"(P.Leider) The problem of American painting had been a problem of subject matter." "Painting kept getting entangled in contradictions of America itself." "We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were." "We tried to find God in landscapes that we were destroying as fast as we could paint them." "We painted Indians as fast as we could killed them." "And during the greatest technological jump in history, we painted ourselves as a bunch of fiddling rustics." "By the time we became social realists, we knew that American themes were not going to lead to a great national art." "Not only because the themes themselves were hopelessly duplicitous but because the forms we used to embody them had become hopelessly obsolete." "Against the consistent attack of Mondrian and Picasso, we only had an art of half truth, lacking all conviction." "The best artists began to yield rather than kick against the pricks." "And it is exactly at this moment, when we finally abandon the hopeless constraint to create a national art, that we succeed for the first time in doing just that." "By resolving the problem forced on painting by the history of French art we create for the first time a national art of genuine magnitude." "And if one finally had to say what it was that made American art great, that was that American painters took hold of the issue of abstract art with a freedom they can get from no other subject matter." "And finally, made high art of it." "(Hess) I think one of the big problems of American art is that it is American." "And what is American?" "How can you be an artist, not a provincial, but still American?" "After all, you are here." "Artists like deKooning and Newman saw this with immense sophistication and moved into what i would call a cosmopolitan plane." "When deKooning first came into this country in the late 1920s, early 1930s, there was practically no American art world." "For all intents and purposes it didn't exist." "And deKooning came over here as a European, a trained European artist, and was caught in the bind that all the other American modernists were trapped in." "(deKooning) Well, I felt a certain depression over there [the Netherlands]." "I mean I felt caught, small nation." "I went to Belgium and worked for a while." "The American movies always being, the Paramount movies, all that movies," "..Warner Brothers movies.." "It [America] seemed to be a very light place." "Of course, I didn't know that movies were all taken in California." "But everything seemed to be very light and bright and happy." "You know, particularly the comedians like Harold Loyd and Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix." "I always felt like I wanted to come to America, even when I was a boy." "(Hess) His first pictures were abstractions, more or less geometric, more or less hard-edged, more or less bright colors." "From there he moved into a series of men:" "poetic, tattered, romantic, poor looking man, tragic, haunted man." "Certainly there's an idea of the Depression." "And of the breadlines, and of the hoboes and the bums, and of the tragedy of the unemployed in these pictures." "(Pavia) Roosevelt [WPA] thought we should decorate all public buildings, which was a marvelous idea." "And we should hire these artists by the week." "And which he did - 23 dollars 90 cents." "He hired a lot of artists and you have to had some background to be in on it." "And we're all trained and schooled." "There weren't that many artists." "It was a very lonely profession at the time." "So we decorated airports, public schools, terminals; whatever you had." "That was the function - adore the public buildings." "(Newman) I felt the issue in those years was:" "What can a painter do?" "The problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting." "Not the technique, not the plasticity, not the look, not the surface." "None of those things meant that much." "Those things, I suppose, could find them their way, but the issue for me, and I think it existed for all the fellows that, you know, for Pollock for Gottlieb." "What we're gonna paint?" "I think the best distinction has been made by Professor Meyer Shapiro, who was talking about subject in painting." "He made a distinction between what he calls the object matter." "For example, people think that" "Cezanne's objects were the apples." "Well, it's possible to argue that that's what it is and for a long time" "I was very antagonistic to those apples, because they were like superapples." "They were like cannon balls." "I saw them as cannonballs." "But he does talk about.." "but Meyer.." "And making a distinction between the subject of a work and the objects in the work" "I think, make say, remarkable distinction that should help people understand that even though, let's say my painting as it developed, didn't have any of those objects, that did not necessarily mean therefore," "that there was no subject there." "(Hess) America was a backwater," "Paris was the center of modern art, then the war intervened and Paris was sealed off, which turned the New York scene into kind of pressure cooker," "of which a number of American artists found their own way." "(Geldzahler) Jackson Pollock was one of the major American artist in the 1930s, who worked for the WPA." "Pollock felt, and said explicitly too, that it was time for painting to go from the easel, from the small picture, which was within the confines of the window frame to the mural, to the wall-sized picture." "He did the painting here on the floor, working on it from all four sides the way the Navajo Indians did their sand-painting in the desert." "Pollock was from the West and knew about Navajo Indian traditions." "And he painted gesturally, not just brushstrokes or the wrist moving, but the whole arm moving across the canvas." "As you can see how the gesture encloses itself again and again to make the entire design of the picture." "It isn't just arbitrary." "If you look at the corners, at the bottom, to the sides of the picture, you see that the design continues to close in and refer itself to itself." "Let's say, it's continuous, gestural, balletic design like choreography, perhaps." "The painting, the mural, the canvas becomes a field of action, in which the artist makes his gestures." "(Motherwell) One has no conception of looking at the finished works," "you know, the madness the risk, nerves things on the edge, this." "It seems to oneself why one's actually making them." "So they seem perfectly supreme and ordered after their time." "And I think all of my generation, the most of my generation, to critics, express them as such." "(Greenberg) Pollock is still taken for this example of far-autism." "The people who admire him most on the New York scene that day, don't take him as a painter." "They take him as an example of a successor, an artist in the line of Duchamp." "Someone who knocked, knocked you flat with his arbitrariness." "(Kramer) The whole Pollock phenomenon is a kind of symptomatic one" "in that his position is based on certain idea of art history, an idea of art history that" "the museum, collecting, criticism, art market, is all geared to, and that is what one might call the heroism of the big breakthrough." "(Kramer) Pollock was a very intense personality but he wasn't a great artist." "His work like the work of all the New York school is based on, well to put it in elegantly, a kind of a mopping up operation of School of Paris." "It puts together certain remnants of Cubism, Surrealism and attempts to charge them with another kind of energy, which, in turn, requires a larger format and a bigger gesture, because something is being drawn to an end." "(Kramer) I see the whole Abstract Expressionism phenomenon, and Pollock in particular, as a kind of last gasp of modern European modernism." "(Greenberg) Pollock's paintings live or die in the same context" "as Rembrandt's or Titian's or Velazquez's." "There's no interruption, there's no mutation here." "Pollock asked to be tested by the same eye, that could see how good Rafael was when he was good." "(Newman) I feel that I'm American painter in the sense that this is where i grew up, live, was born and where I developed my ideas and so on." "At the same time I hope, that my work transcends the issue of being American." "I recognize that I'm American because I'm not a Czechoslovak." "And my work was not painted in Czechoslovakia or in Hungary or in India." "But I hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis." "That it is a language, that is over nature" "That it doesn't have the necessity for its American labels." "But all these issues in the end whether it's American or whether it's painterly or whether it's..are false issues raised by aesthetes." "I expressed myself on this issue many many years ago." "When at a conference between aesthetes and artist I said to these aesthetes, that even if they're right and even if they can build an aesthetic analysis or aesthetic system that would explain art or painting or whatever it is" "it's of no value, really, because that aesthetics is for me like ornithology must be for the birds." "(deKooning) I don't think painters have particularly bright ideas." "(deAntonio) What do they?" "(deKooning) I guess the painting things.." "Not such a bright idea for Monet to paint those haystacks at different hours of the day" "(Hess) A series of women in the late 1930s and early 1940s seemed to be searching for a way out of the European crisis, or the crisis of art." "He was trying to find forms and instead of finding them in abstractions, like the circle for a clock, he'd found them in an elbow or a shoulder and try to create his own elbow or his own shoulder" "or his own eyes." "And he moved from there into a series of abstractions." "And this was his really revolutionary move." "He got rid of color, the abstractions were black and white." "To everyone's intense surprise as soon as he had mastered his black and white pictures, he stopped them and began to paint women again." "(deKooning) I found to make it easy for myself to put something right in the center of the canvas, like a head, two eyes, and a nose and arms and feet." "I had a lot of mouths cut out of magazines, and I noticed that when I had something, a photographic image like this, the mouth," "it gave me a point of reference." "It was something to hold on to." "(Hess) He'd just cut it out of a newspaper ad, this was a "Lucky Strike- be kind to your T zone" or maybe it was Camel." "It was a woman's mouth, and that was the area around which - let's say it was an eye of the hurricane." "(deKooning) I pasted it and it hit me and it was a shock." "Then I knew where I had to go, more or less." "I also felt that everything ought to have a mouth." "I mean, I think that was very funny." "But I think a mouth is a very funny thing, because you do everything with it." "With your ear you only hear, your eye only.." "you don't put spinach in your eye, for instance." "A mouth is a very stunning thing to me." "And of course the woman's mouth is very appealing." "It's interesting, though, that I could only do it with a woman." "I couldn't do it with a man." "Like the Japanese, they make those monstress scowling, you know what I mean." "I guess because I'm not a woman." "No, I began with the woman because it's like a tradition, like the Venus." "This is like Olympia, like Manet made "Olympia" [1863]." "You take a brush and take up some paints and make somebody's nose out of it." "It's kind of absurd, not doing this, this is absurd." "(deAntonio) You paint it right on the paper and then.. (deKooning) Yeah." "(deAntonio) And then what happens?" "(deKooning) Then they're pasted on the linen." "You make a such a beautiful job, because I think it's better than painting on canvas." "(deAntonio) You are a serious paint inventor." "(deKooning) Very much, yeah." "(deAntonio) What is painter remain?" "(deAntonio) Well, I think, it's done with a brush." "I have three sizes." "Those are all the big ones, oh, here are the little ones.." "And I use those.." "And then I make those large landscape pictures, so called landscapes." "I work with very wet brushes." "Those kind of brushes you use when you paint a ceilling - it's drips all over you." "They're made out of a fiber and very little hair." "Like I put them in boiling water until they get kind of rubbery." "It gives me great comfort to paint with them." "Paint can get some kick, that I used some newspapers" "to flatter them out on the canvas, to absorb the oil out of it." "When I took it off, I saw the back-print of the papers, and I thought I was nice." "That's about all." "It had no social significance that way, you know, like Rauschenberg used it or something." "I was just an accident." "(deAntonio) How old were you when you has your first one man show?" "(deKooning) 44." "(Newman) I had my first one man show in 1950, I was 45 years old." "(deAntonio) In 1943, Hans Hofmann had his first one man show, at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, the art of this century, in New York." "It wasn't until he was 65 years old." "Hofmann, as he put it later, spent all his decades sweating out cubism." "(Pavia) All the language and all the criticism in American art came from the idea of the two-dimensional plane, the push and the pull." "All these were Hofmann's words he gave to his students." "(Greenberg) Hofmann had a great responsibility in the fact that he kept, let's say, artists like Matisse," "in the forefront of attention." "At the time his stock was down," "Hofmann had this sense of continuity." "with the past, the whole past was there, even when you didn't consciously know it." "Hofmann was very unsure of himself the way everybody is." "He showed it, he wrote it out because he were the way other people didn't." "I think Hans got into high gear sometimes around '54, '53." "So he painted some great pictures in '42,'43." "Anticipations of Pollock, anticipations of Still." "(Motherwell) As you know, the movement is, such as it is, it is usually called Abstract Expressionism." "I think very few of the artists involved were really interested in the Expressionism." "And I think the, so called, expressionist element has to do with a certain anxiety and a certain violence, that, I think, certainly is in American situation." "Would you say the Abstract Expressionism was the first American art that was filmed with anchor, as well as beauty." "And from that stand point, the point of inherent, was the most balf one and Alfred Barr has told me the most hated expression ever to appear in this country, by other artists." "(Newman) We had no general public the only thing that we did have was the opportunity of seeing each other in shows" "And between '47 and '52 you might say Betty Pasons" "Charlie Egan and in some extent Sam Kootz but the only places where any of us had an opportunity of presenting ourselves, of showing our work." "It was not, in that sense, a true marketplace." "It was not necessary even a showing place." "It was a primitive cultural situation, in a sense that in honest we each lived in lower art studios." "And then there were just a few isolated places with someone that would suit with the work." "And there was the open door and that's all that was." "(Motherwell) My presume was that one of the most ideal circumstances was at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery called "The Art of This Century"." "All the abstract pictures had their frame taken off, there were hung on poles and universal joints so you could actually take hold of Mondrian and turn it, swivel it into the light" "and so on, and really use it with same familiarity that one does in a library rather than standing like one does in a museum at a distance, awestruck before this altar." "And "The Homely Protestant" [1948] was the result of all kinds of revisions." "I mean, it's what's left over." "After revising, revising and revising." "There always was meant to be a figure in it." "You might have a difficulty in finding a title for the picture, in my despair of finding the title for the picture." "So I think titles are important." "I like titles that lead into the picture." "In this particular picture, which puzzled me," "I wanted an accurate title but couldn't find one." "I remembered the Surrealist device, which I'd never used before, of taking a book, and it had to be a favorite book," "so I took Joyce and opened it at random." "Without looking at it, I put my finger on the page and where my finger rested it said, "The Homely Protestant", and I thought "Of course"." "The picture is "The Homely Protestant", which is to say, it is myself." "(deAntonio) Why do we seem to get involved bigger and bigger paintings with the American artist of today?" "(Motherwell) Oh, there are lots of reasons for that." "The scale of America is different." "I would say that most American painters work in what where once small factories, whereas European artist work either apartments or studios that were designed in terms of the scale of easel painting." "There's no doubt, too, that there's a different experience in a large picture." "But I think it has more to do with a heroic impulse as compared with the intimacy of French painting." "(Newman) My first painting where I felt that I had moved into an area for myself, that was completely me," "I painted on my birthday, birthday in 1948." "And it's a small red painting and I put a piece of tape in the middle." "And I put my so called "zip", people which I would prefer to call." "Actually, it's not a stripe." "The thing I would like to say about that is that I did not decide, either in '48 or '47 or '46 or whatever it was, to say to myself," "I'm going to paint stripes." "I did not take an arbitrary abstract decision." "I suppose I thought of them as streaks of light." "When I painted this painting which I call "Onement"," "I stayed with that painting about eight, nine month, wondering to myself what had I done." "What was it?" "And I realized that up until then whenever I used that attitude" "I was filling the canvas in order to make that thing very viable." "And suddenly in this particular painting "Onement" I realized that" "I had filled the surface." "It was full." "In that painting I've got rid of atmosphere." "That stroke made the thing come to life." "(Motherwell) Chance is not a primary idea with me, nevertheless it is true that the "Open series" I discovered it entirely by chance." "One day I put a small vertical canvas against a large vertical canvas, observing the smaller canvas against the larger one" "I thought "What a beautiful proportion"." "And without a second thought, I picked up a piece of charcoal and outlined it on the larger picture." "In the opening handings, among other things, I'm involved in scale." "And I've investigated small scale, large scale would make, I've made as small as five to seven inches." "The largest so far is eighteen to twenty feet." "I've decided not deliberately, but it has come up that way, that I would like to see wine back in that painting, starting with the whole surface, beginning to divide it, rather than I did with many years," "beginning with the image and integrating it onto this surface." "(Newman) I feel that my zip does not divide my painting." "I feel that it does the exact opposite." "It does not cut the format in half or in whatever parts." "It unites the thing." "It creates a totality." "That is, you get .." "You see it." "You look at it and you see it." "And if you don't, there's nothing to walk into it." "It's not a window, leading you into a situation, where you walk through some interior or exterior world, from which you then come to a conclusion." "The beginning and the end are there at once." "Otherwise, a painter is a kind of choreographer of space." "He creates a kind of dance of elements, of forms, and it becomes a, might say, interactive art or it becomes a narrative art instead of a visual art." "When you see a person, you have an immediate impact, you don't have to really start looking at details." "Your first reaction when you meet a person for the first time is immediate and it's a total reaction, in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact." "And to my mind, that's almost almost a metaphysical event." "If you have to stand there examining the eyelashes and all that sort of thing, it becomes a cosmetic situation, in which" "you remove yourself from the experience." "(Motherwell) In some way it's easier to say what I'm doing by saying what I'm refusing to." "And if I look at one of the pictures "Open series"" "I see that I refuse to have a ?" "rather than ?" "." "There're no ?" "there's very little representation, the space is ambivalent and that the line is cluey joint on a flat surface, nevertheless from a certain distance the shape also swims in an airly space" "I refuse to have the surface impersonally painted." "But my touch is on the surface everywhere." "There're enormous differences in the ground, in terms of thickness, thinness, rhytm, or flatness, et cetera." "All reflection I do, I use orange round window sash brushes." "All which I do by a pressure of the brush." "bringing it back and forth in terms of thickness and thinness." "Sometimes I let the brushstroke be very visible and the other time it's very neutral." "(Newman) There's no question that my work and the work of men I respect took the revolutionary position you might say against the bourgeois notion of what painting is as an object, beside what it is as a statement." "Because ?" "even contained an ordinary bourgeois home." "NEWMAN'S STUDIO AT HIS DEAD" "(Newman) There's more to the problem, it seems to me than any old-fashioned idea of what an easel painting is." "A painting can be bigger than anything that can go on an easel, and still be, in my opinion, an easel painting." "And in the end, size doesn't count." "Whether an easel painting is small or big, it's not the issue." "Size doesn't count." "It's scale that counts." "It's human scale that counts." "And the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content." "(deKooning) Does the space for each artist, and Kandinsky said that not here, not there but somewhere." "is a place by your happiness." "Like, for instance, now I'm very much influenced by the idea of water." "Here, we are all surounded here in this neighbourhood by water." "I like the ?" "point and look at whatever it is." "You have to be in that state of mind." "To do that, i guess." "So I go on a bike and look at the water." "And I try to get light of this water." "All the light here." "And it helped me enormously, because I felt in New York that" "I was using colors just prismatically;" "red, yellow, blue, black, white." "I had no way of getting hold of a tone, of the light of a painting." "That I'm a collective artist as there seemed to be no time element, no period in painting for me." "Like last summer I was in Italy and those early Christian-Roman wall paintings, they just threw me for a loop." "Particularly if a brushstroke does it" " I like painting with a brush." "(Rauschenberg) The Abstract Expressionists and myself, what they have in common, what we have in common was a touch." "I was never interested in their pessimism." "or editorializing." "You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself." "if you're going to a good Abstract Expressionist." "I think I always considered that a waste." "But what we did, like what I did, looks like Abstract Expressionism is that" "with their grief and art passion and action painting." "They let their brushstrokes show." "(Johns) The idea that come to me that" "I should have to mean what I did." "Then, accompanying that was the idea that there was no reason to mean what other people did." "So, if I could tell that I was doing what someone else was doing then I would not try to do it." "Because it seemed to me that deKooning did his work perfectly beautifully and there was no reason for me to help him with it." "(Warhol) Well, but everybody's influenced by everybody." "(Frankenthaler) I did not want a small gesture, standing at the easel with a sable brush." "And having looked at Cubism which can be very detailed minute and fine, and has that essence at times of the easel and the sable brush." "I literally wanted to break free, put it on the floor and throw paint around." "(Noland) I was more interested in the making aspect of Abstract Expressionism, than I was in subject matter." "And I mean by that the fact that artists were handling the materials in a psychical way." "The fact that they were making paintings." "That handling aspect of the materials that both Pollock and Still used." "They didn't suppress the tactile quality of the handling of materials to any other picture image." "You never lost the sight of the touch of the making in their work." "(Stella) The thing about Picasso being such a big figure and particularly Picasso and Cubism was something that I just sort of passed around" "I suppose, largely owing to the example of Pollock." "And both Pollock and Hofmann seem to me to have" "I don't want to say, solve the problem, but at least to solve the problem in a sense for me." "They came to terms in some concrete and accomplished way with what has happened with twentieth century Modernism in European painting." "I don't want to be chauvinistic or sound that but what I can say that they established American painting as a real thing for me, something that I had confidence in something that you didn't have to go all the way back and" "worried again about where I stood in relation between Matisse and Picasso." "I could worried about where I stood in relation to Hoffman and Pollock." "(Frankenthaler) For me learning Cubism was great freedom and exercise, really analyzing what Cubism was about." "Why a guitar appeared related to or didn't related to the symbol of a base note down there" "How things pushed each other around in a cellar or ambiguous space." "That's black." "Or I can make it if I'll do it right by arms." "Because of a color and a shape, things go back miles to come back forward yards." "Often called this "Push and Pull"." "And I think every bit of progress in the development of abstract painting goes back." "I've painted "Mountains at Sea" in October '52." "And I had recently returned from a driving trip through Nova Scotia and Cape Breton and I think I've had a summer of making small careful after-nature watercolors." "I've got into my own place on 23rd Street and felt sort of "let it rip!"." "I guess I've ordered a lot of unsized, unprimed cotton duck which we all bought from a sailing supply place." "So I left the stuff on a floor." "I poured the paint on and used relatively few brushstrokes, since I did not increasingly as I've been working," "I didn't want the sign of a brush or how the picture was made to appear." "That area not painted on didn't mean paint, because it had paint next to it." "So it operated as ?" "and the thing was to decide where to leave it and where to fill it." "This doesn't need another line or another pail of color." "The very ground was part of the medium." "A red-blue against the white of cotton duck or the beige of linen have the same play in space as the duck." "Every square inch of that surface is equally important in depth, shallowness, space." "So that it isn't as if the background is a curtain or a drape, in front of which there is a table, on which there is a plate, on which there are apples." "But the apples are as important as the drape and the drape is as important as the legs of the table." "If you just put drips down or or circles or stripes or bleeds," "that become yard goods." "But if you put that stripe with magic there, against that particular background, near that particular circle, and you're involved in the whole ambiguity and play in depth, knowing full well that it's all on that flat thing, then" "you could just skate on it." "A picture that is beautiful or comes off or works, looks as if it all was made in one stroke at once." "I myself don't like to see the trail of a brushstroke, the drip of paint." "To me that's part of a kind of sentiment or cluing in, that has nothing to do with how a picture hits you." "(deAntonio) Is it hard to be a woman and a painter?" "(Frankenthaler) Oh, I think the first issue is being a painter." "(Geldzahler) Clement Greenberg included the work of both" "[Morris] Louis and [Kenneth] Noland in a show that he did in Kootz gallery in the early 1950s." "And Clem was first to see their potential." "And he invited them up to New York, in 1953 I think it was, to Helen Frankenthaler's studio to see a painting that see had just done called "Mountains and See"" "which was one the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used." "(Noland) Morris and I used to talk about what we called one-shot painting." "If you were impressed with what you're doing you only had to do it one time." "Each thing that you did was just done that one time, with no afterthoughts and it had to stand." "You wanted to have this happen out of just the use of material." "And everybody was assuming that the way you went about making art was to start out with drawing." "That had been in the Western tradition." "In order to imagine how to set yourself up to work, people would take, artists would take a pencil and a piece of paper and make sketches or would make plans about how pictures were going to be organized" "and to imagine what the result was going to be." "Most artists wouldn't just go out and get materials and start messing around with materials, and find some way out of handling materials and techniques, to have the result of what they were making come out of that." "They were using drawing in order to structure where they put color, shape, scale, depths etc." "It didn't just start by handling materials, which is a current drawing is another aspect of drawing, but is not the aspect of planning." "It's not assuming drawing is a way of planning how the result of making art." "You start with a roll of canvas and some paint." "It's a matter of getting those materials together." "Almost more in a tactile sense, texture sense than in a drawing sense," "or diagramming sense." "Just how you handle the materials." "How thin or how thick the paint is, what the weave of the canvas is." "(Geldzahler) Color-field, curiously enough or perhaps not, became a viable way of painting exactly the time as acrylic paint, a new plastic paint came into being." "Oil paint would always leave a slick of oil, a puddle of oil around the edge of the color, while acrylic paint stops at it's own edge." "(Noland) I roll the canvas out on the floor and staple it down." "Then tape off the quantities of surface." "(deAntonio) How do you apply the paint?" "Sometimes with brushes, sometimes with sponges, sometimes with rollers." "Any way that I can get it on, where the tactile result is compatible with the nature of kind of the color I'm going to use there." "One thing that people don't generally talk about is a fact that the experience of color is tactile." "We talk about the relative coolness and warmness of color or transparency or opacity and really all those descriptive terms are tactile descriptions rather than to do with, say, the redness of red." "When the color is first laid down, it doesn't have anything to do with the resulting size of shape really." "Once you lay it down, you can choose by sight," "how to bring the total color into a certain quantity, deciding how much of that color going to be left there, will determine what the shape and size of the picture will be." "That's left to last." "You have a way of getting the color to take on a different degree of speed, translucence, transparency, even warmness and coolness." "I'm interested in the pulse of each color, finding its place in relation to the pulses of other colors." "If you get that combination into a certain kind of focus then that focus itself dictates the size and the shape." "So then the judgement comes in and, I think, judgement is crucial." "You know, I mean, you do decide and that has something to do with taste." "Taste is usually, we use it the negative sense but there is the best taste, there's the right taste, there's the real taste." "There's the real thing." "(Greenberg) The 1950s saw the emergence of an avantgarde scene for the first time this country." "The scene replaced academic art as a kind of category in which you place yourself, by to some extent making fun of art as it honestly or seriously carried on." "Duchamp is the scene, he was the first artist who consciously realized that there's such a category as avantgarde." "And he became an avantgardist in the most radical way yet," "that you made yourself significant." "Not by producing good art, but by producing recognizably avantgarde art, with shocks and surprises and puzzlement build into it." "(Castelli) It is advised to $40.000 but actually I'll be satisfied to get 35." "I have $15.000 profit of that, you know, after all." "No, I'm not very busy, I have deAntonio here and then, making a film." "He's making a film, you know." "Like ?" "film, but without ?" ", about the art world." "(Scull) I always knew I was going to buy art." "It was simply a question of having enough money for, with three boys to bring up, with the house of country," "but I always knew." "(?" ") Art today is art for a very small number of people." "Art in every period of history has been art for a very small number of people, mostly the artists themselves, and one or two dukes." "(Castelli) Hold the phone up, I'll tell you (an assistant) Leo Castelli, take one." "(Castelli) But the great event of my career happened a little later, just about one month after my opening" "And that was a show at the Jewish museum." "One painting that I stumbled upon, that surprised me very much, and I was quite stunned by it in fact, it was a green painting." "I looked at the nameplate and it said Jesper Johns." "I've never heard that name." "I almost thought it was an invented one." "But I also didn't understand what the painting was about." "Because the green painting, the squared green painting for me," "I didn't recognize it, as I found out later, that it was a target [Green Target, 1955]" "Anyway, three days later I went to Rauschenberg's studio" "(Rauschenberg) I don't know, I"d like to say I've learnt humility." "But I was so uncertain and shy, that I don't think that I can use more humility." "I went over discipline, however, not humility." "Like what I learned from Albers that you had to have a good reason to decide one color over another." "But in the exercises," "seeing the clinical tricks, that were involved in color." "I've met a lot of nice colors." "I picked arbitrarily the most difficult color, that I could work with." "And it was red, because red goes black very quickly." "None of those early things were about negation or nihilism." "They were more like celebrating the abundance of color." "As oppose to the swindle of color." "Then just gradually it opened up," "I found it got a little closer to yellow, which made orange, and then, you know." "(Castelli) Nobody had understood Rauschenberg before." "I had been wildly enthusiastic about his show a few years before at Egan's, it was the so-called red show, which was a fantastic event, that nobody understood." "He didn't sell a single painting out of that show, except perhaps to friends, who gave him $50 so he could go and pay his rent, for a painting that would be worth now $40-50.000." "(Rauschenberg) One of things I wanted to try was an all-eraser drawing." "I did drawings myself and erased them, but that seemed like fifty-fifty." "So then I knew that I had to pull back farther." "If it was going to be all-eraser drawing, it had to be art in the beginning." "I went to Bill [deKooning] and I told him about it." "Then knocked the door, and started with portfolio of drawings, and then "No, none of those"." "Then we went to another portfolio and he said:" ""These are drawings I would miss"." "So he pulled out one and put that back." "Then he said: "Now I'm going to give you one hard to erase"." "And he picked out another." "And he was right." "I spent, I think, nearly three weeks with no fewer than fifteen different kinds of erasers." "And that made it real." "I wasn't just making a few marks and rubbing them out myself." "I may have said that painting relates much to life as it does to art or viceversa, but I don't think so." "I said you couldn't make either." "And you had to work in that hole between." "(deAntonio) What is that space in between?" "(Rauschenberg) It's undefined." "That's makes the adventure of painting." "(Geldzahler) One of the key early pictures within the proto-Pop movement, perhaps the most important of all, is "Rebus", which is a word that means puzzle." "In this single painting of Rauschenberg's, as early as 1954, there is a veritable anthology of the possibilities that are going to take over during the period that's coming up." "(Rauschenberg) So I prepared a ground of newspapers but colored sections, which happen to be the funniest." "So that I had an already going surface, so that there wouldn't be a beginning to the picture" "and so just it all be additive." "I mean like it doesn't really matter," "like, when it stops." "Because you're dealing with an object, what it can make you think of how it could continue." "You begin with the possibilities of the material." "And then you let them do what they can do." "So the artist is really almost a bystander, while he's working." "I mean the hierarchy of materials can be completely broken down." "(Castelli) In my first show of Rauschenberg's there was a curious couple called "Factum I" and "Factum II"." "(Rauschenberg) I painted two identical pictures, but only identical to the limits of the eye, the hand, the material adjusting to the differences from one canvas to another." "Neither one of them was painted first." "(Castelli) He wanted to show that nothing was really casual, even the slashes, the brushstrokes, the drips were calculated." "And curiously enough, it was in defence of the movement that he had actually moved away from." "It was in defense of Abstract Expressionism." "(Rauschenberg) I wasn't involved in chance as much as I was, hmm, I felt isolated." "I wasn't interested in attaining a precious state of isolation." "I was interested in what was around me." "Art doesn't come out of art." "I mean, you don't work with one foot in the art book." "And no painter has ever really been able to help another and I had no interest in being better or worse than any other artist." "I've had enough self-respect to know that somehow we were different and my work when it functions celebrates that." "My paintings are invitations to look somewhere else." "And they have been for a long time." "Like the new piece." "It's like "How not to throw your newspaper away"." "Because that's where it is." "And if you are contentious at all, information there in one newspaper, no matter where you picked it up, blow your head." "If you pay 15.000 dollars for something, you're not going to let the garbage in it, right?" "I don't know, I don't know who buys newspapers, but I know how they don't read them and take them seriously." "And it's the best book in the world." "(deAntonio) We might have one last thing on that." "(Castelli) Shortly thereafter, Jasper Johns appeared." "He was a modest, shy young man." "And I was so curious to see, what his paintings look like, that I told Bob:" ""Could we interrupt looking at these paintings and go down to see what Jasper's paintings look like?" "So he, you know how Bob's always generous and friendly." "And he said: "Of course, let's go down and see Jasper's paintings first."" "And so down we went." "(Jasper Johns) It had been my intention to be an artist since I was a child." "And in the place where I was a child, there were no artists, there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant." "And I think it meant that I would be able to be in a situation other than the one I was in." "I think that was the primarily fantasy." "The society there seemed to accommodate every other thing I knew about but not that possibility." "So I think that in part the idea of being an artist was not kind of fantasy, but being out of this." "Then, because there is none of this here, so if you're going to be an artist you'll have to be somewhere else." "So I liked that plus I liked to do things with my hands." "So I deliberately then tried to set up in new frame of mine, of myself." "Now whether that how deliberately one can do that" "I don't know, it might just be the thought occurs at the same time that you're ready to do this," "I don't know." "I worked in various ways and destroyed various things" "and became perhaps too serious about what I did." "And the paintings you were talking about started with the flag painting." "One night I dreamt that I painted a large American flag." "And the next morning I got up and I went out and I bought materials to begin it." "(deAntonio) What was the collage material made them?" "(Johns) Paper, rags, newspaper." "Any kind of paper." "(deAntonio) What is the order of application?" "(Johns) In that painting, it would be hard to describe." "It would be very hard to describe because some things" "I stitched onto the canvas with thread, I think." "I don't know what the canvas was." "I think it was a sheet, things were sewn on." "And it's a very rotten painting because I began it in house enamel paint and it wouldn't dry quickly enough." "And I had in my head this idea of something I had read or had heard about: wax encaustic." "And I changed in the middle of the painting to that, because encaustic just has to cool and you don't blur it again." "With enamel you have to wait eight hours before you do that." "With encaustic you can just keep on." "(deAntonio) In a sense that it was precise opposite of a drip and all that?" "(Johns) It drips so far and stops." "Like each discrete movement remains discrete." "Say, within the area of red, you can still divide that into something else." "You could see drips of something, piece of paper, whatever." "Even that was all red." "Then I thought what difference this color make then." "If what you're doing is, not looking at the color, but looking at these other things." "The combination of this new material and this, for me, new image or this new idea about imagery," "made things very lively for me at that time." "They started my mind working and my arm." "(deAntonio) I always thought if there's a connection between the American flag and the fact ?" "." "(Johns) My Aunt Gladys once when she read a thing in a magazine wrote me a letter, saying she was so proud of me because she had worked so hard to instill some respect for the American flag in her students." "And she was so glad the mark had been left on me." "Thinking about the imagery of the flag and what it was trying to say, what it was like then I thought of the "Target"." "Then I had, I don't know why I had this idea, but i had this idea, that I would have the target with these wooden blocks above." "I was concerned with the approach and distance and contact with painting." "So I had the idea that these blocks could be movable." "They could be attached to something behind the target, that would make noise." "So that each one would make different sound." "That was the way it started." "Then I didn't like the idea." "I don't know why." "Maybe it was too difficult." "I don't remember." "But at any rate, my studio had in it various plaster casts, that I had done from people." "Like hands and feet and faces and things." "So I simply thought of these wooden sections, instead of moving back and forth and activating sounds, as being able to lift up and see something rather than hear something." "And then I saw these things I had and I decided to put them in it." "So I did." "[Target with Plaster Casts '55]" "(deAntonio) What about Dada and Neodada and Duchamp?" "which all have already been allied?" "(Johns) What about Dada?" "What kind of question is that?" "What about Dada?" "(Greenberg) When Duchamp made his cage of marble cubes, it looked just like sugar cubes." "Representing of fashioning what could easily be duplicated and he fashioned them in traditional artistic material like marble." "Making marble look like industrial product, like sugar cubes." "Johns followed him by casting a flash light or a beer can in bronze." "And then painting them in some cases to look identical, or a coffee can filled with paint brushes." "Casting it in bronze and then carefully painting it so you couldn't tell the difference between the bronze version and the real version." "Well, the point of that is supposed to be the point." "(Johns) I think all work has relationship to other work." "I think the idea is, an idea, around what we're talking about, is" "the possibility that I deliberately behaved in a Dada fashion in my work, which is not true," "because I didn't know anything about Dada at that time." "Actually I didn't even know the term, I must confess," "I didn't, but Bob Rauschenberg did." "And when someone said that, he explained to me, what Dada was and then I thought" "I thought I should find out firsthand what it was." "Bob and I went down to the Arenberg's collection in Philadelphia to look primarily at the Duchamps." "And I didn't know Duchamps work though," "Bob did to the some extent." "I found it very interesting." "Over the years I found it more and more interesting." "I'm not embarrassed by any relationship that anyone could make between my work and Marcel's." "My work is not imitative of his and I'm entirely sympathetic to everything he has ever done." "I don't think there's any stylistic similarity." "The Dadaists were Dadaists by saying they were Dadaists." "If I'm Dadaist?" "I'm certainly not." "(Philip Johnson) The collectors have made an enormous contribution not only to the market but to painters themselves." "It seems to me that the effect of the Sculls, the effect of Dr. Ludwig, these people that buy, that set standards make everyone else itch to emulate." "The itch to emulate, the desire for status is certainly one of the main things in our society." "(Scull) My first great purchase after the Abstract Expressionists was to buy out almost completely the 1958 show of Jasper Johns." "He did very poorly in that show and I couldn't understand why he wasn't selling." "I thought it was so marvelous, because he was using techniques of Abstract Expressionism, but he was the hatchet man, who really was the moment that Abstract Expressionism started to come to the realization that something new was happening." "I told Castelli I wanted to buy the whole show." "And he said: "No,no." "That's very vulgar." "We can't do that."" "So I bought about eight things." "(Castelli) Prices of Jasper's have gone up fantastically." "The "Target with Plaster Casts", for instance." "It was my first show I bought personally." "The price was $1200." "The "Flag" was the most expensive painting in the show." "It was $2000." "Now these two paintings would be, I think, $150.000 and $200.000, respectively." "(Johns) I've heard that Bill deKooning had said about Leo, with whom he was annoyed over something" ""That son of a bitch, you can give him two beer cans.." "and he could sell them"." "And that time I had made a couple of sculptures," "I've made one or two flashlight, one or two of a light bulb." "They were small objects, sort of ordinary objects." "And when I heard this story I thought:" ""What a fantastic sculpture for me", I mean, really, it's just absolutely perfect." "So I made this work." "I did it, and Leo sold it." "(Castelli) Painting, I think that, frankly, this accusation, that's leveled against the dealers, that they are responsible for shaping the art market, is a very silly one." "Naturally, we are there to do that job and we are doing it." "Now if people - ourselves and the critics and the museums" " go along with us, then there is a consensus there and therefore we are right and not wrong." "I think that we merely doing our job." "(deAntonio) I want to know if artists have any chance of being up there where decisions are made, instead of having to go through you to the Rockafellers." "So I thought, if you have to go to brothers Rockafellers in order to get your job?" "You know, that's where the authority comes from and, you know, that's where you have for any authority to begin the future." "I want to know if we're really gonna be up there, whatever all you would call it, where the policies are made, or whether we have to go to this indirect." "Round about!" "(Hightower) I think the chances are probably pretty slim." "(Scull) I became aware of the fact, that collecting is just not going to a gallery and buying a painting." "Suddenly I became very deeply involved with artists who'd later make up group of Pop artists but they didn't even know each other." "We had parties up here and dinners up here, where lot of these Pop artists met each other." "And my purchase of their pictures seemed to be crucial to the development, you know what happens to a young artist when you buy a painting of his:" "he looks at you like you're completely mad." "And then suddenly he starts painting like a maniac." "(Geldzahler )The Sculls in their front hall have a double portrait of themselves by George Segal." "I remember Ether calling me before she went out to Segal's to be cast." "Wondering whether she should wear a real Courrege or a copy, because she was going to be destroyed during the casting process." "And I think she wore a copy and she didn't see a point in destroying the real Courreges." "(Scull) I don't believe in anything but my own intuition." "And so, when I met Oldenburg, I started to buy and then I heard, someone mentioned to me about a fellow called Andy Warhol." "I wanted to see him in '61, early in '61 and he said to me "I want to sell you some paintings."" "And I said: "What do you mean some paintings?"" "And he said: "Well, I don't care how many you take, but I need $1400."" "(deAntonio) Andy, when I first knew you, you weren't painting and then you did become a painter." "I wonder if you could tell me why that happened and when it happened and something about it." "(Warhol) Well, you made me a painter." "(deAntonio) Let's have the true things." "(Warhol) That was the truth, wasn't it?" "You used to gossip about the art people." "That's how I found out about art." "(Brigid Polk) No, you thought it was chic, that's why you started art." "(Warhol) No, no, D was making art commercial, and since I was in commercial art," "I thought real art should be commercial, because D said so." "And that's how it happened." "Is it true?" "(deAntonio) No." "((Warhol) Yes it is." "(deAntonio) No, that totally ain't true." "Henry in talking about your works at the show said that you did Dick Tracy independently on Lichtenstein." "And he stopped doing the Dick Tracy kind of painting." "I wonder why that happened?" "(Warhol) Oh, because he did it so much better." "I was just copying it from magazines and look at to make something out of it." "(deAntonio) What's your relationship to Pop-art?" "(Johns) The things that have interested me in painting and in thinking of other things" " of course I will tell lies here -- are the things which can't be located," "or are the things that turn into something else while you locate them, or are things which are located so nicely that you know they can't survive." "But it's never interested me just the idea of forming a territory, or a thought and defending it." "My idea for Pop-art is something in that area of.." "I don't like the idea that things are.." "That you're sure what they are." "It seems to me that the term Pop-art suggests that." "That everything is certain." "(Geldzahler) But here are hand-painted 32 Campbell soup cans." "They are painted very flat, very dead on." "Andy that time said that he used the can soup because every day for lunch he had exactly the same thing, a egg sandwich and a can of Campbell soup." "(deAntonio) You said all people are the same and you wanted to be a machine in your paintings." "Is that true?" "(Warhol) Is that true, Brigid?" "(Polk) No, he just wishes it was all easier." "He said to me last week on the phone, he said "Brigid, wouldn't it be nice.." "if in the morning we could get up and at ten o'clock go to all the movies and then all the galleries, and just think it would be, just like Teeny and Marcel used to, you know." "Then how would you get your art done?" "Andy can do that, but I can't, because" "I've got to do my paintings and my books.." "(Warhol) Your hair." "(Polk) My hair, sat under the dryer.." "The great art to come out with dry hair." "(Greenberg) Pop has the same something, an attitude somewhat similar to the Dada, to the surrealist artists, who deliberately used academic means to illustrate unconventional things." "With the Pop artists, there's hmm, a trick of saying:" ""I'm going to make it look... just the way the cheapest art looks"." "But with a difference and a twist." "And people like Lichtenstein and Warhol, they paint nice pictures." "All the same, it's easy stuff, you know." "[about the Tenth Street painting]" "It is." "It's minor." "And the best of the Pop artist don't succeed in being more that minor." "And it's scene art." "The kind of art that goes over on the scene." "The best art of our time, or any art since Corot," "not just since Manet, makes you a little more uncomfortable at first, challenges you more." "It doesn't come that far to meet your taste." "Or meet the established taste of the market." "And the Pop artists, almost knowingly, come more than halfway to meet your taste." "You no more tell if you can see for yourself or something makes see to fast." "It's gonna be mine." "(deAntonio) How did you actually paint the painting, when you started doing it six or seven years ago before Brigid did them?" "Could you tell me the whole process?" "Tell me about the electric chair, which is one of my favorite paintings by anybody." "(Warhol) Oh, I just found a picture and gave it to the man and he made a print and I just took it and just began painting." "(deAntonio) And he made a silkscreen print?" "(Warhol) Silkscreen print, yeah." "They came out all different because, I guess, I didn't really know how to screen." "Brigid just does all my paintings, but she doesn't know anything about them." "(Polk) I know what's good." "I know what's good." "(deAntonio) What do you mean, Brigid does all your paintings?" "(Warhol) Brigid's been doing my paintings for the last three years." "(deAntonio) How does she do them?" "(Warhol) Well, I haven't done any work for the last three years." "(Polk) I just call Mr.Goldman and I just tell him the colors." "I took Polaroids of the four flowers and I switched the colors around and superimpose four cutouts one on the top of the other." "I take picture and have Mr. Goldman do it." "(Warhol) But Mr.Goldman's dead." "(Polk) No, his son." "(Warhol) Ahh." "(Warhol) The reason we can say Brigid's done my work, because" "I haven't done any for the three years." "When the papers said that Brigid 's done all my paintings," "Brigid can say she does all my pictures, she can say, because we haven't done any." "(Scull) Well, you just talk about Andy's." "(Ethel Scull) Well, Bob had asked Andy to do a portrait, which sort of frightened me, naturally, because one never knew what Andy would do." "So he said: "Don't worry, everything will be splendid."" "I had great visions of going to Richard Avedon." "I have magnificent pictures of me taken." "(deAntonio) Must have been photographed?" "(Ethel) To be photographed." "And we do a portrait, so he came up for me that day and he said: "All right, we're all off." And I said: "Well, where we're going?"" ""Just down to Forty-second Street and Broadway"." "I said: "What are we going to do there?"" "He said: "I'm going to take pictures of you"." "I said: "For what?" He said: "For the portrait."" "I said: "In those things?" "Oh, my God, I look terrible."" "He said: "Don't worry" and he took out, he had coins." "About hundred dollars' worth of silver coins." "He said: "We'll take the high key and the low key and I push you inside and you watch the little red light."" "(deAntonio) The automatic.." "(Ethel) The thing you do the passports.." "Three for a quarter or something like that." "And he: "Just watch the red light."" "And I froze." "I watched the red light and never did anything." "So Andy would come in and poke me and make me do all kind of things." "I relaxed finally, you know." "I think the whole place, wherever we were, thought they had two nuts there." "We were running from one booth to the other and he took all these pictures and they were drying all over the place" "And at the end of the thing, he said: "Now you want to see them?"." "And they were so sensational that you don't need Richard Avedon, you see." "(deAntonio) How much did you pay you for your portrait?" "(Warhol) It wasn't.." "This is.." "(deAntonio) Surely $5000." "(Warhol) Hers was so much fun to do." "(deAntonio) How much money did she pay you?" "(Warhol) I don't know. $700." "(deAntonio) $700 for that portrait?" "(Warhol) I'm not sure." "(Polk) I think it's fabulous." "Every time I see the picture," "I'm always flipped out when I see the picture of Susan Thorn." "(Ethel) When he delivered the portrait, it came in pieces and Bob said to him: "Don't you want to sit down at this too?" "Because there were all these beautiful color." "He said: "Oh no." "Let him do it any way he wants"." "(Scull) And I said to you: "But you could change it any way you want"." "(Ethel) But if I.. he said: "If you ever get bored by these.." "we can always change them"." "I've got no more pictures, he said, but you could change them yourself." "What I liked about it mostly, was that is was a portrait of being alive and not like those candy box things, which I detest and never ever wanted as a portrait of myself." "Andy was very clever, because he knows on your side, and I wore sunglasses." "And he said: "Let's have with the glasses and without the glasses." "And he directed me, I tell you, those days he's running in the movies." "Or doing movies." "(Warhol) Let's talk about politics." "(deAntonio) All right, let's talk about politics." "Why did you choose you subject matter?" "The subjects you chose?" "What led you to the series like the car crash, electric chair." "(Warhol) I think it was on July 4th, and the radio kept saying six hundred people were death, or seven hundred, on a highway." "I think that's what did it." "(deAntonio) That's for the car crash." "What about all the other paintings that have to do with death?" "Like the electric chair." "(Warhol) That was the time they stopped killing people on electric chairs." "Or was it before?" "So I thought it was and old image and it would be nice to.." "(deAntonio) You ran into some practical political problems at the World's Fair, right, it was in Flushing in 1964, wasn't it?" "(Johnson) The story of Andy and the most wanted men was a peculiar political event of 1963." "We had at the World's Fair, at the pavilion that I did for New York State a space on the wall that I hired six - was it six?" " great artists." "I just gave them the space and said:" ""Do what you want to."" "And Andy did a dramatic sequence of the most wanted men." "(Warhol) I guess I painted the most wanted men." "(deAntonio) Can you tell who were that men?" "Can you tell me that?" "(Warhol) The most wanted men of that year." "(deAntonio) Who wanted them?" "(Warhol) Oh, the FBI." "(Johnson) It just happened, though, that in the research it turned out that these men were not wanted." "They were all well and happy and living with their dear families." "Perhaps more important politically, they all had Italian names." "(Warhol) They thought they might find them at the fair." "(Polk) Doubt that they had the opportunity." "(Johnson) So how it got to the government, I don't know." "But he called me in anguish, and we had to drop the thirteen most wanted men." "(Warhol) We painted them up." "(Johnson) So I never looked into whose fault it was whether they were wanted or not, we have just dropped the idea." "(deAntonio) Did you paint them up or they painted them up?" "(Warhol) No, they painted them in silver." "(deAntonio) And then what did you do?" "(Warhol) Then I did do a portrait of Moses, somebody liked him." "(Warhol) And then I didn't put it up." "(deAntonio) So it stayed.." "(Warhol) Blank." "(deAntonio) Silver?" "(Warhol) Silver blank." "(deAntonio) What about politics?" "Are there any critics you like?" "(Warhol) I like kind of critics that when they write, they just put people's names in, and you go through the article and you count how many different names they drop." "(Polk) Suzy." "(Warhol) There are more but Suzy is the best." "(deAntonio) The best critic?" "(Warhol) Yeah, when she drops more names." "(Polk) She has just said that everybody's name is in the party." "You feel happy that you've been mentioned." "That was the biggest artie article published." "That's what we're all about." "(William Rubin) The dominant direction since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism has not been abstract painting." "There was, however, a small group of painters that came along in the later 1950s and early 1960s, that created an abstract painting of equal force and equal power to that of the best of Abstract Expressionism," "which is very different in character." "Its posture is not romantic, its method is not improvisational." "It's a kind of more classical, more controlled art, that in a certain sense reacted against the action conception of Abstract Expressionism and against what by the late 1950s had come to be a great deal of very bad painting made in Abstract Expressionism's name." "(Stella) It seemed to me that basically the action painters and particularly the second generation of action painters adopted an attitude to its painting which was based a lot on an idea of allover attack." "But they were inconsistent." "They didn't really carry it out." "In other words, it was supposed to be an allover painting, but it ended up working with to much conventional push-pull." "The other big thing was, as far as I was concerned, was that they all seemed to get in trouble in the corners." "They always started out with a big expensive gesture and then they ended up fiddling around, or trying to make that one explosive gesture work on the canvas in some way." "It seemed to me so the painting and the energy turns finally compromised by all the fixing up that went around the supposedly loose and free explosive images." "I mean we've got to be an illustration of energy than an establishment of a real pictorial images." "I didn't want that." "I wanted to be able to have which I think are some of the virtues of Abstract Expressionism but still have them under control." "But not control for its own sake, a kind of a conceptional paintingly control that I felt made the pictures even stronger pictures." "I wanted to make my pictures at least stronger when I was doing." "The business about my work being unfeeling and cold and intellectual" "I mean, I can't quite explain it." "The only explanation I can make is a biographical one." "Certainly no one would see the black paintings now as a kind of cold and calculating, or very logical." "But they seem to seem that way in the context of '59 and '60." "They would lean compared to some paintings above, but the general look of them, if you really looked at it, it seemed to me that they have awful lot to do with Rothko in the general feeling." "And no one accused Rothko for being cold and intellectual." "There were certain literary things in the air that corresponded to it [to the idea of repetition]." "At the time I was going to school, for example Becket was very popular." "Becket is pretty lean, I guess, you might say, but also slightly repetitive to me in the sense that certain very simple situations in which not much happened are a lot like repetition." "Through the use of a flat regulated pattern" "I could make a painting situation, that read or scene flatter." "I felt that flatness was kind of just an absolute necessity for modernists painting at the time." "And I felt the black paintings are really right." "There were a lot of things in those paintings that were not in anybody's elses paintings at the time." "It seemed to me that they were concerns that painting had to adress itself to." "I got very involved at that time with the black paintings with pattern." "I began making little drawings and sketches." "And in some of the sketches I got involved with patterns that travel." "They were moved and made jogging and I had this slightly shaped format." "And the more I looked at it, the more I liked it and that's the way I built the stretches and painted the series." "And that was the beginning of shaping, for me at least." "I've already has an idea of a kind of paint I wanted to use" "I was interested in this metallic paint, particularly aluminum paint." "Something that would sort of seize the surface." "That it would be also probably fairly repellent." "I liked the idea, thinking about flatness and depth, that these would be paintings very hard to penetrate." "All of the action would be on the surface." "The idea was to keep the viewer from reading a painting." "It seemed to me that you have to had some kind of way of addressing yourself to the viewer, which wasn't so much an invitation as it was a presentation." "In other words, I made something, and it was available for people to look at." "But it wasn't an invitation for them to explore, and it wasn't an invitation for them to read a record of what I have done exactly." "In fact, I think one of the things you could say about my paintings, and it's probably a good thing, it's not immediately apparent how they're done." "You can say that it's finally brushed or it's sprayed or this, that or other, but the first thing you do is see it, I think, and not see how it was done." "It's not a particular record of anything." "That may explain in some kind of way its unpopularity with the critics." "When I said, make it hard for the critics to write about," "I mean, there's not that much for them to describe." "First of all, basically, it's a simple situation visually and the painting doesn't do that much in conventional terms." "They can't explain to you how one part relates to another." "With thereafter, that's so easy for me, so their effort couldn't be of any good." "Saying, there's no suffering, no dust, no feeling, there's no no questioning, I just keep doing it, I don't have trouble periods." "I don't have crisis and anxieties and all that, that are documented on the canvas." "There's a tremendous assumption of artistic humility, which I didn't seem to have." "Too much of success and being essentially too smug about it in some kind of way." "There's nothing in descriptive terms for them to say or to point out something, that you, the viewer, might have missed, if you were slightly untrained or not so used to looking at paintings." "That critical function is subversive." "I don't think that's a big accomplishment, but I think on the positive side, and this, again, becomes suddenly, or not so suddenly, but does become very subjective, but has to do with finally" "both the quality and the value of the painting." "If this presents a kind of visual experience to you, that's really convincing." "It also can be a moving experience." "In other words, that apprehension-confrontation with the picture, that kind of visual impact, that kind of stamping out of an image, and that kind of sense of painted surface, being really it's own surface." "I think it was a kind of attempt to give the painting a particular life of its own, in relationship to the viewer." "I've always thought in terms of pictorial structural organization." "Later on, with the more eccentrically shaped pictures, color just became, I don't know, inevitable in a certain kind of way." "If they were multicolored, then they had to be monochromatic and would leave only a linear structure." "And that's not what those paintings were about." "They weren't conceived to be that way." "This is one the recent paintings." "The edges here are actually fairly hard." "I mean, they're not soft at all." "There's not much bleed in a combination of fluorescent water soluble and Lenny Bocour Aquatint." "You probably can't see the pencil line, but it's drawn out over the canvas first and taped over the line." "This is part of the Saskatchewan series." "These circular Protractors made to fit into rectangular format." "This is one going up here, but you don't see the other half." "And another one coming through from the outside." "One you see pretty much the whole blue in there and one coming up from the other way." "I started with the drawing, usually a rough drawing, in which I plot out mainly how the bands are going to intersect." "Once I know the width of the band, once I decide that and everything else falls in the place.." "(deAntonio) How the marks are set?" "(Stella) The drawing is done from points." "It's done with a beam compass, which I make myself out of lattice." "I punch a hole in a wooden lattice and use a pencil and a nail at the other end and I draw the pencil lines on an unsized canvas." "I then use masking tape, which I tape over the line." "Once the tape is done, it's ready to paint." "And they take this pult afterwards." "The color here is intuitive or arbitrary or a combination of both." "And what I'm really interested in terms of color here, is not so much in the interlacing, but rather I'm interested in using the curve to make a color travel." "With the interlacing, particularly in the picture like this, there's no question if you have some illusions and some kind of figure ground relationships." "What keeps the push-pull from defeating the picture what I think keeps it on the surface, is this feeling that the colors move they follow the bands, they have a sense of direction." "And it's the directional sense of the color, I think that holds the surface for the painting." "(Scull) I have learnt from many people, who seemed to be taken with the fact, that my purchasing art has changed lives quite of few of these artists." "And of course I'm aware of just a few of them." "One of them is Charles Chamberlain, who was a hairdresser when I met him." "Big fellow, huge mustache, I couldn't image him of being a hairdresser." "And working on a sculpture was such a horrible situation for him to suddenly making a shift from being a hairdresser to working with this powerful iron and tin." "And so he said to me if he only had $10 or $15 a week of a steady income," "(I think it was $100 a week) he said: "I would be able to tell my boss to go to devil and really do this work"." "And I was so impressed by his work, that I said: "Go ahead."" "And of course, right after that.." "Right after that summer, he was never a hairdresser again." "He became a full time sculptor." "With Larry Poons..." "With Larry Poons I found out, he was a short order cook." "And I said: "How much you make a week?"" "He said: "Twenty-five dollars."" "I said: "What are you talking about?" "Nobody makes $25 a week anymore"." "He said: "Well, what I mean, I only work two hours a day.." "and that gives me enough to"..." "I said: "Well, I'll give you eight weeks' worth of salary... and I'll buy a painting from you"." "And he looked at me very suspiciously, and he said" ""Well, I'm willing to quit my job, but I want the eight weeks in advance"." "because if you change your mind, I'm out of a job." "(Poons) Robert Scull never walked up to me and said:" ""Here, Larry, I want you to.." "I want to help you."" "He did it through Dick [Bellamy] and he was a dealer and it was a business." "I mean, if he wants to think of himself in that way," "I've got nothing against it." "I might say the first major influential painter for me for me was probably Mondrian." "I mean, I was never a student of painting in any kind of normal sense of the word, that I went to school and studied art history." "I've seen a lot of paintings but.." "As Mondrian was the first that time first moving painting experience for me that I can remember." "(Geldzahler) The paintings have always based on very accurately plotted drawings and what happened was that the dots appeared at the points on an invisible grid where lines had crossed in the early compositions." "The grid was completely suppressed and what you were left with, were the dots indicated in the key pattern." "But the pattern became something that was difficult to read and the entire thing became a color field the way Frank Stella's paintings of a few years previously had been." "What happened to Larry Poons during the 1960s was, he moved more and more towards the sensuality, where he began mixing the colors, the background became more subtle, the dots slipped into ellipses, and from ellipses slipped even further" "into slipped brushstrokes." "And the influence of some of Greenberg's principles and the influence in particular of work of Jules Olitski changed Poons from rather hard and cold painter to a painter of beautiful pictures." "(Olitski) I decided to be a painter, when my grandmother died." "There was something about dead that made number of things clear to me." "You know, I was a kid," "fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.." "And I have loved her very much." "And I someway felt she was one of a few people that supported me, or that she loved me." "And I got nevertheless the sense of an absolutely wasted thrown-away life, like a dead cat on a garbage pale heap." "And it made me..get a very clear look on all the people around me." "Family, their friends.." "One things that got through to me was the notion of if there's anything that you want to do, that's meaningful," "in my case it was painting, do it, do it." "If I just get spray the roller in the air somehow it could stay there," "that would be it." "So to spray a painting or using a spray gun suddenly seemed a way of achieving of a look that I wanted to get." "Painting is among other things, one of its essentials is color." "Otherwise it's drawn." "But there is an area or there is that aspect of painting that is inescapable:" "the drawing is inevitable to it." "And one place where drawing is inescapable in the making of a painting, is its edge." "The line where you decided that the painting ends." "This is where it's going to be stretched to." "It's drawing." "It's a drawn line." "It's an edge." "To me if you made this line within the painting, it's introducing drawing into an area where it's not essential." "But my feeling is that color is essential, in the sense of the essence of painting." "(Geldzahler) Artist are used to talk about color, about shape, about form." "It's obvious to anybody who thought about it, that you can't have a pure color in a picture." "Because the color has to be.." "the shape has to have a color." "Color can't exist by its own." "What the color feels painters have done to the most successful extent than anybody has done previously, is to make color the subject by completely denying notational references, completely denying illustration and having the color itself expand, and bellow and rest on the surface." "It's the color which is the subject of the picture, not color describing something else familiar, that color invented by the artist." "(Olitski) Well, look, to begin with it's almost impossible to say what the painting is about." "I don't think one really knows what the experience of making a painting is." "More than the things that this painting is about is, I would call it, flooded surface." "Flooded surface." "And if I try to introduce drawing within.." "the painting or more within.." "In here there is a kind of flawing womp of paint." "which introduces some drawing within." "I want a painting in which the structure develops out of its color." "I decided to do it with the expansion of the painting" "and the bearing on where the painting is." "That kind of decision." "I tend to work from the inside-out." "So the beginning from the inside, I mean, pretty much in the center here, with color and the relationships of other colors to it, and its expansion outward." "And then the decision where it does end." "Where does it begin to tape a roll out, where is this line still in it." "Where is it still alive?" "Now you make a develop up to here, you know" "and here, and there, you know, or it might not." "Or I might decide, well, it's really this, too much refeet of color." "It's also making the chance to flood into rack, to destroy." "I find it very exciting and it was irresistible to go that further or to try to go to the further step, to see what would happen." "You know, you get a thought in your head, if all of this I put this or I change this in that way," "to spray some more on it, to spray the whole pool of color over it," "or any of the number of things you can do." "What will happen?" "What it will look like?" "(Poons) The paint is acrylic, Aquatech." "(deAntonio) How is the paint applied?" "(Poons) Well, pouring." "I've been pouring for about a year now." "So the combination of pouring, muscle.." "Sometimes, you know, I can get an effect by.." "doing it hard or just laying it down soft." "A lot of it has come from knowing the slight shift on the floor, that I'm working on, because gravity does pull the paint around." "I've kind of gotten used to this floor." "it has taken a little while." "(deAntonio) And then what happens?" "How long does it take for the painting to dry?" "(Poons) This paint is actually pretty thin compared to some of them." "Say, paintings up to a couple of months ago were much thicker, and I used a great deal more pigment" "They would take up to three weeks to dry." "(deAntonio) Do you feel there's drawing in these painting?" "(Poons) Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of drawing in it." "Yeah." "(deAntonio) How?" "(Poons) Well, there's much it is, you know, color stops, forms appear." "Some kind of imagery is suggested, I guess." "It's more a point of discovering a drawing than making a drawing." "Which would kind of get into, when I start cropping a picture." "(deAntonio) What happens to this painting now?" "(Poons) Well, I take it up from the floor, roll it up, and take it upstairs and put it on a wall and shape it." "Would you believe a beautiful painting come out of this?" "Down, down." "Up a little bit." "OK." "And move the ladder up." "Just take in it off the left side." "Yeah, that's kind of thing that gets exciting." "Like this excites me." "And this came out, that purple starts come out." "Well, I though it looked really good on the wall." "Down a little bit, down." "Well, I had a feeling that it looked a little, a little too slick, good." "Stay up there, Dany, and put about two tapes, two tapes on the left side." "The right side there, where the tape is now." "(Dany) Two tapes?" "(Poons) Two." "When you've even got one more." "When you're up there, put the two on." "And then put one more for the top too." "Down, down, down, down, down, down... down, down.." "Down." "Well, I mean, when I'm putting color down, and when I'm thinking what color to put down next," "I'm making the same kind of decision as I'm doing now, saying there's too much of that color, or there's not enough of that color, set on pouring it," "I'm dealing in a quantity of color, at this point." "Rather than a specific color, you know, the specific color is there, now I'm dealing with the quantity, how much of it." "You know, or to say now if I do this," "I wanna know how this would look like." "Which is the same process like I wonder what purple would look like here." "Do you see what I mean?" "(Newman) There's more to the problem, it seems to me, that any old-fashioned idea of what easel painting is." "A painting can be bigger than anything that goes on an easel and still be in my opinion an easel painting." "In the end, in the end size doesn't count." "The size doesn't count." "It's scale that counts." "It's human scale that counts." "And the only way you can achieve human scale is by the content."