c meanings in the objects that go into
your paintings?
IA
No.
PC
You just use them -- ?
IA
No. I know when I painted ~he Door I had it in Hollywood and Sidney Janis
came along and said, "You've got a whole lot of symbolism in it." "What
do you mean? I never tried to put any symbolism into anything." Maybe
you're bound to get some but I don ' t look for it and I don ' t try to put
any in. I think there's enough symbolism in making things move around
without my trying to put a few clever little symbolisms in it. I don't
think it's necessary. What I'd like to get is some feeling in his face.
Some ~ feeling outside of flesh.
PC
How do you mean outside? - why?
IA
Well, I ' m talking about getting the life int o a person. Let's say T
painted you and let's take it from two viewpoints: Say, first, sitting
there you ' re dead and your face would look like that; it would be cold and
it would not have the feeling it has now. I want to get the difference
between your being dead and your being alive. You can't put your finger
on it, you can't say what it is. But it shows . l\low you ask what that is .
You try to get it; and I don't mean a great big smile or this or that. It ' s
unidentifiable. You ' ve got to give it a life outside of that. I don't mean
a likeness - to hell with a likeness. You see what T' m trying to say? If
I were dead and you were looking at me, and you look at me here alive,
there is a difference and that ' s the difference between just a head -- I
like to get that. Now I don't need any symbolism in that, for the love of
Mike. You aren't full of little tricky symbolisms. I don't need it. I
wouldn't want it. I ' m not trying to make a picture. I don ' t know what
I ' m doing. Just wasting my time, my friend.
PC
One of the things I find interesting is that you ' ve never, you know, had an
endless series of exhibitions. Every now and then there ' d be one .
IA
Actually I ' ve had only one one-man show. That was at the Chicago Art
Institute. nnce I had one somewhere else but it didn ' t amount to anyth i ng.
I wasn't trying to have any. ~he Art Institute was the only one. And
they dragged me into it. I didn't want to do it. You know it's a lot of
work. J mean I just didn't want to do it. All these artists have to show.
I have exhibited - but T've about stopped doing that - all over the world.
I think I was in more Carnegie Internationals than anybody else in the
-52-
world, Again and again and again I was in all the shows and in Europe
and all around. And now I ' ve gotten tired of that, Well, for one thing,
there ' s vandalism. The art now I think has more or less changed . It goes
around in cycles. You almost have to have a publicity agent; you have to
be a stunt man. What is new today might not be new by tomorrow evening.
Like Robert Indiana and so forth. You have to keep moving along with it.
And you judge any man - even if it ' s Picasso - if he makes realistic things
how good would he be? You'll find that all these chaps - Picasso's early
work stinks, it's terrible. Even Cezanne, Matisse, Courbet who came along
about 1911 were prominent because they we re the outcasts, they weren't good
enough to get in any show . So they found out by making abstractions they
started a vogue, They didn't think it was going to hit even; they were
more amazed than anybody, you see. But design or pattern or whatever novelty
you have is not enough. A hundred years from now what will they care about
a novelty of today? Today we have long h air and it ' s all right. Tomorrow
it will be a totally different thing. People will be different and will
want to live a different way; maybe half of them will be living on the moon
eating dust - I don't know. But it's a different thing. They don ' t think
about making their work good; they think about making something which gets
attention. That isn't satisfying. You might as well be an actor or a
singer or something else. Well, why not? They don't want to give it that
much attention. They just won't. Why would they?
PC
When you're in Chicago or Mew York do you see exhibitions or go to museums?
TA
nh, yes. I follow art and all its trends all the time. If there ' s something
I cut out of a magazine -- you know there's got to be trip~e talk lately
and I can make as much triple talk as anybody. And t don ' t have to read
someone else's triple talk to understand what's going on, I take a look at
their ability. You see, when they get enough modern art so that they're
competing against each other it will be all right. Am I boring you with all
this?
PC
nh, no, no.
IA
Don'~ you see that when they start competing with themselves then the poorer
ones will drop out. Jackson Pollock will kill de Koening and Motherwell and
so forth. A lot of those chaps - who was it? - Gottlieb, who -- was a
fourth-rate, conservative guy who showed at Carnegie would be nothing; but
he gets in this thing with six other guys and he gets known a little bit,
you see. But, say, look at their work a hundred years from now, what in hell
have they got. Are they that strong or that good? No. We have great chaps
making abstractions, most of the old masters, why hell they could walk
around these guys making abstractions, could beat the pants off them. We
haven't got any better than that and we've had lots of chances. You see,
the Italians were apprentices, they started out at fourteen or fifteen.
They knew all about color, they knew about pattern, they knew about the
figure. They had lots of models. So they had to make figures, up to a
certain extent; I mean good ones. The ones now there's hardly anyone who
can draw even. They ' ve cut it out. That's the way I feel - I don't know.
One thing I do know is that every artist when he gets to be about sixty-five
thinks the hell with the new art. Rut it doesn't bother me any. Let them
go . I don ' t know what they're doing. They smash a car like John Chamberlain
or do this or that. Maybe they~re happy doing it. I don't know. It doesn't
-53make any difference. Maybe they have a point, maybe they have got something. So many of them have so little to show . I love r.iacometti's
stuff. We went up to Canada to the World ' s Fair - Expo 67 - was that two
or three years ago? Then t go into a room and I see these beautiful ancient
Etruscan figures that long. And T thought: Oh, r.od ! Giacometti, you had
to copy, too. Picasso has always been copying. r.iacometti did these
elongated figures. Did you go to that show?
PC
No.
IA
They had two Etruscan figures this long. That kind of let me down on
Giacometti. I love his drawings and stuff anyhow. But, you see, why
imitate? Why don't artists think for themselves? If we know they ' re bad
why try to pretend they ' re good?
PC
Well , they ' re all afraid.
IA
Yes. And I ' ll tell you another thing: they probably all have dealers.
And the dealer says: do this, do that, it will sell. And a dealer can
wreck anyone faster than anybody. 'T'hey may really be painting for the
dealer for sales.
PC
You've been fairly independent o f dealers?
IA
Yes . I wouldn't touch them. I haven ' t use d them in the past and why should
I us e them now. They crash in after you don ' t need them . And all they do
is try to -- you see, they ' ve almost cut out the big exhibitions in the
world.
PC
Well, it's so expensive.
IA
Yes, that's true. 'T'he last International of any size that I was in was
Lord Reaverbrook - Lady Dunne. When was that? - about six, seven or eight
years ago I guess.
PC
It was 1963 .
IA
You know she wanted to buy The Window. I said No. Do you know what T did?
It was shown at Fredericton. I got the encyclopedia and looked it up. 'T'he
population is about 8,000. I said : my God, I worked twenty years on it.
It shouldn't go to a town of 8,000; that's a thousand a year. Oh, yes, I
had one other compliment, one crazy letter after I painted The~Window. I
think it was shown in a book by Eliot, that Life chap .
PC
Oh, yes.
IA
I got a letter from T.ondon from - guess who? - Huntington Hartford ! I don't
know him fr om a row of beans. He wrote, "I like your picture very much and
I'd like to buy it" or something to that effect. I cabled back to him, "I
like it, too." Also I gave him a price of like about half a million. He
flipped. He said you know T can get all kinds - Dali and others for that.
You know he's been pushing Dali a lot. Well, do you know what he's paid for
Dali's? - three or four thousand. And he puts out that he pays like eighty
thousand. That's bunk. I said, "You're in the c anned goods business. Keep
on buying them . " He's such a .•• that ended Huntington Hartford. God, he ' s
something!
They get involved .
-54PC
You've had some collectors who've bought quite a few things from you over
the years , haven't you?
IA
Not too many . Senator Benton bought quite a few. He bought that fo rnfi~_l.E,
thing. I think he bought about ten altogether. I don't know why he did .
PC
~hat's
IA
Maybe that ' s one reason he never met me .
PC
Oh , r ea lly ?
IA
Way back at the time o f the Encyclopedia Brittanic a show - oh, God, I think
it was about 1940 - he had that Encyclopedia Brittanica show. Do you
remember that?
PC
Oh, yes, the Encyclopedia Brittanica exhibition.
IA
They had about everybody in it. They had a Grant Wood. They finally
wrote to me and wanted a small one of mine - The Man with the Mallet. I
said: I won't sell it unless .. . I asked , "What's the highest price you've
paid for a picture?" Well, it was for a Grant Wood. I said, "Unless I
can get more than you paid for the Grant Wood I won ' t let you have i t."
So they came across with more than Grant Wood got
I said okay theno Then
later on they went around and sold the damn collection - I don ' t know two or three years later - (I didn ' t get in the book there ) - he sold them
all except mine. Then he gave it to some place in Connecticut ~ the Wadsworth Atheneum I guess. For a while it was hanging in the office of Rihicoff,
the governor of Connecticut. Ribicoff said, "I ' m going to keep that picture."
I' ve never even met Ribicoff. Isn't that funny? The Man with a Mallet is
a picture of my brother . And he hated it. I said~ell, I don ' t want to
paint your hair . " So I got an old stocking and put it over his head . I
called it Man with a Mallet. When it was shown in Chicago someone asked,
"Is that a Chinaman?"-I said, "Certainly." Which made my brother mado
Why not?
an awful lot from one collector.
I disapp e ared.
That ' s f anta st i co
0
PC
You met Dubuffet when he was in Chicago , didn't you?
IA
Yes . Where do you get all this information! You must have been rehearsing
for this interview . Wait a minute - you know more about me than ••• You
poor guy, you must have stayed up for at least three hours looking up all
this junk. Yes, Dubuffet came to Chicago to the Arts Club, I forget the
ye ar now . Have you got the year down? You probably have .
PC
1951.
IA
1951 - was it that early? Okay. He came to Chicago to the Arts Club at
the Institute. He told someone there that there was one person in Chicago
who he wanted to meet. Guess who it was! Me ! Well, I don't know any
French but my wife speaks it excellently. A meeting with us was arranged .
We took him over to the Racquet Club which we belonged to . Matisse was
alive then . I asked him outside of Matisse and Picasso who is the most
important artist. He said, "Mai. Moi." Don ' t you love it ! Oh, yes, he
- 55-
was nice. And do you know why he liked my stuff?
like mine.
He thought his work was
PC
Oh, really?
IA
Yes. He has the se paintings as big as this wall. I gave him a whole set
of photographs of my work which he wanted . He wrote the frontispiece for
the catalogue. You ' ve seen that?
PC
Yes.
IA
You ' ve seen everything .
PC
Me.
IA
Only you?
PC
I try.
IA
What girls have I gone out with? But Dubuffet has go tten real famous .
Katharine Kuh has two or three of his early paintings. The last time we
were in France we had intended to see him but he was away or something.
PC
He ' s a fascinating man.
IA
You've met him, have you?
PC
Yes.
IA
Didn ' t his wife die?
PC
I don ' t know.
IA
I think she was very ill with cancer or something way back .
PC
Yes, in 1953 or 1954 I think.
IA
Yes.
PC
Does it!!
IA
Doesn't it though!
too fast.
PC
Yes.
IA
We seem to be traveling now once in a while. I like to pick up a few little
antiques and stuff; art mostly. We like to travel. I try to play golf but
I ' m rotten at that. I can ' t get the ball - either the water hole is in the
way or my ball doesn ' t know how to pick up its wings and fly. I took up
outdoor skiing, country skiing a week ago and T flopped on my back and knocked
my head out for a second. That's not for me. I go home and I dream. When
I ' m driving a car I ' ll be thinking about all kinds of things. When I ' m
Who puts you through the works now on this?
You ' re pretty thorough, aren't you?
I keep trying.
She was very ill.
Time flies.
My Lord, I was young yesterday and here I am.
It goes
Do you have any other interests or activities or hobbies?
- 56-
playing golf T think I ' ll send that way down by the green and T watch and
the thing goes ten feet or T hit my shin or something. No, no. It ' s
ridiculous. Oh, I play ping - pong.
PC
TA
Do you think that your travel influences you in any way?
No. T don ' t think that travel influences me in any way except t hat I get
to see the art of the country. And you get to realize ••• Like we went to
Angkor Vat I think it was about t hree years ago. We saw it about two years
before they marched in. We stayed a double dose; as a rule we stay there
about five days but this time we stayed ten days. All around Angkor Vat
there are about thirty or forty other buildings and so forth. I liked the
architecture. My brief study of arch itecture stood me in good stead . When
I look at, say, a painting of a chap making a window or a door I can see
whether he knows about this thing or that thing; I know when he leaves out
things. You don ' t put a nail in a board as if you were hitting it with a
saw. If you want to saw you use a saw; if you want to drive in a nail you
hit it with a hammer. There are too many chaps making things. Of course if
you want to be like Sheeler or Georgia O' Keeffe and leave everything out
that's one thing. But I mean when they do go far enough like that or
anything you make ••• if you make a table and want it to lean make it lean;
if you want it to stand make it stand so strong that it can stand without a
leg; if you want to. Rut be more or less knowledgeable about simple little
things. We don't want to have much you can do with little stuff around.
We ' ve got everything made by hand or machinery that stands on the floor and
so forth and we're five feet or six feet tall and our vision is right down
on the dust level - what do you want us to do?
Now T' ve forgotten what you asked me. Oh, about traveling. Well, about
five years ago we went to Russia. We were in Moscow. We spent about two
and a half weeks in Russia. Tn Moscow I made a few watercolors. We had a
view right on Red Square. I was painting a watercolor back of that thing,
making one of those funny onion-shaped buildings. A policeman came along.
Peop le were standing in back of me. I'm like my dad in that he never could
paint or draw when people were standing in back of him . He used to go
around and my mother would chase people away . My wife had a motion picture
camera and when people would come up and lean over me she ' d just grind away
taking pictures of them and they ' d move away . Wasn ' t that a good idea!
Rut then this Russian cop started shoving me away. I thought he meant that
the other s had cameras shooting. I told you, "You can blow . " He stood
there for five or ten minutes trying to make me move on. I wasn ' t supposed
to make a drawing of it . I stood up to him and he finally left.
PC
Did you meet Ru ssian artists when you were there?
IA
Yes . We knew the Cultural Relations chap from Soviet Russia . Senator Benton
gave us a letter of introduction to him. Verensky, a friend of his that he
met in this country when he was here . They have a guard twenty-five miles
outside of Moscow. I think we had Lenin ' s room or some suite up there; it
was terrific; just in front of Red Square. You see, you paid for the whole
tour and you took whatever they gave you. You might get in a flophouse or
in a pal~ce. Well, in Moscow we had this beautiful suite. They had a bright
red telephone and an inkwell a yard long; there were two rooms with velvet
-5 7-
curtains and beautiful pictures hanging all over on the walls. Within
about the first hour after our arrival we got a telephone call from this
chap to come over to his club and talk about going out to the country. It
was just about lunch time and my wife said: we'll go down and buy our
lunch. I said, "Heck, we ' re going to eat a t the club
Isn't that pretty
nifty; here we are in Moscow only about an hour and right away they ' re
asking us out." We went over to his club. It was a big palace they had
taken over. Tt was empty here, empty there. Finally we found this chap.
He talked to us and he said, "Tomorrow we'll go out to Verensky. You pay
the cab." And then he went off. He didn ' t even buy us a drink. We
thought : boy , that 's pretty sociable! We went back to our hotel. The next
day we had lunch be fo re starting out just in case. We went out at twentyfive miles the police , you know, see you go on -- you go out twenty-five
miles and you stop unless -The place was out forty miles. It was a little
place about like here with birch and pine tre e s. They had about fourteen or
sixteen people there. They were poets, sculptors, painters . There was a
table about the length of this studio loaded with caviar, vodka, fruit,
chocolate candy, appetizers, everything you could think of. It was great.
No one there could speak a word of English except the interpreter. My wife
was sitting next to a pretty good-looking guy of about fifty. He kept
pointing at me. Oh, I made a toast; I don't know what I said; I said : "One
should be more individual . " I said the wrong thing. Now a lot of these are
Establishment artists. They're allowed a nice apartment in the city. They
get $12,000 a year without any taxes . They ' re allowed a car and a country
place. Which is pretty darn neat . No income tax or anything. And they're
respected. Anyhow after we got back to the hotel this chap said, "You're
posing tomorrow." I said, "What do you mean ! " He said, "The chap who sat
across from you is a sculptor and he wants to make your head . " I said,
"What does he want with my head?" Well, the next morning at a quarter of
eight this sculptor arrived in a little jalopy car. I got in. I thought:
well, here I get shanghaied; away I go. Since I ' d read all these detective
stories, I thought: I ' ll do as they do, I 'll look here , I'll look there so
I can kind of identify where they ' re taking me . Well , after forty-five minutes
of this I thought : what the hell! I 'm shanghaied anyway. We went out to
an old dilapidated four-story building - not too bad - on an avenue. I
thought this must be it. We went in . He took off his shirt and put on a
kind of an Apache red and white striped smock with big figures all over it
and a beret like the French wear . He put me on a high stool. He offered me
a bottle of vodka. Well , it was too darn early for that. Af te r I'd sat
there for two hours his wife came in. She had a tray filled with grapes and
chocolate candies and so forth . She wanted to know if Jo was coming. She
didn ' t know that Jo hadn't been invited. Again he offered me a drink o f
vodka. T took it this time because I was getting tired in the fanny sitting
there . He said, "This head will be shown in the United States . " He made it
in clay in three hours - a head this big. So that was Mo scow.
0
PC
Do you visit artists when you go to different places?
IA
Well, we had an introduction. This was writers, artists and poets. In
Israel when I met this Lubin that night, Jo was tired , we hadn ' t had any
sleep for thirty-six hours - she was on the phone trying to get us -- she
was good at getting airplane tickets - used to be a flyer. We finally got
in there. Though T hadn ' t had any sleep I went out with Lubin. I met
-58-
Israeli poets, writers and painters and everything. I was too tired to
know what I was talking about. They had holidays then for seven days
anyhow. Then we met some newspaper people. They had sandbags against
the doors. I asked why. They had a little boy who was frightened because
of the noises. Then we got a chauffeur and drove over Israel. It isn't
a big country. Tn some places it's only eight miles wide. The chauffeur
had been a sergeant in the Six Day War. He was amazing. He was in the
artillery or tank corpso He took us around to secret places: "I'll show
you what we capturedo We have a tank for every man in Israel with Russian
insignia on them and everything else
Imagine it! Fields of tanks and
cars. Everyone in Israel could have a captured jeep. Loaded with them!
Thousands and thousands of them! And they've got that place growing, you
know; they've got thousands and thousands of trees. Out of a desert they've
made a place that looks like California. Now you go ahead. I've talked too
much.
0 "
PC
Okay. I'd like to go back for a second. You were talking about color and
form. And in looking through the photographs, I mean looking at some of
the paintings recently, I notice that the colors generally seem to be somewhat muted in a way.
IA
Are you trying to say "dirty" colors?
PC
No, no, no.
IA
Yes, I know; oh, I know.
you mean --?
PC
I mean, you know, your ideas of using color.
IA
Well, listen - these afterimages. First, there's the object, whether it's
a human being or a still-life or whatever; that's there. Then there's the
light falling on it. Then there's local color. Now if you - what was I
going to say? I don't know.
PC
I'm curious that the relationship between the colors of the real object --
IA
Muted,
They're clean colors but muted.
Listen, I mean when you're talking about color,
You're trying to --?
Oh - what 1 was going to say was about these afterimages that I use: they're
bodyless; they don't have any form; what T'm getting at is that they're more
like spiritual colors; they're luminous like a gas flame that comes out a
blue-green flame. Say you look at an object, an apple - say it's red or
green, it doesn't matter - and you're looking at a thing which not only has
color but also it has a function of having shadows on account of its shape.
And also more or less with our eyes a perception of volume, a certain amount
of volume. Also the solidity of it; it has that weight. Shadows and the
light on it and the light only shows wherever it hits that one area of form.
Now afterimage - I look at that and see the afterimage; it's bodyless; there's
nothing but the opposite of the brightest part of the color. For example, if
the apple is red the afterimage would be a kind of blue-green. It varies I
suppose according to each person and according to the intensity of the light
you put on the apple. 1f you lobk at a yellow cadmium disk, the first thing
you'd get would be a strong pure magenta, the edge a dark blue. ~hen that
would disappear. (This is when you close your eyes after you've looked at
-59-
the color . ) Then you would get a blue-green center and a dark (I ' m talking
about the little round disks that I have ) , dusky magenta edge. Third ,
you ' d get a blue-green center and a magenta edge; blue-green gets dark,
almost a blue-black . Fourth, a strong blue-green center, dusky red edge
tinges to blue black. ~hey get fainter as they keep on changing. Now so
far I ' ve only looked at one color at a time. If I were to follow this thing
through further, which I will do, and , say, I look at two different distinct
colors - say, vermillion and a yellow cadmium - then you ' d get a strange
combinati on; I don ' t know what it would be but it woul d either have to combine
the two or separate the two; but it would be rather amazing. Then you have
two colors. Then, say, I take red, yellow and blue ( the strongest in a blue
would possibly be cerulean b l ue cobalt would be too dark) - the closer you
come to the medium •• • The color which shows the most variation , I mean afterimage, is white; white is the strongest by all means. And the darker you go
the less effect you could have. This is a whole field in itself which will
have to be studied. Psychiatrists or anybody studying this it will vary with
each one . We have color blind people, don ' t we? And some people are more
sensitive to certain colors than others. So naturally this won ' t ever be a
set rule for everyone .
PC
This is all based on your own observation?
TA
Entirely on my own observation. Now here if T were painting that coat I ' d
mix up a color as close to that as possible and put it in the sunlight which will make it false to a certain extent. If r don't put it in full
sunlight I won ' t have the reaction to the thing. So I have to falsify, you
see. If I kept it in, say, this top light I might have to sit there for an
hour and a half. Which I'm not going to do. So to a certain extent all
this stuff is false, you see . Yet they have enough truth so that it shows
that there's an opposite force battling them. Now if you make the whole
thing one color your eye is going to want t o see the o t her col or anyhow. So
I relieve that tension and put the other in. Which will make the color I ' m
painting look better and make the other color. It plays them both up.
PC
You ' ve never studied any of the color theorists ' writings, have you?
IA
Oh, yes - well - no, I haven ' t. They get everything mixed up. I mean they
ramble on . You get double talk. That ' s why I take the object itself and
find out for myself what little I can. I don't want their theories because
you get all bawled up. Not only that, but they ' re probably inaccurate because
they don't even know the colors. They wouldn't know these palette colors I
have. You see, every color we have compared to nature is way out, is way
false . You can ' t represent them accurately; we ' re just giving a vague imitation of what is in reality. We can't reach the yellow of anything; we
can't reach the red. And these theorists know even less than the painter
does because they won ' t know that angle . I'm just go i ng at it from the
reaction I would get.
PC
What kind of colors do you use?
IA
I u s ed to make my own. I use Windsor Newton. But we used to make our own.
My father used to get colors from Germany, from London, from all around the
world. Reelenburg. We had a pure rose madder; rose madder is just the washings
-60off a rug , you see . The strongest rose madder, the deep rose madder, is
the first washings. The paler rose madder colors are the second, third
and fourth washings. Like the afterimages they get paler . 'T'he early
Italians used lapis lazuli and mixed a terric blue. J'd like to get some
and grind it up. We used a granite slab and I used to grind paint by the
hour. My God, all through the Chicago Art Institute I used my own paint.
Way back in the 1930s my brother and I made charcoal. We were the first
ones in America to make charcoal - the All American Art Char coal Company .
We founded charcoal in this country. We were the first ones to make it .
We were ahead of Windsor Newton or any of them . Then they tried to copy
us . You might as well know it - I don ' t care : We went down near St. Louis
and got swamp maple . Soft maple made the s oft charcoal and hard maple made
the hard charcoal . You slice it and run it through machinery and so forth .
Poor Devoe and Raynolds and those other people used to use coarse Mexican
mahogany. Their charcoal wasn ' t any good . The best charcoal came from
France . It was vine charcoal made from grape vines . They had these old
women who never heard of a minimum wage col l ecting the vines for probably
six cents a day while Harry Bridges wants $800 an hour . Grape vines make
beautiful charcoal , the very best . You have to burn it enough to get all
the brown out of it; but if y ou burn it a little bit more it will crack,
crumble. Tf you don ' t burn it enough it will be brown and that ' s no good .
But I was telling you about making paint .
I went to the National Academy in New York to study. At that time I had my
own colors, the same that my dad used; cadmiums and everything . Each
cadmium varies according to the chemical plant it comes from. So I had
these colors. A young Belgian chap named Verheyden had come to Chicago.
He was a nice, likeable chap . He was hard up . My dad knew him and showed
him how to make colors . So he took my dad ' s way of making colors with
poppy oil and made Verheyden 9 s Oils . So at the National Academy Charles
Hawthorne was using Verheyden's Oils . And I had the same stuff. Hawthorne
used to say, "Oh, these are the finest colors. Get Verheyden ' s . " I didn't
tell him that he was using my dad ' s oils. I had the real stuff and he was
using Verheyden ' s Oils. Isn ' t that crazy! I made all the colors then . I
used Blocks Colors for a while; I used it on Th~ D££E_. I ' ve used Winsor
~ewton, ab out three kinds of stuff.
I knew Shiva . t knew Persley and
everything: I didn't like his color too much. I think Wins or Newton is
as good as anything. But all of these colors are bad for the simple reason
that they put in them like a brown mucilage is half of it; commercially
they fill it up with whatever you want to call this dope . Over in the barn
next to us he re up in the attic I have big boxes of dry color, rose madder
and everything, and I think I ' ll make some colors . I can make colors that
are three times as strong as the commercial colors which I know . There
again if I wasn't so lazy I'd be much better off . Yes, that ' s true.
PC
Do you read?
Do you have an interest in music?
IA
I read because I can fall asleep immediatelyj My wife reads book after
book and so forth. But I tell her stories. I can tell her stories in the
middle of the night , two o'clock . She wakes up and says she can ' t sleep,
and "tell me a story." She has a very logical, reasonable mind. So I'll
start off and say: well, I ' ll tell you one. Up in the Arctic there was a
goose and he covered five acres; and he was one of the small geese, you know.
-61-
They had lots of geese but they were over the Arctic a ways so you wouldn ' t
see them. If you saw a goose big enough you might disturb them in some way.
Then I'll tell you what they had: On the outside the goose had white
feathers. You ' d open up one layer and you'd see yellow feathers. On the
morning when the sun was red and everything the goose would bring out its
red feathers and so forth . It would depend on how they felt .
I'd go on
for hour after hour . Yes, I read some . I read art books a lot. My wife
says I never read them . I have this library here and there and on the third
floor in the attic . I used to keep catalogues. I have catalogues of some
of my dad' s shows from way back in 1892 and 1893 and 1901. I used to know
all the American artists . I didn ' t like Gi lbert Stuart much. I studied
under Leopold Seyffert . He ' s dead now. He went through the Pennsylvania
Academy; then he was in Europe on a Cresson Scholarship and everything .
Arthur Carles went there , too . Carles was very talented .
PC
Did you ever study with Arthur Carles?
TA
Well - no - he wasn't teaching much; yes, T think I did have Carles, too .
And Breckenridge . But what the deuce was I talking about? Oh - that I
didn ' t like Gilbert Stuart so much. They all look alike. Seyffert used to
say, "Ivan , if you just look at one or two they aren 1 t so bad . They all
look alike . " And I ' ve never forgotten that. If you look at one of them it
isn ' t so bad. If you put them all together there are too many Gilbert
Stuarts . He ' s not my favorite artist . But that ' s true of almost any one.
One or two is pretty good but if you see too many it spoils it . That ' s
true of art .
PC
Well, it's like anything.
IA
Oh, yes . I know but I mean • • • Ever since then if I see one I take a look
at it anyhow.
PC
Did your father ever talk about Eakins?
IA
Well - yes, he ' d talk about Eakins. At that time the nude model wasn ' t in
vogue too much. And they wore a mask over their eyes; you knew that?
PC
Right.
TA
T guess most of them were prostitutes. We don't know. Anyway, it doesn ' t
make any difference. At that time Tommy Eakins was very poor; did you know
that? He used to wear rubber hip boots. He had a dog named Harry. When
they ' d have a show at the Pennsylvania Academy it would be a dress-up
affair, black tie and so on. Eakins would come in his hip boots, ordinary
clothes. They thought he was sort of queer or nutty or something. But he
didn't have a nickel. His studio was in Philadelphia. We saw it one time.
A little narrow room with a skylight about the size of a sheet of typewriting paper. He couldn't afford a model. He had three sisters. I always
used to say to my dad, "I ' ll bet you that Tommy Eakins looked through the
keyhole in the bathroom to make his studies of figures." My dad would say
to me, "That isn't so, you damn fool." The classes at the Pennsylvania
Academy were separated, the girls in one class and the boys in another.
At that time they couldn ' t smoke. Later on the rules were changed and they
could smoke , in the corridors. So Eakins had this girls' class - have you
-62heard this?
PC
Yes, yes.
IA
You know about what happened in the class?
PC
Oh, right .
IA
When he got fired? There's a chap - I can ' t think of his name right now he ' s writing a book on Eakins right now. I gave him my dad's material.
The book will be coming out soon
There'll be something in it about my
dad and the pictures I let him take . At that time all the artists made
sketches . They were very fond of sketching. That's one reason why I
didn't like to make sketches. They all made sketches there. I used to see
these damned sketches.
Yes.
0
PC
You're just contrary.
IA
Of course it is. They were all drawing. Most of the artists I used to see,
including Chapin, were all making sketche s. I just hated it. I never made
sketches. Now I wish I had. And he had all these notebooks -- the whole
bunch would have sketchbooks around j and were making drawings. I have
upstairs that many drawings that my dad made in Philadelphia. (I gave some
to the Pennsylvania Academy ) of streets that are torn down, like Ray Street,
Martin Street, the Broad Stre e t section. Aren't you through?
PC
That's the end of this tape.
END OF TAPE II - Side 2
-63-
TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH IVAN LE
IN HIS STUDI0
I~ WOODSTOCK~
LORRAI~E
ALBRIGHT -
TAPE III
VERMONT
FEBRUARY 5 & 6, 1972
INTERVIEWER:
PC
Paul Cummings
IA
Ivan Albright
PAUL CUMMINGS
PC
This is Side 5 .
Yes, you were going to --
IA
1 want to go back to about the year 1902 or 1903 when I was about five or
six years old; 1 was born in 1897 so this would be about 1903. We played
chess. My dad bought a chessboard. That isn ' t too expensive a game for
an artist; with that and a few pieces you have your game . Next door to us
was a sculptor, Leonard Cornell, a Frenchman by birth. They ' d come over
all the time and play chess . Finally my mother said, "you're wasting too
much time playing ches s , you can't afford it . " But T learned to play chess
early; so did my brother. So this chap Alfred Jurgens came out. He'd been
in Munich with my father - an artist from Oak Park like Frank Lloyd Wright
or Hemingway - came from the same town and was about the same type. Jurgens
bragged a lot. He came from a family of fairly good means, he had money to
a certain extent, not terribly rich, but not poor by any means . He loved
to brag. He'd say, "Adam, you don't know this and this , let me show you
what to do . " He played chess a little. One day my dad said with his tongue
in his cheek, "Why don't you play one of these little kids here?" "Oh,
Adam, ••• (muttering)." Of course we beat the pants off Jurgens. My dad had
a long studio made next to the house out there in Edison Park which is now
part of Chicago. Well, you could see this big blustering German walking away
in a huff . It was a dirty trick but typical.
My dad was president of the Chicago Society of Artists in about 1914-1915.
They were having a dinner at the Art Institute. I forget now the name of
the artist who was to make a speech. Anyhow my dad quizzed him about his
speech and so forth and got all his stuff. My dad, obse rving the formalities
of president, introduced this artist and told all about what this guy was
going to talk about. So when the poor guy got up to talk all the wind had
been taken out of his sails. A rather dirty trick but it was kind of fun
maybe if you're not on the receiving side . Now ask me what you want to know.
I may not know anyhow . I have very find brushes, the smallest Wind s or Newton
makes, number 30. When I was in Hollywood they had number Olf which is the
smallest they made. But hardly anyone used them so they stopped making them.
I should have bought hundreds of them. But I can still get number 30 . Once
I put a stroke on a canvas (if you can call it a stroke ) I leave it. I
mean when I work on a thing I don ' t go over it.
PC
You don't overpaint over things?
IA
No, never; not on this stuff. To start a new painting, first I think of
what I want to make. That may take a number of weeks. When I painted Ida
I had her there for three weeks before I started to paint on her. I have
-64-
her do everything; when I say "pose" I don't look at her; when I say "rest"
I look at her. I'd say, "Sweep the floor" or something
When she 1 s
resting I ' d look at her. When she's posing I never look at her. I never
hire a professional model; I've never had one yeto The models I use are
all amateurs and they can't take these five dollars an hour or fifteen
dollars an hour poses. They don't know themo They ' re not glamour girls
or Valentines . They take natural poses. You can make them sleepy and tired
and they'll slump in a certain position that you know is more or less
natural. If you want to wait until they get tired the hands will drop down
in a certain way. Then I study the light on them here and there. I don't
make a sketch and try to have them fit the sketch. I work with the model
and with light. Generally in the studios I 've had before this one i t's been
so that I could pull every curtain up or down and control the light. Then
when I find something I lmke I mark the position on the floor with Scotch
tape, the hour of day, how the clouds were, and about where the sun was.
So I have that information . Then I monkey around and if I find a better
light I'll mark down the time, the clouds, and everything. Naturally, I
know that it's just the law of averages if I get that lighting
Then I
make a note of the clothes and so forth, so much open and so much closed and
this and that . And I write down the poses . I don't try to make sketches
at all, cute little sketcheso They don't amount to anything because I'm
going to make a picture. And that will be my sketch. You asked about
symbolism, I don ' t mean allegory. I figure what am I going to have him
be or do - heavy? old? will the background be a foil for the figure? and
so on. In Vermont here they all wear a crazy dusty green shirt and pants .
In Wyoming they were a totally different outfit - blue jeans and short
coats. I ' ve had a studio in Wyoming and painted there some. Once' I 1 ived
in Warrenville . Some of the old people there said to me, "You aren't a
native." And after twenty years I found out that I was a native and all the
people who said I wasn't were dead and gone. So I decided I wouldn't get
caught that way again. So I went to Wyoming.
0
0
The first day a cowboy came up I said, "Listen, brother, I ' m not riding
your horse and you ' re not using my palette o If you want to paint, fine.
If I want to ride, fine. And, by the way, I'm just as much a native as
you are as soon as I hang my hat on this nail. I'm a hotheaded Huno I ' m
a native." That ' s the tendency here, see . When they say to me, "You're
here recently," I say, "Oh, no. My wife ' s ancestors were buried in Vermont
two hundred years ago . How soon did you come over here?" It's trueo The
Carpenters have been buried for about two hundred years up in - what's that
town near Burlington? - Huntington, I thinko I said, "We left this place.
Only the lazy ones who couldn ' t move, didn ' t have legs or brains stayed
here." You see, the whole coast was infested with pirates or things of a
certain type . Which is fine; pirates at least are an aggressive group like
our present-day dictators and pre sidents. The good pirates moved out.
They were looking for gold or corn or Indians or squaws or something. But
the poor weak pirates stayed here. But we moved away from Rhode Island to
Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to Ohio, some went to Pennsylvania,
then to Illinois, Kansas, Missouri. And then a branch of our family went
to California to the gold rush . I had an uncle who did that. He was a
good-looking guy . His mother said to him, "James, you ' d better go to
college." He said, "Oh, I don ' t have to." He came back from the gold rush
and said, "I should have taken up geology. I didn ' t find anyth i ng." Which
is true .
-65PC
How do you like living here as opposed to Chicago?
TA
Let's say it 's different. We have so many transp l ants around here that we
get a cross section almost of New York, Chicago, Boston and what have you.
We have every typeo You see, we're right near Dartmouth College, it 's
fourteen miles from here. So we have that whole crowd. We have tycoons,
we have lawyers, we have doctors, we have professionals and writers; we ' ve
got undertakers . We ' re short on stores and restaurants . Actually they ' re
thinking of getting an etching plant in there . Weinsock is chairman there.
T'm going over there, he 's going to give me a little studio down below.
T may have to teach to make it ethical. Then I ' ll make my first etching.
Years ago, in about the 1920's, when Robert Harshey was director of the
Chicago Art Institute he used to say, "Ivan never makes an etching." Now
I may be making one .
PC
You've never t au ght either, have you?
IA
I taught once at the Chicago Art Institute . I wanted to see what it would
be like. It was a summer classo I had sixty students ranging in age from
sixteen to sixty . I remember I had two modelso I said to the class, "Whose
work do you like?" They said, "El r.reco, Cezanne and Vela zquez." I went
up to the library and got colored prints of each. I came down and delivered
them to the classo I said, "Each one of you take the artist you like . "
They thought that was nice. I said, "Now you paint like that . " Well, you
should have seen the results . One poor thing picked out El Greco . And T
had one nun in the class. T remember telling her; "You 1 d better pray harder.
You need more - you'll have more faith." And she said, "You sound like a
parable." I said, "Yes, I do." Then I had an old woman of about sixty - two
from Kentucky. She said, "I can't paint without a breeze." I said, "It ' s
easy to fix that in a minute." I told the monitor to go out and get that
fan, get the biggest one there is out there if you want some good heavy
mountain breezes. I had him hook it up, put it in back of her. I said,
"Is that blowing hard enough for you? Paint well
They wanted me to
continue teaching. The student in the class who had most talent was my
monitor, a young Jewish man of about nineteen. And there was a girl who was
very talented; s he was part French. Out of the class of sixty those two were
good possibilities. At this time they were just starting to grade art.
Imagine! Pujalus was another teacher there; he was teaching still-life
drawing or something and was very good at it. He ' s Greek. He was very
serious; don ' t tell them this and this and this. I said, "I'm not going to
grade these kids . " He said very seriously, "You've got to grade them."
When the time came to grade I said, "I'm going to give you kids a break.
I'm not going to grade you. Take the grade you want, any grade you want."
A lot of the girls wanted to go to normal school. So they all took A' s except
the nun who took an A minus and the monitor took a C. They said, "Gee, this
will help us in our course."
0 "
PC
They were there for credit.
IA
Now what do you think of that! That taught me a lesson. It taught me more
than it taught them. Everybody good or bad thinks they ' re good. The nun
took an A minus because she didn't want to be quite that good. But all the
rest except the monitor took A' s. Isn't that amazing! Some weren ' t teaching
-66-
and didn't need it. That's remarkable. It gives you a lesson, you see.
I had si x ty in the class. I had two models. And, Lord, they were painting;
maybe they should have been drawing or something. I found that I lost my
voice. Talking is hard work. I didn't make anything . I spent more going
down there. But anyhow it gave me a clue to what teaching is like.
PC
Do you have any artists who are particular friends of yours ?
IA
No.
PC
Were there some?
IA
My brother and I knew William s. Schwartz in Chicago and Chapin and there
used to be a whole bunch of them. At one time I was president of the Chicago
Art Society. I knew all the artists in Chicago. I gave four artists ' balls.
I was chairman of two of them. They were held at the Drake Hotel. There
would be three or four thousand people present. I found out what people
like at a ball; when people are having drinks they like to move around. So
I set up three bars at different locations. Even if they only walked ten
feet. What people don ' t like is to stand still any place even at a bar.
I'm talking about motion in pictures. There ' s such a thing as motion and it's good for them, too; they relax more and so forth; or amusement.
Forcing one in one little spot without a change is never good. I mean I can
stay working with a painting year after year but I mean people as a class
like to have entertainment. Now the party I ' m having for Dorian Gray in the
front living room I'll have this here, we'll set up a bar here, we ' ll have
one out there for drinks, we'll have the food somewhere else. And all those
people don't know each other and you can ' t introduce them to each other.
They'll have fun moving from one place to the other . Am T wrong?
PC
It'll work, yes.
IA
That works. You give them a better time. After all, what they want is a
good time . They ' ll meet different people under different conditions. They
come down here and say, "ooh! ooh! ooh ! "
PC
What did you think of the retrospective you had in Chicago a few years ago?
What was it like to go in and kind of see all your work?
IA
You didn't see it, did you?
PC
No, I didn't see it.
IA
Well, I had all the pictures. They did a mighty good job of putting up
partitions around and so forth. I had a setup of The Window; I had a brick
wall they moved down and a whole room, they made a ro-o maround it. I had
the electrician put in a light - I worked with him on it - so that first one
light would go here and then one light there; alternative - we timed it I don't know - at eight or ten seconds. First the light would go on on
this side to create the illusion of space and li ght; then this would be
light; then that without going to dark; and then that would go off. And I
had my Door brought to Chicago and that was there all fi xed with the ori ginal
doo r , to~ Which added a certain amount of reality to the e xhibition. It
Not any.
They're all gone about.
-67was one of the biggest crowds they ever had there.
PC
But what was your own reaction walking in and seeing all the paintings?
IA
I was glad to see them together . Actually I had never seen them all
together. I didn ' t know that I had painted that much
My reaction? - well,
the comments on it. That ' s about it. I had shown two or three in different
places all over but I had never seen a bunch of them together. About all of
them were there. Well, I didn't want to do it. Then the exhibition came to
the Whitney. That wasn't so good because it was the last year before they
moved out to their new quarters. That wasn ' t half as good. Did you see
that exhibition?
0
PC
Yes.
IA
It wasn't a tenth as good. In Chicago they had potted plants and they really
gave me the grand works. The Whitney was no better than a warehouse.
PC
It was so dark there.
IA
That was a very poor representation.
the best,
PC
I saw a show at the Whitney once and a couple of months later I saw it at
another museum. I couldn ' t believe it was the same exhibition. The lights
and everything.
IA
In Chicago they made different stalls all along and everything and it was
beautifully hung. The Whitney was just like that warehouse where we used to
judge pictures in New York wherever that was. ~o, I wasn ' t proud of that
display. But I didn ' t give a damn personally.
PC
Have you served on many juries?
IA
Not too many . Enough to be on juries. I wasn't too interested . The deal
used to be from Burchfield to Speicher, that crowd; you know they used to
pass around "you give me a prize and I ' ll give you a prize." Well, I used
to cheat myself out of quite a few prizes but by being a fool. I had this
Lemon job, you know, with the apples early. Louis Ritman was going to be on
the jury. He's a Frenchman really, I mean he lived in France for twenty or
thirty years and he likes the stock French frame . I made a frame with
mirrors all inside of it and then I put the corners in the middle of the
frame, I was up for one of the big prizes; they said that if it had the
frame off it would get the prize. Another time I sent The Fisherman to the
Americans show. The frame needed a little fixing but thB°"t-afternoon instead
of working on the frame I played ping-pong all afternoon with some gals or
somebody. If it weren't for that frame I would have gotten the Potter Palmer
gold medal. Instead Alexander Rrook got the prize. These are incidents I
know about. Then in Philadelphia early I had the Lineman in a show, Paul
Trebilcock was on the jury. He came back and said,~"Ivan, you were up for
the Peck gold medal," That was for a figure piece I think. I said, "What
happened?" He said, "Crowell said: why give it to a young man?" I was
thirty-two then. I had Ida up at the Institute. My brother was on the
The Chicago Art Institute was by far
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Sculptors' Jury at that time. They had a jury from Boston
Do you know
WoodWoodbury? - an old artist like 'T'wachtman - people who went way back
bury from Boston, I thinko And some more people like that on the jury.
Well, Ida was up for consideration and Woodbury said, "T 1 m not going home
until I make sure that that doesn't get a prize
In Chicago they had a
guy named Ruffolo I think it was - that may be the wrong name - anyhow he
said, "Well, that has guts. 1'hat should get the prize." But the other guy
stayed and I didn't get the prize. Finally I did get an honorable mention
on another work, that Fleeting l_i~ that now belongs to the Metropolitan.
Some weeks later I was going through the Chicago Art Institute. Now there
was an old gray-haired goat, a trustee of the Institute, named Graham Aldus.
I guess my dad in his younger days or at some time had told this guy that
"your beard looks like a hairbrush" or some such thing (I'm not sure what he
said). My dad had a pretty sharp tongue like Whistler had. Did you ever
hear the story about Whistler? When he was introduced to people he would
say "Oh, but it must have been another Whistler you met; it wasn't I. It
must have been another Mr. Whistler." Well, anyhow, I was ·· going through the
Institute with someone and this old billy goat happened alongo He came up
to my picture and said, "Oh! I didn't know that you were the son of Adam
Emory Albright. I'll see that you never get another prize." Now he was a
trustee. Do you get that! I had never met the guy beforeo Imagine! This is
kind of shocking, isn't ito And so on down the line.
0
0
0 "
I've mentioned this chap Chapin. I liked him socially and eve r ythingo But
he was an enemy of mine. He tried to see that I would never get anything .
For the fun of it I painted a landscape in New Harbor
It was after I had
painted the Door. It was in 1939 and I was tired of painting; it was the first
time I had g~away. So I used a palette knife on the damn thing and took
another name, James Fleming
I sent it to the Pennsylvania Academyo It got
in and was up for the prize. And then Chapin spotted the frame and said,
"I think Ivan must have made that." And he stopped me there. And so fortho
Oh, I could go on and on with this junk regarding other prizes. I got
plenty anyhow; I got more than I should have had. That's the way it goes.
I was up for the gold medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters no, the American Academy I think. I belong to that. And so Ted Rowan said,
"Oh, Ivan, you're up for the gold medal." I said, "Great! Who else is up?"
"Oh, Georgia O'Keeffe." I said "Great stuff!" Well, she got it. I think
de Koening and Rattner and myself were up for that, and otherso You know
writers and everybody can vote on thato The National Academy, I mean the
National Institute of Arts and Letters have 250 members. The core is fiftyo
They have five of each. So now I have a chairo I don't know what the chair
is for. I haven't seen it yet.
0
0
PC
You haven't been up there?
nice chairs there.
All those nice chairs they have.
IA
No, I don't mean that. They call it a chair; you're given Chair 13 or 19 or
something. Do they actually have chairs there?
PC
Oh, yes; they've got your name on it.
IA
Are you kidding!
PC
It's up in Audubon Terrace off Broadway.
Where are they located?
They have very
-69IA
I didn't know that . I've never seen my chair . I must go to see it when
I'm in New York. I was on a jury once in Chicago with Buckminster Fuller.
PC
What was that for?
IA
Well, okay, I'll tell you in a minute. Oh, God, I don't know what year it
was, it was after 1946 , I think it was 1948 or 1950 along in there . It was
at the Drake Hotel and we were judging automobiles. I never knew until the
other day when I got a book on the stuff that he made automobiles. I don ' t
know the front of a car from the back. I can't even open a door. t'll
tell you about my auto driving. Would you like to hear that?
PC
Yes.
IA
PC
You know, people in this town don't know that I'm an artist. One day about
two years ago I took the jeep uptown to the Post Office. The town is filled
up pretty solid there. There are four places to park in front of the Post
Office. Three were filled and the one directly in front wasn ' t. There's a
little alley where you come off the driveway. I pulled up just as a great
big oil truck about two blocks long went by . I th ought: gee, I ' m too close
there; so I pulled up in front and then was going to back out, I mean back
in there close to the sidewalk. Well, I must have been dreaming. I got my
foot on the accelerator and zoom! The car took off with some speed . I
knocked down the antique cast-iron lamppost which was about thirty feet high,
then pl owed through the post of the mailbox which was about three feet high;
T went through a trash can about three feet high, and I almost went through
the side of an old plumbing supply building. And T almost took down a
flagpole about forty feet high. Finally the car s topped. I wasn't frightened.
T just thought:
My God, what's happened! I didn't have a Vermont driver's
license . T just have a Georgia license because after a certain age you
have to take a test and what test could I take, although I've been driving
since I was twenty years old. The cops came up. They didn't holler at all.
And did I have a crowd around me! The next day I'm in here painting and I
have this little radio on . (It doesn ' t work now.) J heard on the air that:
"an elderly gentleman (or man) almost went through the Post Office yesterday.
He took down an antique lamppost." T wondered what the insurance would
amount to. You know, they were a year fighting; it was an antique. T didn't
know it was an antique in cast iron. 'rhey had to get it in sections. The
bottom part is curved, the other part is ••• and all this stuff . And every
half hour when I wanted to hear some music I'd turn the radio on and my
face would turn red because I heard all this stuff on the radio. I got known
at the liquor store . The guy at the Post Office was very nice. He was
looking out the window and saw the lamppost go down, And do you know what
the damage was? - $600. And later I found out that the lamppost had live
wires that I cut through. It went so fast luckily it fell away from me.
It's a wonder but I didn ' t get hurt at all. It scorched the windshield; the
whole windshield was almost ruined, So if I had gone out I would have been
dead. I went into the Post Office and asked them to call up my wife and
tell her that I had a slight accident and that I didn't want to walk home
and would she please come and pick me up. Well, you can cut that out.
Anyway, I think -(Tnterview is resumed the following day, February 6.)
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Resumed February 6, 1972
PC
This is February 6.
The _ Win~~ - right?
I think you wanted t o continue talking then about
IA
Yes, I want to continue talking about The Window and try to make more of a
concentrated viewpoint. In the first place the setup covered an area of
about fifteen by twenty feet in back of the window. Then I stood in front
of the window to a certain extent. Now I have possibly about fifteen major
movements in the picture swing this way and then foil against it, and then
minor things like the lamp, like a flask, like a bowl with flowers, like
the chair with the three movements; possibly forty to fifty minor movements
controlled by the major movements.
PC
What's a major movement?
IA
A major movement would be swinging a big area i n one direction, say, like
a big arc; say, the whole window frame would swing one way. And then to
counteract it on the other side I might have part of it swing one way and
then swing back to have a force there. I make forces and then try to
stabilize them and put them so they won't be too violent. For instance, I
have three beer bottle s in one area. Each one, although fighting each other,
is made from three different viewpoints so they're contained. But also in
this case of motion I'm trying to have it so you feel that you're walking
back of it and all through it, not just looking at it. I'm trying to put
the observer in the picture and not outside of it. Although he is outside
of it, I make him wander around through that room. Like the picture frame
on the wall I put my canvas right next to it and look back of it so that
he's not looking at a picture on the wall but he ' s looking sideways almost
flat against the rear wall thirty feet away. Which means I ' m entering him
into the room; he ' s walking around the room and seeing the things as if he
were in there from their different positions. They take on different poses.
I'm composing with motion instead of with area, although naturally it becomes area on flat paint. Which gives it a life of its own, a different
kind of a life.
PC
What started this looking at things from different points of view?
IA
It was a gradual thing. The first pictures had a little of it. As I ' ve
told you, I had one, Flesh - it was just a glass bowl with water and the
flowers upside down. ~ould go either way. We ' re taught that this is
hollow. J figured out: well, who can tell which way it's hollow. It can
be convex or concave. And late r with The Door, which is eight feet tall,
I made the flowers from different heights because I had to get them higher
and from different angles. I found it had more volume and more space that
way. Instead of trying to pretend there's space I used the exact realism
from a different direction and I made one flower from one direction and the
other from the other direction. You see, before you looked just one way and
you only had one view. I looked two ways in that picture. But I had to
make them so that no one could tell that there was a change of pace because
that would ruin it.
PC
But did that start by chance or by coincidence?
-71IA
Well, no - as I told you, when I studied at the Chicago Art Institute
their color was mixed up with their form, and color was mixed up with
light. I struggled through this school. The teachers didn't know what
I meant. Hawthorne was always just color and he didn't understand when
I said I wanted form. I was probably one of the first ones to go for
form. From the form I was trying to get more space than form. So that's
how it started. I was trying to get around the object and trying to get
to model it more than what you see. I'd walk from one position to
another. That led on - like if you had a person standing - I painted the
~ineman at the old church at Warrenville, it was fifty feet long - well,
I moved away back. That was one thing. That gives it more movement.
Then I walked from one side to the other to try to reach around it to
make it more sculpturesque as it were. From the sculpturesque it turned
into more motion. I'd walk further around and I found that it gave more
of an extending of the figure out towards you. So now after all these
years in ~e Vermonter, which I'm working on, I'm trying to have his hat
move around or an arm lift up. If I want to make the arm lift up I work
from underneath it with a motion and then have another motion forcing it
down and up. And you can swing the hand back and forth. I'm not trying
to use distortion. I'm not distorting anything. If anything, I'm making
the object more realistic by walking around it. In other words, an object
has a million different viewpoints and I'm taking a certain one. Now, for
instance, say I'm going to paint a banana or a grapefruit or orange or
apple on a table. That object doesn't have any size; it has all sizes. If
you stand off fifteen feet it's smaller. If you stand off far enough it'll
disappear. As it's disappearing the color will become more and more neutral
until finally you'll just have a black spot. So what I do: say, for any
object I'll walk about the same distance around it so it will keep relatively
the one shape; say the object is three inches high; It'll keep that roughly.
But I'll be painting the back of it and the front of it and trying to relate
the two but not too violently because it won't work. But I am getting
around the object. Well then, the object will have a tendency to try to
get out of that shape. There's where the action happens when the observer
looks at it. A lot of these objects I paint are trying to get back to their
original shape and that's where the force lies. And the job of the artist
is to compose with these shapes and do what he wants with them. Naturally,
that's where the artistic effort would be displayed.
PC
Yes, because as you look at these things from different points of view in
theory it should open up the form or change it in a way.
IA
I painted a chain, an old automobile chain they had on tires. It had little
loops and holes in it. Let's say it had about eight loops. I hung it up.
I painted one in a normal position like anybody else would paint it. Then
I got back of it and painted the next one - no, I turned the canvas upside
down and painted the next link; and then painted the next one in a normal
position. Well, you might say the chain had a tendency to be horribly
angry so it tried to twist around. Then when you hold the real chain up
against the painting it looks silly and as if it doesn't have any life of its
own . A lot of these things are angry. You can make them peaceful by having
it static. The normal part (I call it static) will emphasize the things you
want. So you're composing with spots of emotion like it had a volcanic feel
like in Yellowstone Park where there are all these pots, there are some
boiling here, some are quiet here, some boiling there, and some are bigger
- 72-
than others, and so forth. You're designing with different controlled
motions, you see. Well then, what happens is that the observer looking
at the painting it won't register except it will be disturbing. Possibly
I make mine more disturbing than I should because I ' m still experimenting.
But if you wanted to you could use the same thing to make a thing more
beautiful. Constable or Poussin could make it very melodious and graceful.
or what you could do: if you were to paint a figure piece outside, I mean
small figures like they have in a lot of pictures, you could get back of a
man and make him actually walk about , you could move him forward. And then
you could have one nearer walk towards you, you could make him walk up a
hill and around. Now in that picture of the Cornfield which I painted for
Senator Benton I walked around an area of two acres in a cornfield and
tied each stalk I was going to paint with a piece of colored cloth in white,
red, blue and so on, so I could identify it. And I walked around in a
certain pattern and movement.
PC
What did the different colors of cloth mean?
IA
So I could tell what I was painting, to identify wha t T was painting. If
I had eight pieces of white cloth in one area I wouldn ' t know which one I
was looking at. If the cloth was red then on my canvas I ' d make red spots
in the section where these cornstalks would be. The next blue, the next
yellow, the next green, or black and white, and so forth. The result is
that when you ' re looking at the painting I have you walking around in that
field. You aren't looking at that field; you're in it. Then I try to keep
you in there so that you don't walk out. Because if you walk out you ' ll
get a George Inness. And I don~t want you to walk out. I want to keep you
in as much as T want to; or if I want you to talk out I can make you walk
out and then walk back in again. And that's what this should lead you to
do; and I think it will. Now let's see what else we have. I'll change to
talking about a piece of sculpture which I will work on after I get through
with this Vermonter, which I've been working on for about seven years; I
expect to w-;-r·k ~it for about two more years. Or when I get tired of
painting I'll work on this sculpture.
I have an iron stand made with a crank on it from a truck. It will lift two
thousand pounds. The head eventually will be about thirty inches high or a
little more, about twice life-size in height; that would be about four
times in volume. I'm working from photographs of the shroud that Christ was
wrapped in after the Crucifixion. This shroud is now in Milan, Italy.
According to books on the subject this shroud is a fine piece of linen.
The shroud is fourteen feet long. After the Crucifixion it disappeared. It
was supposed to have been found in Constantinople. Later on the Crusaders
brought it to France and from there it landed in Milan. Once in a while it
is displayed to the public. In about 1896 or 1898 along in there about the
time photography came into existence an Italian chap connected with the
Church was allowed to photograph the shroud. Of course when he shot the
photograph he had a positive. The measurement of the height of Christ
according to this shroud is five feet eleven which means He was a very tall
man for those days. He has hair coming down here on the side down to His
shoulders, there's sort of a pigtail in back, the blood shows up white. A
doctor who examined the shroud estimates there are either fifty or a hundred
and fifty wounds. Naturally only the wounds which showed on the skin are
-73-
vi s ible , Also His nose was broken, The Roman soldiers who sc ourged Him
used clubs something like a policeman ' s club with two or three leather
things, say, eight or ten inches long at the end of which were attached
things like lead pellets . So I ' m going to make this sculpture. So the
feeling I want to get across is a feeling of awe, of strength, of majesty.
In contrast to this there ' s this head I ' m painting of Atwood, a man seventysix years old; I ' ve worked for two years on his face and hands. By comparison
he looks like ten pounds of suet, no more no less. No matter how you try to
dignify him he remains flesh and a man, Now this photograph of Christ which
I have had enl arged , I ' ve taken two or three photographs of the back and
the front - although the characteristics of being human are there, there ' s
this feeling of awe , strength and majesty. It ' s totally different. Now
how will I get that feeling into my sculpture? First, I will have to make
a head - using calipers - more accurate than anything I have eve r made.
First will have to come the structure of that head more definite , as true
a s I c an possibly make it . In addition I will have t o project a greater
feeling of love, sympathy , kindness , humility than I ' ve ever done before .
Whether or not I can do it I don't know. The head 1 make wil l have to awe
the person who sees it , If it doesn't make them cry, if it doesn ' t make
them feel guilty, if it doesn't make them want to be better, if it doesn ' t
do everything that Christ represents, it won ' t be any good. And how far I
can go in accomplishing that - for instance, I ' m looking at Mr. Cummings
here; I ' m comparing him with a piece of fruit, say, an apple on the table .
He has life that shows . Now it isn't a change of form. The apple stays
the same but the life doesn ' t come out too much; it ' s be tter than a piece
o f pottery but that ' s all I can say . But this other head. Now what is
that difference? It is there . Because , after all , my seeing thi s gentleman
is that these rays of light from His face coming here make this form there ' s
something in that which carries beyond form. And it ' s that feeling the
difference between these rays of light and darkness which emanate from the
figure and this man T' m l ooking at have to carry something outside of just
the physical shape of it , or I'm wrong .
That is the quality that will have to come in this figure but to a far
greater extent. Tha t' s more or less the way I have to define it . In other
words , I ' m l ooking for the spirit, I guess you ' d call it . But I don't want
to look for the spirit by calling it feeling. It ' s not feeling . It will
have to come through knowledge. And the knowledge will be that in between me
and what I ' m looking at there ' s that feeling in the air, in the atmosphere,
which I have to get . In other words, I will be modeling t he atmosphere . And
I don ' t mean to make i t misty like a Rodin and cloud things. But more
accurate . But it ' s going to have to create such dignity and majesty that
it ' s almost impossible to understand . When I'm trying to make this sculpture
we ' ll find out what happens , In modeling, for instance, the piece will have
to be so sensitive and it will have to be accurate; construction will have
to be there, I ' m taking that for granted . Otherwise it won't be any good ,
But in addition to that I ' m going to hav e to - well, I gue ss the best way
to do i t will be to model it and then put it in a kind of dark sp o t and
look at it every day and see what happens. I guess it means that I ' m going
to have to cut out drinking and a few other things.
PC
I'm very curious about the light which we've talked about, t he quality of
light.
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IA
Oh - the quality of the light. I don't work from sketches. I work from
moving a model around for, say, three weeks or moving a still-life around
in a hundred positions . I ' m using the skylight, top light. Then I ' m
getting one light. And then I like to concentrate; the more you make it
smaller and smaller you'll have a sharper light and more shadows and it
brings out more form. Now here in Vermont the light is fairly good . But
it's better in Canada. I ' ve gone to Canada a few times, to Stratford for
the plays. I find that the farther north I go the stronger and the whiter
is the light. I ' ve painted in California a few times and that is simply
ghastly. It gets kind of an orange glow . It ' s impossible. I don ' t like
it. In 1926 to 1930 every artist down there would have his studio right
near a stopsign so people would come and buy these paintings . They painted
wisteria and so forth. I like a cold light, what some people might call a
cruel light, the kind of light that no actress would want. I like a
powerful white light on the head; this is the light that shows the form
the most. A steady light with white clouds reflecting down I think is the
best light you can have . Long ago da Vinci said that; a small courtyard
with a white cloud above it. But Italy is too far s outh. If you go north,
as far north as you can, you'll have a white light. Then you ' ve got to
figure that --
PC
The thing I ' m curious about, for instance, in The
osity of his hands and his face.
IA
Personally I can't see that. But when I went to Chicago and looked at my
pictures I thought there was a little luminosity. I think that may be
caused by getting close values. In painting a hand (and incidentally most
artists paint terrible hands, including Rembrandt, horrible ) you should make
the fingers so they can move.
PC
Rut do you look at the hands the same way you do an object?
IA
Yes. It doesn ' t matter whether it's the head or the hand or a button or a
piece of wood or the background, or a brick or whatever. I mean I look at
the head that way. I try to make it more feeling . On the painting of the
Fat Man I painted years ago with the derby on I tried to put force in his
eyes . ~And I had almost to put it in myself because people generally have
kind of a look of receding their eyes or they ' re hiding all their emotions
back of it and trying to be secretive. You have to pull the emotions out
of them. Now actually this chap wasn't a spiritual type. He was a little
politician, he was in the house here, he came from Bridgewater, he had two
or three hundred acres.
PC
A Vermonter, right.
IA
Yes, a Vermonter. He had two or three hundred acres. He made maple syrup,
not that there's anything wrong with maple syrup. He thought he was a
second Will Rogers. He would spend his time telling me in a slow voice offcolor jokes and so forth. He had been road commissioner. He's a Phi Beta
Kappa. He was the first man I painted who - I never had a professional model,
I won't have them because they think they're the actor and I'd rather be the
actor myself. He was just a typical ordinary man getting old. His wife
died . He ' s now living at The Homestead here. Some woman left a million
Vermo~ter,
is the lumin-
-75-
dollars for 't:'he Homestead and it looks as good as the Ritz in New York or
any other place. You have to have good references to get into this place.
There were twenty-three old ladies and only three men. He was seventy-six
years old and these old ladies c alled him "boy" because he was the youngest
one in it. He came over to pose . He said, "T ' m awfully glad, Mr. Albright ,
to get away because here I can take off my tie , and there are so many women
there . " (In the West people called me Ivan but here T' m Mr. Albright . ) But
to get back to this sculpture I ' m going to do, I'll have to ge t spiritually
into this. Tt ' s something outside of t he modeling of the head . You h ave to
put extreme love into it. The more love or sympathy or humanity, you might
say . (Although I'm not a human person; I'm a fool in so many ways.) In
this case it has to have the ultimate of your feeling of love , sympathy,
compassion , everything good to make it or you won ' t have it . In painting
or anything you cannot have hate. Tf you have hate you destroy the picture
and yourself. Tt doesn't work . You can have hunger, you can have thirst,
you can have great feeling for texture, you can be sensitive to touch, you
can be sensitive to color, but for the head you've got to be sensitive to
love. Otherwise it will not work. And I think that ' s the only thing. Now
that love won't change the shape of it but it will add something to it. And
you won ' t get that through feeling . You're going to have to just look and
see the difference because it's extended out . Because, after all , when I'm
painting you I ' m not touching you; I'm off a ways. And here this radiates
out from a person. So it's in the air between myself and the object I ' m
looking at. So in there whether you call them cosmic rays •• • Buckminster
Fuller would know exactly what it is. T haven't had a chance to talk to him.
PC
Could you explain how you use the magnifying glass that you have?
IA
Well, you see, I have this corduroy coat which happens to be a very cheap
corduroy , the ribs are about an e ighth of an inch apart. It should have
wide ribs. A wide wale corduroy would have been easier to paint; I don ' t
know why I picked this one; I guess I didn ' t think too much about it, the
color was good, and he had it on. In Vermont they were all green mostly .
They should be Robin Hood or something. So I use the magnifying glass when
I want to bear down on one section.
PC
(inaudible)
IA
Oh the setup I have, I have this dummy all dressed up with his clothes.
On the dummy let's say I ' m painting a certain section of the sleeve. I brush
underneath the magnifying glass. So instead of the area being, say, two
inches square, I've got an area of four square inches; I can see more. That
corduroy takes on a rather wonderful texture about like a raspberry, you
know, those little sections of a raspberry; it's that color and when the
light hits it it's rounded, it ' s soft, it's mostly deep rose madder, and it
turns around and it ' s almost like hair and it almost purrs like a kitten.
Well, you've got to put things into it, you've got to love that cloth or
what are you going to have? If you think the wrinkles are too sharp you ' ve
got to change it to make them more gentle. I ' ve cut out patches in the
back of the coat because places where it got the sun turned a kind of tawny
yellow and got bleached out. So I ' ve cut out patches. I have a stick I
put over my pictures to rest my hand on. I take the most interesting parts
of the coat and cut pieces out and tack a piece to the stick and pin them
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around there. And so the wrinkles won ' t change I ' ve got a jar of spray
starch that I spray on, say, the sleeves s o that the folds s tay more permanent while I ' m working on that area. I have the whole picture flexible,
I then tie it up with definite things so T can take an area of , say, half
a foot square and I put safety pins all through that to hold it in shape
until T get through. Then when I get through I don ' t care about it ,
PC
But you don ' t use the magnifying glass on the canvas when you ' re painting,
do you?
IA
Well, I use it - yes , I paint under it . I have a thing like this. Here.
(demonstrating his method) I have it like that, you see . And then I could
do this . Tf I were doing that I ' d take a bigger one - where is it? - oh,
here it is. You see, I won ' t be holdi ng this box here. I can see it , you
see . This brush is too big . (I ' m using a Number 3 .) And then paint it ,
My wife likes sunny days, as most people do ; which is fine . But I like a
cloudy day (I ' m selfish ). Then the light is strongest on this figure. Also
when there ' s s now on the ground the effect is of a powerful magnifying glass
on the object , I ' m a realist in the point that I want td paint it that way .
I ' m an abstractionist in that I ' m trying to have motion. But if T' m going
to make a thing move I ' m not going to make a dist ortion. I don ' t want to
move a distortion. I'm no t intere sted in distortion . T mean that ' s fun to
play with but that ' s just like a dream .
PC
What is di s tortion?
TA
T mean if I wanted to di s tort that I could make that coat this big or the
sleeve here . Like a Dali , I'm not trying to make a fantasy or a dream.
PC
So you try to follow -- ?
IA
Yes, I follow construction , When T make this thing I ' ll make it so it will
work . I ' m not trying to make a wonde rful pattern like surrealism. Which
you could do . That ' s another field ,
PC
But it ' s more real than real in a way?
What would dist ortion be?
TA Yes. Well , the reality is more than what a man can dream up. A man who
makes a fantasy of surrealism is thinking that he can beat nature. And he
can ' t. Because he ' s part o f nature , and he ' s a small part and when he ' s
tying himself up -- I ' m just trying to follow nature and let nature come
out . Which is a whole lot stronger I think. I'm just the instrument of
making it , ln other words, T' m not an arti s t. No , it ' s true .
PC
You 9 re an observer .
IA
I ' m an observer, yes,
to look .
PC
But still you don ' t u se trompe l ' oeil and all kinds of things like that?
IA
No. That would be - well, that would be like Bosch or something . That
would be fun, too, But I would much rather do this and see how far I can
But I ' m making them observe it the way I want them
- 77-
go with it. I really think that one could make figures - you see, these
things are terribly distorted here. If there are too many I'll paint one
ou t.
PC
I see.
'!'here are too many objects on the canvas.
IA
I have one there, one there, one there, and one there. Now what T want to
do is get this log, this beam here, turning definite enough to hold those.
As a base of these things I may have to adapt the mean so it will take care
of that. I don't want the porch to shove in. I want it to shove out here.
And if I want to have a feeling of walking around there I'll force a bunch
of things so you can get around there, so you can put your arm around there.
I don't want to make just a blank thing that is solid here. You know, you
can walk around there and I'm going to make certain areas so you'll feel
that . And I can do it through motion. And, of course, color comes in too.
Which I think would be interesting.
PC
But your color really tries to follow the color of the object, doesn't it?
IA
Yes, the color of the object; that's right. I wish I had a better example.
Well, you see, there's ridicule here to some e xtent. This is his sleeve.
Here's a husky old chap with his coat on and I pull this down more than it
would be. And then you put on this underwear which looks like lace that
they might have had in France a hundred years ago . It's frivolous but the
frivolousness makes a foil for the rugged old clodhopper or whatever he was.
It's a foil against it. And I think it should have a foil. Now here's
this man and I don't know whether he thought much about Christ or not; I
don't know. Here's the cross I got from Ethiopia. I'll make that stronger.
And then this happens to be open and exposes the chain and what he did think
about Christ. But it isn't a thing that other people knew about; it's just
that his shirt happened to be open and you saw it. This is to tie it up
not only as a picture but with philosophy and f~ith and so on.
PC
But do you think then of this as having religious connotations because of
that?
IA
Well, I think that people might grab their own shirt and see whether they
have something. If they have, it means something to them. If they don't
have, they ' ll wonder what, you see. But I think anything outside of the
picture that you can give significance to is important. Because, after all,
what is a picture? I mean I could paint eighteen men. Well, what good
would that be? They're all men. For what? I mean I think a painting
should have a sort of religious connotation. The_]_~ has. I think if a
picture is important it should possibly be tied up with religion maybe, or
with faith, or with the universe, or something. I mean just painting that
one Fisherman thing I did mean I ' m not trying to appeal to the ones who
kill-fish or-the ones who kill deer.
PC
What about this one with the hole in the wall gang kind of thing?
IA
That was just being typically Western. I had that material. Everybody in
it had been a gangster. One guy that made the spurs had been in jail. I
opened up Butch Cassidy's revolver, or six-shooter rather, and saw that he
had misspelled his own name. He had "B. Cassidy . " He had carved the name
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inside . That lariat came from something . Just about everybody had been
in jail or something. Except our cowboy manager, George Conwell. I had
his boots . I used to say, "My gosh , that 1 s the only one who hasn't been
in jail ! " Later I heard that he had been in a reform school. So that
made it perfect . And, by the way, that picture is in the Phoenix Museum
now.
PC
Okay.
I ' ll just flip the tape over.
END OF TAPE TII - Side 1
-79-
TAPE III - Side 2
PC
This is Side 6.
IA
You mean you want that on the tape?
PC
Yes.
IA
I've made about five lithographs: one of Ida, one of The Fisherman, one of
the Showcase D~l, one of myself, and I forget what the other one -was.
Then I ' ve made about half a dozen silver points, Of course the silver point
has been out of style for a time. Rut anyway I made them. As everybody
knows, you use a coated paper.
PC
How did you happen to do the lithographs?
did they come about?
IA
No, they weren ' t commissioned at all. I made one of Fleeting Time, the one
that's at the Metropolitan . I used my own pictures because I didn ' t want
to spend the time of getting a model and putting all that much time into
it. Although I did spend about six months on the last one - the Showcase Dol l .
PC
Do you find that your ideas change from making the lithographs from the
paintings?
IA
No . It doesn't make any difference. Hold on a minute; I'll get one to show
you, This was made about a year and a half ago. Laurance Rockefeller bought
this property and had this building torn down . And this, you see, is starting
to turn yellow and green , I don ' t know how it will work out. It will turn
all kinds of colors as it gets older. I use silver, gold and platinum, T' m
the only person who's ever used platinum or gold. T used platinum more or
less as a joke because
Technically it makes the color bluer than
silver does and it doesn ' t change color, Tt stays forever. T got about
half an inch of it made up and the bill was fifty dollars. However, that
really isn't as expensive as it seems. You can make many silver points with
that length if you don't lose them . But I did lose a whole set of them;
they're so small that they disappeared. See here they are. I have a glass
with about thirty gold, brass, silver, and platinum things in it. T put them
in these things here. That's gold. Then T can twist it around into any
curve like a modeling tool so T can make a wide flat line half an inch, an
inch, or anything I want, I made one - not this one here - up near Garda
where my wife went to college a year or two ago just to get a degree . I
took a piece of flat copper about an inch long and I thought - well, grass
grows, you can buy a square foot of sod and there are so many blades of grass
in it. So I took this and filed it like a comb, then I scratched it and I
can make like two dozen blades of grass in one stroke. Well, why not? When
you're cutting grass if you had to cut it blade by blade it would take quite
a while, and if you were to draw it blade by blade it would take just as
long. You can figure out a lot of shortcuts, scratch around like an old hen,
and so forth. Again I used a number of viewpoints.
Were they commissioned?
How
PC
What kind of building is that in the drawing?
IA
At one time I think it was a church, Then it was abandoned and I think
became the Frost Lumber Company. And then Laurance Rockefeller bought it
and had it torn down . So probably eventually it will be the Rocky Apartments
- I don't know. This part was a beautiful old brown. I took a view here,
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see. You can see there are different angles more or less . Well, everybody
traveling on a train or driving in an automobile through the country has
noticed old buildings and how they turn aroundo Now if every place you
went every building stayed just the one view you saw it in you ' d be rather
bored. The fact that that turns around and the whole landscape turns with
it is one of the charms of moving. Tn this case here I have some drawings
I made in which I tried to get - I made a number of drawings from automobiles in different countries driving along where the things will keep
turning around. I try to give that effect. I don ' t want to make a formal
landscape. When I ' m sitting driving I ' m moving, you might say . As I ' m
moving the whole thing sweeps around or disappears . On the left side it
swings around to the left; on the right that way; you have two circles like
two wheels moving around. And that ' s what I want to get when I ' m moving .
Now if I ' m looking at one side and the clouds keep swinging around you have
to get that . You don ' t get it by just standing still. You have to draw
in motiono
PC
When you did this building did you move from place to place?
IA
Oh, yes . Here you can see that it would be impossible to see down here
from that way . I kept shifting around. I had a young artist, Bruce Penney,
who liked to make pictures to sell more or less . I used to tell him, "You
just draw . " But the temptation to sell was too great. He had to make a
sketch and the n make a painting of it. He used to watch me . I ' d keep
moving around here and there and you see the lumber he re and there. So
although it has a distorted feeling about it, each angle is correct . Now
again if you look out the train window and you see these hills coming around
that's what ' s fascinating . And that ' s what the artist will have to get in
his pictures from now on: to have it be fascinating if you use realism.
I ' m tired of the one-position painter, which is what we ' ve had up to now.
One-position painter they call them . If t h ey don't like the name they can
change. Anyhow I have changed. My dad was a one-position painter. I have
one of a bridge here. Come over to the light here. This is the bridge
right out there, you see.
PC
Oh , yes .
IA
This is silver point ,
on it.
PC
Platinum and silver .
IA
This was made about six years ago when we first came here . The willows are
here now and so forth . Look, this blue here - I made the water and the
shadows in silver and platinum, the blue is part and the shade is platinum.
The blue is platinum and silver . And the bank is gold , copper and brass.
Look, this is turning green there . They said in earlier times that in about
fifty years they turn green a lot. That thing is going to be all green .
But the blue won't turn green . This is the river here and so forth .
PC
The platinum doesn't oxidize so much.
IA
The platinum doesn ' t at all they say,
not .
And this is done with what again? - silver This was made in - I don ' t think I ' ve got the year
I don't know whether that's true or
-81-
PC
IA
Do you make many drawings as complete as this?
I made four silver points like this. I made one at Aspen like this. I
changed all the buildings. Walter Paepke was out there; he made the town,
you know. I made a picture of the old mining section, the little shacks,
and I turned them all around. 1 had about eight views there, too. And he
came around and said, "Ivan, why do you make this bad part of town? We
have a nice hotel over here and a bunch of new buildings." But since that
day - that was about twenty years ago I guess (the kids were young and they
were out there skiing) - the old mining section has been all torn down.
The beautiful old buildings that the artists always like the government calls
slums. Whenever I hear of slum clearance I just cringe because that's the
part I love. And they tear it down and then they put up ghastly buildings .
In Chicago they tore down my studio, an old red brick building which wasn't
quite a slum. They were going to make a mall of ngden Avenue. Andy Rebore,
a friend and contemporary and collaborator with Frank Lloyd Wright, designed
it and changed it. Of course it was well-kept all the time . They made a
mall and they offered to move my studio building and give me a brass tag.
T told them they could keep their brass tag, T' d get my own dog tag . And
so they tore it down. And over my studio they buil t a Buddhist temple. So
that ' s wonderful. So I was kicked out of Chicago in about 196 3 . So we
moved here. My studio went so then we followed soon after . Which was
probably a good thing . But, you see, it's yellow now like the other one I
showed you. You probably know more about this than I do. See, the~e ' s a
green spot, there are a few green spots and with age --
PC
Well, the copper will
IA
It has nothing to do with the artist. Age will make it look better maybe.
'T'his is metal,_ it will probably last for ever . I mean certainly as much as
a graphite pencil would last.
So this is a different medium. I have about
four or five of these. I make one once in a while. I started one of the
old hotel here . Would you like to see it?
PC
Yes.
IA
I didn ' t get it quite finished before they tore it down.
PC
While you're looking for that, do you keep your palette like this?
IA
'This was a set palette I was making for something. I hate mixing each
color -- so I sat one whole afternoon -- In this I had four colors; okay,
I have this red, that's supposed to be yellow, this is my blue, that's my
green. T put some of each color in those four. And then in the reds only
I put this red. In the yellow I only put the yellow; I didn ' t put the red.
In the blue I put blue including cobalt . In the green I put in the green.
So for a certain picture I have a certain set thing which will do certain
things.
Now if I try to mix them first it would get too bright. So if I
want to emphasize something I can lower the other colors in a simple way.
PC
You keep it under water - right?
TA
Well, this is a good deal like what a chemist does. For instance, if the
people who make aspirin were to mix up a quantity that was ten times stronger
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each time you ' d say "What an idiot !! " Well, I would say of a chap who will
try to paint a picture in tone by mixing each time "What an idiot!" So you
can make a tone, you can make anything you want , you can run it all through
the reds and people will say, "Isn ' t that a marvelous feeling ! " Well, it's
simple to do . Well, you can run it through the whites. If you want to
make it light (like Twachtman ) you can run white in all of those . Now I
put a little of this color in here, that ' s yellow, this cools it . In the
black I put all four colors. So no matter where I use it in all four there
may be more in this. I can warm it or cool i t .
PC
How much of the red would you put into the red , say , in proportion?
IA
If I had a palette knife I ' d show you . ( demonstrating ) Fooling around
with the thing I ' ll show you. Let me see, here ' s one that was painted from
that setup . It's on a blue or a brown board . See, these boards, - that one
was done on that brown . Here ' s a thing I'm making from that . This is going
to be the afterimages of that only. The first one I ' ve tried. Now here
I've got some notes on this . Okay. When I got The Vermonter ' s coat (sound
of turning pages, and reading from notebook ): "alizarin the after-image
comes fast vivid blue, green and so forth . Purp le sends off purp le reds
afterimage pure acid green . " So I ' ve taken vermilion as somewhat the same.
I ' ve just got up this far . Now I did that hair without that set palette .
I was too lazy, I thought I could get along without it. This part is a set
palette. That will become a little too strong. And this part here comes
there. This is ju s t an apple core I had . The yellow and cerulean blue after
orange cadmium (sort of whistling sound in machine ) - what's that noise?
orange cadmium afterimage is cerulean blue . Now here ' s what I do . This is
a set palette for that. I put some of all those colors on here and in
water . If I put turpentine in first and then water it doesn't dry out so
fast . Otherwise this stuff will dry out in three days and I'd have to do
the whole thing over . It ' s a pain in the ear . Pardon me . This is what I
did, I take
PC
Just a dab.
IA
About that much - not quite that much. Red is stronger. That much in all
the reds . Which ties them together. This much here for the blues - no, a
little more - about that much in all the blues . Now they have a definite
relationship . And in all these four I have this in that , and this in that ,
so that although there ' s this color in that this is re lated to that in a
minor way . And the whites the same . The thing is T' ll get it up to this.
Then T1 ll use this to get more detail: It ' s kind of fascinating, isn ' t it?
PC
But this is all based on that color idea?
IA
Yes , this is based on the color principle. This is based on afterimages .
If I see this - if I wanted to see the opposite I ' d see that maybe. Of
course I'd have to check eventually - I'm talking about this throws out that
color.
PC
What are you going to call these?
IA
Oh, I don't know.
I see.
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PC
memorabilia .
IA
I don ' t know . Now look at the positions we've got here. 1t would drive
me nuts if I didn ' t write these down; I couldn ' t possibly remember all
these . For instance , suppose you l iked to hike and you walked around
these woods at random for half a day. Could you sit down and draw exa c tly
where you went? You ' d have a hard time doing that. Or, say, you walked
around for three days. You ' d have to have a map to know accurately where
you were. Now here I have this, you see. This first piece here. "Stand
over here for picture." t stood way around here. Outside of the canvas
is on the left side. So I try to get movement all through here so that no
matter how you turn the thing it ' ll read .
PC
Have you ever done this before with two paintings of the same -- ?
tA
No, this is the first time I've ever tried it. I've never tried an afterimage before. Of course, what I'll do now is go into it further and really
check on my own notes and make sure that these are right. Then what comes
in is a whole study of the intensity of the light and all that. Don ' t you
see you go on and on.
PC
But on that page you read from there it said - what? - 1945 or something .
IA
I started it when I did the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Then I left off on
that for a long while . I did that because of t he k le ig lights. 'T'his is
the first picture I ' ve put it in , I mean the first really serious one . t
had this and I thought it would be fun to see what would happen. But there ' s
too much of that blue; if I were doing it again I ' d take different colors.
You see, I just copied this thing . If I wanted to make another one I ' d take
objects like an orange, or an app l e - a red one and a green one, a banana,
and so forth so I could have all the combinations. You see, I haven ' t
tried putting a red and a blue and a green together over there, which would
probably give me a neutralized muted thing in the center. '!'his is just a
beginning experiment . I understand the motion now but this part I don ' t
understand yet. I ' m going to get at it. Rut I ' m no t going by feeling, I ' m
going by the reaction.
PC
That's a problem there to see --
IA
Don ' t you think it will be kind of fun?
PC
Yes .
IA
No - well, you could go on three or four times . Some colors have more white has the most afterimages, is most powerful because white has all the
colors in it. In one of hi s books Buckmins t er Fuller said something that I
think is rather amazing. He said that if you were to take, say, an apple
the red that is there is co l or that is rejected; that only the colors which
are rejected are what you see, the colors that are not wanted in the apple .
If the apple wanted the col ors it would have absorbed them . So, after all,
that kind o f let me down; here . I ' m painting only things which are rejected.
PC
What about an orange?
But won ' t you then get an afterimage of the afterimages?
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IA
Yes, anything is the same way. Anyone painting anything is painting the
rejected colors, or they wouldn't be there. So you can run into philosophy,
too .
PC
It ' s an interesting idea.
IA
Well, it is . I think it ' s fascinating. Tt makes you think twice, too.
Rut don ' t you think it will be rather amusing to do this? Vou see this
yellow will go to magenta. '!'hen you'll have some violet inside there.
These colors come in pure without any form. So with form you have value.
T' ll play around with it and see what T get. Tt'll be more luminous. '!'his
looks, may I say, earthly? - this other one. The things that we see will
be more drab and look like a Rembrandt or something solid and so forth.
These others look more as if neon lights were about them.
PC
You haven't tried any acrylic paints or any of those modern --?
IA
~o,
PC
You're not interested in -- ?
IA
I haven ' t.
I have enough trouble with these.
I don't have that much --
I think this one here - what I want to make from this:
This is orange but
T use a composition for the fold, then I'll use that to finish it up and
change and modify it; I'll probably put this thing here around trying to
make it a little better. Maybe I'll shove in at the end just a piece of a
trinket or something. I think I may put it next to an apple core (which
would be devoured) against a piece of jewelry (which is not devoured);
they don't fit together at all; they're just opposites. Why would you have
jewelry next to an apple core? Then if you want to give it the element of
time -PC
You have endless theories of these juxtapositions.
IA
Yes, I know. If you want to give the element of time you just show the
apple core as being old, make it half rotten, then subconsciously people
know that the apple wasn't eaten half an hour ago. The only way we have of
knowing is by the relative experience of a thing. What else have you got!
I can't write down that this apple is ten days old; you have to show it.
Then if you wanted to have another contrast let ' s say we'll have two apple
cores, one fresh and one old. Therefore, the person is not tidy. It also
means that he ate an apple last week and he ate one today. Therefore you're
showing a week of time. Little things like that add. Any bit of philosophy
you can tie in with showing, say, decay or time, etc., can be important. Or
if you had two water glasses, one whole and one broken, it would show that
the person is careless. It has no significance in painting but you can use
it for design as well as anything else. The person is careless; he ' s broken
one glass, so they'll think: when is he going to break the other one.
PC
One of the things I find interesting is that you have kind of so little
interest in having other - the work of other painters around.
IA
Oh, we have a houseful of paintings.
PC
I mean other artists you know.
I mean -- what do you mean?
-85-
IA
We have the rooms all full of the work of other artists
PC
I mean contemporaries.
IA
Well , not American contemporaries because there wouldn't be any end to it.
You might as well have a store then if you bought each artist . Heck!
PC
But I mean there are the Rembrandt etchings --
IA
I have some back here. You see, we keep changing them
We have a Degas.
We have a whole bunch of other art , charcoal drawings, different ones. And
upstairs T' ve got two Picasso plates, one glazed and one in the clay
And
there's a whole bunch of things upstairs which we haven't had a chance to
put together yet because we've been remodeling and so fortho We'll put up
about half or more of them and then after a year or two change them
I'll
get Byron Thomas to come overo He loves to come over and put things here
and there . He ' s niceo He's sweeto These notebooks here cover all the
different periodso I don ' t know what ' s in this one hereo We might as well
take a look . The Vermonter is in about seven years' books; there may not
be anything on it for all I know. (reading from notebook :) "You get planes
like the archaic Greek and limb ( I ' m talking about the arm here or something )
not realistic but simple large planes." (Leafing through notebooks and
reading brief snatches from here and there: ) "Nail piece of linen to top,
both sides to balance picture •• • lower flap of pocket and lower part of
pocket o'' Tf T' m taking a new area I start thinking first and then writing
down noteso I don ' t want to just paint, I ' m not just going to copy that
thing. The first thing I do is try to think: What value of significance
does it have in relation to the rest of the thing; which way do I want it
to goo Like with these diagrams I got tired of making these diagrams so T
generally put them in notebooks now. But I have all these positions, you
see. This is just one - under where shirt collar and each position on
the doggone thing .
0
0
0
0
PC
Well, you go from kind of the general to the more specific and more specific
and more specific, don ' t you?
IA
Well, yes, I'll have a few big movements if I want to and see this part of
the coat I painted in back of him; you see, I wanted it to come this way.
Now the shirt this part I paint this way to open it up; the sleeve I'll
paint this way to shove it here. I'll paint underneath this arm to make it
lift; this other one I may paint down to lower it. That is just an outline.
What I want is: He's sitting here this way; I think I want to turn him
that way to make him rounder and bring out this; I ' ll turn this this way;
but then so that will turn I ' ll have three turning that way and then I ' ll
come up and turn one this way, that will make that turn more. If I turn the
whole thing you can't - you don ' t work that way. If I turn it this way
then if I want to I ' ll turn the wood that way and continue even out in
space
And then to make the action better - see these little arrows. I
intended to make a little circle, a motion up there. You see I turn this
this way, I turn that the opposite way and that ' s like little dust things in
the air . Tt ' s kind of hard to explain all this stuff, isn ' t it? It ' s a
new theory. Now you see this thing that's drawn here . I think that's
fascinating. I want that for direction anyhow. Tn composing in a big way 0
-86-
I haven't got this placed yet. I don ' t want to put it too close to that;
I don't want it too high up. This thing is flexible. I don't want to
crowd on his head; I want to give him room to breathe and to move and so
forth. And the same here. I may raise that up a little bit to give him
enough area to stretch out if he stood up. And the same way the force is
down here. When I get to this I'll study it and make notes first and
everything on what I want to do. I know I want this to swing out. I'll
have to get him to pose with those pants first to get the general shadow
of the stuff and then I'll use the dummy. Eventually I ' d like to have
this part come around like this so you can put your hands around it.
PC
How about things even like the hair here which is --?
IA
This thing is not painted well here,
PC
His hair and eyebrows?
IA
What's wrong with that? - I mean -
PC
I mean do you look at those from different points of view, too?
TA
T can't - T made this blue here to get some space in between there. Then
they give some - very little . This is too strong here yet. I don't want
to make it too evident so people will see it; I want them to feel it most
of the time. I want them to feel it but I don't want them to see it.
There's a distinction there, isn't there?
PC
Yes.
IA
T think everything should be more or less felt and not seen,
When you see
it that's ridiculous because you want to see it. T mean I look at you
the space I sense it, see. ! want to turn that down more. '!'here ' s too
much light on that. T1 ll have to turn that down more. So I'll get at it
some day when I feel there's a good light on it and I'll turn that around
so that (sort of whistling sound in the machine) -- The machine is tired of
me. I don't blame it.
(evidently some conversation off the tape)
PC
Oh, yes, that would be good.
IA
I should get a writer.
in hell they are.
PC
Well, some of them are in the Chicago catalogue.
TA
Oh, yes, there are other ones. T don ' t know whether that would take too
long, I mean five minutes or what. Don't you think it would be important
for me to write, say, for whoever saw these pictures?
PC
Right,
IA
Yes, Senator Benton has about eight or ten. But I could give roughly let's see, let me get the catalogue. Let me see.
(Machine turned off)
Right.
If I should die tomorrow nobody would know where
But there are other ones.
Like The Cornfield which Senator Benton has --
END OF TAPE TII - Side 2
END OF TNTERVIEW
End Ivan Le Lorraine Albright Interview