There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 10

Date: About 1961 to 1965

There's a Cow in Manhattan

Part Ten

I still don't know what it's like to be adult, and I remember when Buck changed to being adult. He began to stay home all the time. Pat Deem began wearing shoes all the time during the summer when he was ten years old and he was adult from then on. Bud Otts, Fr. Hilary's brother was always adult. Fr. Hilary isn't adult yet, but he's a priest. Bill Updike is adult now because he doesn't have anything else to do. I just can't get around to being adult. You must learn to rest a lot, and have opinions that everyone knows you have when they meet you. I began knowing I should choose to be adult when it was time to wear shoes during the summer. For some reason I always thought I would certainly wear shoes when I was fourteen without even thinking about it, but when fourteen came it just didn't happen. I learned how to spit though. Buck and I talked about it and I told him I would never change into an adult by choice; I would just find myself being an adult. Now I know that to be an adult is a conscious choice. You have to make up your mind not to be interested in the general time that a child has and I could never forget that time a child knows. It is an artist's time. An artist knows one time and he is born with it.

Lee has this sense of time and we got into one another's way now and then because we were always thinking the other was suddenly adult one morning, never to return to that one time we had always known. We spent hours talking and concluding many things that consoled us, but it really applied to the time we were thinking of being adult. Even within the same day we would find we were back into the child's time again and all our adult conversation had only been a mood. This is what kept us always interested in one another, yet it let us know nothing was going to happen and change our friendship into some kind of adult position. Any adult thing we were ever going to do was going to be done without the other. Naturally this led to deep affection and to a sort of despair all at the same time. We were mostly happy though, we knew that whatever we did without one another was not going to happen this year. And it didn't, and we painted in the same studio together for hours without talking. I did a lot of painting, but for some reason I wasn't keeping them, but kept painting over them. It wasn't because Lee was there, or perhaps it was I didn't know, nor was I worried, I was changing and didn't know what to look at when I looked at these new paintings.

Lee breathes too much when she paints and I forget about breathing often and must suddenly take many deep breaths to catch up my oxygen.

It doesn't really matter how my paintings got to be known by people. I told Lee that I was going to paint so much without knowing it, nor looking up, that finally an airplane would fly over the earth and see there was a spot on the earth and that spot would be my paintings. I know no other way than this way, for it takes an adult to make certain how paintings would be seen, exhibited and bought.

Benny Andrews introduced me to Meda Mladek who was living in Washington D.C., whose husband was in the Finance Department. She was European small and rather handsome and had a posture and carriage like Verdalee, so I acted like I saw myself act when I was with Verdalee. I treat everyone the way they make me feel. I visited her often while I was rehearsing in Washington. She liked my calligraphic paintings and bought one and took another on consignment. Richard Herman was a friend of Erika's and he saw my work when I took it to Washington, and he bought one. Meda Mladek visited me here in the loft again and brought her friend Robert Graham. Robert Graham showed a large painting of mine in a group exhibit soon after, here in New York, and also bought a smaller picture.

I attempted carrying my paintings around to galleries like a rug merchant, but gallery owners know who they are talking to, they don't really need to look at the paintings so carefully. I saw that when they talked to me they knew they were not talking to an adult, and anyone carrying paintings around from gallery to gallery like that must be adult. A rug merchant is certainly adult.

I was very proud to go to the Graham Gallery exhibition. It was a group show called "May Festival" and the first real gallery I ever exhibited with. I had shown paintings in the City Center Gallery, there was also the Silvermine credit, I had shown work at the Metropolitan Museum in the employees' cafeteria, but all those things just happened to be. A painting at the Graham Gallery did not just happen to be, it was actually sought out. I was asked to exhibit it by Robert Graham. It was one of my large shelf paintings and I remember there were purple and orange stripes in it. It had a dimension that was strange to me in that it was almost a four foot square. While I made the stretcher I got mixed up in the measurements, for I had planned a six by four foot stretcher, I either ran short of wood or forgot what I had in mind and when I put it together I had to paint something on it, and this was the painting chosen.

Manhattan believes in the Grahams. There is Martha Graham, Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden, and now Robert Graham. Robert Graham came by the loft one day and told me he just had to use my bathroom. When he was finished he promised me a lot of old frames and sure enough within the week he came by and gave me a dozen frames. They were very lovely and had pedigrees on the back which are little pasted labels telling different owners and even museums. One had "Louvre" pressed into the wood. I wonder what the frames once held. Graham was interested in my painting a picture to fit one of the frames and continuing the painting onto the frame. I tried it, but it didn't work for me. Such an idea as that is the idea of a rich man and Robert Graham was very rich and had always been.

I know more girls who have changed their first names to whatever they wanted. Lee is really Eleanor. Ann Grosvenor is really Juanita. Jean Rigg is really Frances. I always thought if I were a girl I would call myself Ann but now it's Alice. Some boys change their first name, but it usually doesn't work because they change again. Girls don't because they wear makeup and can continue being their new name because they make themselves up to fit that name and it isn't very easy to make up but one way. Boys don't wear makeup and can't make themselves up to fit a newly chosen name, so they change their name again.

It was simple for me to get involved in a gallery. I had heard such awful stories about artists who tried for years to get into a gallery, but never found anyone who was interested in dealing with their work. There are all kind of arguments about art dealers and how the world has made art into a product to sell and how the artist doesn't have his choice in any way about anything, but this never bothered me. An artist is one who finds the world owes him a living, so he can paint. Whatever arrangement comes about that can allow the artist to continue working is the proper arrangement. An artist is not interested in what he has done, only what he's doing. When this gallery world has changed into something else, it will be fine with me as long as I am left alone and given a chance to continue working.

I told Jim Zver and Benny about my luck with Robert Graham and how it looked as though I had a gallery. Lee was very impressed and pleased for me. She has a way of saying yes, everything is going very well, but don't forget to continue worrying all the time, it's a part of adult life. Sometimes she said it badly and sometimes she said it good. This time she said it good and I heard her but didn't pay any attention.

Robert Graham telephoned one Monday morning and asked me if his assistant could come to the loft and talk to me about my work. I said it would be fine for this to happen even that morning. I liked Robert Graham calling me to make an appointment. The assistant arrived with her husband. She was Joan Washburn. I was only interested in the strange fact that Robert Graham's assistant was a woman who brought her husband with her to visit with me. The husband had nothing to do with the visit, and sat in the other room while Mrs. Washburn talked to me and looked at all my pictures. All this had something to do with upper-class and proper procedure, but I didn't know just what, until Joan Washburn told me that the Graham Gallery was not going to take me into their stable; that I was not what they were really representing. She told me about a rather new gallery that was run by Allan Stone, who she thought would be very interested and left. I was still wondering why she brought her husband, as I closed the loft door and sat down to think about where I was. I decided to hate Joan Washburn because she was not Robert Graham, yet managed to get her authority into the Graham situation even to the point of telling artists Graham could not use them. Then I realized that it indeed was a strange position for Joan Washburn. She was hired by Robert Graham and one of her functions was to go to artists that Graham thought interesting, and tell them all the interest was being dropped. No wonder she brought her husband. Naturally, everywhere I went after this interview with Joan Washburn I met her. I started handling it all as professionally as I could and talked to her as soon as I saw her, then I decided to avoid her and sneer. Finally I found her coming over to me, greeting me, and asking about my work and my results in the most cordial way until I've become very pleased to know Joan Washburn.

Next, Allan Stone. It isn't simple to go to a gallery and talk to the manager and ask them to be your dealer, not even if you do not know them. When I got to the Allan Stone Gallery I realized I had been there before just looking. I had seen him before too and thought he was the Joan Washburn of the Allan Stone Gallery, because this Allan Stone was younger than me. I had decided he had a humped back the first time I had seen him, but this time I saw that he was not humped-back at all, but was one of those type men who has no neck and is all back. He looked like Eleanor Roosevelt a bit and a football player with a back injury, but when there was a chance to see him full-faced, he looked like he should. There was something about him that reminded me of Bud Otts, and that was comforting, but really no help at all. I still don't know how to approach a gallery dealer, and this time tried to be cool and weathered, so i said, "Allan Stone, I think you need me!" He didn't say anything to that, but asked if I had any photographs of my work, which I did. He looked at them carefully and said that I was certainly influenced by Jasper Johns. I told him that I had indeed heard of Jasper Johns. Allan Stone put the photographs back into the envelope and asked me if he could come see my paintings at my studio soon. All I could do is look real Georgie-like and exclaim "Really?"

Allan Stone telephoned he would come and visit the next week at about ten o'clock in the evening. I asked Lee to bear with me. She's always good at holding my hand when big time things are at stake. By ten o'clock I had the loft clean, coffee ready to make and paintings arranged. By eleven we had drunk the coffee and re-arranged the paintings. At twelve I was very interested in rearranging the loft and had most of the furniture in the middle of the room when I saw what a mess the place would be in if Allan Stone did arrive, so that is when he telephoned that he was downstairs. He didn't say much about being so late, he didn't say much about my paintings, but he set some aside and told me he would have someone pick them up the next day, and did. There were ten that he wanted. He also bought fifteen drawings right then and there and gave me a check. The ten paintings were returned within a few days and they all had labels pasted on the back that said Allan Stone. I didn't know what it meant but it was certainly the beginning of a pedigree on the backs of my stretchers.

After he left, Lee and I walked to the west end of Fulton Street to have a few drinks at a White Rose bar. We talked about my coming glory and watched some of the late late show on television.

Allan Stone bought drawings now and then from me when he saw I was in need of some money. He once showed one drawing in a Christmas show at his gallery. I went to the opening and didn't know what to do about it, but there I was, hanging with other drawings, but that didn't make as much difference as I thought it would. This association went on for three years. Whenever I thought Allan Stone had forgotten me, he would visit. Sometimes he brought people with him. Sometimes he would ask me if I needed money. One time, he brought Ileana Sonnabend, but she said my calligraphic oil paintings were unethical and I said, nonsense.

In those years I worked for six weeks for Rose Fried, but promised her two days a week and she kept insisting on more. When I told her I couldn't even do two days she got very angry but I meant it and had to quit. I had found out that I certainly would never have anything to do with gallery work. It was for a different kind of mind than I had. I did meet Greta Garbo though. She came into the gallery once when Rose Fried was gone. Rose had bought an artist's entire estate of work somewhere in Montevideo and was always flying there. Well, there stood Greta Garbo, and she was too early for the exhibit. She was with a gentleman who sat down, but Miss Garbo and I talked about Jawlensky. I told her some things I knew about him and she informed me that I knew much more about Jawlensky than she did. It was such an honor to hear her talk and say Jawlensky. I don't know if she remembered me like I remembered her, but I got a strange feeling that I was looking like one of those dapper young men who work in galleries and I really didn't like that feeling. I'm sure Greta Garbo was very influential in my quitting my job at Rose Fried's gallery.

Also in those years Lee decided to move to the country, to Staten Island with Jean Rigg. Jean was starting to teach third grade and got a position there, so suddenly I was living alone again.

I don't know how it happened, but it happened after Lee moved out. I began working very hard. It's difficult to eat when one lives alone because it's impossible to cook for one, so I usually had a sandwich and an orange drink at Chock full o'Nuts about four o'clock in the afternoon, when WQXR brought on that awful woman who interviewed people. Then I would go to dance class, return home and paint until midnight. At about eleven I would drink beer until I felt very tired, then I would prop the painting I was interested in mostly by the window and go down to the street and look at it. Nobody would be on the street and in the summer Mary Alice O'Neal would sit on the window sill and watch me down there. I saw my paintings in the best way this way, because they looked like they looked without me. I took a pair of cheap opera glasses with me at times. I got the opera glasses in Germany in the PX, but seldom took them to the theatre. After peering at my paintings, I would go east on Fulton, then to Pearl Street to an all night diner called the Pearl Street Diner. After I had eaten a sandwich or hamburger with the Wall Street Journal employees, I'd return to my loft exhausted. These were marvelous days and nights and when I think about it now, remembering I was usually painting by nine o'clock, I worked for many hours. But, as Mary Anthony would say about plies, "You've got so many millions of plies in you, so you'd better get them out," I decided I had so many hours of painting in me and I'd better get busy. Now I usually paint one full session a day, and usually in the morning. Now I know how much I can do that makes sense. In those days I didn't know so much.

On one of those nights while I was peering through my opera glasses at a new painting propped at the window, I decided I saw a rectangular shape on the canvas and while I ate at the Pearl Street Diner I thought a great deal about using a rectangle among those calligraphic horizontal lines. It came to me that if my calligraphy looked like writing couldn't a rectangle look like a picture. A picture is usually a rectangle and the next day I began a small painting with a rectangle in it that felt like a landscape. It was dusty and rather formless, but had traces of a horizontal in it and all around the rectangle was calligraphy that looked like writing and it became a composition with an explanation because that is certainly what it looked like. By the time a month went by I had a Dutch Landscape with Explanation and knew I was on to a further discovery of how to make a picture.

Squares are very fine, but rectangles are better. A square is complete but a rectangle continues going. If you stare at a square then close your eyes it remains in your closed-off vision, but a rectangle always moves about and you can't really lock in its impression. One horizontal in a rectangle puts anyone into a landscape because a landscape is a horizontal -- even if it's diagonal. A horizontal in a square makes the square more square. I am not interested in that so much as I am interested in a landscape or a picture.

A picture has to do mainly with a rectangle and a picture has to do with something already known. Our eyes see on a rectangular basis more than a square basis and a picture is only for seeing. I am interested in making pictures only for seeing just like all pictures and that's what I do.

Allan Stone is an Allan and one thing an Allan doesn't like to do is put his arms over his head. That is alright with me, but it takes a long time to know that, plus remember it when with an Allan. I had begun my rectangular landscapes that were painted in the middle of a larger rectangular canvas, and Allan Stone came to see me, so I showed him these new ones and he didn't put his arms over his head and didn't say anything. Allans can say lots of things, but Allan Stone doesn't say many things. He did tell me he would like to give me an exhibition though, and he exhibited only my old works of calligraphy and bought a lot for himself. Of course this made me think my new discovery was something I should consider forgetting, but I couldn't and continued with my new pictures. One of them was lots of calligraphy that was scratched through black paint, so that the calligraphy was like chalk on a blackboard. It reminded me of a blackboard, so near the top I painted a little rectangle with George Washington in it. A woman saw it at the gallery and asked me about it, at a party at Allan Stone's and I told her it was a blackboard with a George Washington on it, just like she had seen. Allan telephoned the next day and asked me what I had told that woman. He explained it was a Mrs. Goodman. I had heard of Mrs. Goodman when I was working for Rose Fried. In fact I had delivered a Duchamp box to Mrs. Goodman and here she was wanting to know about my George Washington on a blackboard. Allan informed me that she didn't want to know anymore about it, that I had talked to her too much and she had unbought the George Washington. Allan told me to always say "the river flows" whenever anybody asked me about a painting.

If a picture is a picture, anything is familiar in it and anything is familiar or it wouldn't be anything. The shock of Robert Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around its neck and standing on a painting is a shock of familiarity. A picture is an arrangement of familiar objects that hasn't been lost.

The calligraphy in my paintings looked like writing, but looked like writing in English, so I began painting copies of English paintings, especially the portraits of Henry Raeburn. Henry Raeburn was not a very interesting man, I suppose. His pictures are not very interesting, but the way he applied paint was masterful. It is calligraphic. The English paintings certainly looked English. After a while, it was possible for me to paint a picture by copying a familiar painting and not add any calligraphy at all. I did arrange for a border to be all around the painting so it would look like a copy. When I first did this I made two copies side by side or one on top of the other. It was the only way I could show they were copies. When I decided to use Frans Hals, I did six copies of Malle Babbe all on one canvas; three on top and three on the bottom. It was all working so well, I did copies of Degas, Goya, one painting of clouds by Constable, George Inness, Millet, Corot and others and was able to have another exhibition at Allan Stone's gallery the next year.

All the artists I used had a similarity in their paint application. I don't know why they do, but there is a calligraphy of paint application. It can be called brush strokes and they all work on the same principle. I could never do a Rembrandt, and I tried many times. Rembrandt gets under the paint as well as on top of it, and it is impossible to copy comfortably. John Constable is similar to Rembrandt, the only difference is they spoke different languages. I know more about English painting than any other because I know the English language. My Corot and Degas looked rather English, So did the Hals and so did the Goya; that did not bother me because the picture worked. When I first painted a Vermeer it was "Woman in a Red Hat" and it had a border and it was small with limited color and when it was finished it did not look English. It did not look like a Vermeer in paint application, but it did look like the "Woman in a Red Hat." The main thing about it is that it looked like a George Deem.

When such things happen, they do not happen on purpose, they just happen. They can happen again, but the artist never knows while he is working that it will happen. Finally, of course everything looks like the artist, but the artist is not always around to know that. Each time I paint a Vermeer it looks like a George Deem, so I'll probably go on painting Vermeers.

Once I showed my paintings to a few people who were visiting here at the loft and one man said that they were very good paintings, but he kept asking what did I really paint. I told him I painted only those copies of paintings, but he kept wanting to know what I really painted. He said that there was no way for him to see what I really painted like. When I told him that my way of painting copies certainly did show how I painted even more clearly that if I had painted my own images, he didn't understand what I was saying. It was strange that someone couldn't see clearly the way I painted when all he had to do was look at the paint and not look at the image, then see how clearly I painted the way I painted.

Corot, Degas, Hals, Raeburn and Hogarth all paint alike. There are more than that who paint alike, but that list gives some idea of a paint surface. Goya and Chardin, Boucher and Fragonard also go into this list. This has nothing to do with what they painted or what colors they used, it has only to do with how they painted. They calmly knew how to slowly draw a brush with paint on it over a surface and could control how much paint they could deposit at certain moments. This is painting and this is what a painting looks like and always will. All paintings that are paintings that are seen generally everywhere have this result. Rembrandt, Rubens, Daumier, Ingres, El Greco, do not paint like this, they each have an individual quality that is not general and they stand by themselves. They stand behind later painters like Soutine, Dali, Renoir and Manet. I cannot copy them, there is no reason because they are not general. None of the painters in any list here have to do with who is better. There is no such thing. It's just that some painters are general and some are individual and I am general and paint in a way that can be understood by anybody as painting.

Anyone can understand what I talk about if they look at reproductions. Reproductions are tracks of paintings. Any reproduction is an opinion of a painting just like engravings of masterpieces in the eighteenth century, but engravings showed the character and photographic reproduction of today shows the texture. This is very difficult to see in a painting when the reproduction isn't seen first.  I had a very difficult time seeing painting when I first began studying at the Museum school in Chicago and always looked up the reproduction of a painting I saw, so I could understand its tracks, just like anyone looking up words in a dictionary.

Of the general painters, Vermeer is the most perfect and most general. The way to recognize general painting is realizing that anybody can do that kind of painting, if they know anything about painting. Those who don't know how to paint can certainly recognize general paint application from individual paint application, just like anyone can detect a well woven rug from a commercial rug, and they don't need to know anything about weaving, although a commercial rug has nothing to do with individual painters' technique.

The other way of saying it is by talking about automobiles. Every car looks the same in that some cars don't look like trees or houses, they all look the same and when anybody thinks about a car, they think generally the same thoughts. Suddenly a pickup truck comes into view. A pickup truck doesn't look like a car and neither does a jeep. A pickup truck or a jeep or any variation on an automobile is an example of an individual styled painter. If Picasso is a Ford car, Matisse is a paneled truck. Chagall is a hearse.

 

End of Part Ten