Oral history interview with Fletcher Benton, 1989 May 2-4
Benton, Fletcher Chapman,
b. 1931
Painter, Sculptor
San Francisco, Calif.
Size:
Sound recording: 7 sound cassettes analog
Transcript 150 p.
Collection Summary: An interview of Fletcher Benton conducted 1989 May 2-4, by Paul J. Karlstrom, for the Archives of American Art, at the artist's studio, in San Francisco, Calif.
Benton speaks of his education in the Midwest and the decision to pursue an art career in California, and the problems of regionalism and provincialism in art. He describes the art scene in San Francisco in the 1950s, and talks about the effect of the San Francisco environment on him. He also speaks of art dealers and their methods, art criticism and museum politics. He discusses his methods and materials, his early ventures into sculpture, his involvement with kinetic sculpture, his work in watercolor. He recalls his acquaintance with John McLaughlin and discusses the influence of Joan Brown's work on his own.
Biographical/Historical Note: Fletcher Benton (1931- ) is a painter and sculptor from San Francisco, Calif.
These interviews are part of the Archives' Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.
Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service.
How to Use this Interview
- A transcript of this interview appears below.
- The transcript of this interview is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Fletcher Benton, 1989 May 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
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Also in the Archives
- Fletcher Benton papers, 1965-2003
- Image Gallery items from other collections related to Benton, Fletcher Chapman
Interview Transcript
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Fletcher Benton, 1989 May 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview with Fletcher Benton
Conducted by Paul Karlstrom
At the artist's studio in San Francisco, CA
May 2, 1989
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Fletcher Benton on May 2, 1989. The interview took place in San Francisco, CA and was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview
FLETCHER BENTON: FLETCHER BENTON
PAUL KARLSTROM: PAUL J. KARLSTROM
[Tape 1, side A; all tapes are 30 minutes per side]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Fletcher, it is a pleasure to sit here with you, to learn more
about you and about your work. We’re sitting in a rather wonderful structure,
a combination home/studio that you built over a period of years, absolutely
gorgeous. And you’ve been also generous in making this space available
for special events, including for the Archives members. So I’ll go on
record right here as thanking you and Bobby for that. We’ve known one
another for quite a while, and this is a marvelous opportunity then for me to
ask questions through which I’m going to get to know you better. Above
all, the thing that strikes me is that you, as a painter but particularly as
a sculptor, have produced a distinguished and fairly visible—in terms
of scale certainly—body of work. No question about this. You have this
wonderful studio, you certainly have, you’re known in the art world, you
have contacts—and I don’t mean just in the Bay Area—you have
contacts, and yet somehow I feel that you and your work aren’t as well
known as they might be. Now there certainly must be reasons for this. And these
are some of the things that I would like to pursue. Kind of examine the situation,
say why is this the case? Regionalism, the fact that you’ve chosen to
work, live and work, in San Francisco, may be one of the issues involved. But
as I was thinking about doing this interview, certain questions emerged. And
one of them is who is Fletcher Benton? It’s a familiar name, but who is
Fletcher Benton? How does he and his work fit into developments here in the
Bay Area, and beyond that in American art, international art in general, over
the last few decades? I’m really interested in getting to know you, and
therefore your work, a little better. We were talking earlier and you said that
you felt, in a way, that you had suffered through the damage inflicted by regionalism,
that this is a factor that has an effect on artists’ work and certainly
on yours. And then you also said you felt that to a certain degree you were
a victim of a regional dealer. And I wonder what you mean by that? Why do you
feel this way?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, in all fairness, the suffering has not been something I couldn’t
handle. It’s been, it’s been a little bit a sideline view of a game
that seems to be going on on the East coast that isn’t played out here,
and. . . . I came to California by a flip of the coin. Truly. After I’d
graduated, standing out in front of the school, flipped a coin with a friend
of mine, and we headed west, largely because I’d been in the service here,
and otherwise it wouldn’t even have been a consideration. I came out here
not realizing I was going to stay. I have stayed here for 30 or 35 years.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What year did you arrive?
FLETCHER BENTON: I arrived here in 1956, so that’s 33, 34 years. And, but to answer
your question, yes, I think anything outside of New York suffers from regionalism.
Certainly if this were New Orleans or St. Louis, or Kansas City, Kansas, the
damage of regionalism would be a lot greater than it certainly is in Los Angeles
or San Francisco. But the very fact that New York still holds all the marbles,
and they still look at the rest of the country as the frontier, and the power
and control of the dealers in New York—they don’t want to relinquish
any of that control to anyone else. And suddenly the West coast presents a threat
very much now to the selling of American art. But in my case I’m perfectly
happy on the West coast. I love it here. I’ve raised my children here.
My lifestyle here has been bearable. I’ve been able to do things outside
of New York in terms of space, equipment, heavy-metal deliveries, and using
heavy steel that I could never have managed certainly in New York. And there’s
been a sense of freedom here that puts pressure upon artists who go to New York.
You can go to New York as a free soul and very soon realize that you aren’t
going to make any difference at all unless you conform to what New York is,
what they expect of their artists, what the dealers expect of the artists, what
the mold is of the artist. I mean, you go there as one person, but if you’re
going to make any difference at all, you definitely can leave New York as another
person. I mean, it’s a controlling place. I’ve been there. I’ve
had a studio there. I saw all the warning signs. And I am a very stubborn Welshman.
I was not going to give into that. I mean, it was not something that I was willing
to sacrifice for. I just felt—maybe it was an insecurity that caused me
to leave—but I just wanted to get the hell out of there, and find my place,
be left alone and do my stuff. The question, however, you asked me was how has
this affected me now that I’m 58 years old, in terms of people hearing
my name, or looking at my work, making some sort of aesthetic judgment. I wanted
to give you that background in order to answer this question. I think it’s
hampered me a lot, especially in northern California, where I have not fit it,
never did fit in, and will never fit in. It is my residence only. I don’t
fit the image here that I was just speaking of in New York, except out here
it’s a more timid thing. You know, it was the funk art; it was the figurative
school. But that was a very timid thing; it was not an all-encompassing sledgehammer
like it is in New York. So to answer your question, I’m hoping that through
this, through some things that will be going on in my life, that there will
be more exposure to what I’m doing. I’m known in New York as a kinetic
artist, as maybe one of the ten kinetic artists in the world that were working
in the late sixties, and that’s been a long time ago, but they still know
me as a kinetic artist. [chuckles] I’ve had no growth to them. Their minds
have been closed to that, because when I had a New York dealer, that’s
where they last saw me: doing kinetic art, showing at the Galeria Bonino on
West 57th Street, right in the center of all the activity there. And regionalism
constrains an artist’s opportunity for the rest of the world to know what
he’s doing, and that is the damaging aspect of regionalism.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you feel that you—you uniquely here in the Bay Area, or at least
as part of a small group—have been victimized by this regionalism? What
I mean to say is that, from what you just said, you had the disadvantages of
working in a region, working in the Bay Area, without some of the advantages
that accrue, and those advantages ironically are part of the look of a region.
A whole group of artists then will be put together and there is interest in
them because their work and their interests match a view, often from New York,
of what the Bay Area is like, whether it be funk. . . . I would agree with you.
Just looking at your work. . . . I would never point to you and say, “Ah!
San Francisco artist. Bay Area artist.” But I would probably look at you
and say, “If it’s a Californian, he looks more like a Los Angeles
art[ist].” We’ll get into that. But do you feel that you’ve
sort of doubly suffered. You’ve elected to be in the Bay Area, to be based
out of the Bay Area—you do have a well-known dealer—so you’ve
been here and given up a few things by not having a contact or residence in
New York. You also, because of the nature of your work, don’t match. So
you’re not going to be noticed then for those qualities that are part
of the area. Double out. Twice odd-man out. Is that a fair. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s fair. I think all artists suffer from regionalism. But let’s
say that outside of New York everything else is regional.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: Unfortunately. So we all. . . . Suffer’s a tough word;
maybe that’s too strong. We all get a little tarnished by that. In my
case, which has happened to a few artists, I was going along at the age of 33,
34, trying to find out who I was, and all of a sudden became interested in kinetic
art, not because it was kinetic art, but because I was looking for a way to
take my painting, to express my painting in another way. So I was using motion
for that. It never occurred to me that there was a big kinetic movement going
on in Europe and South America. So all of a sudden I was swept into an international
thing that was going on. It was instantaneous notoriety. With that, I had a
very strong New York representation. I was even with Knoedler’s for a
short time—very, very short time. But I was with Galeria Bonino and they
had Paul Burri briefly, they had Ron Mallory, they had Nam Jun Paik. They had
several South American artists, DeMarco, and they showed Otto Pienes, some Otto
Piene things, and some of the German and Italian artists, kinetic people. So
I had, in my thirties, this strong representation in New York. Then when I stopped
doing kinetic art—by choice, I felt I’d gone as far as I wanted
to go with it—I stopped completely making it and went ahead to deal more
strongly with other concerns, such as what was the third dimension all about.
I was perfectly aware that regionalism was going to be a strangling set of handcuffs
that I hadn’t had before. Because when I was in New York, it didn’t
matter where I lived. I could have been living in. . . . I mean, no one ever
asked, “Where does he live?”
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Or where he’s from. You know. It was never even something they were
concerned about, because there I was, very much in New York.
PAUL KARLSTROM: They probably assumed, actually, that you were a New York artist.
FLETCHER BENTON: Exactly. I’ve had so many people shocked to find out I lived in San
Francisco, of all places. Of all places.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: So I knew very well that the chance of me having the exposure after I got
out of kinetic art, and living here, was very slim. Most New York people know
my name. [But] they have not the foggiest idea what I’ve been doing since
1972. They still think I’m fiddling around with kinetic art. It’s
true. And that is where I think regionalism has been frustrating for me. If
I hadn’t had that burst of recognition when I was very young, and attached
to a certain movement, I may have been, like so many other artists, a victim
of regionalism forever. I mean, at least I was out of it for a while, then returned
to it. And where I am today, most people are not that aware of. At least on
the West coast they are, but back East and Europe not so much. That’s
okay. I mean, I’m old enough now that all that New York glitz doesn’t
make any difference to me. I don’t need it. If it comes my way fine; if
not, big deal. I’m doing well here. I have the freedom to do what I want,
and I have the freedom of choice here. And I never felt I would have had the
freedom of choice in New York under any circumstance. And the guys who were
my age that made it big there moved. Many of them are in Santa Barbara now.
Many of them went on up into Vermont and what have you. They got the hell out
of New York because it’s a killer place.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I was gonna ask you—you said that you actually spent some time
in New York, and I forget if it was a couple years on one occasion, one or two
years, is that right?
FLETCHER BENTON: It was less than a year.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay. And when was that?
FLETCHER BENTON: It was in 1960.
PAUL KARLSTROM: All right. You mentioned that you saw the danger signs, I think is the way
you put it, and then consciously made a decision to separate yourself from New
York. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and so many other artists feel obliged to participate, to live there,
to work there. You gave it a try and then you said, “Whoa! Wait a minute.
I see things that I don’t want for me,” and what were they. . .
?
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, in my case, let me say this, I think every artist that goes to
New York has a choice. You either stay there and conform and tolerate the pressure
that inevitably is put on you or you leave there and remain somewhat free. And
to me I just wasn’t willing to give anything up to stay in New York. That’s
not the way I do things.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What did you see happening that worried you, that you didn’t want
to participate in? What was going on with some of the other artists, or with
the art world itself, that gave you pause?
FLETCHER BENTON: The New York school was on a train leaving town.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Uh huh.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, it was definitely on the way out. Stella and the whole new group
were coming in. I got there just as Pop Art and all that stuff was, you know,
coming up from under the ground, sprouting, and. . . . I felt such surges in
New York. I felt it getting on the bus; I felt it going to museums. I felt a
panic [power—Ed.] in New York, a surge. People refer to it as the energy
in New York.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, yes, it is; it’s certainly energy. People are going somewhere.
Everybody’s moving fast. But I think it was dangerous for me. Those were
the flags. I knew that I had to adjust to the energies that were there, and
the adjustment meant compromise, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I just
simply wasn’t willing to live in some awful place, and schlep my stuff
up and down five flights of stairs, and freeze my ass off in the wintertime,
and get hit in the face with slush, and deal with the humidity in the summer.
Because I grew up in Ohio. I’d already, I knew all about that stuff.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: And on top of that, to have to change my personality, to have to change
my freedom of choice to deal in certain areas that I knew had to be a part of
the next wave. . . . I’ll just interrupt myself for a moment. I gave a
criticism, you know, at Columbia [University] two years ago in the graduate
program there. I had over thirty students. I spent two or three days visiting
studios, talking to these people. And what I felt in 1960 I saw in 1986 at Columbia,
or 1987 in the students. Complete dishonesty, in my mind. That these students,
as graduate students, at Columbia, in art, were trying to find out what would
sell in New York. And I don’t mean sell for the buck, but sell for the
image. I didn’t see one honest student. They were all jockeying at the
start of the horse race to get in a good position to the rail, to win the race.
PAUL KARLSTROM: How could you tell that?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, when you’ve taught for 22 years, you can.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, was it in the critiques of the work, the work itself said that to
you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: The work itself.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . or the questions that they asked you, or what?
FLETCHER BENTON: It was. . . . Out of those 30 or so people, I would say maybe three or four
of them were trendy. There were a couple Westermanns there, working in wood.
There were some paper and string people. There were a couple of junk people
who were working with coat hangers that they found down on a street corner.
It was all somebody else, and it was all trying to deal with the shock factor
that seemed to get attention in New York. [chuckles] But so many of them were
dealing with rehash, you know. And those that weren’t were trying to find
out what would click. What would get, what would be, what would be this year’s
fashions in art. You know, what’s gonna noticed this year. What’s
gonna get in the New York Times. What’s gonna get mentioned. It was all
that Andy Warhol dealt with, and it’s all that Ultra Violet wrote about
in the book, Famous for 15 Minutes, about Andy Warhol. You read that book, you
know what the art energy is in New York. And you either fall into that formula
and do whatever you can to get noticed in New York—and I consider that
dishonest. Because we are what we are, and as artists we must work to develop
who we are. We don’t manipulate ourself to fit in to a situation that
we hope will get us known to the public through the press. And that’s
the dishonesty that I’m talking about. And I think we can thank Mr. Warhol
for leading so many minds to think that everybody’s going to be able to
pull that off.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But is it the idea that the look, the image, is in fact the substance, so
that there’s no difference between the two, and if you could capture the
look then you’ll succeed? Is that part of it?
FLETCHER BENTON: If you could capture the attention, you will succeed.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, and you do that through the look of something.
FLETCHER BENTON: Through the shock of it all, through being noticed. I mean, however you
want to do it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What about here? Do you find with the. . . . You’ve taught, oh, a
good number of years, I think, at San Jose State, and you’ve obviously
had a lot of contact with students, and you even have students assisting you
here at the studio. Do you find then a fundamental difference between the younger
artists, students, from here in the Bay Area specifically, but outside of New
York. . . . Or do you find that some of those same aspirations and desires are
there?
FLETCHER BENTON: They’re the same here. Largely because, you know, the way communications
are. We’ve got art magazines all over the place. We’ve got specials
on television. No, they know what’s going on.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Now something that didn’t happen to me in school, but I’ve seen
it happen to so many students. I used to teach at the [San Francisco—Ed.]
Art Institute, and it happened there as well. You’ve got the students
who are extremely aggressive, and they try to find out what it’s going
to take to make it. And they become aware of certain things that they have seen
that have made it for other artists, and they work toward those goals. And in
the process I think they lose their identity. Yes, definitely, you have that
out here. Most of the New York artists, even today, that are getting funded,
weren’t born and raised in New York—and they talk about New York
artists. I mean, there’s less than what, 3 percent or so? Or nothing maybe?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, it’s nothing.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that is true, and it’s something that’s interesting to
consider. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: They go there because it’s the Big Apple, right? They know that’s
where it starts.
PAUL KARLSTROM: They’re like residents or interns.
FLETCHER BENTON: They go to the temple.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Would you talk about—looking at the positive side of regionalism,
which seems to be our issue of the moment, you talked about the freedom that
you’re allowed—or one is allowed—in the regions. Perhaps less
pressure, less temptation, less need to participate in this frenetic activity.
The possibility of being yourself—and that is a positive factor. And I
gather you feel that that situation here has allowed you to pursue ideas as
they come to you, your own concerns, without the same kind or pressure to conform—or
by that I guess we really mean to try to participate stylistically in something
that is attracting attention, to get attention. So you’re better off for
that. But do you feel that. . . . Let me back up a bit. Under no circumstances,
as far as I can see, does your work show the stamp of the region. You’re
not responding, as far as I can tell, to qualities that pertain to the Bay Area.
I mean that is not one of the things that you’ve gotten from this soil,
or this atmosphere, environment if you will. The freedom, yes. Do you suspect—this
is speculative—that if you had stayed in New York. . . . In other words,
if you hadn’t have made the decision to return, that your work would have
been fundamentally different?
FLETCHER BENTON: To answer. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Have you ever speculated about that?
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, yes, yes. I’ve thought so often about it. I don’t think
I would have, I might have stayed longer, but I don’t think I would still
be there. I mean, I just know my personality. I think I’m basically a
shy person. I cover it up in lots of ways. Everybody likes to say they’re
basically shy. I think I am as well basically shy, and I know how I try to cover
it up. But I know that if I am challenged too much, I will not compromise. I’m
a very stubborn Welshman. It’s gotten me in lots of trouble, but in the
case of my work, it’s been my salvation. It’s been my escape. My
work has been a place where I go that no one else can be a part of, and it’s
a very nice place. I suspect if I didn’t have my work I might have some
serious problems. But with my work it’s. . . . You know, it’s my
love affair. And I have tried to say this to my students, that if you do not
have a love affair—I don’t mean a marriage; I mean an active love
affair with your work, that will, that is so exotic and exciting that you know
that that will sustain you for the rest of your life, you should never become
an artist. And this goes back to some of that dishonesty I was trying to tell
you about that I saw in the eyes and the faces and speech and work of these
students at Columbia. There was no love affair. It was a business deal. That
was my feeling. So, to answer another part of that question, what has regionalism
given, which I think was the question. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think so.
FLETCHER BENTON: [chuckles] Regionalism has given me a boudoir—just to be a little
romantic about it—it’s given me the space to have my love affair
bigger than it would have been anywhere else. It’s allowed me to be able
to make my way in life, pay my bills, and still have the exotic freedom of this
thing I do. And all of sudden, as I get older, I don’t need the carrot
that’s dangling in front of people in New York. I don’t give a shit
anymore. If they, you know, want to know where I am, they can look in the phone
book. Because I am going to be no less and no more because of New York as an
artist. They won’t make me anything more than I am able to make of myself.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It seems to me this question of regionalism, which indeed fascinates many
people, is a complex one, because you in a way are defined by where you have
chosen to reside. And I think it’s fair to say that regionalism for you
is simply a matter of residence; it’s not a stylistic consideration. Here’s
where the complexity comes in—and I’d like to pursue this and maybe
we can exchange a few ideas. The confusion is this—or the complexity is
this—in the case of your work, regionalism has not been a force in determining
imagery. Stated simply, your work does not betray its locale, where it was created.
It’s, if you will, international, or maybe somewhere else, or maybe combination
of both. So you’re not a San Francisco or a California artist in that
respect. And yet you do have ties, which we’ve pursued, to this earth.
. . .
[Tape 1, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . interview, May 2, 1989, this is tape 1, side B. We were talking about
the big issue, the complex issue, of regionalism, and specifically how it’s
affected you and your work. It seems to me to have been both positive—as
is always the case with anything [chuckles]—both positive and negative
aspects. One of the observations I was making is that regionalism is not regionalism
as a style, as a kind of imagery that reflects place. And this is often how
the term regionalism is used. Really what you’re talking about is a matter
of geographic location or residence. You happen to have residence in an area,
that then is also described as regional, having certain qualities, none of which—as
far as I can see—really appears in your work. It seems other. And so the
impact of regionalism on you is more the result of being in that area and being
removed from an area where there’s a more active criticism, where things
are noticed, there’s more activity. It leaves you a little lonesome, quiet,
and removed in some ways in terms of the activity of your career. One of the
questions that arises—is what about the dealer, what about the instrument
that is established to compensate for that distance from the New York center
of activity. What you’re looking for, of course, is an audience for your
work. I mean, this is natural and normal, and I assume that this is the case
with you as well. No matter what it looks like and no matter where you live.
The disadvantage of being here has been—and continues to be, I guess—that
you’re a little out of the swim, and you’re simply not seen as much
as you really need to be seen. But the fact of the matter is, you have a very
well-known dealer, John Berggruen. I would say John operates on a certainly
national if not an international basis with some very distinguished artists.
I mean, you’re in what’s got to be the best gallery in San Francisco
to achieve what we’re talking about: get you and your work out there.
FLETCHER BENTON: But that’s not the function of galleries outside of New York.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No?
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t think. Not the big boys. Their function is to bring art to
the community. . . . John certainly is the number one, maybe the number one
on the West coast. He’s not interested in promoting artists. This is my
evaluation, dear John, if you ever hear this recording. This is my opinion.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: But he doesn’t really care about developing me or Nate Oliveira, or
anyone else he handles. What he is concerned about is making money. And he brings
to the community the young artists in New York that are doing this and that
that have already proven themselves there, that have had good shows, good sales,
and so forth. And if an artist—God help him; we’ve all been there,
and I’ll certainly be there again—go into a slump or fall out of
favor, well, my feeling about John Berggruen is he’s not going to shore
that up [or] make the difference. The same is true of any other major dealer
here.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, right, and we’re not going to single out John.
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It just so happens that he is your dealer.
FLETCHER BENTON: It just so happens that our dealers today are operating as merchants. That’s
their, that’s how they see themselves.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But isn’t it in the interest of a local dealer, whether it’s
John Berggruen or anybody else, to find ways to make more visible their own
artists, simply for business reasons.
FLETCHER BENTON: Not when they constantly bring in new, people who haven’t been shown
here who they can sell to their collectors that may already have Nate Oliveiras
or Fletcher Bentons. It’s much easier for them to do that than to spend
great amounts of time developing the guys that have already sort of had their
fifteen minutes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What if you had strong representation, consistently, over the years, New
York city? Regardless that you happen to live in San Francisco. Your main representative
now, your main dealer—I guess exclusive. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: [shakes head no]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Not exclusive, but the main one is San Francisco based. What if you had
maintained a strong relationship with a New York dealer, even though your art
then changed? You were known, as you say—primarily still are in some quarters—for
kinetic [work]. What difference would that have made? Are you suggesting that
you absolutely have to have one of the prominent New York dealers to get the
kind of ongoing visibility that’s necessary to keep a career, well, at
least in the public eye.
FLETCHER BENTON: First of all, I can answer that question this way: I realize that there
is only one thing that an art dealer can give to an artist, and that is credibility.
They’re not going to give you chicken noodle soup when you’ve got
a cold. They, in most cases, are not going to finance your career—and
if they do, you really are forever under their control. They will have your
work out and try to sell it. So the more important dealer, the more exposure
the dealer has, the more exposure the artist gets. That’s all you’re
going to get. And especially for sculptors it’s quite often you could
make more money without a dealer, once you reach a certain point. So a dealer
gives one credibility. Now if I had a strong dealer in New York, who had continued
to have my work out in the public eye, there is a danger in that as well. And
in my case, I think my growth might have been stunted because of it. Dealers
I think subtly do ask for whatever they’ve been selling well from the
artist. And that may not always be where the artist is. And the danger of having
a New York representation that’s strong is that they can support your
work at auction—which for sculptors it doesn’t make much difference—and
they will have a tendency to drive the prices up. And that is a trap, because
for sculpture there’s a different commitment from the collector—and
we can talk about that later, and I want to talk about that later—but
I think that over the years my prices may have been driven up to such a point
that the people able to pay those prices become fewer and fewer. And since sculpture
has to occupy space, it is more difficult in many cases to sell than something
that hangs on the wall. So it can be diminishing in that respect, too. Then
all of a sudden you wake up someday and you realize, “Geez, I’m
getting $175,000 for this piece, but selling one of those a year,” or
two of those a year, or whatever. And the dealer’s putting pressure on
me in subtle ways to do more of whatever’s selling for $175,000, rather
than saying, “Keep on truckin’ with whatever you’re interested
in, Fletcher, and we’ll see how it goes.” Those are the negatives
of it all in New York. I think there comes a time for every artist when he adds
to the stable of a dealer. When that happens—not to every artist; I mean,
it has to a few artists who reach a certain amount of exposure and importance—and
when that happens you then have something to say, subtle or otherwise. But if
you’re a midlife artist and you’re sort of middle in importance,
you know, your muscle is less.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Fletcher, you raise something of a dilemma here, it seems to me. Because
you say on the one hand that by being removed from New York, or as we’ve
been discussing, being located in a region not the main center, your career
has in a sense been handicapped in a public way. Your dealer. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Wait a second. My career hasn’t been. I mean, I feel great about it.
It’s just that what has been. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Visibility.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . hampered is, from my point of view, is having my work evaluated. I
mean, it hasn’t been. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, okay, the visibility then.
FLETCHER BENTON: Right, it really hasn’t been evaluated. It hasn’t had a chance
to get in the horse race.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. Well, okay, that’s what I meant. I know that in fact you have
a very successful career, basically.
FLETCHER BENTON: As far as being able to pay my rent, I’m doing just fine.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right. And so that’s not an issue. But what seems to be an
issue, though, when you talk about being, quotes, “victim” of regionalism
and the regional dealer apparatus, I think you mean the frustration of not having
the work as well known internationally as in the area—you would like to
just get a response, a broader critical response.
FLETCHER BENTON: To have it looked at and to have people make some judgments about it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And so it’s difficult to think of a remedy though, frankly, Fletcher,
because we’ve got a situation where you feel that less exposure because
of where you’ve chosen to live, this has affected the situation. Your
dealer, by virtue of being—it’s in the nature of the beast apparently,
you seem to think: If it’s a local, regional dealer, they want to make
money—so do New York dealers—but they’re not placed as well,
in the same situation, and they do not end up performing that function, which
is to expose the artist, to achieve exposure for the [young] artist. Okay, so
that puts you in difficulties with your [other] agent. If you’re in New
York, as you just said, there are other pitfalls, dangers, involved, having
to do with—and one may be being stunted at an early stage, being required
or encouraged to produce for a market. And one then wonders—for any artist,
whether it’s you, anybody else—what is the happy medium? What is
the answer to that situation? Because then it isn’t simply not being in
New York that has this effect. You see what I’m driving at?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think the answer to that is the one that is so hard for artists
to grasp, because it’s so simple. I mean, it took me a while to really
come to grips with this, and I’ve tried so hard to explain this to my
students. That you’re working for yourself. You’re working for the
addiction of your own pleasure. And if that’s something other people feel
pleasure with you, can go along with that pleasure thing, then they buy what
you’re doing. And it seems to me that an artist is truly walking down
an unpaved road, with lots of water puddles and stuff, and it’s so easy
to slip and fall. But if you . . . I hate to use the word—if you believe
in yourself—I don’t know any artist that doesn’t have a whole
hell of a lot of insecurity and doubts about what they’re doing, but that’s
the exciting part about it, you know, that’s the High Noon [factor], you
know, that’s great. That’s what keeps us going. But it’s very
hard to explain to a critic, an art dealer, or a collector the absolute seductive
joy, the heroin high that you get when you really have a love affair with your
work. Because you’re constantly working for that hit. And it’s so
self-serving. So I don’t know, maybe I got off the track here and didn’t
answer your question.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, not really.
FLETCHER BENTON: But I think there are a lot of artists that miss, that have not dealt with
that. You look at Wayne Thiebaud. Doesn’t matter if he has a New York
dealer, whether he’s collected or he’s not collected, he has received
such joy in painting. Anybody that’s got half an eye at all can look at
a Wayne Thiebaud and know this guy had a hell of a great time doing that picture.
Or on the other hand, if you look at Gorky or you look, ohhh, certainly not
de Kooning’s later work, but even his figurative things. You can see there
was a struggle there, there was a battle there, there was a, it was a one-on-one
thing between the canvas and . . . Diebenkorn. As it is with Thiebaud and the
canvas, but it’s a different thing. There was a fight, there was a slug-it-out,
there was combat. Painters have and sculptors have certain of those, their works
you can look at, and you can see, “This guy’s got a constant combat
with this canvas.” Others you can look at and you can see a constant joy.
Others you can see a constant sort of meditation, where it goes almost beyond,
it almost becomes a mindless act. I’m thinking of the photo-realists.
I mean, they’ve got to get to the point where they took this picture,
they’re translating it to the canvas, and it’s got to be some sort
of higher order in their brain, where they sit there hour after hours rendering
something. So that’s perfectly valid. And I think you don’t have
a love-affair with that and if you aren’t looking for those heroin highs,
it don’t make any difference—dealer or not a dealer, collector or
not a collector—then you don’t have that love affair I was talking
about. Which bridges all of the puddles in the road, gets you through that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. Well, let’s assume a certain level of economic security for
an artist. Thinking of the fate of artists in general, not just your case. Let’s
assume that there has been achieved an economic security, presumably that the
work is selling well enough to provide that—or maybe there’s another
combination of things, maybe rich inlaws or something. Who knows. But there’s
not that concern about just surviving. And that there’s enough for a studio,
for space in which to work, materials. And that then provides this arena for
what you’re talking about, whether it’s a struggle with the work,
the confronting the canvas or the materials, or whether it’s just a joy
in working—and this presumably is why artists choose to be artists. The
best ones. You know, this is what they’re about, what they want to do.
And I think that that’s valid, and I would like to think that’s
true, that’s the view I have. But it’s still for most artists—and
I suspect you’re one of them—that that rather introspective, rather
private activity, working for oneself, whether it’s the joy of it, the
need, the struggle—whatever—is given and fine up to a point. But
it seems to me that many artists crave this relationship with the world.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: With the world. And it, so it isn’t enough, I mean, what you describe
is why it’s done and what creates these things, these images, these pieces.
But the concerns that you’ve expressed, and the whole terminology—victim—of
being regional. . . . You certainly haven’t been victimized economically;
you have a solid. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Victim, again, is a tough word. I don’t feel, I don’t feel I’ve
been unduly victimized. I chose to be here, and by being here I realize that
I’m going to have less judgments made of my work.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So the goals, what we’re really talking about—this is what I
was trying to lead to—is that the circle is incomplete, the scenario for
the artist—certainly some artists, presumably you are among them—is
incomplete without this serious attention, this relationship with an audience
and preferably and informed, a critical audience, where judgments can be made,
where there’s a response—and an articulated response. So it comes
into the area of criticism, and thoughtful writing. What I’m suggesting—I
don’t want to put words in your mouth—but what I’m suggesting
is that part of what you are interested in, as an artist, is being a participant
in a dialogue about art issues. And that your work then perhaps can add another
perspective, an example of the bigger issues, and finally cultural issues, a
dialogue in our civilization, our society. And if you’re not known, if
you’re not visible, you can’t participate, no matter how much joy
you have in making your work. Is that fair? Do you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s quite fair. My concerns, at my age, were not the concerns I
had ten years ago, certainly fifteen years ago. I mean I always had my love
affairs, that was from such a young age. I hope to God I can get it up and keep
it that way with my art until I pass on. But I have, my commitment has not been
superficial to my love affair. Everything that I’ve done has been for
the benefit of that, for the benefit of my work, for the benefit of the freedom
of choice. By the way, the freedom of choice—I just have to stop for a
moment. Because you, in your questioning, it crossed my mind that I think artists
become artists—those who stick it out—because they want to be totally,
I mean, one hundred percent responsible for their actions. I mean, if you were
a painter or a sculptor, you are totally responsible from beginning to end for
every single decision. No person, no set of circumstances, no political thing—at
least in this country—can, if you’re tough, can have any effect
on your decisions in the conception, from conception to completion of a work
of art. Those are all gloriously your own decisions—good or bad—and
at the end you stand there, cross your arms, stick your finger up your nose,
or whatever you do, and you say, “Well, that bunch of decisions taught
me something, you know, it gives me a place to go next, go on to the next thing,”
or “Those decisions I feel are totally wrong, and therefore I won’t
make them again.” But in every case, the learning process is total. I
mean, it’s a. . . . Do you know what I’m saying as an artist? I
mean, maybe you understand this as a historian and a writer, and maybe you don’t.
But artists have, that’s the gift. You know, they say, “Oh, this
person’s very talented,” or “Oh, this person’s very
gifted.” Bullshit! You know. What is really important is the artist is
totally, totally, responsible for what he does. And where else in life is that
true? I mean, even the writers don’t have that privilege. The poets do
but the writers don’t. Because they’re edited, they’re knocked
around, they’re, you know. . . . But an artist, a fine artist, is totally
responsible for it. I find that incredible. I mean, to have that opportunity
in my one life to do something that I start from beginning to end, it’s
finished, and I stand back, and it’s all my stuff. To me, that’s
just beyond words.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, acknowledging that, which is I think a rather eloquent statement of
why you do what you do. I don’t think you can improve on that very much.
Nonetheless, I would think you agree—and certainly our conversation so
far indicates this would be the case—that there comes a point when you
want to move beyond your own experience of making the art, of the activity,
of the freedom, everything else that’s part of this, and you want to communicate
something, you want to connect with an audience. I gather that there has been
in part of this total scenario a dialogue with the world. And if it isn’t
jumping into the big question too soon, I would like to know how you see this
dialogue, the nature of this dialogue—you know, what kind of a relationship.
You talked about a love affair with your work, and that is a relationship. What
about your relationships, through your work, with the audience?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, that’s a good question, and I’ll try to answer it—and
maybe this is where I would hope someday to, you know, have some perspective,
have my work put in some overall perspective by someone. I don’t think
I am special. You know, it just so happens that I’m interested in doing
what I do. I don’t think that makes me of a higher order than someone
who doesn’t do it. And what gives me thrills, what gives me pleasure,
I’m selfish enough to think it must give other people pleasure. I mean
I truly believe that if I could find that kick, that thing I was talking about,
that gives me great pleasure in this love affair, I hope to hell it’s
got, it’s [universal] enough that others can respond to it in some way.
And I really believe this firmly. I made a decision to work with geometry. I
don’t want this tape to sound like I sat down and made a decision. I didn’t
sit down and make a decision. The decision was made some magical way. I don’t
know who makes them for me, but they’re made magically. That I was going
to deal only with geometry. And so far in these pieces of sculpture, since the
kinetic period, even that period, I’ve been dealing with geometry. I may
fall out of love with that, but right now it’s my main concern. To me
geometry represents the musical notes that. . . . Well, let’s take a piano
for instance. You’ve got 88 keys, you hit ‘em and they do certain
things. You combine these, they make different things. My bone pile—or
my palette—is made up of geometry, of shapes that are fairly common to
most all of us, as musical notes are common to most all of us. And I might digress
for a moment and say that [what I respond to in the art] [is what I’m
after] in my own work, in that there has been a common note struck, either through
a stroke, through a sense of chiaroscuro, a sense of color, that is not intellectual—and
I will go back to this intellectual thing more and more, because I firmly believe
that there is very little about the art process that I know of that is intellectual.
But to get back to the palette of geometry: I feel that my job is to take the
keys of my piano and put them together in chords, with notes, with timing, with
repetition, with crescendo, with beat, with all of the things that go into music.
I believe that those same things can be visual. I know very little about music.
I’m somewhat tone-deaf. Yet I respond to music in a way that I [think]
is most common. And that is, if something is playing along, I may not know the
song or the piece of music, and if a sour note is struck, I’m almost sure
I can pick up on it. I’m aware of it, because it’s out of harmony
with what’s going on. And in my work I try to arrange these geometrical
forms and shapes in such a way that you can look at them and respond to them
as you would respond to music. You know, you’re going to say, “Well,
Jesus. That looks good,” or, “That hears good,” or, “That
feels good.” There’s nothing more than trying to reach the highest
order of getting these things together in a way that you as the viewer can respond
to. And I don’t expect you to say, “Gee, the tragedy in that stack
of cubes is more than I can handle. I’m about to fall apart.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Or, “The symphony of the triangle and the circle. . . “ You
know, I don’t expect that.
[Tape 2, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Fletcher, you were saying?
FLETCHER BENTON: If you were to say, “I like that piece, Fletcher,” and I were
to say, “Well, what do you like about it?” First of all, I wouldn’t
do that probably because it’d be very foolish of me. Because you really
don’t know what you like about it. You might say, “I like the six
cubes that are standing up there; they look like stairs, and that funny little
thing sitting on there, leaning up against a shaft, and [shepherd’s] this
and a [what].” But if I were to push you, you probably couldn’t
really isolate anything. As would be true about a great work of music. I mean,
if you get pushed too far, you can’t really discuss it; you can’t
tear it apart into elements. Because what makes it what it is, is the total.
And it’s really the job of the critics to say something about it, but
if you were to say, “God, I don’t know what I like about it, it
just makes me feel good,” you have said to me what I have tried [chuckles]
to give you. Because there are certain things that. . . . I mean, I could do
something very ugly too, and I could do it as an ugly thing, and if you were
to say, “That’s very ugly,” I would say, “My god, that’s
terrific. I’ve gotten to you. You say that’s very ugly; what I meant
it to be was very ugly.” So it’s not like, for instance, analyzing
Rodin’s sculpture—or maybe that’s a poor example—or
the painters. I mean, it’s much easier for historians and critics to talk
about painting. Because it’s, first of all, it’s two-dimensional,
but secondly it’s all illusion to start with. It’s not something
you can bump into or ignore. You can’t do that with sculpture. Sculpture
is real, in space. If you walk through a room where there is a sculpture in
daylight, and you come back through that same room at night with the lights
out, you’re damn aware of that sculpture being in there. And it has a
presence that goes beyond just the illusion that painting’s all about.
So it’s not quite the same, but it’s a critic’s job to break
down what the artist is trying to do. It’s not the artist’s job,
ever.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So what is missing then, to a degree, is the critical participation in your
career, that has been sort of a missing link. Because you, as you say here,
it’s the critic’s job to try to identify these qualities, or try
to verbalize, articulate, the reasons for these responses. You know what you
want from your audience, or certainly part of it. You’re looking for a
response, and you have ways of working with materials and with forms and shapes
that you hope will strike those common notes.
FLETCHER BENTON: Exactly.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And yet. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And either it’s going to or it’s not going to.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: You can’t hype it up.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But to complete that important relationship, then somebody else needs to
reflect on the dynamic of what’s happening and try to explain it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Where I feel that regionalism has shorted some of us, a little bit—and
I’m not crying in my beer. I mean. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: All right. It’s your tape [interview]. You can if you want to.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. [chuckles] It’s your, we’re friends, and I’m more
able to be totally free about things with you maybe than someone else. In the
sixties, there was this great invitational surge among museums, and, you know,
there was enough [art] floating around, they could have invitationals. They
weren’t even juried shows. I mean, as I recall, you were invited to show.
At the Carnegie or at the Whitney, during that time, it was a little more open
to what was going on, and they weren’t always looking for the newest stuff.
They were throwing a few of the old boys in there just to keep everybody honest—the
Whitney, I’m talking about.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And there were many other, throughout the world, other invitational shows,
which were done to have the work out there, to have the people confronted with
it, to have them talk about it. I think shows today are more a shock value,
more a trendy value. A lot of the museums have a franchise mentality now. [raises
voice as if speaking in a lecture hall—Trans.] I will say that again:
A franchise mentality.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [laughs]
FLETCHER BENTON: And, you know, whatever is passing through New York gets on the train and
goes out to the far regions of the uncivilized West. I think it’s bullshit.
That’s all right, I mean. . . . But, we don’t have the opportunity—we—the
artists on the one hand to be placed in a public view where we are there with
many other artists and can be compared visually, discussed, torn apart, beaten
up, whatever the case is. Those shows don’t seem to exist much anymore.
I don’t know, unless you know something I don’t know, that there
are many really invited group shows throughout the museum [structure], throughout
the regions, throughout the vast city of New York, where the public has a chance
to take the younger fellow’s art and say, “Well, how does this stack
up to Diebenkorn?” or to whoever, David Smith, or whoever else. And I
think that’s one of the biggest crimes of the late seventies and eighties.
I hope to God it doesn’t go into the nineties, but I suspect it will.
There are too many young curators and young museum directors out there that
put more emphasis on their ability to be current on what is going on in the
hottest corners of New York than on a total overview of what [really] has been
going on. And I think it’s tragic. It again goes back to their function
as a curator or museum director to serve the public—to promote and serve
the artists and present them to the public. The dealers have become merchants,
the museum curators and directors [are becoming a] bunch of trendy yuppies.
But history weeds all that stuff out. [chuckling] I sound like I’m beating
the drum because of some hurt that I have. I don’t have any hurt. I just
think it’s a shame. I go to a museum, I can’t see what the hell’s
going on in comparison to what has gone on anymore.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you feel that the. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, we get [Anselm] Kiefer over here. We get Kiefer here at the San
Francisco museum, well, geez, that’s great. I would much rather have the
money that was spent on the Kiefer show, in doing a survey show of, say, from
1960 to 1980, Bay Area [conservative] show. Or something that is really, puts
things in perspective and allows those artists in those areas to be looked at.
[Interruption in taping]
PAUL KARLSTROM: We’re now picking up after a little break in the taping for lunch.
When we stopped taping you were talking about something that you regretted,
over the last two decades at least, and that’s the absence of the kind
of exhibition, probably juried, but large-group shows where you have an opportunity
to see a number of artists brought together and a chance really, I suppose,
to get a better indication of what’s happening in current art. Probably
a better idea for the critics and for the audience, but also I guess for the
artists themselves, to see how they’re fitting in. And I gather from what
you said that you felt that this, that the current situation, which takes place
pretty much in the museum arena, traveling exhibitions, which are curated, as
they say—the curators make the decisions, make the choices—that
this presents a distorted view of contemporary art. Is this right?
FLETCHER BENTON: I think so.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Who do you feel is responsible for that? What does that mean about art of
our times, and the way it’s being handled?
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t know who’s responsible for it. I think that San Francisco
is a typical situation, you know. We have a new museum director, Mr. Jack Lane
[San Francisco Museum of Modern Art— Ed.], who came here to make a name
and push his career further, and also get a new museum for San Francisco. He
was brought here by very powerful people on the board. And I think that he’s
going to try to fill in all the inadequacies of the museum based on their formula
for a franchised museum, sort of like a Jack-in-the-Box, and the menu is fixed,
the collection is fixed, and I don’t see it serving the community the
way the museum has in the past. And even in the past the museum has slowly been
divorcing itself from the community, from my point of view. I’m sure that
people will argue the other way. But instead of San Francisco being a museum
that is unique in itself, which brings in shows that are available, but also
concentrates very heavily on formulating shows here, of people who’ve
made a substantial reputation for themselves on the West coast. And sending
these shows out. Those little and beautiful shows—not little, but beautiful
shows that go out to other museums to show them what we contribute as West coast
artists. They’re many, many artists here deserve that sort of thing. They
intend to, from what I gather, focus more on the international aspect of a well-rounded
franchise-type museum. I think this is very egotistical and. . . . The San Francisco
museum can never compete with L.A. County, and for them to think that a new
museum, downtown, and so forth, is going to compete with the Los Angeles art
scene and LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art—Ed.], MOCA [Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art—Ed.], it’s just not gonna happen. There’s
not enough money here to do it. There’s not enough openness. So we’re
going to end up with just a nice, mediocre museum that reflects really nothing
that you can’t find anywhere else in the United States. So I don’t
know in these traveling shows, these curated shows, who is responsible for them.
I don’t know how it works anymore. But I suspect the amount of shows that
are floating around. . . . And most of that get to town here, were curated elsewhere.
If you’ve only got four or five shows you see a year, curated by four
or five people, you’re getting very narrow view of what the hell’s
going on. You’ve got the view of four or five people.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you feel then that in the museum community, whether it’s the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art or University Art Museum at Berkeley, Oakland.
. . . Well, keep Oakland out of it a bit, because it has a pretty good record
of focusing on local or on California; that’s its mandate. But some of
the other local institutitions, do you feel that there is insufficient commitment
to the community on the part of those who make the decisions, that in other
words it’s really a professional tracking, and it just happens that their
next post is at, like Jack Lane, at the Modern, to further his reputation, or
perhaps move on elsewhere, but basically his role here is to, well, enhance
the credentials and reputation of Jack Lane?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And so the choices then are made entirely on that basis, or largely on that
basis, rather than perhaps a sensitivity or openness to the local art community.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles] I’m giving your answers. Well, I was just checking.
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I wanted to make sure I’ve got. . . . I don’t think we need
to dwell on this right now, although it’s part of the whole regional picture
that we’ve been discussing, but what about some of the other museums here
in the area—over the past years, and right now? I mean, there’s
some changes, important changes, afoot. That [is the case at] the Fine Arts
Museums. And the fact you participated in the program, “The Eye of the
Artist,” at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which [the series—Ed.]
is devoted entirely to local artists and their work and their views, sponsored
by the “Old Master” museum in this case, not the modern museum.
Does that hold any special promise to you? I mean, candidly, what do you think
that means? What’s happening?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, as far as I’m concerned, it holds the only promise. And I’m
not going to mention names because it’s not even important.
PAUL KARLSTROM: _____. No.
FLETCHER BENTON: But many of the people who were dedicated to the San Francisco Museum that
were here three directors ago, and who have contributed immensely in time and
money to the development of California art for the San Francisco museum, and
through the San Francisco Art Institute when it was connected with the museum,
used to have the San Francisco Art Annual, I think it was called, big survey
show. In due respect to all these people—not all of them; a large percentage
of ‘em—have pulled out of the San Francisco museum and are saying,
“Look, you guys at the Legion and DeYoung are trying to do something.
Count on us.” And I’m one of them.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean whatever I can do I’ll do it. I don’t intend to service
the San Francisco museum as I have over the past any longer. It’s going
to be a nice little boutique museum, and if that’s what they want, fine.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That really is an interesting shift here, and one that seems to be as a
result, to a certain extent, of the personalities or interests of the directors.
I mean, one has to think that that has played a major role, that it isn’t
the mandate of the trustees in either case—entirely—because I don’t
think. . . . Well, let’s put it this way. This is not an interview with
me, but Harry Parker at the Fine Arts Museums—and it’s very true—his
arrival here will mark a shift in the involvement of those established city
institutions, vis-a-vis contemporary, or certainly recent art, and California
art. Because Mr. Parker is interested in the twentieth century. It’s as
simple as that. So he will be interested in focusing more on that. The changes
at the DeYoung, especially in that respect, [involve] two things: much more
concentration on American, and then also bringing the American [collection]
really up into the twentieth century, with some interest in more recent art.
I think [it] reflects entirely his idea, not the trustees. The trustees back
him. What happened at the Modern, which is perhaps more germane to our topic?
What do you see in looking over the years in the patterns of activity at the
San Francisco Modern? What happened there?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I’m not really sure, because I’ve tried not to be too
involved in the museum. I do know there were key people there, as they say on
the college campus, “There were core people there,” that cared about
the San Francisco art scene: Mary Keesling, Byron Meyer, Frank Hamilton, and
there are many, many others. But from what I can see, the board of trustees
has shifted to corporate minds working there that seem to think the [thrust]
of our museum should be more national and international than local, so the concentration
of money and effort is not used to serve the community through buying and exhibiting
works from the community, but works from other places. The [implication] is:
Let’s make it a strong international museum, the best we can. And I [also]
get this feeling they’re competing with L.A.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And that’s too bad, because they’re going to lose.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But do you think that’s entirely illegitimate? Could one argue, on
the other side, that a vital world class, as you will, art center—or a
city that aspires to be that—needs. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t think they’ve got the money to do that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay. So you think then it’s a matter. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And I think they’ve got a champagne appetite and a beer budget. And
I don’t think they can do it. They’re starting too late.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Then it’s really a matter of the use of resources, with their inability
to recognize the limits of resources that are available.
FLETCHER BENTON: My feeling is that if they wanted to be an outstanding museum, they have
an opportunity to do that by dealing with the strong California people that
are already here that they could present to the world. From Richard Diebenkorn
on. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . to Wayne Thiebaud, to you name it. [Robert] Arneson. Let’s see,
Los Angeles people, many, many wonderful artists there. And then they would
be a special museum. That could be a special thing. Doesn’t mean they
have to close off the city limits to the rest of the world. We could still have
good, strong curated shows coming in here. But that the main concentration and
contribution would be unique. Yet it seems to me they don’t want to be
unique; they want to be franchised, as I’ve said. And I don’t understand
that at all. I just can’t see them competing with some of the great museums
around. And I don’t care who comes in to direct it. I just don’t
see how they can play catch-up ball. I mean, you’re in the museum business;
maybe you could, you could say, “I don’t agree with that, Fletcher.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, no, I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I wouldn’t say that I disagree.
I would say this, though. The role of the Oakland Museum, of course, has been
very close to what you’re suggesting. It truly is in Oakland; it’s
not in San Francisco. And there’s limits to what they can do. But certainly
they have attempted to carve out that area for themselves.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, but they didn’t have the money, they never had the great directorship,
and it was a city museum.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s totally different. San Franciso is a private museum. I think
there is money available there to them now, but not if they’re going out
on the open market to bid against paintings that are anywhere from, you know,
$300,000 to a couple of million. I don’t know how they can do it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that’s a problem of course a lot of museums face now. What about
the cultivation of patrons here in the Bay Area by, well, by the San Francisco
Museum, but then the response of—or lack of response by—patrons
in the modern field in general. I mean, how would you characterize that?
FLETCHER BENTON: I can’t compare it to anything.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I don’t really think I—excuse me—[should] talk about
that. I do feel that there’s less of an opportunity in San Franciso than
there is in Los Angeles for doing things, because San Francisco traditionally
is a very conservative town. Those people who have a lot of money don’t
particularly want to hang it out in front. They don’t make a big deal
about it. It’s, you know, it’s respected to just sort of be quiet
about your work. Well. And in Los Angeles, as you know, it’s kind of in
reverse. You’ve got it, it’s hanging out there, everybody to see
it. . . . I don’t see the money flowing easily in San Francisco.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you’ve been—aside from the museums—I mean, you have
been here long enough to observe—and in a position—to observe the
nature of local patronage. And I am not thinking of museums; I’m thinking
of collectors, those who were willing to invest in, show an interest in collecting
contemporary art. How would you characterize it, and do you see any changes
over the last. . . . Obviously there are people who collect your work. You have
collectors and all that. What about the Bay Area over the last few decades in
that respect?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think it’s, there’s more collecting here. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Than when you arrived?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. There’s more collecting everyplace than there was thirty years
ago, but, you know, quite frankly, I am not one of the people in the know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you know, we can talk about our impressions, and over the years certainly
you would have developed impressions of, well, you know, just how good it is
here. Is this a city that supports visual arts? Whether it be a museum or. .
. .
FLETCHER BENTON: In comparison to where?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, in comparison to the ideal, I won’t say that, because that would
be good positive support of all the cultural institutions. In comparison to,
I don’t know, a comparable regional center—maybe Los Angeles. You’ve
talked about that. Can’t compare it to New York. I mean, we’re not
going to ask that.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think there are a group of very serious collectors here. I think that
there is some prejudice to what they collect, as a group. And that’s a
general opinion that I have that may not be a fact.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What is that prejudice?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think it’s very supportive of the Art Institute—what
represents the Art Institute. I think it’s very much the California funk
thinking and school, California figurative and landscape school. I think that
they support that very much. A lot of people own my work here. So it’s
not sour grapes for me. But generally speaking I don’t think the collectors
here take any chances, except maybe through this Northern California Art Institute
way of painting and thinking and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you’re describing a situation where, interestingly enough, the
regional qualities, the imagery, the style that’s associated with the
region, is that which is collected locally and supported. You say that this
is your impression, but among those who have collected art, if it’s locals,
they’ll look for the, well, the Bay Area, the typical Bay Area expressions,
the regional expressions.
FLETCHER BENTON: The Bay Area school. If you were to say. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: In the largest sense.
FLETCHER BENTON: In the largest sense, the Bay Area school is what’s collected.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Of which you are not a part.
FLETCHER BENTON: I am not a part of it. But that sounds like I’m playing my fiddle
here when. . . . No, no, it’s okay. If I had to count on San Francisco
for what has happened to me, I’d be in big trouble.
[Tape 2, side B]
[This entire tape side was recorded at a lower level than usual, so tape hiss
masks much of the conversation. I especially had trouble understanding when
both PK and FB talked at once.—Trans.]
PAUL KARLSTROM: We’ve been talking about regionalism, Fletcher, a subject which I
think we haven’t exhausted but we can certainly move on to other aspects
of it now. What I would like to do now is get some of your recollections of
what it was like here when you arrived. In other words, what was the situation
in which you found yourself? And I mean, of course, in terms of the art world.
You were not in the beginning, I think, directly or intimately involved. Or
maybe that’s a wrong impression, that, you know, it took a few years to
begin to develop your own role within the community. What was it like here?
What did you find?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I came here in 1956 and gravitated to North Beach. I heard about Nate
Oliveira at the Institute; I knew that Diebenkorn was there, Joan Brown was
a student at that time, over there doing some great paintings, Manuel Neri was
around. There was a group of artists about my age that were over there, but
strangely enough I never became a part of that group of people. I don’t
know why that was. I guess it’s because I wasn’t going to school
at the Art Institute, and I didn’t see them socially. They’d come
to North Beach occasionally, but there was no interaction. They hung out in
other bars. I hung out in the main bars up Grant Avenue: The Place, the Coffee
Gallery, the Bagel Shop, Vesuvio’s. And most of the Art Institute students,
at least if my memory is right, were hanging out in a couple bars down close
to Bay Street, right down from the Art Institute. So our paths didn’t
really cross. And I didn’t go to a lot of openings. I was not in the art
scene.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you thought of yourself as an artist.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean you moved here with a self—conception as artist. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . to set up your career.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I painted signs in North Beach to make a living, and I showed my paintings
in the Coffee Gallery and The Place, the bars out there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, you did?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. I had my first one—man show with The Place where all the poets
had blabbermouth night on Monday night. I had my first one—man show there.
My second one—man show was at the Coffee Gallery the year it opened. I
had the first show in there. And I was doing my best to paint every day, and
I sold encyclopedias at night and painted signs for a living. Encyclopedias
were. . . . Oh, that was black time, oh boy. But I did pick up sign jobs, and
I was able to squeak by. Had no extra money, but I did have extra time. I had
time. And I realized then that that’s all I would ever have is time. And
not that that’s any great revelation, but I realized that, you know, whatever
I did with my day, the more time I could save to do my art—or at least
think about it or play around with it—-the better off I was going to be,
so I didn’t really have a straight job. I worked as a janitor: Maxine
Keetering’s coffee shop, right above Manuel Neri’s studio on Grant,
the corner of Grant and Green. It’s still there. But I was not in what
you would call the main hot stream of young artists, which was strictly Art
Institute.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, did you know about them? I mean. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I knew about them but I didn’t know them.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And it’s interesting, now as I look back, I’ve never been. .
. . I wasn’t a part of it then, which is probably in a way very helpful.
. . . I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had assimilated
over there. It’s very interesting. But I steered clear of that, and I
remember seeing one of the art annuals, Art Institute annuals at the San Francisco
museum, and I saw these paintings by Joan Brown that just knocked me right out
of my socks. And I was at that time 25, 26. Joan must have been 22, 23, maybe.
And they were so dynamic. There were [also] some Diebenkorns in that show, and
some Bryan Wilsons—-and they were so dynamic that that left me perplexed.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, it gave my work another perspective. It made me feel very insecure;
it made me not want to deal with the Art Institute in any way, because in a
way it became threatening.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You were intimidated?
FLETCHER BENTON: Intimidated. I was very intimidated, yes. So I continued to work even more
so within my own self, my own shell. That kept me from having the opportunity
of being closer to that whole scene. So here I am 35 years later, 34 years later,
just. . . . I know all these people now, but I’m still just as isolated
now as I was then. [chuckling] Also you asked me in general what was the art
scene here. The art scene was very, very good. I can’t think of her name
now, the woman who was the director of San Fransico Museum who went on to a
directorship in New Delhi, India. She was. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Morley, Grace McCann Morley.
FLETCHER BENTON: Grace Morley.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: I knew her not well, but I knew her. But what was going on then was foundation
stuff. It was good stuff. It was straight—up ball stuff. I mean it was
people like [Mary] Keesling, and all these people that were here in the community
that, because of what’s happening now, have now drifted away from San
Francisco Museum, were building the museum at that time. There was some charter
thing where the museum and the Art Institute were under the same charter. I
only know that when I was teaching at the Art Institute I was on the last committee
that dealt with the Art Institute annual at the San Francisco museum, and that
was the first year [Gerald] Nordland came there. I remember Jerry telling me
their budget was, at the San Francisco Museum, was $75,000 a year including
the elevator operators. That was the last year we had the art annual. And I
remember feeling this sickness in a way. I was on the art annual’s committee
at the Art Institute, as I just said, and we realized that it was time not to
have it any more because certain political things were happening. John Coplans
had come here and pulled a deal where he juried the show one year and selected,
I don’t know what it was, five or ten or fifteen artists to show the following
year as invited artists. And all of a sudden, there was a kind of a corruptness,
a kind of a controlled competition, that a lot of the artists felt very badly
about. John Coplans was not a contributor to the San Francisco art scene. In
my estimation he was a user, and the only thing he really did that was positive
was he was involved with the Artforum magazine, along with Jerry Nordland and
some of the others. But. . . . So it was, that was the last Art Institute annual.
And that annual was probably the most important show on the West coast, for—we
never used the word then, but “emerging.” I mean, there were no
emerging artists then. We were young artists. But it was a show where the young
artists could be selected, juried in with some of the older guys, and it was
wonderful. Because you could, as I grumped about on our earlier tape, you could
see what was going on. You had some overview of things. And I don’t know,
I guess [it was] after Grace Morley things. . . . John. . . . Oh my goodness.
John. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Humphrey?
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . Humphrey was there trying to hold the thing together, and when Jerry
came [Gerald Nordland], Jerry was able to remodel the museum, which I thought
under the circumstances was a monumental task.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Because of funding?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: _____ the money for it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, funding, money, opposition, the whole thing. It was probably a greater
coup than them getting a new museum now, what Jerry Nordland did. So he stayed
for a while and then Henry [Hopkins] came, and Henry left, and now we have the
great corporate image running our museum, and we’re off on the generic—museum
track. And. . . . So to get back to your question, it was a hot time then. There
was support for young people. There was energy and vitality. And, you know,
I think even what vitality and energy we have now comes out of the Collector’s
Forum and a few groups around the museum that really are these same people who
were doing it then, you know: Byron Meyer and. . . . That, again, that core
group of people. God knows what’s going to happen when they go their way,
or if they all abandon the San Francisco Museum, and I know some of them that
have already done it. ‘Cause these people are old war horses, and they’re
wise, and they’ve seen it from the seedling to, to maybe it getting all
cut down into timbers now. So it was a different time. The art dealers were
dealing in art through a dedication and an interest in the artist. And there
was a camaraderie amongst everybody that I don’t think exists so much
now. The artists don’t even congregate so much. The art biz is biz, biz
only.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So even though you say that you, at least in the beginning, didn’t
have a lot of contact with art students, I mean, the Art Institute group, in
fact, or nonetheless, over time, after a few year anyway, you did feel part
of a Bay Area art community, regardless of the direction your work was taking.
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s not true.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: [I, I’ve] never felt a part of the Bay Area artists.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, okay, then let’s clarify the. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Because my connection with artists was more social than. . . . And saying
hello and recognizing each other. But to be, to move with Roy DeForest and Joan
Brown and Manuel Neri and all those guys down the pike together with Bob [Robert]
Hudson, Bill [William] Wiley, and the rest of them, I was not going on that
road. I was never included in that sort of California thing.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, but. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Or Bay Area thing.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you did describe a situation which you found more positive than the
situation now, and you mentioned, you used the term camaraderie, and that there
were a group of collectors, there was Grace McCann Morley, there were the annuals,
and so whether or not you were personally. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But that was not a concentrated group or. . . . It wasn’t what they
call the Bay Area art scene. When you say “the Bay Area art scene,”
it’s like saying “the New York school.” You know, it really
narrows itself down to kind of a given. What I was talking about was not a given,
but the lack of a given. By the cameraderie meaning that the museum would work
with the Art Institute, there would be juried shows where everybody could submit,
and they would be juried and put in the San Francisco Museum as a juried show.
And my memory is that those shows were fairly wide open, until Coplans came
along and felt the need to tighten everything up, and then it just choked itself
to death.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So the operative. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: They were introduction shows. It gave each young guy a chance to put his
[or her] stuff up there—you know, if he was lucky. If he didn’t
get it this year, he might get in the next year. But there was always that hope
that it would get out there and get juried and everybody would get to see it.
Not true anymore. Not at the museum level. There’s no such thing—that
I know about. And there never was in Oakland.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So what you’re describing then is, when you talk about a positive
situation here, at the time you arrived or shortly thereafter, it was really
an openness. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . an availability of opportunities to show, whether or not you were
part of the group you’re describing as the Bay Area school.
FLETCHER BENTON: The museum was serving the community.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: It is not serving the community in that way now, nor will it ever again.
It’s gone.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, how did you come to. . . . Maybe I’m making an assumption here,
but you talk about some of these patrons and then collectors, those who are
interested, supportive of Bay Area art—or art that was being produced
here, and artists, emerging artists. . . . Presumably some of the people you’ve
mentioned made connection with you at some point, whether it was Byron Meyer
or, you know, anybody else like that. Did this come about. . . . At some point
you were discovered or acknowledged, seen, as somebody working in this area.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you recall?
FLETCHER BENTON: Not exactly. What happened was, there were a few artists, there was Diebenkorn,
Bryan Wilson, myself, and some Sacramento artists that were showing at Gump’s,
at that time—and that was pretty much the premier gallery. . . . Then
Dilexi [Gallery] came along, and Dilexi picked up the harder core, sort of what
we know as the California group now, Roy DeForest. . . . Oh, gosh, it fails
me right now, but the really avant garde. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, Ron Nagle, or [someone] like that.
FLETCHER BENTON: Ron Nagle, right. Those guys were showing at Dilexi. I did Dilexi’s
gold leaf work on that first gallery.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You did?
FLETCHER BENTON: Designed their logo and painted on _____. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: So that was your _____ _____ [history].
FLETCHER BENTON: That was my closest connection. But out of the support groups in town, there
was a hard—core group, the Mary Keesling/Byron Meyer group became a very
hard—core group. And Rene DiRosa, and later on came into that as a hard—core
supporter of California funk and northern California art. They never collected
my work. To my knowledge they were never particularly interested in it. I didn’t
fit into that, you know, to their collecting scheme, which is fine. But there
other people in town that did collect my work. Names that have since passed
by. The Haases have been very supportive.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Which ones?
FLETCHER BENTON: Evie, and her brother, and the children.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: Of course the Haases, without the Haases there would have been no museum
to go generic. And I’m sure that. . . . Oh, no, and I’m not sure,
but this [new developments at SFMMA] must be very enlightening to them.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is it possible for you to explain—or did you think about it at the
time—why you and your work would attract the interest of certain individuals
rather than others? It’s something you’ve thought about. Certainly
you were looking for an audience, you were looking for collectors, I would guess,
you were showing in a gallery.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I was a decent painter. And I think if I had stayed with it, I might
have found my way as a painter of some note. But some events happened. Nineteen—fifty—nine
I went to Europe after a semester of teaching at Arts and Crafts [College of
Arts and Crafts, Oakland]. I stayed at the Cite ‘ University briefly in
Paris, and then I took a studio outside of Paris, traveled all over Norway,
Belgium, Holland, Germany, on a motorcycle, did all that stuff. Came back to
New York, and I won’t go into those details now, because you may want
to know about them later.
PAUL KARLSTROM: We’ll go into it later, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: Then I came back to San Francisco, had a show at Gump’s. First kinetic
pieces. Show was taken down because it was considered to be obnoxious, obscene,
whatever.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, we’ll talk about that in detail.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I stopped painting, I stopped everything. A year or so later I started
doing the kinetic work, and all of a sudden I wasn’t in San Francisco
anymore.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I was lifted instantly out of here to an international status. And so I
never had a large number of collectors here to start with. I had this big kinetic
thing. A few [collectors] bought the work here, but not many.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Certainly not Mary Keesling and Byron Meyer and those people. So then I
came back to San Francisco, had another catharsis, stopped the kinetic thing
and started doing my stuff that I’m doing now. I was doing just the opposite
aesthetically of what the California Bay Area school was doing. Theirs was drip,
splash, and bump, and I was doing shiny, bronze, highly resolved, machine—looking
things. So I alienated—I was more and more [alienated] from the local
group than ever before. And actually it’s probably only been [in] the
last two or three years that my work has become a little more salty, you know,
a little saltier looking. No matter what I did, I could never sync with what
was going on here. I was always out of sync. And that’s okay, because
I’m glad that I was not so influenced that I felt a need to fall in line
with the movement that was going on here. And I didn’t deliberately reject
it. I always carried on with what I was doing and I didn’t want to contaminate
it by what might have been more beneficial for me artistically here in the Bay
Area. Didn’t interest me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, thanks for reminding that the period we’re talking about now.
. . . Certainly after your arrival in the Bay Area you were operating as a painter.
Because again, most of us tend to think of you as a sculptor, and this is something
of course you’re gonna talk about later.
FLETCHER BENTON: I’ll tell you something that’s very interesting. I didn’t
start doing three—dimensional sculpture seriously till 1978.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that’s amazing.
FLETCHER BENTON: I bought my first welding machine in 1978. I did kinetic sculpture, but
no welding; it was all glued together. They were considered to be wall pieces,
two—dimensional. So from 1978 to, what are we now, ‘89?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Eleven years. And it’s been an exciting eleven years.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I think it’s important to remember that you really did start
out as a painter, and through your evolution there—again, we’ll
talk in much more detail this—but it seems that there was always a return,
some connection to wall pieces, that your interest in paint, in color or _____
_____.
FLETCHER BENTON: Some of these [pieces] are two—dimensional.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, yeah, exactly. But anyway, getting back to the situation here, you
were almost abruptly, through opportunity and historical chance, moved into
a different expression, one that moved you almost entirely out of the prevailing
Bay Area setting—which in a sense precluded collecting by these very supportive
patrons whom you’ve mentioned but that seemed to have a real interest
in the regional expression. So it’s almost academic, you know, it wasn’t
even a judgment. It seems to me there really isn’t much of an issue involved
here. You went your own way. You went a different direction. And that determined
probably to a large extent then much of your subsequent career in terms of your
relationship to the Bay Area.
FLETCHER BENTON: Definitely. If that hadn’t of happened, and I had remained here, it
would be interesting. I don’t know what would have happened.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You said you were interested Joan Brown, whose work you saw, and do you
remember what it was? Do you remember what it was about the work that you saw
that struck you that way? Because you seemed to, from what you said, you were.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . it had a power. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Tremendous impact.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What was it? Do you recall? Was it something you could express?
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, I do recall. First of all, I didn’t know Joan Brown very well
then. I mean, I wasn’t even sure when I’d see her at openings that
that was her. But she has these penetrating blue eyes, like the heavens, you
know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: She was always very attractive. [She] always made me stand a little straighter.
Well, anyway. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Back to the work.
FLETCHER BENTON: She had a huge painting that was figurative and it was done with a palette—knife—a
painting knife. It wasn’t a real palette—knife, it was a house painter’s
scraping knife that she picked up these luscious gobs of paint with and put
these palette expressions on the canvas to support and shape the figure. It
was beyond David Park. Beyond. Park’s color was always a little dirty.
This color was. . . . It was beautiful. It, you know, I want to say acidic.
I guess it was acidic. The reds were acid. The yellows were acidic. It was rich,
dynamic, big, powerful.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What year was this, do you remember?
FLETCHER BENTON: ‘Sixty—four, maybe, ‘2, ‘3, ‘4?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Where was the. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I’m not sure.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Where was the exhibition? This was what, a one—person show with _____
_____?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, it was the art annual.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Art annual. Early sixties.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think it was the year Bryan Wilson won first prize, got drunk, made a
fool out of himself at the dinner. I don’t know which year it was.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay. Anyway, you saw this work and. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Jay DeFeo was painting then.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean all these people were there, at these annuals. Now if you could have
had the experience of seeing one of these annuals, I mean, today it would be
the most exciting thing that ever hit this town . . . the annuals that were
happening in that period of four or five years. Dynamic work.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What I’m trying to get at here though is your relationship either
on. . . . On a personal level you’ve already said that you didn’t
have an involvement with these artists for one reason or another. And so you
would never describe yourself as part of that gang, despite the fact of course
that you know many of them now, and some of them actually have been here in
this very room, so that’s not an issue—but that’s a different
thing we’re talking about, more of a social thing. And you also stated
that you were really impressed by some of the work that was being done. And
yet I gather you didn’t seek them [the artists] out or in any way feel
that you needed to in your own work reflect these currents that were going on
here. Is that right?
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s true, and I think if there was anything that caused me to hang
up my brushes and get rid of everything—which I did literally; got rid
of everything, slashed most of my pictures—was that group of young artists.
Roy DeForest. . . . I’ve never told them that. Roy, Joan Brown, what Diebenkorn
was doing, and Nate Oliveira, and all those people. There were days that I’d
go to my studio and work and I’d see the finished product on the wall,
and I’d compare it to what I saw at the annuals and, you know. . . . And
I was in several annuals, by the way. And it was heart— breaking. I just
finally said “to hell,” you know, “I can’t go any farther
with what I’m doing.” And these people were booming on down the
road, and doing what I would have liked to have done. And I just hung it up
and went a different way. I probably would have done that anyway. I’m
not saying that they caused me to be where I am today.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I understand.
FLETCHER BENTON: But what they did was very inspiring and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, inspiring, and I gather also discouraging to you.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, discouraging, right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Both at the same time, right. So I would have to, from the basis of what
you said, I would have to say that the work that was going on, particularly
of these younger people here in the Bay Area, had a very important impact or
influence on you, and not quite in the way one usually suspects, which is then
an attempt to absorb Diebenkorn’s _____ and imitate him. That in fact
it pushed you in a different direction.
FLETCHER BENTON: Further away from them.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: It really did.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s interesting. So what was—I think we would have to say—what
was a discouraging or frustrating experience for you, in fact turned out to
be quite positive in your development.
FLETCHER BENTON: As we sit here and look back on it, yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: I still have this wonderful passionate love for painting. . . . Oh, boy.
Well, can’t do everything.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, we’ll talk later, at some point, about the differences between
the two: the 2-D and the 3-D. But moving on—you’ve described a situation
here in the Bay Area, mainly in terms of painting; what about, what did you
find around you in sculpture, in three-dimensional work that you recall? What
was the situation with sculpture? By that time I imagine some of the funk [art]
was beginning to develop.
FLETCHER BENTON: _____, the ceramic things were going on. DeForest was doing his marvelous
things. [Pete Voulkos and Bob Arneson.] [Jack] Zajacks was working around, but
not close enough here to make any difference. Isn’t that funny, I can’t
think of many sculptors. The names. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Let me see that book.
[Tape 3, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: We were talking about the situation that you encountered when
you moved here to the Bay Area. We talked a bit about painting and your relationship
or, in some cases, lack of contact with the prominent features or communities
here, your interest in painting. And you were beginning to talk about the situation
with sculpture, what was going on here that you were aware of. And maybe you
can recall some of the things that interested you? Presumably stimulated you
to pursue some of your own directions.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, those are good questions, Paul. I suppose the hardest
thing I have, the hardest question I would have to answer now is who influenced
me. At this point looking back at my work, who influenced my work? I don’t
know. To tie that in with your question, since I jumped from painting into the
kinetic art thing, which was dealing with the surface of metal and the sterality
of the. . . . Sterality, that’s not right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sterility.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . the sterility of color and space and time and all that
stuff. My work was very highly polished, very finished, very machine-like. I
don’t think any of the sculptors influenced me in the Bay Area. I liked
very much what [Robert] Hudson was doing. I liked what [Wilfred] Zogbaum was
all about. I liked very much Roy DeForest’s three-dimensional pieces.
But there wasn’t any strong influence that I can recall.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you weren’t aware. . . . Well again, I don’t
want to put words in your mouth.
FLETCHER BENTON: No. No, ask me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Were you aware of sculptural activity, or activity in three
dimensions, in the Bay Area?
FLETCHER BENTON: Um mm. [negative]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, did you feel. . . . Was there anything that really struck
your notice?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, not really.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you know of say Jacques Schneir, for instance, working over
at Berkeley?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I didn’t, until a few years ago. [chuckles] I kept
hearing the name; I didn’t make any association between the name and work.
No. I knew about John Battenberg. I knew Sam Richardson was doing some three-dimensional
pieces in resin. Bruce Beasley was casting aluminum, and then went to some other
type things. But these were more contemporaries. And at that time, from about
1963 to 1973, that period of ten years, what I was doing was so removed from
they were doing anywhere, except for just a couple little pockets in the world.
Not that it was that great. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: _____ _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . but it was just odd what my preoccupation was. It was
kind of a machine art. And there were people doing machine art pieces. There
was the aesthetic of several artists, but they were mostly Italian and South
Americans.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you, what you’re saying is that you were not stimulated
by any sculptural activity here. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . to move you along in the direction that you took.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, Bruce Nauman. . . . Bruce and I showed in American
Sculptures of the Sixties. That was the show of shows.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And of course I’ve always liked the Claes Oldenburg things—less
so now than then, but they were very dynamic then. And [Donald] Judd was doing
his stuff, and you know, there was. . . . I wasn’t swept off my feet by
any one particular person.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sounds to me like you were more interested in, more influenced
or affected by, some of the painting of the people around the Art Institute—you
mentioned Joan Brown—than by anything that was going on in three dimensions
in sculpture here.
FLETCHER BENTON: True.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But I absolutely have to ask you about this, because we’re
talking about what is known as a fairly historic time in connection with sculpture,
certainly with ceramics in the beginning—and that was in 1959, Peter Voulkos
came up to set up the [ceramics] department at the University of California.
He had been down at Otis and that story is well known. A lot is made out of
that. The official view is that he had considerable influence on the area, on
the Bay Area. He came up here, and most of the initial work I believe was with
ceramics, and it would have been fairly early on that he started casting in
bronze and building some of these larger pieces. My question is: Did this have
anything to do with you at all? Were you aware of it? Did it make any difference
what Pete Voulkos did?
FLETCHER BENTON: I was very aware of his bronze pieces. I was very taken by
that series. There were some that moved me very much. I do not care for the
piece down in front of the jail [San Francisco Municipal Court, Bryant Street]
down here.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, that we drove by today.
FLETCHER BENTON: Right. The piece the San Francisco Museum has, very nice piece.
The Oakland Museum piece, dynamite piece. I’ve seen a few of his maquettes.
They just are so wonderful. And, yes, I think he is very important. But he was
casting; I never cast. My things, I had one cast piece; I didn’t do it.
My pieces were fabricated; it’s a totally different process. A different
way of thinking. Pete is the artists’ artist. And he is, is still to this
day, the man we all love and respect. I mean, he is the king. And, but no, I
wasn’t close to that group of people.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you certainly. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: There were a few others working at Berkeley, but. . . . I mean,
there was Harold Paris. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Harold and I have shown together from time to time. I was not
close to Harold, but we did see each other. We did talk. He was a very neat
guy, you know, he loved to talk and have a good time, and tear ‘em up,
and. . . . I think he was very innovative. I think he was frantic about being
recognized. But that’s okay. So was Dali. [both chuckle]
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s an interesting connection: Dali and Harold Paris
_____.
FLETCHER BENTON: But I was not a part of the Berkeley school either. I mean,
I really. . . . The more I’m pushed into the corner about where I belong,
the more I don’t know where I belong. I’m all of a sudden becoming
very interested to find out myself, and I’m sure if I’m asked enough
questions and talk long enough I’ll find a spot, but I’m sure somewhere
else [other than the Bay Area].
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, there are two parts to this and, you know, being aware
of individuals and their work in no way says that that’s equivalent to
your position, or that you have to necessarily fit with Peter Voulkos or Jeremy
Anderson [chuckles] or anybody. But one. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Jeremy. By the way, Jeremy Anderson: dynamite. I liked his
work very much.
PAUL KARLSTROM: He was doing some interesting things at the time, I believe.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, terrific. The wooden pieces.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And there was actually, if one expands the definition of sculpture,
I think there was really a lot more going on around here. It seemed to be a
mixing of sculpture and painting to a large degree.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm, yeah. And found object and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which may or may not have something to do with your work. I
hope that we can talk about that a bit. But it does occur to me that at least
it’s a possibility that Peter Voulkos showing up here had to set some
kind of an example, or call attention to—what’s the term we can
use?—the physicality of sculpture, the assertiveness, its occupying space.
And, you know, my chronology of his work isn’t all that good, but at some
point he started doing some rather large-scale pieces which. . . . Well, I don’t
know; there had been Benny Bufano. I was going to say it hadn’t been done
before in the Bay Area. That’s not true. There is some tradition of large-scale
sculpture here. And what I am asking you, what I need to know, is did his [Voulkos’—Ed.]
presence and his work in any way, as a model or an example, of the possibilities
in sculpture, have any effect on you?
FLETCHER BENTON: I think that he was doing these things told all of us that
if the desire is there, it can be done, because Pete did it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Like a, sort of like a role model, in a way.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, exactly. Even today he affects me that way. He is such
a powerful person. The best.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what we’re trying to do here—and it’s
necessarily a slow process, because you. . . . Because you—let’s
face it—you admit, you’re not sure how you fit in. You’re
curious to find out.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I’m certainly curious to find out. That’s what I’m
doing here. And it’s not exactly a process of elimination, but it’s
a groping, and what we do is turn first of all to the most obvious things—and
we may get a response there, may not—but the most obvious figures or developments.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But could I just say one thing, that you can pick up on later
if you like?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think what San Francisco and Bay Area has done for me is
give me the freedom and the opportunity to be whoever I am. And I know that
sounds maybe like a trite little statement, but I truly mean that. I was sitting
here thinking, what if I had not left Jackson, Ohio—which we’ll
talk about—probably the biggest influence on me was in a back alley in
Jackson, Ohio, to set a scene.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Good! Boy, now we [take] _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: But if I had left there and gone to, for instance, Louisville,
Kentucky, or maybe to Cincinnati or to Columbus or to Dayton or some, something
within the compass of my realm at that time, would it have challenged me? The
Bay Area challenged me. The very fact there was so much going on and so much
good art challenged me not to be so much a part of that, but to push me to be
whatever I’m going to be. Good or bad, you know. I was very aggressive
about making some kind of statement. And I believe very strongly that the more
I did, the more I would find out who I was. So I’ve been very prolific,
constantly trying to get enough in front of me so that I could make a judgment
on myself. San Francisco allowed that to happen.
PAUL KARLSTROM: One of the things that I believe characterizes the Bay Area,
perhaps almost uniquely, is an enormous capacity for experimentation—often
failing, by the way, coming very short of the mark, but nonetheless this wide-open,
imaginative environment. And I would suspect that this alone—and this
is really following up on what you’re saying—but this alone would
serve as an enormous general influence without the specific influence of any
individual.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, I’m smiling because it’s like one big
Bay to Breakers situation, you know, really. [laughing]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that’s an interesting analogy!
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, it really is.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You can’t say that any of the runners or costumes in the
race necessarily specifically had an impact or influence on you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And they don’t really compete against each other; they’re
just sort of stimulated by each other to, you know, to get some, to get to the
end of the race. [still laughing]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. That is an interesting analogy. And certainly the spirit
of Bay to Breakers. . . . Which I suppose certainly to whoever’s listening
to the tape, because they may not know that this is this giant [annual] race
that’s become sort of like a gigantic city party, street party, with some
serious racing [runners] but basically San Franciscans just doing wild things.
And anyway, this analogy seems very appropriate, very apt because there can
be an environmental influence on any individual that isn’t tied necessarily
to the breakthrough or the discovery of the work of any individual, but each
of those individuals is contributing to this ambience.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And, unless I misunderstand you, you’re acknowledging
that this ambience is probably critical to you as a creative person.
FLETCHER BENTON: It wouldn’t have happened in Dayton, Ohio. And it wouldn’t
have happened in Columbus, Ohio. And I’m not sure it would happen in Kansas
City. [laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I think not. I mean, I hope what we’re agreeing
[to] here is that this quality of imagination and experimentation and sort of
free-wheeling, gutsy, try-everything approach, which is characteristic of this
area, made for a very fertile environment for you.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, there’s a lot of attention given to San Francisco
through the poets.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, that’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: And through the musicians that came through. I mean, it wasn’t
just the Art Institute.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But basically, we see now that you really don’t feel.
. . . If I asked you how do you fit in to this situation in the Bay Area—and
I think you basically answered it—you would say, “Well, really not
at all.” There’s no individual with whom you identify. You certainly
weren’t collaborating with anybody. You don’t feel directly influenced
in an important way by any individual. And so there it is: how do you fit in?
Well, comfortably but not specifically, in terms of direct influence. You don’t
fit in.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think that’s fair.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: If we have to measure art in decades, and decades and centuries,
and artists by their locality, regional or otherwise, and by their influences,
well, I don’t know where I am. I don’t believe in that, by the way.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And that’s all right, anyway. There is another idea California
art—even beyond this Bay Area art. And I think. . . . I [almost] hesitate
to bring this up, because I think it’s something that we’ll grapple
with throughout the interview—and this is not an attempt to put a label
on you; I’m not interested in that. But we all draw from various sources
and in different proportions, and the fact is that you’re associated with,
you reside in California, you’ve made a conscious choice. You have connections
with Southern California as well. And there is this idea of California art.
For you, what is that? Whether or not you see yourself as part of it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I can answer that very well. I know if I was doing sculpture
in New York, it would not be like it is here. Because the very physical part
of getting a sheet of steel from the guy that sells it to my studio was—ground
floor or otherwise—is a major, major job. And the fact that, you know,
I would probably be working with small pieces of metal, which are drops and
so forth that I picked up from some fabricating shop. I would probably have
very limited welding equipment. I probably would be doing mostly pedestal pieces.
If I did do a big piece, it could only be done when I got a commission and I
could have Lippincott build it. Whereas here, I have the luxury of calling up
and having a semi-truck pull up in front of my studio, we get that steel off,
we bring it in the building, and we can take those flat sheets and make anything
we want out of it. I don’t think that’s true in New York. In fact,
I am dead sure it’s not true in New York. Serra probably takes his paper
maquettes to a steel guy and says, “This is what I want,” you know.
“Make it happen.” I know Tony Smith did that. Because Tony told
me personally he did that. He had models, he took ‘em to Pace, Pace took
‘em to Lippincott, and Lippincott built ‘em, and that was it. In
fact one show Tony said he didn’t even know what was going to be in the
show, and I said, “Why is that?” and he said, “Well, I don’t
know. I gave the models to the gallery. I don’t know which pieces they’ll
put in the show.” He had no idea what was going to be in the show. Because
his control was gone soon as he’d finished the paper model.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And if you look at his work, you can see there’s no accident
in it. I mean, it has to be what it is. There’s no chance for chance.
Whereas in my work as I’m doing it, I quite often change it. There’s
a little bit of chance in every piece I do, a little bit of discovery, little
bit of that stuff, you know, that’s fun. It goes beyond model making and
paper work and, and/or that sort of thing. I think. . . . That’s what
California’s given [me]. It’s given me the ability to do whatever
I can afford to do here with no restriction—or little restrictions, or
not as many restrictions—as New York or Chicago or some other place.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what you’re talking about there, of course, is very
practical, the physical side of it. You know, what the environment allows you
to do, and also the economics involved. The [time] and space.
FLETCHER BENTON: But that sometimes determines the direction artists take indirectly.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, it molds them into different. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: And this certainly applies in the area of sculpture where you’re
involved in, it involves heavy material, space, the business of moving things
around, and working materials. And obviously that’s very important. But
what about something a little more ambiguous and perhaps spiritual, and that
is the idiom of the art of California? Is there something in the, in California
art—whether it be sculpture or painting—the expression here, that
might differ from elsewhere. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: There is.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . that you would respond to.
FLETCHER BENTON: There is. In California you don’t have the pressure and
the restrictions of conformity that you have in New York. We talked about it
earlier.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: It doesn’t exist here. It does exist in New York. That,
there’s so many people there. There’s so much going on. There’s
all the art magazines, the powerful art dealers are there, the museums, and
everything else is there. Therefore the pressure is equally geared to that.
You don’t have that in California.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you don’t feel though that there’s any theme
or type of theme that runs through expression in California art? I realize it’s
not all the same.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, I think there is.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That would distinguish it from art produced [out of] state.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think if you took ten New York artists—and I think
you would agree—and ten California artists, and you mixed ‘em up
in a show, you can tell exactly which was New York and which was California.
PAUL KARLSTROM: How would you tell that?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, with me it’s sort of just a gut feeling. It’s
like visual Braille. . . . There’s a freer [sensibility in California].
A lot of people say, “Well, the light is different out here; therefore
the colors are paler.” Well, I don’t quite go along with that. I
mean, it, maybe there’s more color here. [pauses, thinking] Interestingly
enough, one might say California is a casual place; therefore the art should
be more casual. I disagree with that. I think the art is infinitely more formal
in California than casual. You think about that. It’s a very interesting
statement for you to think about. Ed Ruscha, typical example of what we were
talking about earlier. If you look at his work, it’s highly formal.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Billy Al Bengston, very formal. Chuck Arnoldi. If you really
look hard, it’s very formal.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I agree, but of course you realize. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Now, in New York, it’s less formal.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think I would agree, but it’s interesting that the examples
you cite are all Los Angeles artists. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, that’s. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and I wonder if you would say the same thing about the
Bay Area.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I would not. I’m. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think that’s interesting.
FLETCHER BENTON: I wasn’t even aware of.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think it’s interesting, and I think it’s extremely
revealing, because I would venture. . . . I would ask you, straight out right
now, do you feel more of a rapport with the expression in the Los Angeles area
over that in the Bay Area?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, if I had to choose, I would say, where do I belong, here
or there, I would have to say in Los Angeles. But I don’t feel I belong
there either.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, but you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But more so.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Because you’re talking about formalism and all that, and.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It has to do with. . . . I think if you’re very casual,
you need to tighten up a little bit. If you’re very uptight, you escape
through loosening up. And, you know, there’s a thread that runs through—this
is very personal thinking, as far as I’m concerned—works of art
that stimulate me—and that thread is invisible yet revealing in many ways—that
has to do with classicism, classic. . . . I don’t want to use the word
“formal.” I want to say classic. You could push me to formal in
certain areas, but it’s a classic sense about things. And I think that
as casual as Californians are, the art out here, with one exception now—you
know, on the funk people up here, that whole Art Institute thing, is very New
York. And the reason it’s very New York is the New York people came out
here and planted all their seeds. [Clyfford] Still, [Mark Rothko—Ed.],
all those guys who left their mark so indelibly at the Art Institute that even
to this day it’s not erasable. You paint over it, it bleeds through the
paint. And there’s no way it goes away. So in a sense, California, whatever
the Art Institute represents, may not be California. It may be New York. What
was transplanted here by those key people.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s very interesting what you’re saying, because
I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that many observers. . . . You’re
taking a slightly different perspective of it. Many observers talk about L.A.
art as [in terms of] an L.A./New York nexus or network. And that it’s
exactly on the idea of, well, minimalism. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Minimalism is not New York. In my opinion.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, there’s certainly some connections there as well,
but what you get is the L.A. artists dealing with New York issues. Like post-painterly
abstraction was much more evident in L.A. and in New York than in the Bay Area,
that the Bay Area seems to diverge on those issues. You get somebody like a
Ron Davis, for instance, or Craig Kauffman, and all these people that the criticism
of the time, of the sixties, would invariably [connect with certain] issues,
concerns, so-called major issues. The Bay Area almost never was mentioned in
connection with these issues. Anyway it’s food for thought because what
you’re doing is presenting a kind of a twist on this, which is provocative;
it’s interesting. A different way of looking at it.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, San Francisco’s a very Frenchy kind of place.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Frenchy?
FLETCHER BENTON: Frenchy. You know, Frenchy art.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean by that? I have to bite. I have to bite. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, you know, it’s kinda. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean like Paris?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. It’s Frenchy. It’s. . . . Los Angeles is
not Frenchy.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: San Francisco’s a little Frenchy.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You think in a way Los Angeles art is in fact more open, and
San Francisco art, despite the openness of opportunity, is more closed or introspective.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and turning on itself?
FLETCHER BENTON: Very much. Very much.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which of course is, to my mind, absolutely the total opposite
of your work, and your expression—which is, well, it’s basically
a very clear statement. Well, it’s not my business to say what I think
[it is].
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, of course it is. Why not?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, because the interview is with you.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But I do know that, once again, the way you percieve or describe
characateristics of Bay Area art, usually it’s in terms that are quite
different from the way I think you percieve your own art, or the way I’ve
just described my own response to it. So there is an interesting, really quite
a gulf, that seems to separate—at least at this stage anyway—that
seems to separate your work from the prevalent mode here, and that in fact one
could draw more evident connections with some of the expressions in Southern
California, some of your colleagues, people that you know.
FLETCHER BENTON: I’m certainly closer to John McLaughlin than Richard
Diebenkorn.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Great artist to be close to, John McLaughlin.
FLETCHER BENTON: I made a special trip to meet him. You know, another interesting
thing about. . . . I think, the Los Angeles scene and the San Francisco scene
are as far removed as what was going on in Italy and what was going on in France,
you know. At any one period you want to choose. [chuckles] It was similar but
quite far apart. The interesting thing about the West coast and the East coast
that I’ve found—that is to say Los Angeles/San Francisco connecting
with Boston or New York or whatever; leave Washington [D.C.?—Ed.]—I
have found that New York artists are the greatest describers of their art of
any group. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Very verbal.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh! Terribly verbal. I mean, New Yorkers, you ask anyone that’s
an artist there to talk, and they can talk your arm off. I don’t think
Californians are too good at talking about their stuff. And most of my artists
friends that I see regularly, we never talk about art stuff.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: My Los Angeles friends I love and see, we never talk art stuff.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You know, I think that’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: And you being an art historian, many of these people are your
close friends. You go out with them, you don’t talk art.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Never.
FLETCHER BENTON: You try to do that in New York.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I know, I know.
FLETCHER BENTON: _____, you’re dead. [laughing] I mean, it’s like
two-thirds of their statement is what they have to say, verbally, about it.
[laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, we’ll pursue that, because I think it’s an
important distinction.
MAY 3, 1989
[Tape 3, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Fletcher, yesterday we talked about, oh, a number of things.
We dwelt a while on the issue of regionalism, because you are a San Franscisco-based
artist. And then we began to move into your experience in California, your recollections
of what was here when you arrived and what kind of interaction you had, one
way or the other, with other artists, with the art community, the patrons, your
response to painting, your description of some of the things that interested
you, what was going on here, and then we were beginning to talk about sculpture,
because of course there was a point when you began to shift from the two-dimensional
and finally some of the work which brought attention to you. I gather that this
really for you began to happen in the early sixties, this shift from painting,
I mean, the flat surface, two dimensional, and beginning to move it. And which
was a very important time. There was that big exhibition: Sculpture in the Sixties,
I think it was called. And I believe you participated in that show? That was
at L.A. County Museum?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. So just to give some historical context to this, the
sixties seemed to be an important decade for some developments in sculpture.
More attention was perhaps being paid at that time than before. What I would
like to do is get, briefly, your view of the situation. And that means American
sculpture, not just Bay Area, but American sculpture at the time that you began
to become involved. And if I may I’d like to start out by reading what
Tom Albright—the late critic, Tom Albright—who wrote of course this
important book, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945 to 1980 [Thomas Albright,
Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1985, p. 137—Ed.], that’s what I’m quoting
from, his observations on the situation at that time, and then just get your
reaction to it. See if it stimulates any thought. So I’m quoting Albright
here:
There were several reasons why the physical nature of sculpture had a strong
appeal to artists in the early 1960s. In an age when so many kinds of artistic
expression were competing for attention, it was a sure-fire attention-grabber.
The new connoiseur of contemporary art was young, impatient, and on the move,
and one caught his attention with art that he might trip over or bump into,
art that physically moved by itself or threatened to engulf him. Much contemporary
sculpture was therefore a branch of show business. Beyond this, sculpture seemed
to offer more new avenues for exploration than painting did, and seemed more
responsive to the expansive mood of the times. Space-age technology produced
an entire range of new materials and processes: titanium and fiberglass, vacuum
forming, computer programming.
Okay, that. . . what do you think about that observation?
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, I don’t think it’s true at all.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, why?
FLETCHER BENTON: As far as the space-age materials, I don’t know of any
artist that was exhibiting about, that was into what would be space-age materials.
Fiberglass, body putty, stuff like that was not space-age stuff, you know. I
mean, they’ve been making the Corvettes out of fiberglass long before
that. Boats. It was a very common thing. As far as those people that were doing
kinetic art that’s so slightly referred to there as show business, I think
that’s not quite fair, because there weren’t that many and I think
they were using motion not as an attention-getter, but more an artistic ingredient.
In fact, the whole kinetic movement was based on the fact that time and space
were being used as aesthetic elements. I was trying to get to Naum Gabo, and
the manifesto that was written I think around 1919, 1921, that said essentially
that along with the Futurists, the poets, and the whole thing going on that
they no longer accepted art as purely two-dimensional, three-dimensional statements,
but considered the fourth dimension of time and space. So, no, it simply is
not true. It’s a clip; it’s a foul to say that. I mean, his statement
is more an attention-getter than the [supposed] show biz involved [in what]
the artists were doing, that’s according to him.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What then would be your description of the situation in the
early sixties as you became involved.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think the sixties reflected the breakaway from the New York
school and Abstract Expressionism. And I think the sixties will show some giants
but it will also show miles and miles of Italian chrome and Italian polish and
Italian thinking, the Plexiglas. It’s not all Italian, but I use that
because it sort of really did come out of that Italian mentality.
PAUL KARLSTROM: The high-style [in Milan]?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, high. . . . Right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [Lamberghini]. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And if there was anything that was high-tech that Tom is pointing
at, I think it’s directly there, you know. I mean, Italians are the world’s
greatest designers when it comes to that sort of thing. And so there was a lot
of polished metal, and there certainly was a hell of a lot of resin and Plexiglas
stuff. I used them. I used polished metal. I used clear Plexiglas that was painted
with transparent acrylic laquers in order to deal with what I was interested
in: the movement of color and space. And since these art objects needed a frame,
needed something to hold the motors and all the rest of the stuff, I got involved
with trying to make that frame something more than just a plain black box, so
I started designing the frame that hid the motors that made the color move in
space. So I would probably be considered very much a part of that Plexiglas
and shine decade. But there were also, some other really tight stuff came out
of it, you know. Pop Art. Didn’t Pop Art come out of the sixties? You
know, we had quite a few things going on there. But more so, I think the sixties
reflected that the artist was sick and tired of the iron fist [with which] the
dealers of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the New York school handed
the entire country. You couldn’t even show unless you were a part of that
family of Abstract Expressionism. I mean, if you were doing something that was
not related, forget it. You weren’t going to be included in the show.
So when that finally broke the cartel, then there were so many artists throughout
the United States [that] at least had a chance to get their stuff seen. I think
that’s the important thing about the sixties. More than anything else,
they broke the grip that New York had on what we saw in the United States that
was considered fine art. And by the way, there was nothing in sculpture coming
out of New York, except David Smith. I mean, who else?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And he was coming out not in force, but he was making his mark.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Basically you’re saying—well, you’re saying
several things—but one of them is that most of the interesting activity
in sculpture really was outside of New York, that there was really. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, definitely.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . less experimentation, less working with materials and
the three dimensions, in New York city.
FLETCHER BENTON: Absolutely. There was more going on on the West coast in sculpture.
In a three-dimensional statement.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, New York was all wrapped up in earthworks. They were
wrapped up in performance art. And there was the [Marcel] Duchamp influence,
which is the heady thing that New York is always wrapped up in. And I think
California was somewhat free from that. And there was a concern for the object,
for the surface, for the presentation. . . . I’m not going to use the
word slick. That was the word that was used, and when you refer to the sixties
that’s a word [that] keeps popping up. I’m not sure it’s a
fair word.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, but attention to shall we say craft and finish and an
interest in materials. . . . Let me ask you this: Do you feel then that there
were other underlying reasons for the use of some of these different materials.
It does seem to me, or seem to us, looking back, that new materials were introduced
in an imaginative way into art. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But they weren’t new materials. They were new to the
art statement, but they were not new materials.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that’s what I said. That’s what I’m
saying. The fact that they, there has been then, they were chosen, they were
validated. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . to be included in an art statement is important. My question
is this: Was it because of an interest in the materials themselves and in certain
aesthetic qualities that could be achieved by combining them, or were there
other underlying reasons that these materials were used—other than availability?
What about in your own case? Was it that you were primarily attracted to these
materials, or did they seem to do something that you wanted them to do for an
idea? Express or idea, or. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I wanted a clean look. I used a lot of polished metal
because I wanted the encasement of the mechanism to reflect what was around
it. Therefore it had less volume, less visual weight. I mean, there were very
solid reasons why I did that. And also there were many other guys working with
stainless steel, polished aluminum, Plexiglas, and stuff who were doing it,
I think because if you wanted something transparent, you were foolish to use
glass because it breaks. There’s only one other thing you can use, and
that’s a clear Lucite, a clear Plexiglas, you know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Very practical.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, they could get transparency and not get breakage.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s also lighter.
FLETCHER BENTON: But that wasn’t the reason. The reason was breakage.
I mean, all the framers started using Plexiglas. There was some big thing about,
you know, the artists have turned to plastic.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What did you. . . . Go ahead.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I think they used stainless steel and a lot of aluminum
because the metals did not rust. And stainless steel could be glued. There was
some space-age glues that were used in fighter aircraft that had very high temperature
strength and very low temperature strength. And especially with my work, I could
attach stainless steel. I didn’t do any welding till 1978. All my sculptures
were glued together, essentially, over wooden frames. Some of the people I knew
that were working in these metals—there was a certain respect for the
material. You had a respect for stainless. You had a respect for bronze. You
had a respect for aluminum. Steel is forever. It’s a heavy metal that
can be abused. You can do damn near anything you want to to steel. And you can
go back and fix it. It’s a marvelous metal. It’s a metal that can
be violated. And there just was not anything going on in New York, that I’m
aware of—there may have been a few little pockets of stuff—that
dealt with any other metal than steel. And it was usually put together. You
see, you can weld steel with a very inexpensive device. They’re called
crackerboxes and slang for a little stick welder that you can buy for a few
hundred dollars. And at least you can stick steel together. So if you could
find small parts and get a little crackerbox welder, you could do it in your
room or wherever. It ran off of 110 voltage. And you could stick little pieces
together. So there were little pieces stuck together and painted. The metal
was never anything more than something that could be melted together and be
free-standing. It was not a metal that was respected or used for its surface.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think the only artist that was doing anything. . . . Now,
I shouldn’t say only.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But one of the few.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, in the fifties, was this guy [Lassau], you remember him?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: That soldered little pieces of [brass together].
PAUL KARLSTROM: [Ibram].
FLETCHER BENTON: Ibram. [No, that’s not right. OR: Lassau _____.] . .
. It’s called tree sculpture.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Marisol was doing great things. Mary Bauermeister was doing
what? I mean I think Mary Bauermeister and Marisol were the two leading women
artists—along with Louise Nevelson. Marisol and Bauermeister were, I think,
probably getting more recognition. I could be wrong about that. I probably shouldn’t
say that, but they were certainly up there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: These are the ones that you were aware of.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. And Mary Bauermeister was the poet, you know, was the
person who was thrown in with the Constructivist movement, who worked with lenses
and worked with distortion and worked stone. She worked with beads and all sorts
of things that she was able to assemble, and she would put them in boxes and
then draw in the boxes. Are you familiar with her work?
PAUL KARLSTROM: I’ve seen a few things. I’m not real familiar, no.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, if you get a chance, you should try to dig into Mary
Bauermeister. She’s still alive. She was married to [Karlheinz] Stockhausen
[the composer]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, yeah?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah [chuckles], it was her second husband. And. . . . But
Mary Bauermeister was very talented. She’s not doing any more work that
way. She’s doing gardens. She’s designing gardens and so forth in
Europe. And is not with Stockhausen any longer. And Marisol we all know of her
work. I mean, I thought she was terrific. And Louise Nevelson, the dynamic things
that she was able to accomplish in her lifetime.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Were you familiar with Nevelson’s work in the early sixties?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Because it occurs to me that she had surfaced, so to
speak, and was actually—well, this may be, this is more the myth—maybe
late sixties, was visiting California, certainly had become pretty well known.
I seem to remember that this was about the time that she became prominent.
FLETCHER BENTON: But she didn’t use metal [until] well into the seventies.
Right, and I’m sure there’re many more. I haven’t done my
homework, Paul.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that’s all right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I bet if I picked up a book I could find lots of examples,
but I don’t think sculpture was doing that well. I don’t think it.
. . . When Tom [Albright] referred to it [he indicated that] everybody was jumping
on the bandwagon. What I personally think caused everybody to jump on the bandwagon
in terms of sculpture has been the fact that certain communities have a one-percent
law for the arts, and I think the fact that architects were putting more stuff
out in front of their buildings, and all of a sudden you have Sculpture International,
and you can see in one issue maybe fifty, sixty fabricators—art students
who have gone out and couldn’t make it so they make other people’s
art.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Foundries, fabricators, what-have-you, installers. So to be
a sculptor these days, you can be like Tony Smith. All you need is a card table,
pair of scissors, some glue, and paper. You stick something together, send it
off to a fabricator, and he builds it for you. There are very few sculptors
in this country that are committed to the full process, where you’ve got
it all hangin’ out. There just aren’t that many. If I were in my
right mind, I wouldn’t be doing it. You can hear the grinders going down
there right now.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, I know! [laughs]
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s probably ruining your tape.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh well, as long as we can hear what you have to say. [chuckles]
It’s sort of part of the ambience.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. Well, I chose to do my own fabrication because I didn’t
know any better. But now that I’m committed to it—and believe me
I’m committed. I mean, it’s just a bottomless pit of dumping money.
There’s no, you never have enough money for it. I do have the benefit
of saying, “Wait a minute. That’s wrong. Cut it out, take it off,
throw it away, or change it.” If you’re sending it out to a fabricator,
you don’t have that opportunity, unless you’re willing to pay through
the nose—and where every change is triple the cost.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is the difference that. . . . I mean, you do have people assisting
you, because you have a staff.
FLETCHER BENTON: They’re all artists and, yes, they do help. A lot.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But is the difference the fact that they are working directly
with you, under you, here on the premises, and that in many of these other cases
the design goes out and really that’s the end of the direct involvement
of the artist.
FLETCHER BENTON: True.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is this what you’re describing?
FLETCHER BENTON: True. I mean, the artist goes there and stands around, and
you’ve seen Louise Nevelson up at Lippincott walking around and with a
grinding shield over her face, and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: She’s an observer, though.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, sometimes you’ll see her take a, strike a weld,
or do something, but believe me that ain’t doin’ it. But you go
there and you look and see what somebody else has done. You point a lot.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles] One of the things—not that I want to keep invoking
Tom Albright—but another observation he made, difference between, you
know, East coast and the West coast, along the lines perhaps of what you were
suggesting just now, is that the West coast sculptors, artists, tended to be
more involved, actually working with the materials. The artist, the creator,
actually grappled, if you will, with the materials, and that this was really
quite unusual, to find, in New York—or maybe in Europe; I don’t
know about that. _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, let’s think about that. I mean, just think. . .
.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, let’s _____. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I think he’s right. I think he’s dead right. Edward
Lucie-Smith brought up a point, which I have since given quite a lot of thought
to, that painting in the United States definitely [has] umbilical ties to Europe
and European painting. Sculpture in America does not. I never thought of it
that way, but I believe that that is true the more I think about, that the sculptors
came out of a can-do society. The British call it can-do; we call it do-it-yourself.
I mean, the guys, most of the guys that were working in sculpture, came out
of all sorts of model airplane building, hotrods, the car, romance with the
car, with the assurance that they could, if they wanted to do something they
could figure out how to do it themselves. Whereas in Europe, sculptors don’t
do that. Sculptors have foundries that they send their work to. They’re
not involved in the process of actually doing it. So. . . . I believe that is
the case and therefore those people in New York, those three-dimensional people,
didn’t have the opportunity to be as involved in the work as we do on
the West coast. Why? One, because it’s a seasonal place. And if they’re
working outside they’ve only got so many months out the year they can
work outside, if they’re doing anything of size. If they’re in and
around New York city, chances are they aren’t even going to have enough
space to do too much. Their materials are limited, because of, as I mentioned
yesterday, getting the materials to and from a supplier in New York is no simple
task—especially if you’re an artist who doesn’t have a lot
of money. You’ve got to go to scrap yards, you’ve gotta find metal—however.
And then, you’ve got to get it in your studio and when you get it in your
studio, and when you get it in your studio, you have to weld it. Then you have
to grind it, then you have a neighbor saying, “Why are you grinding? It’s
getting dust all over my couch. It’s way too much noise. Take that shit
somewhere else.” So that there is really no freedom there. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: That comes back to the idea of freedom, which we were talking
about.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. So the West coast guys had freedom and the New Yorkers
were calling it the frontier. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which is everywhere out of. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: In Pennsylvania, wherever you were. I mean, there were other
places, but since we were really referring now to the West coast as opposed
to the East coast, out here, as you know, we have separate buildings. You can
go rent. . . . We have industrial parks. I don’t think they had industrial
parks in the sixties back east. I could be wrong, but I’m from the east;
I don’t remember industrial parks. That’s a very California thing.
So you could go rent a section in an industrial park.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And not bother anybody.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s right. The guy next to you may be, may be doing
body work. The guy next to him may be laying up fiberglass for a boat. So you
come in there and weld up some steel and do some grinding, who cares? So we
had. . . . The physical part, that is required to be a sculptor and have the
freedom, was already here. So it did make a difference. I mean, we were not
restricted the way they were on the East coast—or the way they are in
Europe. The farther east you go [chuckles] the more this is true.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s interesting, and it raises the question of what
you mentioned, car culture, and that is associated with most of America, but
outside of New York city. That which is quintessentially American is not really
a part of what is supposed to be America’s great urban center.
FLETCHER BENTON: [Certainly].
PAUL KARLSTROM: And you also mentioned fiberglass and working up the hull of
a boat, for instance, in this industrial park you’re talking about. And
it raises an interesting question, which I’d like to put to you. Do you
feel that American recreation—I’ll use that term, recreation—leisure
time, tools and instruments of leisure time—and I’m going to use
the automobile as an example of that, not just transportation for work—but
something in which America enjoys itself, moves around, boats—obviously
that’s evident—finally, surfboards. These different tools of pleasure
and recreation, do you see a connection between them—they are three-dimensional
things; some of them move—and the development of certain attitudes towards
sculpture and the time we’re talking about? First of all in general, but
in your work.
FLETCHER BENTON: In the sixties, [you mean]?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. What do you think about that notion?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I just wanted to say one thing. We talked yesterday about
how I never really fit in out here.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, I accept the fact that I didn’t really fit in
in California. And to this day I don’t fit it. That’s okay. It’s
a beautiful place to live. I don’t need to fit in. That’s not why
I came here. But I was thinking as we were talking that I am somewhere between
my developing years in the East and the freedom of the West.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You were born where?
FLETCHER BENTON: In Ohio.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I think that I am probably more in my thought process an
East coast or European thinker than I am a West coast. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Really!
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. I think I am. My ties are closer to the whole Constructivist
thing that’s going on in Europe, and I think that my materials have ultimately
reached a substantial, traditional group of materials. But that’s not
what you asked me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, but I. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I think the surfboard, sailboard, roller skate board, the dragsters,
and all that stuff does have an effect on all of us. I mean, just the aircraft
industry alone. The center of it is California. The movie industry and that
whole thing in the fifties and sixties with the cars, the beach, the broads.
You know, I mean that’s. . . . No offense, I’m using a sixties term,
everybody.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, after all, we’re talking about the sixties.
FLETCHER BENTON: Right. But I think it goes back again to what Edward Lucie-Smith
brought out, as we were talking one day, and that is the pioneer spirit that
came here with the pilgrims and all that baloney, and it’s built the country,
and that it’s done all these great things, has been a pioneering spirit
that’s not dragging along a lot of baggage. And I think that, especially
in sculpture, this is true, that the sculptors here, the guys who are working
with their hands and making something that is three-dimensional, are not dragging
along a lot of traditional baggage. So in a way they don’t have to overcome
their tradition, you know, their social boundaries. I mean, we have no tradition
here in sculpture. None.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Would you say that this is more true of the situation in California.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . on the western frontier. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It is more true.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . than the East coast?
FLETCHER BENTON: We are more free here. We have less tradition here, because
the people in New York city—and I don’t even want to use the East
coast. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: All right.
FLETCHER BENTON: The New York scene is directly tied to Europe. I mean, the
European collectors for years didn’t know California existed. They still
aren’t coming to us. So they come to New York and they stop there. They
buy and reflect and are turned on to what they relate most to, which is the
European way of thinking in art. You know, it’s the. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: You said a moment ago, upon reflection, [that you] feel more
tied to the East, and finally to Europe, than you do to. . . .
[Tape 4, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I asked you a question a few moments ago, before we had to change tapes,
that had to do with your comment that you felt, despite your long residence
here, fundamentally more tied to the East and perhaps even to Europe than California.
And I’m wondering if you can explain what you mean by that—and hopefully
beyond the fact that you’ve been involved in making your own sculpture,
fabricating, which we’ve already pointed to as a non-New York, a California
habit. So that would [seem to] undercut what you said. There must be some other
reason that you feel more tied to Europe and to the east. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I don’t know of many sculptors that came to the West coast and
became West coast people, you know, that were able to absorb the beach, the
sunshine, the freeways, the car mentality, the movie mentality. Except I know
that Chuck Arnoldi came from Dayton, Ohio, but. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, a lot of these guys were. . . . Well, DeWain [Valentine]
came here from Colorado. How can I answer that question? I live and work here,
but my aesthetic has more of a classical sense to it. At least I think it does.
I don’t know if other people feel that way or not. . . . There’s
a certain traditional kind of classic direction that I try to achieve. And I
think it’s. . . . Did I use the word traditional? Because I feel [that]
is important in my work. And you might say, “Well, what do you mean by
traditional?” and I’m not sure I could tell you. It may be because
of the geometry, maybe because of the way I compose and deal with forms and
space. But I do try to achieve a classical sense about it. I think that that
sense is more, is certainly more European, and in a way I think more eastern.
What do you think of that? I mean, do you see what I’m saying?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I think we. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t know if I can be specific. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I’d like to pursue this a little, but of course we’re using
terms that you almost have to come up with your working definition at the moment.
But you use the term classical and I am suspecting you want to contrast that
against its so-called opposite, the romantic impulse, and that presumably from
what you say you would associate much of California art with a kind of romanticism,
well, rather than certainly classical ideas of structure, and this kind of thing.
More emotional, and the classical is more formal and structural. Is this. .
. .
FLETCHER BENTON: I think that’s very fair. I’m glad I asked you, because you
said it pretty good there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I’m an art historian.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh. [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: But do you feel then that your work—describing yourself—is
devoid of emotion? I mean, in our earlier conversations I got the sense that
there was this important force running through it, in terms of your artistic
intention to a degree, which was emotional and subjective, seeking a kind of
response.
FLETCHER BENTON: I am seeking a visual response, yes, and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: But not an emotional one.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, what. . . . Well, let me ask you a question. I mean, I would say it
was emotional.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, for me it is. If you look at something and you feel good about it,
do you consider that an emotional. . . . I mean, you feel moved by it, or good
about, or you feel at rest with it, do you. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: At rest. At rest is a good term to use for the classical.
FLETCHER BENTON: Or you feel turned off by it. Is that considered an emotion?
PAUL KARLSTROM: The classical. . . . We could really get into a long discussion.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, but I’m, we’re talking about emotion. I’m
trying to say that I’m dealing with geometry, and that is about as pure
and unemotional as you can get—unless you want to get back to when the
guy and the gal fell out of the trees and put some pebbles around the ground
and drew a circle and pointed up to the moon or the sun. But no, geometry is
very unemotional, but I think it can be assembled and put together in such a
way that their relationships to each other get some emotional response. It may
be similar to—back to music—what you might feel emotionally when
you get a series of notes that stimulates you, or something like that. It’s
not a big thing, you know; it’s. . . . I mean, you can’t take geometry
and get the emotional impact that you can with romantic elements, you know,
the romantic school, certainly.
PAUL KARLSTROM: There’s a wildness and sometimes a sense of, well, even chaos, and
certainly energy and activity that one associates with the romantic direction.
There’s no absolute involved in here. But with the classical—again,
trying to relate it to your work and your goals—I would suggest that the
classical tends to, certainly evokes a response, but it’s one of organization
and order, an underlying order in things.
FLETCHER BENTON: Ah. Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which then can be a reassuring thing, something to hold onto. I would say
romantic tends be often more disturbing, playing on the emotional side, unstable,
as opposed to classical, which is, again, more of a carefully constructed sort
of. . . . Rooted, tied down to a foundation, to give you some bearings.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, let me say this. I. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Please disagree if I. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, no, I think that’s very good. I try to set my sculptures up in
such a way that if you removed any part of it, it can’t, it’s not
what it was. So that each element needs to be there. Now to arrive at that point,
is sometimes very difficult, difficult for me. They may look. . . . Parts of
them look random, and I suppose the test is to remove one to try to prove the
point. The piece still exists with the same visual impact, but that element
removed or another, or something else added to it, then I haven’t done
what I started out to do. So, yes, it is order, it is balance, and in some of
pieces there’s humor—at least for me. They make me laugh sometimes.
Not always. And in others it’s very serious, it’s very heavy and
very serious.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What are the issues involved? Everything that has been created is focusing,
for that moment anyway, on a certain idea, on a certain goal, a certain objective,
a certain theme or issue. And although you touched on this in our conversations,
I wonder if you could plunge right in and try to describe that in connection
with your own work. You mentioned [just] now some of the goals, or some of the
responses that you’re hoping to elicit from the viewer. I hate to say
this, but I have to: What is it fundamentally about? Or is it just one thing?
What’s your main objective?
FLETCHER BENTON: Why I’m doing sculpture?
PAUL KARLSTROM: In the work itself. What’s the theme, if you were pinned down?
FLETCHER BENTON: There is no theme.
PAUL KARLSTROM: “The theme of my work is.”
FLETCHER BENTON: There is no theme except I suppose that I. . . . No, there
is, there’s really no theme that I’m consciously aware of. That
each piece has to find itself. You know, I start—I have elements I’m
putting together, I’m trying to get the family together, you know. Sometimes
I can’t do it. Now you’re asking me, “Well, what do you mean
by getting the family together? What do you mean by creating something that
the order is fixed, and if one thing is removed it no longer has the same order,”
and all these things? I don’t quite know how to answer that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That is the question, of course.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. I don’t quite know. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why do you want to. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Why do I want to continue to do what I do?
PAUL KARLSTROM: To do that?
FLETCHER BENTON: Because I get a certain visual pleasure out of getting these
things put together in such a way that I feel they’re right and can’t
be changed. I get them to a point where they can’t go any farther and
can’t be any less. It’s a sense of—God, this is a word that
is really so outdated—but I’m trying to find, I’m trying to
find the best composition of a certain amount of given geometrical forms. Now
maybe that’s not enough for one to spend a lifetime trying, but it interests
me very much. And I think the better I do it, the more you as the viewer will
unconsciously have a response to it. You won’t even know what that is,
maybe. It’s almost a secret thing, saying, “Well, gee, you know,
I don’t like that piece.” “Why not?” “Well, I
don’t know why not. I just don’t like it. There’s something
that bothers me about it.” Or you might say, “I feel very good about
the piece. I like that piece.” “Why?” “Well, I don’t
know. I just like it.” To me that’s enough. I mean, if you. . .
. Well, I’m gonna say this, and it sounds boastful, but it is not. And
I think it’s telling me something; I hope it’s positive. But I again
and again and again have people who come here to my studio who are interested
in getting a piece of mine, and when they get here they can’t make up
their mind.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Now I hope that’s good. It might be bad. You know, I mean, it could
be bad. After they’ve left, in some cases, they haven’t taken anything,
because it was very confusing for them, and that they couldn’t just light
on one piece. Other times they have taken more than one piece because they couldn’t
make up their mind. They’d get two or three pieces and they would take
them, instead of just one. And time and time again people would say, “God,
I have a feeling about a lot of your pieces. I just don’t know what to
do about it.” And they expect me to tell them. I can’t tell them.
But I can say to myself, “That’s what I wanted.” You know,
I wanted the work to be each piece as, taken as far as I can take it. So that
it’s, it stands by itself, without too much question. I’ve had other
people say, “Well, you know, you should throw in something there to, you
know, some burr in the bushes.” Something that’s a little out of
whack just to. . . . Instead of having everything just where it should be, maybe
there should be something that isn’t where it should be.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What you’ve described, at least as I hear it at this point, is really
a fundamental respect for composition and, if I dare use the word, design. We
talked about design earlier. We talked about the emphasis of Italian design
on much of art of the sixties.
FLETCHER BENTON: That is a word I don’t use. But if you want you may use it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, let me use it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Okay.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And then you can counter with whatever word is better, because
that’s what we want to find out. But up to a point what you’re describing
as a goal, or what you’re after in your work, is to achieve that balance,
that composition, of elements—you’re working with geometric elements.
These then become elements in a design, in a composition, and that what you
want of them, what you require of yourself, and of the finished piece, is that
they come into harmony, they come into balance so that if you, as you say, remove
one element, it would be wrong. That, to me, sounds like a goal of really superb
design. How would you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, you know, I don’t consider design a fine-art form. So I don’t
use design. I use composition. . . . That’s it.
[Interruption in taping]
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I have to keep going back to things we talked about yesterday, and
that is music. I feel that I am dealing with givens. I’m dealing with
visual notes. And I try to put those visual notes together so that they represent
chords, they represent timing, they represent crescendo, they represent very,
very abstract things about music, about the musical note. I mean, people try
to describe the musical note. You know, a high might represent, might be like
a bird. Or a bass horn might be like a villain. Or whatever, you know, Peter
and the Wolf thing, in school and how they tried to explain all that stuff.
I think there are birds and villains in my work as well, but hopefully they’re
in some sort of concert, some visual concert. As far as my work having a message,
or some deep meaning, no. It doesn’t have it as far as I know. And it’s,
I’m not driven by some deep concern here in the. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, let’s try another tack on this.
FLETCHER BENTON: Okay, good. Because [I’m having] trouble.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And I certainly don’t mean to be, use the term design
in any kind of a negative or perjorative way. It’s simply useful to suggest
an impulse, which has to do with organizing elements in a way that if that is
the main goal—the organization of these elements—one thinks, at
least, of the term design. But let’s set that aside for a moment. Presumably,
in making art, the artist has a notion of art that separates it from, as you
were saying, from design, that there is a difference between fine art and design.
If many of the goals seem similar, in a superficial way, then the question arises,
what finally separates it, other than the fact that the artist is, calls himself,
herself an artist, and says this is art. This of course is a pressing question
of our times. There is something that allows you or assures you—in fact
I imagine you would be rather strong about this—[that the] things you
make, are indeed art.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why is that so?
FLETCHER BENTON: Because I’ve put together the pieces the way that I wanted them put
together.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know, the old joke: It takes two people to paint a painting. One to
paint it and another one to come along and hit him on the head when it’s
done. And I try to be those, both those people in these pieces. It gets to the
point where I’m hitting myself on the head and I say, “That’s
it. You know, you’ve gone as far as you can go.” You can’t
take it any farther. And. . . . Well, this is really a. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: This is a big question. I realize that. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: All of a sudden I think about the [Robert] Bechtle article I read that you
wrote.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And then I jumped over to Richard McLean, the photo-realist, and a few of
those guys. What’s the difference between what they do and the photograph
of which it is of? I mean, is that art, or is that illustration? Some say it’s
a good question. It’s illustration. All right, okay. Let me take this
tack. I’m going to say something that I really believe. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, go ahead.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . I mean, you really got me in corner here, and I’m
thinking about it, and I’m drawing from the benefits of teaching, which
is you stand up year after year and you talk to [the] students and all of a
sudden you surprise yourself with something you’ve said, you know, they’ve
brought it to the surface, and it all of a sudden has meaning to everybody.
I think those artists who are nonobjective artists, those artists who work without
relationship to object, have a greater task than those artists who are working
with recognizable shapes, forms, objects, emotions, intuitions, suspicions,
and all that other stuff. Because the nonobjective artist has no place to launch
what he’s doing from. A person who is working with the figure or landscape
or still life or whatever has a common place to launch it from, something that
is recognizable—for everybody. Then how he deals with that becomes his
personal interpretation of it, leaving the viewer standing there more or less
able to give to the painting whatever it is they want to get from it, in some
case, you know. It’s not that they’re gonna stand there, look at
this thing, and get the same emotional feeling that the painter had when he
distressed something that was recognizable. You know, I’m thinking of
say Manuel Neri. He takes the form, he distresses it, he paints it, he interprets
it in his way. If you took ten people who didn’t know Manuel Neri and
walked them by that scupture and asked for ten responses you’d get ten
different answers. And if Manuel was there you’d get an eleventh. So it
becomes very subjective when you are the viewer interpreting a painting or a
sculpture. Well, it is, even if it’s nonobjective, but what I trying to
say is that the nonobjective artist has to establish certain rhythms and certain
abstract common denominators with the viewer that the guy who’s doing
the, the gal who’s painting in a realistic way does not have to deal with.
Do you see what I’m trying to say?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I do.
FLETCHER BENTON: So that in my case I’m not establishing a distressed
figure as Manuel is. I’m not starting with it. I’m starting with
nothing. Except geometry. Now I’ve got to get that stuff together in such
a way that there’s a response . . . that there’s a response. And
the better I can organize these shapes, hopefully the stronger the response.
And the response may be nothing more than, as I said before, “You know,
I like the way that looks.” I keep thinking of Ben Nicholson. I really
like his work. I like his great color sense. There really isn’t a hell
of a lot there, if you start taking his work apart. Yet when he gets it together,
with these very soft grays with a little bit of white, and another muted color
here or there, and the cut shapes or the delicate lines, the puzzle lines that
go through the piece, all of a sudden it has meaning to me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, meaning. Meaning. You just said the key word. The goal is to somehow
communicate or to point to, flush out, some meaning. And. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But you’re asking me, “What is the meaning” and I don’t,
I can’t tell you.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, but we should try. I mean, I suppose that’s good enough for
a starter, or maybe for an ender; I don’t know. But that, I think you’ve
now suggested or hit upon something that in your mind would separate design—craft
if you will—from art, what makes it art. And in this case, it is to try
to communicate or invoke some meaning. [Let’s, Just] think of [a, the]
world view. I mean, why is that an interesting activity? Why does that matter?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think if you can reach a great sociological grouping,
with nonobjective statements, you’re going to reach a more common and
honest feeling in all of those people than if you try to reach them through
recognizable realistic statements, because each social group has a different
[feeling] about women [than this], different feeling about religion, a different
feeling about this and that. I suppose you’re. . . . Still lifes are common
with all societies; they can appreciate a nice still life. I think the geometry
of every, of every society, which comes forth in their coinage, comes forth
in their architectrue, comes forth in their fabrics—the most primitive
[basic?] part of that society. I’m thinking of the Middle East, and. .
. . [Topography, Typography], it always shows up there. You try to touch a universal
thing. It goes back to music. I don’t care how far out the social group
is or whether they’re playing on a reed or beating on an oilcan or whatever,
when the rhythm is right, everybody can respond to it. It’s really the
most common, basic. It doesn’t have to be Bach. It can be the primitive
in the woods pounding on a log.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you’ve just introduced another word, which I think is very important,
and that is the concept of the universal.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now I don’t want to say. . . . You’re going to need
to say this or agree or disagree, but it’s based on this conversation.
It seems to me that your artistic goal is to try to apprehend or try to approach
this notion of the universal, this thing that ties us all together, this shared
experience. And that is a very noble and very traditional artistic goal. That
defines the artistic aspiration or mission, whereas no designer I think is going
to claim that he or she pursues the work with the goal being to provide a bridge
or a contact, some touch, with a universal. Am I overdoing it, overplaying it?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I think design many times has to do with function.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Or advertising or. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Or whatever, but it has a function. Whereas nonobjective art is different
from design in that it has no function except to be what it is. Period. It has
no reason for being other than what it is. That is not true of design ever.
Ever.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Of course that’s an art for art’s sake notion. That the object
has an identity of its own, is responsible only to itself. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Sculpture especially. [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. Interestingly enough, as you probably know, ideas about that are changing.
The notion of art for art’s sake is not exactly in the highest credit
right now. Many observers, people that care about this kind of thing, require,
demand of art, as a matter of fact, that it connects to us as human beings.
We don’t. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, who says this? The National Endownment of the Arts?
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, no, no, no. A lot of art historians and a lot of critics and a lot of
artists.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, what. . . . Well, tell me about it, because I’m so isolated
here, I don’t know what you’re talking about.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I’m just suggesting this, to see what your response is to that
notion. The idea of art for art’s sake, of course, goes back to the late
nineteenth century, [and maintains] basically that the object can, has worth
and validity and importance separated from any other considerations, even separated
from people, if you will. It has no responsibility except to itself. And we
heard that in the sixties, if you’ll recall. Talk about a sixties phenomenon,
that it was self-referential, the work of art. And that is absolutely fine,
like it or else. I would suggest that the times have changed. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Ah, I get it now.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and that we are requiring more of art and artists, and
I don’t think that the two are incompatible. I think it’s just a
matter of how you describe it all. But the notion—and I don’t want
to beat this one to death, but I think we’re on to something—the
notion of something beyond even what you described as the initial goal in your
work, which is to work with these geometric shapes, to bring into harmony, bring
them into balance. Hopefully that will evoke a certain kind of response, or
a response. That that is simply a step. In other words, the finished piece is
a step to something more, a goal that goes beyond that, and you keep coming
back to a notion of some universal, so I have to believe this means something.
This universal has interest and importance because it applies to human beings
and to mankind. And so the art finally could be viewed as not in the service
of itself—art for art’s sake—but in the service of the needs
of civilization, of what makes us a civilized society, that it is something
that contributes to our lives, and to our culture. Does that sound way too fancy?
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [Okay.]
FLETCHER BENTON: I am dealing really with the eye.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Not the soul?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Not [the mind]. . . ?
Tape 4, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Fletcher, when we ran out of tape on the other side, you said that you were
dealing with the eye, and then I asked you not the soul, not the mind, and you.
. . . That was a question, and you were beginning to respond. Could you pick
it up there?
FLETCHER BENTON: I am dealing with the eye. And, you know, you’re getting into me deeper
than anybody has, Paul, and you’re forcing me to really think this out
a little bit more. In order to do what I do I don’t need to have answers
to the questions you’re asking. But, yes, it is the mind and it is the
soul. But it’s, it’s an uncluttered mind that I’m trying to
reach. And in a way it’s an untarnished soul. It’s. . . . I find
children respond very directly to my work. They respond to the color, they respond
to the shape, they respond to the interest of, “Oh, does that really move,
that circle hanging there on that thing?” Maybe, maybe, maybe what I’m
trying to reach in everybody is the innocence, a sense, a sense of an uncluttered
statement, a sense that you can look at what I do and not have to be sophisticated.
You don’t have to have, you know, great knowledge of art history and you
don’t have to be able to tie me to somebody, or say where I’m going,
and, I don’t know, all that stuff. But I do think that the mind and the
soul are involved.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Are you appealing then to, oh, a certain important part of what
human beings are and that has to do with the, with a certain simplicity, a less
complicated past. We at least like to think of childhood as a less complex,
less complicated, less troubled time, and you mentioned that you’re interested
in the. . . . Or you didn’t say that; you said the children respond, I
think, in a very special way to your work and that is the kind of thing that
you’re looking for, and presumably then you’d like to touch that
same childlike part of adults. Is that right?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, it’s not something I’d really put into words
till you pushed me to get it into words. I think that’s true. A couple
of things happened to me that as I look back were meaningful. There was a time
I wanted to learn to draw well. I wanted to be a good drawer because there was
a comparison. If you drew well, people could come and say, “Gee, that
looks just like that.” And immediately there’s a recognition as
you having achieved something better than somebody else because it looks more
like it. There was that time in my childhood. There was also a rainy day. There
are going to be many of them, I suppose, but I remember one rainy day, I wanted
so much to go outside with the rest of the kids, and I had a cold or something
and my mother wouldn’t let me go out. She had a new box of crayons, and
she got me some paper, and said, “Take these beautiful colors and make
something.” And I don’t know, that was a big moment. And color has
probably been my, one of the biggest challenges of my life, and I didn’t
find out until I was trying to get in the submarine corps of the Navy that I
was colorblind. I’m about 30 percent red-green colorblind.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Are you really?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, which doesn’t really make much difference. I see
the same greens and reds you see, it’s just that in low light level, or
when you get into very pale shades of grays that have a little green or a little
. . . a little red or a little green in them, I can’t distinguish the
difference. And in dark colors, I can’t tell dark green from dark red,
if the light level’s low. So, anyway. The other thing that I remember
that I hope we can talk about more later, because I’m very close to it
now, is the old man who bought used farm machinery, cleaned it up, and painted
it bright colors for the farmers. And I’ll tell you more about that later.
But he used the primary colors. He had green. He had green. Grass green. He
had lipstick red. He had daisy yellow. He had sky blue. He had black. He would
take that machinery, those farm-machinery tools, there’d be rakes that
were pulled behind tractors, he would take what is known as a disk machine that
has disks, that disks the earth, and he would paint those disks different colors.
The cradle which holds the disks would be a different color. The tongue was
a different color. And there was this harmony of these basic, rich child-like
colors. I mean, they weren’t, you know, the sophisticated secondaries
and emotional whatever the hells. These were just good old red, good old blue,
good old black, good old orange, good old yellow, whatever. And there was something
very honest and direct about that. But it stimulated the hell out of me. I mean,
I would get a reaction when I rounded the corner. . . . It was in an alley,
the small town. We had the typical block, square block, and then alleys that
crossed in the center. So that in this square block, you had this X, and in
the center of this, these two alleys where they intersected the center of the
block, behind all these junky old stores and stuff, was this used farm equipment
place. And in order to get to my father’s office, I would have to walk
through this alley from school. And I had to make a turn in the middle of the
block, and wham! I’d make that turn, and there was this vacant lot full
of pure color. Just always surprised me, no matter what. And I walked by there
so many hundreds of times, I can’t tell you. But if I was thinking about
something, or eating an ice cream cone, or whatever, preoccupied, there was
always the shock of that area of pure color. And what you’re looking at
here, in these steel watercolors when I paint them, it is directly back to that
farm-machinery thing. And I can honestly say that. It doesn’t come from
anywhere else. You can’t hook that up to anything. But that’s where
it’s hooked up. Now, in a way, that is decorating, [okay]. But that’s
what this guy did. He got. . . . I mean, it didn’t make the machinery
run any better that it was painted these multiple colors. But it attracted the
basic people that bought it, the farmers who were very unsophisticated in this
town. The town was four thousand, five hundred people. It was made up of farmers
and coal miners—and a few business people, businessmen, you know. Had
the store, the drugstore, and whatever. And these farmers would come in and
buy this used farm equipment. And they bought it from this guy. Because he painted
‘em bright colors. This stimulated ‘em, it excited ‘em, and
they bought it! I mean, this guy did a hell of a business. So there is something
very basic about color. Any artist will tell you. Color is very basic. And most
art dealers will tell sculptors who don’t paint their pieces, “Well,
give us some color! You know, we need some color. People like color.”
Well, that’s not why I paint my pieces, because there are many that aren’t
painted. But I still get the thrill out of. . . . That piece over there originally
was not painted. I had it lacquered a dark [steel].
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why don’t you say what you’re pointing to so that _____ _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s a steel watercolor that is a circle with a jagged. . . . Well,
it could be a rake, couldn’t it? A farm machinery rake. With little cylinders
stacked on it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What year is that?
FLETCHER BENTON: This is recent, very recent. It’s three months old.
PAUL KARLSTROM: ‘89!
FLETCHER BENTON: ‘89, right! [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: All right.
FLETCHER BENTON: So. . . . The piece was not designed to be painted. I came
to work one day, I was feeling rotten. In the studio I was just rotten, I was
feeling cranky, and, you know, all the crummy stuff. And I, on the second floor
where I have my small pieces, there’s a paint table where I’ve got
all of this guy’s colors. Red, green, blue, orange, turquoise, black,
white, you know. Basic stuff. And I thought, “God damn it. I’m gonna,
I’m gonna get into some color today. I’m gonna paint my thing like
the farm machinery. And I proceeded to go ahead and do it. And it’s happy.
It made me feel good that day. I’m sitting here talking to you, and I’m
very happy to be looking at this piece. I feel. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Me, too.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . very happy to see this piece.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Me, too.
FLETCHER BENTON: I have that same nice, good, clean, innocent feeling I had when I walked
through the alley in Jackson, Ohio, and I saw this guy’s farm machinery.
Now, for me, the artist, that’s enough for me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That is, indeed.
FLETCHER BENTON: That is enough for me. And. . . . What we’re trying to
do is to get into it deeper, to find something deeper there, and I’m sure
there is. And I appreciate you pushing me to that, because if you feel good
and you feel happy about that, and those colors have a relationship that just
make you feel okay, then I’m getting to you somewhere. I could ask you
the question: Where am I touching you? Where does this piece get to you, from
your eye, to your brain, to your soul? I mean. . . . [gets up and moves away
from microphone]
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you’re going to bring it over here, to look at it more closely?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I want to get it because the glare is bad here.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: The colors are a little happier with not so much glare.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You’re absolutely right. There’s something about these—and
I think they’re wonderful pieces. That’s an unsolicited expression
of admiration—and also joy and pleasure. There’s a playfulness about
much of your work, and certainly about these. . . . What do we call them? Steel.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Steel Watercolors.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Steel Watercolors. The reason is that they presumably are the materialization
in three dimensions of the wonderful series of watercolors that you’ve
done.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And we’ll talk later in more detail about that process.
But I think. . . . I think it’s interesting what you describe in terms
of your own response—and motivation—response to these pieces and
motivation in painting them, of taking these colors from the old farm-equipment
painter.
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s like safety blue, danger red. . . . [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right. [chuckles] And the using. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . coverall black.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . of them this way, the response that that gives you, well, I think
it’s very effective. I would say that I feel the same way about them.
They do, they make you feel good. They. . . . I think what you’re describing
really is the bigger issue that we’ve been trying to get at, that which
distinguishes art and the aspirations of an artist, a good artist, from simply
painting up the farm equipment so it’ll be more attractive and attract
the attention of the purchasers, partly because it makes them feel better. But
the goal there, of course, is to move the product.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s part of it. The primary goal. In your case, I suspect
that the main goal was not to move a product, a piece of merchandise in this
case, a sculpture. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . but rather to share with viewers, hopefully lots of them if possible,
these similar feelings and even an assocation with your own past. I mean, you’re
drawing upon your past, your experience. It seems to me that this was a very
important experience of yours. This is something you remember quite vividly.
FLETCHER BENTON: Very.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You described walking by every day. That had a meaning for you, and you
suspect or you hope that it’s possible through your work to communicate
this positive feeling, this constructive feeling, this feeling of pleasure,
with others.
FLETCHER BENTON: I have never told that story before. I mean, everybody [that’s interviewed
me] knows I was a sign painter. But I’ve never told the farm-machinery
story. And it’s interesting because. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s a great story.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, there’s really more to it than that, but that for
starters is a good one.
There was one other thing that happened to me, and it was [at] Cole’s
Art store in Columbus, Ohio. The town that I grew up in was so small that each
year when school started we would go to Columbus, Ohio, to buy the school clothes,
because they had a couple company stores there, and that was about it. We went
to Lazurus and to Columbus, Ohio. That was maybe 75 miles from where my town
was. And to get there in those days, it was a two-and-a-half hour drive, and
I would go with my mother and my brother and sister. We’d go to Lazurus,
we’d get, she’d call up ahead so that it’d be, the same woman
we bought things from, she would take us through the store, buy what we needed
for the year. And then, in the afternoon, there were two things that, three
things that I always wanted to do. One. . . . And I did it on each trip. One
was I would go to the Planter Peanut man, who used to walk up and down the sidewalk
giving peanut samples. He had the big hat on, and the suit.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: And I’d buy a bag of peanuts, I’d go over the state capitol,
and I’d sit on the bench and feed the squirrels. Then I would walk two
blocks down North High Street. Now, Columbus, Ohio, is really a farm burg. It’s
a big place, it has Ohio State University, a great football team, and it’s
the capitol of the state, but it’s essentially one, long road—must
be 20 miles long—and everything grows off of that, like little suckers
on the trunk of a tree.
PAUL KARLSTROM: A strip city.
FLETCHER BENTON: It is a strip city. So I walked two blocks north to. . . .
And I was walking along with these peanuts, okay, and I saw Cole’s Art
Store. And I went into this art store. It was on the second floor. The boards
on the floor were worn from, God, decades of people coming in there and walking.
And they creaked and they had, you know, like the old hardware stores, creaky
floors. And I first discovered this place, I got upstairs, and it was one big,
long room. With glass cases full of colors. Colored pencils, colored chalk,
colored paint. They had, in those days, paint samples, a board with all of the
colors that were actually painted on the board to show you how they would go
from their intensity to their whited-out sense with white. It was like going
inside of a rainbow. I. . . . God almighty, it just. . . . It just really hooked
me forever on—on that world. It was, I just wanted to buy everything.
And I bought a bunch of tempera paint, the jars that you remember probably having
in the first or second grade, a big jar of blue, big jar of red, big jar of
green, the big jar of orange, and so forth. Again [chuckles], the farmer-equipment
colors that I’d had in first grade. Now I was nine or ten years old when
this happened, so I was well out of the poster-paint, first grade stuff. But
still, there were those basic colors that just, boy! So I’ve gone through
enough stuff, and I’m at a point in my life where I’m going back
to—not intentionally, but I’ve sort of slipped back into all those
kind of wonderful, innocent feelings about form and color. I didn’t tell
you about my whizzer motorbike, which I repainted several times, but it’s
not that important.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, your Steel Watercolors that—and I must say this—I don’t
ask them to be anything more than what they are, because what they are is plenty.
In other words, I don’t, I look at ‘em and I don’t try to
figure out what the form represents. It simply doesn’t matter. I mean,
it’s quite clear to me that it is what it is, and it works on me visually,
and I would say, well, certainly aesthetically, I don’t know, probably
emotionally as well. I mean, it’s entirely satisfactory and effective
as it is without being a rake, without being any other known object that you
might think of.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, for me, as we sit here and talk and I look at this thing,
it is a series of decisions that I made. And that’s the fun of being an
artist. To be able to make those decisions. I mean, I go home at night and I
walk in the back door, if my wife tells me there’s something wrong with
the plumbing, or whatever, and what shall we do about it? That very question
means that I have to make another decision. If I’ve been working here
all day, I don’t even want to deal with that. I’ve made all my decisions
for the day, you know, I, I’m out of decisions. So in these pieces especially,
it’s decisions. You’re looking at forty or so decisions. If I can
make those decisions in such a way that I feel they’re the best decisions
I can make about this, then I have something that—it’s not really
sophisticated; there’s an innocence about it. I mean, I could be using
elements, and I could be dealing with sculpture in such a heavy way that it
could create a great sort of mystery, and people could stand there and look
at it and write into it whatever they needed to get out of it. I’m not
that way. I am working toward, I suppose, if we had to say the truth, the child
in every person. A certain innocence, and a certain classical sense of order.
There’s one other thing I wanted to say about this. [pauses, thinking]
Well, I talked too much.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, earlier you said—I don’t know is this is what
you had in mind—but earlier you said you wanted to say something about
I think limiting options. You were talking about selections and choices and
decisions, and how you really want to try to limit them in some way. You were
saying this in reference to painting.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, I know what it was. Thank you very much, because it is
of interest. It is of interest to these, because in most of my work nowadays
it’s that I go way beyond where I should stop, and then the creative,
really the strong, heavy creative thing for me is the subtraction process, the
subtracting away, from going too far. But having been a painter—and I
love painting. I love painting. I just wish I could do both. My emotional demands
are more of a painter than a sculptor because I want instant gratification,
which you can get as a painter. And it’s very hard to get this in sculpture
because things have to be fabricated, welded together, sanded, finished, painted,
whatever you’re going to do with it. It’s a long damn process. Whereas
as in painting, you know, you can have your work up, and you say, “Well,
I don’t like the red up in the upper right hand corner, you can knock
it out with some blue, and change it, push it around, whatever. And as a painter
I was a push, slash, drip, slop, tighten up kind of painter. So I was really
in there moving it around, and there was always the hope, as a fisherman has,
of catching the big one. And I can’t be the only who’s felt, who
feels this, but you hope you’ll have an accident, or you’ll discover
something by accident that will help lead the way and, you know. In a picture
unless you’re a photo-realist or somebody who’s got everything pretty
much predetermined, there are a lot of accidents that happen. But the way I
work in sculpture, I don’t have that chance. You know, it’s not
there, there’s not the hope that [chuckling], “Well, you know, maybe
I’m gonna discover something here that I didn’t put into it, or
by putting these things together they’re going to do something, and they’re
gonna interact in such a way that I’m going to discover something.”
Not true. Not true. Sometimes in painting them, there is a nice relationship
between one color and one shape to another color and another shape. So. . .
. I said earlier that these pieces represent, you know, pretty much what they
are. There’s no accident here. There’s no, nothing like what happens
in painting. And you can sense sometimes when you see a painting where the artist
discovered something and had an accident and it paid off. You know, it’s
not just for the artist to see it. Sometimes it’s obvious. I think Hans
Hoffman had a hell of a lot of accidents.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sometimes not good. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Sometimes not good. [chuckles] And certainly the New York school, they were
dealing a lot with accidents.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You know, Fletcher, what this suggests to me is that one of the things that
you’re seeking is a kind of control. Control, I don’t know if I
would extend it, I wouldn’t presume to extend that to your environment.
But a need to, for one reason or another, which we may probe later, a need to
maintain a control over what you do.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. A lot of control.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which is, fits in perfectly with your notion of classicism and your self-description,
or the description of the work as leaning more towards the classical not the
romantic, because the idea of the accident in our time, the Abstract Expressionist
gesture and spirit, is letting go of that control.
FLETCHER BENTON: Hmm. Funny.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You know, they’re just different ways of dealing with the world.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think we’ll pause now and pick up tomorrow?
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, okay.
MAY 4, 1989
[Tape 5, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yesterday, when we wrapped up, we were getting into what I thought
were some very interesting areas. One of them was, it seemed to me, some acknowledgement
of the importance of your childhood experiences. You just mentioned that as
time goes by you seem to feel that perhaps those early experiences, [and] I
think you said, before you were fifteen, had as much of an impact on your work—or
on you, anyway—as anything that happened subsequently, speaking in terms
of influences. And I would like to pursue that theme a bit, to try to learn
just why you feel that way, and then some specific incidents, or people. Obviously
our childhood is important for the forming of our lives, but you, unless I misunderstood
you, felt that your early life was perhaps the major influence on your work.
So can you explain that to me?
FLETCHER BENTON: If you had asked me that question five years I wouldn’t
have had an answer, but especially in the Steel Watercolors and the fact that
I’m using color again in—and some painted watercolors—but
more so in the sculpture where I’m using a palette again with multiple
colors, I am aware of the effect that this small town had on me. And it was,
it was because most of my interest and my joy was dealing with paint, working
with paint, the smell of it, the fact that I was down in that basement room
that my parents gave me. Painting leather jackets with Vargas girls on them
for the guys, my friends. That was sort of my social recognition of the time,
copying them off the calendars. I was learning the alphabet out of a Speedball
pen book, brush strokes, the. . . . And I was also trying to paint at the time.
Probably from about ten to fifteen, I now am aware of how important those years
were to me. Because I was constantly painting everything in sight. I had a Whizzer
motorbike which [chuckles] was a funny thing that happened right after the war.
They came out with a one-cylinder motor that would fit in the frame of a bicycle,
had a belt drive back to the rear wheel, and was quite a device. Dangerous as
hell, and I had several accidents, and it’s a wonder I’m still alive,
but it was a fun thing. I had a Whizzer motorbike, gasoline-powered thing, and
I used to ride that around town. And I’d put it on an old bicycle, so
being very conscious of the nicked-up old bicycle, I painted the bicycle. Striped
it, did a lot of decorative stuff on it. In a way [chuckles], I mean, that was
probably going on in California with hotrods, you know, at the beach, but I
didn’t know anything about it. I mean, the town I grew up in was forty-five
hundred population of farmers and coal-miners. And I think I mentioned yesterday,
the guy that was painting the used farm equipment, [that] was probably the closest
thing I’d seen to color—other than the sign painter who was very
influential to me, a little bit later on. His name was Bill Hankey and he was
the laziest sonofagun. He was a typical sign painter. He probably was a sign
painter because it was the laziest thing he could find to do, most laid-back
thing.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Bill Hankey, however, was an incredibly good sign painter.
I mean, he was triple-A. He just had the touch. Well, after the war in 1945,
‘46, I went to work with Bill Hankey as an apprentice sign painter. He
taught me the trade. This was after those few years in the basement down there
trying to decipher the Speedball pen book. I think it was Higgins’ Speedball
Pen Book. So there was this particular smell that sort of went along with oil
paint. It was linseed/turpentine smell, and it was, you know, I can even smell
it now, and get so wound up that I could fly. You know, it just sets me off,
it gets me excited, it’s, it’s wonderful. And most of those colors,
especially the paints that I had at the time were very primary colors—as
were the sign colors. As was the used farm equipment guy. So this went on, and
I went into the service when I was eighteen, came out when I was nineteen, went
to college, started looking at museums, started being introduced to the art
world. And I always felt—and it might have been because this old German
paraplegic, who’s still alive, Max Hendershot, who made us copy this awful
calendar art of the forties. . . . One painting that you’ve all seen was
the green bow with the red carnations. I mean, it’s a classic piece of
cornball calendar art. I think, God, I painted that thing half a dozen times,
but. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: When was this? When were you studying with Max?
FLETCHER BENTON: Mr. Hendershot?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: Old Max. I was eleven or twelve years old when I first went
up there on Saturday mornings to be with him. But it was exciting. It was the
only instruction I had. He was the only one around there that had an easel in
the whole county, I think. [chuckles] And my mother had made arrangements with
some character in Columbus, Ohio, for me to study with in the summertime. We
went up to visit him and he was a roaring, roaring gay. I mean, my mother, five
minutes with him, said, “I’m sorry, but we have to go.” We
turned around and left. I mean, it was, this was really, really something, and
of course he was eyeing me. I was a nice, young, little guy here, and. . . “
PAUL KARLSTROM: So your mother really. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . encouraged you, in this way, and then, and tried to arrange
for some kind of training, some kind of guidance.
FLETCHER BENTON: She did. But either through Max Hendershot or through just
my own awareness, I felt the sign painting and the fine arts should not interact.
And it was something I felt very strongly, and it was something that I was aware
of very early on.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now how did you figure that out? Because that’s not. .
. .
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s not the kind of thing that. . . . Unless you’re
in a situation where you’ve had access to museum collections and there’s
a lot of cultural information around, it’s not necessarily the kind of
distinction that one would make. You know, art is art, and very often art is
[simply] if you can render well, make something look like something.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I haven’t been asked that question before, but
my first answer to that is that I pride myself in having a very good eye and
I pride myself in having a tasteful sense. And I mean I was aware of that very
early on. And to me there were sign painters painting paintings, painting pictures,
doing paintings that were was so awful. You know, it was sort of the stipple
[method]: You put the sky in first, and then you stipple the trees on top and
you’ve got the lake with the diminishing road and the. . . And I mean
I was just damned aware that that was not legitimate. There was something just
really awful about it. And I was also aware later on, you know, in my twenties,
that there were fine artists that I’d met or heard about who were doing
signs. And they were terrible sign painters. You know, I mean, they thought
because they could, you know, get paint under their fingernails then they were,
they could paint a representational picture of red poppies in a green bowl that
they could also paint signs. Not so. A sign painter’s mentality is totally
different than the mentality that one has, I think, as an artist. Now that throws
me into a odd set of circumstances, doesn’t it?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Because I was a good sign painter. I was self-taught. I learned
almost everything about sign painting, with the exception of billboard pictorial
art, interestingly enough. I never attempted too much of that. I felt very weak
in that area. And I felt intimidated. And I just would do anything I could to
avoid it. Because the scale was so large, the. . . . It was just overwhelming.
So, I mean, I did a little bit of it, I reproduced. . . . I remember [Wheat-a-men]
beer logo, which had an eagle on it and a bunch of other stuff, but for all
practical purposes I stayed away from it. But when it got into truck lettering,
show-card work (which I didn’t do much of), but glass gold, the shiny
bank gold on. . . I did a lot of gold-leaf work. In fact I did a lot of Spencerian
gold leaf, which is probably the most difficult form of gold leaf. And I really
didn’t like gold leaf work so much. It paid well. I mean you could make
a lot of money fast. But it was a tedious, tedious endeavor. And I am not a
tedious person. I mean I like results right now. If I could take a shortcut
to get somewhere I’ll do it. So I. . . . I got off the track there, didn’t
I?
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: But anyway, I kept the sign painting separate. It wasn’t
till I was thirty-two or -three, when the Gump’s show came down, that
I said, “Wait a minute! Maybe there’s something in all of this that
I can use.” It was like that door was never opened in my studio, mind,
when I was doing my art. Never! There was none of my sign-painting equipment
visible. [It was] all put away.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Where was this happening now?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I’ve covered about ten, fifteen years just in this
last. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, okay, _____ _____. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, I jumped from my childhood at fourteen, fifteen to
thirty-two in the, out Elizabeth Street in the grocery store.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I only did that because I carried this concern that they must
not overlap for all those years. I mean, it was a very serious thing with me.
I continued to paint signs. I painted ‘em into college, I painted ‘em
here in San Francisco. And it was my pocketbook. It was the way I could feed
myself. So I couldn’t ignore that. And it was interesting that I didn’t
want to get into big billboard pictorial stuff—which I could have done
very well.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, why didn’t you?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, that may have been because that was close to the fine
arts aspect, and I didn’t want to deal with that. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why, ‘cause of the scale, or what?
FLETCHER BENTON: Because you were trying to reproduce something.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, if you, for instance, if you’re in the real estate
business, you might come to me and say, “I’ve got this billboard
out on Ninth Street I want you to, you know, do my portrait over here in a big
oval. . . .”
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: “. . . and next to it I want a building that I’ve
got for sale.” Well, that gets into something beyond the alphabet, and
beyond layout, and I didn’t want to do that. Which is another thing, too.
All the years as a sign painter, layout, proportion is very important, because
you’ve got a given space which you have to go in and break up the space
and. . . . And you always work from the center out. You know, center to the
left, center to the right, for your spacing. And today everything’s spaced
computer-wise, but in my day, the great sign painters were the guys who could
take the word lawyer and get the “L” spaced properly to the “A”
and the “A” to the “W” and the “W” to the
“Y” and the “Y” to the “E” and the “E”
to the “R.” I mean, that was the word that they asked you to letter-space
when you were getting your journeyman’s card ‘cause it’s a
tough word, lawyer. But I was always very sensitive to the negative space between
the letters, and I was always very sensitive to how you lay out a window or
a sign or a truck door, whatever, because that got into composition, that got
into making a statement that was fixed. And that statement, you know, had to
have impact, it had to have certain rhythms and certain color combinations.
It wasn’t like going to your grocery store where you’ve got your
grocery-store lettering of green, red, and blue on white paper. All right. So
it was interesting, as I continued to paint more as an adult, I found that when
I dealt with the canvas, I was dealing with it compositionally from some secret
place that had crossed over into the sign world. I mean, I was dealing with
the space in a very deliberate concerned way. Before I made my first stroke
on the canvas, I was concerned about where the weight of the canvas was going
to fall, of [how] my composition was going to fall on the canvas. And if you
look at some of my early paintings, which I don’t have many around here,
you’ll find that there’s a lot of negative space—and maybe
falling to the lower left bottom, or what have you.
[Interruption in taping]
FLETCHER BENTON: I guess what I’m trying to get to is that there was that
time after the Gump’s show, after the nude circus performers were taken
down because they were considered obscene and not in the best taste of the Gump’s
tradition, that I stopped painting entirely. I was thirty-two or -three at the
time. It was only some months after that, that I said, “Wait a minute.
All those years of working with the alphabet, there is something there that
I want to use.” Also it was a little more accepted by me then, at that
time, because there were New York guys that had been sign painters, and I figured,
well, you know, there are a few sign painters out there that were using some
of their techniques and some of their learnings from sign painting. And I said,
“Okay, I’m gonna take the geometry, the alphabet, and I’m
gonna deal with the alphabet, or I’m gonna deal with the negative part
of the letters, and what-have-you.” And I started doing the kinetic things,
which ultimately directed us to where we are now.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Umm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I’m certainly getting to this in a long way, aren’t
I. The question was about the colored pieces and why is that close to my childhood?
It is close to my childhood because I’m more relaxed now about my, about
what I want to say. I’m not hung up with “Is this sign painting,
or is this fine art?” I’m not hung up with some need maybe that
I had early on to make some heavy statement. I mean, a lot of that stuff. It’s
just like you’ve been sunburned and you’ve peeled it off, and there’s.
. . . You know, I feel very. . . . I feel very innocent now. And I had, you
know, sort of covered that up. So the influences that I’m dealing with,
especially in the Steel Watercolors, Steel Drawings, and many of the things
that happened after my Folded Circle, Folded Square, Alphabet series relate
directly to that wonderful innocence and excitement I had before I left town
to go into the Navy. I mean, there was no big deal about it. I decorated my
bicycle, or I painted it up. I’m painting up my sculpture now. And they
could be bicycles, I suppose. Really. And there’s no big deal. And I was
involved for many years making a big deal about it. And I’m glad that
it’s not a big deal anymore. Because now I can, I feel just totally free
to, to wander on the rest of my life doin’ whatever I feel like. With
no reason for it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That to me sounds very Californian, as a matter of fact, and
I was going to ask you at some point if you’ve felt any connection with
some of the activity—and I guess we can look again at the sixties—this
polychrome movement, I guess it’s called. Or somebody like Tom Albright
would call it that, where artists, painters cum sculptors or assemblagists,
began then to paint in very bright colors their constructions and their sculpture.
I think of somebody like Robert Hudson.
FLETCHER BENTON: But it’s interesting, most of those people—in fact,
I can’t think of anybody that it is not true of. . . . If they painted
their sculpture, it wasn’t a flat paint, I mean, a flat color. There was
modulation, there was chiarascuro, there was one color painted on top of the
other, there was. . . . It was more of an easel painter’s dealing with
it. What I’m doing is not an easel painter’s way of painting; it
is a sign painter’s way of painting. [chuckles] You know, you don’t
mix a little bit of color right on the surface and. . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you would, in a sense, disassociate yourself from that particular
development in Bay Area art—or anywhere else for that matter. You really
do believe that your discoveries or the directions—in respect to color,
now we’re talking about, that your work took—were independent to
a large extent, but certainly more, derived more from early life experience.
FLETCHER BENTON: Absolutely. No question.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Your own life [rather] than any other concurrent development.
FLETCHER BENTON: All those years that I painted signs when I was very young
really had a greater influence on me than I was aware of until the last few
years or so. And all of a sudden I realized just what an impact it had had.
I’ve just buried it. I’ve kept it separated. I opened the door a
little bit, but I didn’t let it all out. I’m gonna let it all out
now, you know, see what happens.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you feel then that in your work you’re at a stage now
where you can expose, if you want, what you are all about? That that’s
what the work becomes. Not all about, but that that is more important to you
than trying to deal with issues, styles that are in the air being developed
by other people.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, definitely I don’t deal with issues. I’ve
never dealt with issues. I think the closest issue I ever dealt with was when
I got to California and I was sort of associated with the figurative landscape
school. But I was never dealing with issues there. It’s just [that] I
was put there because I sort of looked that way. No, I don’t know what
issues I’ve dealt with. But let me say this, that I don’t know where
I’m going now. I just want to keep working, and I want to keep enjoying
the experience of each piece, if it’s painted or not painted. I want to
get a little bit of that innocence back into it. And that’s kind of what
I’m interested in right now. . . . Because you can remember the innocence
you had as a teenager. I mean, everything was new and fresh, and of the first
time.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me try to clarify certain issues or points of view that
I believe have developed about you and your work. Which is a slight digression,
but not really. It’s something that I would like to dispatch at this point,
and then set aside. The art critics and art historians of course feel obliged
to make these connections that we’ve been talking about. They can’t
help it; it’s the way they operate. And sometimes it is inappropriate.
I think maybe in your case this would be so. But again looking at Tom Albright’s
survey of art in the Bay area, and it is something that has to be dealt with
because it exists as perhaps the major survey study for this area and it does
include you. Albright said that in the sixties sculpture in the Bay Area took
on more of a technogical finish, a high finish, a concern with surface, very
much like in formalist paintings. This was according to Tom Albright. And that
this happened especially around San Jose State. Of course you. . . . I can’t
remember what year you started teaching there, but you are associated. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Sixty-seven.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, and so I think then what he. . . . The implication is.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And he’s absolutely right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, the implication, certainly for a reader of Tom Albright’s
text, is that you and your work and your influence as a teacher played a role
in this development deriving from certain, the look of formalist painting, maybe
its concerns, then carrying that over to the three dimensions. Is there some
truth to that?
FLETCHER BENTON: There might be. There might be. And just let me have a moment
to think about this. I never thought of myself as a high-tech person. Just because
the metal I used was stainless steel, and just because certain parts of that
metal was polished to a high finish, and just because I used timing motors—which
by the way, the particular timing motors I use are the same motors that were
being used in the 1920s for clocks. I mean there was nothing high-tech about
it at all. But there were people who were working with the same thing. They
were working with high-speed DC motors with sophisticated timers, and they were
getting into a lot of real delicate wiring and a bunch of other stuff, that
were high-tech. Even [Robert] Rauschenberg’s bubbling thing in that show
that Maurice Tuchman put on was very high tech, and you wouldn’t consider
Rauschenberg a high-tech artist.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: But it took high tech to make that mud bubble. And I was sort
of thrown into a general category there. But Tom is not all wrong at all. I
was very interested in surface, as I’m interested in surface now. [chuckles]
It’s just that, paint rather than. . . . But mine was not a high-tech
contribution. The reason is I never had the knowledge of it. My motor-driven
pieces were so basic and so elementary and so pathetically amateurish if you
ever look at one. But where I think San Jose got this recognition was a lot
through Fred Spratt, who was not a particularly high-tech person either, but
he was always—and still is—on the weather front of whatever’s
going on in the art world. I mean, he’s always. . . . If computers are
hot, he’s the first one to get out there and push computers.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What was his name, Fred Spratt?
FLETCHER BENTON: Fred Spratt. He was the head of the department for years down
there. He’s finally retired. But kinetic art was hot, so he went after
the kinetic people, and I was the closest one, and that is why I was asked to
teach there. It wasn’t for any other reason than that the kinetic thing
had hit. And San Jose has always tried to be [at the forefront], even though
it’s a farm-town school; and it was, whether you know it or not, the first
state school in the state-school system. Was a teacher’s college. But
Fred’s very aware of things, and thank God for him because he kept that
school right up front. And at one time it had over fourteen hundred students.
When I was there a teaching staff of over eighty. That’s just teachers.
It was probably the largest art school west of the Mississippi River. Now there
were other people there that were much more involved in the high-tech thing.
They weren’t big names, but they were people who were really into it.
And many of the students, like Mike Cooper, Bob Strini, just to name a couple
of them. Sal Pecoraro was into that kind of. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: These were students of yours? Some of them?
FLETCHER BENTON: Couple of ‘em were, like. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: What about [David] Bottini?
FLETCHER BENTON: But they didn’t learn anything from me. Actually I learned
a hell of a lot from them, ‘cause these were real. . . . David Bottini
was a student of mine. But these guys, that swift bunch in the seventies. They
were right out, they were California, they were right out of “sweat and
shine,” you know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So it was a more general, something in the air they were responding
to, rather in your opinion than a direct influence from you.
FLETCHER BENTON: Not me. No. Yes, you’re right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, they weren’t particularly responding to me. I was
more symbolic than anything else. For instance, I didn’t know how to use
a lathe, which is absolutely imperative in that high-tech kind of thing. I don’t
know how to use a milling machine. My only knowledge—and it was so basic
it was pathetic—was with a band saw and a table saw. And I mean, I stumbled
through that. So it was a myth. But Tom’s right in pointing his finger
there, because they were two really hot schools then: San Jose and Davis.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Those were the two California schools.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And quite different, in the kinds of artists and art that was
coming out of them.
FLETCHER BENTON: Absolutely. If you wanted to be a painter and, you know, do
the more ragged things, you went to Davis. And [Robert] Arnesson was there,
and [Wayne] Thiebaud was there, and. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: [William] Wiley at one time.
FLETCHER BENTON: Wiley and Roy DeForest. If you wanted to do more highly finished,
highly resolved works, you went to San Jose.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Where did that leave the Art Institute then? Somewhere in between?
FLETCHER BENTON: The Art Institute. . . . [Hah]. Well, you know, the Art Institute
is really a necessity. It’s a very expensive necessity. I think the Art
Institute really develops the image of what an artist should be. I’m not
so sure you can learn a hell of a lot there. But that’s all changing.
You know, I’m talking about when I taught there. It was. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I was really a, you know, I was really riding in the front
of the bus before desegregation over there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean?
FLETCHER BENTON: [chuckles] Well, I mean, I should have been in the back of
the bus. I was the wrong color for the Art Institute.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh. [laughs] You mean. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, I was. . . . They didn’t even have a band saw
or a table saw when I went over there. I bought this cheap little band saw and
this cheap little table saw. . . .
[Tape 5, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: You were saying?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, the band saw and the table saw lasted one semester, and then they
were totally done in. The fine arts students needed stretcher bars made, and
that’s what they used to make them, and. . . . It just wasn’t a
place to do anything. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: How long were you there?
FLETCHER BENTON: I was there ‘67, ‘68. Two years.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Kathan Brown was teaching printmaking right up in the same, up in the tower,
and I was teaching some sort of—I don’t know what they called it—beginning
sculpture or design or something. I left there to go on to my stuff and Kathan
Brown opened Crown Point Press.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You just felt like a, well, a fish out of water there, I gather.
It just didn’t match at all what you were about, or. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I couldn’t get anyone in my classes because [chuckling] there was
no one over there that was really, would be caught dead sanding a piece of wood.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckling?] Let’s. . . . We’re gonna be talking more about
kinetic sculpture, about developments in your career, but I don’t want
to let go of. . . .
[Interruption in taping]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I don’t want to let go of the earlier period and some of the points
we were discussing, before we’ve really gotten what we need from a discussion
of your childhood and certain biographical life-experience issues. I suspect
that things that happened in your life are definitely reflected in your work,
and so it’s essential for us to try to pinpoint some of those things,
try to get at the essential Fletcher Benton. This isn’t all that easy
to do, and we certainly don’t want to duplicate, you know, bringing together
a long chronology because that’s being done for your monograph right now,
and it’s something that can be built upon. So for the purposes of this
taping, this oral history, what we want to try to do is ferret out those things
that might not appear on a chronology, a published chronology. Those things
that maybe give a little more insight, the whys, the wherefores. One of the
things, as we were wrapping up yesterday, that really struck me was this. It
seemed as we talked that your concerns, what you were trying to achieve in your
work, at least in part has to with a desire to control your environment. To
control. Which I suspect in a way goes counter to aspects of your personality.
That’s really not for me to say. But I sense there may be a bit of, a
tension or a dichotomy between the order that—not just in your work, Fletcher,
but in your environment, this studio, this. . . . I wish that [the] listeners
could see it because it’s absolutely gorgeous. Carefully, carefully thought
out, organized, composed living space. I suspect that one of the reasons it
was important to you—and I believe this was the case—of the long
difficult process of bringing it to reality, is that it was a way, once and
for all, to articulate your working and to a certain extent living environment.
This of course is a kind of control. On the other hand, there’s usually
a reason why we feel this need. I’m making the question too long. Forgive
me. But I’m trying to. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I’m enjoying the question. [both chuckle]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I’m trying to get this, and I wonder if we couldn’t for the
moment just assume there’s some truth to this observation.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think it’s very true so far, what you’re saying.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Maybe we could go back—better that you say it—but maybe we go
back to any point in your background, in your experience that might give some
insight into that.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think you’re dead right that I do want to control. Why that
is, maybe if I start talking I can find because no one’s asked me that
question before.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Unbelievable. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, yeah. I mean, my wife certainly says I try to control things. In the
case of my studio, it’s orderly for I think a general reason that I might
be able to state, and then we could work backwards from that. Maybe it had to
do with my mother telling me, “Go clean your room.” I don’t
know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [No.]
FLETCHER BENTON: No, it goes beyond that. Somewhere. . . . Oh boy, this is really something
to say but it’s the truth. I mean, there’s no reason not to be truthful.
Somewhere I either developed the. . . . I developed this or. . . . And I’m
sure it comes from guilt, that it’s very hard for me to be free to do
my work, my art projects—and they are art projects, my art things—until
I’ve got all of the other bullshit taken care of. You know, like is the
grass mowed, has the car been washed, is the. . . . Well, those are poor examples,
because I never wash my car and I don’t have any grass, but—at least
that needs cutting. [laughter] Oh, God.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Careful, don’t reveal anything.
FLETCHER BENTON: Right. But there is a sort of a preparation that I go through.
Oh my God! All sorts of stuff’s coming into my head, Paul. There is a
preparation that happens. I have to, you know, I come to the studio in the morning.
I spend anywhere from 30 minutes to possibly all day in the damned office or
wherever else dealing with the stuff I hate the most. I mean, the stuff I hate
the most. Why can’t I be the kind of person that takes the things he despises
the most and puts them aside, ignores them, or says, “Oh, after I do the
fun stuff, then I’ll go do the bad, ornery stuff.” With me, I’ve
gotta take care of all of the mess, all of the blocks of lead we’ve towed
around in our life, that we have to deal with. Like the government, like this,
like that, like paying bills, like all that dumb stuff. And then when all that’s
done, what energy’s left will go [into my] work. Now that makes no sense
at all, but that in fact is the way I am. I don’t know why I’m that
way. And if I’ve got, if I’ve got clutter. . . . Now it’s
interesting, because I work in clutter. I mean, I don’t mind clutter where
I’m working. In a way when I’m painting these pieces over [here],
I’m like Giacometti, you know, he always worked in a tiny little corner,
and then he started making some money and they bought him this nice, big studio,
and he ended up working in the. . . . They went over, and he was over in the
corner working again.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, that’s very common among artists, and I’m the same way.
I’ve got a huge studio on the second floor, and I’ve got a big glass
palette down there, and I invariably end up working in about one square foot
on that palette because everything else is eating up the space. So it’s
not that this is a condition that carries through all aspects of my life. I
do need to, I do need order. Now why is that? Why is it that I need order around
me, but I don’t need order to work. That’s an interesting question.
That’s a very interesting question.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is it possible. . . . Well, it’s pointless for me to speculate, obviously,
but just to try to raise certain questions, or direct thinking a bit. Is there
any aspect of your own background that you felt at the time was out of control
or chaotic.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, yes. [laughs ruefully] Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: Like. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what about your early years, and your home situation?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I mean, it happened to me in high school, and, you know, it’s
not something I really want to talk too much about. Got way out of control,
and we both got in very serious trouble.
[Interruption in taping]
FLETCHER BENTON: Out of all of that, I was no longer a relaxed, naive child.
But in a way it. . . . I required of myself more and more that I control things.
Well, there you are; there’s the control thing coming back. Because that
incident was totally out of control, and I never wanted to find myself in that
situation again. And maybe control, maybe that control business some way or
another is woven in with this business of order. I suppose it is, isn’t
it? I mean, the more orderly something is, maybe the more easily it is to control.
I don’t know. But I don’t think you’re referring to control
as a negative thing. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . and I’m not referring to control as a negative thing either.
It’s. . . . I need a certain amount of order—and I’ve said
this to Paul a couple of times, and the people who worked here with me all hear
it constantly—and that is that to find something, you have to refer backwards
to something—and usually this involves paper of some degree or another—it’s
my Achilles’ heel. I am absolutely brought to my knees if someone says
to me, “Could you find something, 1983 and. . . .” I think, “Oh,
God, ‘83, ‘83, where’s ‘83? 83’s gone.”
You know, it’s out of my life. So I’m devastated by the need to
keep track of stuff. I mean, to me, if I live a day—and this is probably
more reflective of my personality than some of the things we’ve said over
the last two or three days—to me I am livng right now, and really my whole
self is right now. Yesterday is gone. It was spent. It’s like eating a
pizza which you had last night. You know, you ate the pizza. The residue, it
comes out in due time. And then you start the process all over again. And I
am very much that way in my work. That’s why, for instance, my work may
go out of here with an acid, dark brown patina, come back after a show, and
go out again painted multiple colors, because I’m no longer the [same—Ed.].
. . . [chuckles] I mean, if it comes back, and it’s sort of a brownish,
all-one-color patina, and I don’t feel like that the day it comes back,
and I may just repaint it. I’ve done that many, many times. Because I’m
not the same person I was when that piece went out. It comes back, I feel differently,
and since I’m the artist, and since I have control, I’ll change
it, [the] color of it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Since you have control, that’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. I mean, I am responsible totally to myself and myself alone when it
comes to my art. There’s no wife, there are no children, there’s
no lease on the building, there’s no checking account, there’s no
nothing. I am the whole show. And that is to me the greatest reward of being
an artist. We said this is one of the earlier tapes. You know, what other artist
has this opportunity? There’s only one, and it’s the poet. Certainly
the actor, the performer, don’t even come close. The architect, he’s
as far as I’m concerned, with the exception of Frank [Gehrey] and a few
other guys, they’re nothing but subservient to the proportions of the
industry: four by eight.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And the clients.
FLETCHER BENTON: And the clients and the control, the pedestrian mediocraty
of government controls, from the city level to the county to the state to the
federal. So, I mean, to become an architect, it’s just making a whore
out of yourself. Very few of them rise above it. Very few. Less than one percent.
So I mean, who else? The artist still has that opportunity. We are the only.
. . . Listen to me; I’m getting all wound up here. But we are the only
dedicated group that has no federal benefits. None. Except social security,
if we pay into it. There’s no way to even control that, really. So we
stand out there alone. We have no residuals of any sort due us. The poets at
least get a residual of something, if the book sells.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, well, none of them sell any poetry.
FLETCHER BENTON: I know, but the point is it’s on the record.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: The artist gets nothing. And, since this is going on tape, one of my big
heats—and at least I can get it on here, and it’ll go away in the
safe—is that California made this effort to give the artist a five-percent
resale commission or residual or whatever, and the people that supported those
who didn’t want that to happen, were shocking to me to find out who they
were. Hunk Anderson, Nathan Oliveira, Henry Hopkins. Obviously John Berggruen
and most of the dealers. Those are just to state a few that were on an executive
committee of a group called CADRE [__________—Ed.]. I can’t remember
what that stood for, but CADRE was this group of. . . . John Merriman was another
one, the legal professor at Stanford. Al Elsen was another one. And here was
this [tight] little group of upper echelon people who through, I think, donations—a
lot of it was Hunk Anderson’s money—went to the State of California
and lobbied and lobbied and lobbied to beat this law down. To keep the artist
from getting a lousy five percent—a lousy five percent!—of the increased
value of a work of art during the time that it was purchased and resold again.
That. . . . Now wait a minute; don’t say anything, ‘cause I’m
not finished. That is less than sales tax. It’s less than half of what
you tip a waiter. It’s chickenfeed. Yet these people felt that their egos
were such that they felt and argued publicly that without their support of the
artist and buying the work that the work would not have increased in value.
That is so much horse hockey [sic], I can’t tell you. You’re a historian.
Name me one artist that did a great masterpiece in his early years, and never
painted again. Name one. There are none. The reason early work is valid and
becomes a masterpiece is because the artist continues to pay his dues, he continues
to work, and there are, there is a continuing ruler or tape measure to measure
early work from. These guys have failed to consider that. . . . I mean, the
classic example is the Rauschenberg incident with the Scull’s Angeles
cab guy. When the Rauschenberg painting went for $80,000 at auction, [and] Scull
had paid two or three thousand for it, or something like that. In that auction,
Rauschenberg stood up and said, “You know, I should get a couple years’
free cab rides,” is what he said, I think. It may not be exact quote.
And Scully stood up and made some wisecrack about tough shit, you know. “If
I hadn’t bought your painting, you wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be
selling for $80,000.” That is simply not true. If Rauschenberg hadn’t
continued to paint, the damn thing wouldn’t have been worth more than
two or three thousand dollars. So anyway, how’d I get off on that subject?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you were talking about the special role of the, sort of. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, yeah. I got off on that subject because as an artist we have total control.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Nobody’s pushing us around. So it’s very nice. And I love it.
So I take a brown piece and I paint it multiple colors. But that’s off
the subject too. Boy, do I get wound up.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, what we were. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Bring me back, Paul. [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: What we were talking about. . . . All of this is interesting; it’s
all part of the picture. What we were talking about. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Control. We were talking about control.
PAUL KARLSTROM: We were trying to get at, articulate your. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: And order.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . I think quite apparent, self-acknowledged need for control and order.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, I. . . . Let me interrupt because I know where I was.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: Just let me finish this.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: I was talking about using up a day.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: And that’s important to me. Because when I use the day
up, it’s gone. Each day, for me, is the hope of the next day. It’s
not what happened yesterday. And I really live a hundred percent in that frame
of mind. It makes it very difficult for the people around me to deal with me,
because if I have to deal with yesterdays or -years, boy, it’s terrible.
But. . . . I mean, right now, sitting talking to you, I’m thinking about
what I’m going to be doing tomorrow. When we have a break, I think, “Jesus,
tomorrow I’ve got this to do, I’m working on that, I’ve got
a new can of yellow paint,” you know pretty basic stuff. But it’s
the important things. And the more cluttered my life is the less tomorrow becomes
a fun day to have my own choices about. ‘Cause if your life gets cluttered
and gets out of order, they start dictating what you do the next day.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s interesting though. I see a slight contradiction in what you
say. You were saying that you live very much for now, for the moment, for today.
Yesterday is over. But on the other hand, I get the very distinct impression
that you also are preoccupied with the next day and with the future. And let
me suggest this: Perhaps anticipating, trying to think what things have to be
done to make sure things happen in a certain way—which is a kind of control,
a trying to project into the future. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s a kind of order, too.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . you’re grasp and management of events, and so that suggests
that it really isn’t that much living for now, for the moment, which would
be then throwing yourself entirely into this.
FLETCHER BENTON: You’re right. You’re right, unfortunately. And
that. . . . That is not. . . . I mean, I keep hoping by controlling the moment
and keeping things in order, I will have that opportunity. I mean, I haven’t
lost hope. I get little bits of it each day. I get a little bit of fun, you
know, a couple hours here and a couple hours there, but I keep hoping that [chuckles]
the more I deal with what’s coming at me—and that brings up the
other thing: my emotional ability and my ability to deal with things are not
that of a sculptor. I mean, I’m the first to admit that. I have the disposition
of a painter. I need an immediate kind of thing to happen. Well, I’m quite
sure if I could take care of one thing, it would be that I could have it done
right away. I could have sculpture happen the way painting happens. It doesn’t.
It’s impossible. Because in sculpture you lose the very key thing that
is most important to an artist. We’re talking about order, we’re
talking about. . . . What was the other thing?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Control?
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . control. But one thing we didn’t discuss in this
thing of where the artist is—and where I am—is privacy. I mean,
a painter has this wonderful privacy every day to put in the studio and to drift
with whatever they are that day, whatever they are when they wake up in the
morning, whatever things influenced them or have come up in the day before that
has their chemistry and their brain set up for the following day. They could
go to the studio and quietly have these things, share with these things, share
with the previous pressures or the desires of the next day. In sculpture, that
very seldom happens. I mean, I. . . . We’ve been talking about how difficult
it is to keep things in order, and why I live for the moment and look forward
to tomorrow, and why I’m trying to hold all this together. It’s
to maybe get some privacy back. And, and dammit, you know, you came here for
this interview this morning. I had to ship a piece out. There’s a semi-truck
sitting down there, that involved about six people to get the thing loaded,
a fork lift, a bunch of paperwork, and all this other stuff, which if I was
a painter that would never happen. I’d call up [Scott] Attow, and he’d
come out here and I could be on the pot and it wouldn’t make any difference.
He’d get the painting and go on his way. And somebody at the other end
would have a hammer and nail and they’d hang it. I’ve gotta send
my guys to [Washington]. They’ve gotta be there when the truck arrives.
There’ll be a crane there. There’ll be about six other people at
the other end, including the architect, the engineer, the owner, the art agent
that sold it, my worker, the truck driver, the crane operator. So I suppose
the hardest thing I have had to deal with—and I’ve dealt with it
in such small doses that I didn’t really realize what I was doing—is
all of this lack of privacy. And I can promise you, if I had known this in the
very beginning, after I got through the first year or two of the kinetic involvement,
I would never have gone in for it. Because I didn’t want to lose my privacy.
I didn’t want to be, you know, a public servant. That is required, if
you’re doing sculpture, if you’re doing big sculpture, if you’re
greedy as I am. I want to build it as big as I can get the money to build it.
Then you shouldn’t cry in your beer, Fletcher. You’ve gotta take
all the other shit that goes along with it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Are you suggesting that you’re not entirely sure it was worth it,
then? That maybe what you, maybe what you had to give up was too big a loss,
too important—in retrospect.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I’m not exactly saying that. I’m saying that
as I get older I’m getting freer from that feeling, but I have had that
feeling. I didn’t feel I was trapped by any means. I mean, I can stop
any time I want to. I’ve had two main direction changes already in my
life: from painting to kinetic art, from kinetic art to what I’m doing
now. They were very risky times, really. I don’t care about that. But
I didn’t realize what I was getting into. I thought if you want to make
sculpture, you want a big steel piece, you get some steel, you get a welding
machine, and a couple grinders, and you make it. Not true. Not true at all.
You’ve gotta have a place to build it. You’ve gotta get it out the
door. You’ve gotta get it on something to move it. I mean, it’s
unbelievable. And if you want the “shock of the new,” a la Robert
Hughes [referring to Hughes’ book, Shock of the New—Ed.], read a
government contract on an NEA grant for a sculpture. It’s something like
thirty pages! They’ve even got a minority section in there, where you
have to hire so many minority people. I mean, come on. What the hell is going
on? So, to answer your question, I simply didn’t know what I was doing.
And now that I’ve adjusted to it somewhat, I have good people that help
me, I have a certain routine that I follow. So the routine itself, once it’s
put in motion, takes a lot of the strain away from me. I’m able to put
that into process and things move along on a predictable path. But in the beginning,
my God, if someone had said to me, “In order for you to do what we did
this morning, you have to do this and that,” I’d say, “Forget
it. Forget it.” Give me some cadmium red, you know.
[Tape 6, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: As I said, we’ve been grappling with certain issues that really move
into the area of your own personality. And obviously what I’m trying to
do is to see if there aren’t some aspects of that which can explain, to
a certain extent, your work. And we have been talking about a need for order
and for control, trying to. . . . Well, I get the impression that you are disturbed
or made uncomfortable by the idea of accident, of surprises. Whether there are
certain events in your life—you’ve mentioned one—whether there
are other events in your life that could explain this. That to get off balance,
and you’re not in control, possibly some bad things can happen. I’m
just not sure about that, but it does seem to me that—you talked about
it earlier, too—that the accidental, the surprise, in your art [is] not
the kind of thing that really attracts you. And one would assume that from looking
at your work. How do you feel about that? Do you feel uncomfortable about accident?
The unknown? The unexpected?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I count on the surprise. Now is a surprise an accident?
If I’m working along and. . . . I actually have dropped a piece, you know,
where I’ll have this tacked together, and I’ll be holding up a circle
or a cylinder or something, and it’ll slip out of my hand and drop and
fall into a very interesting place on the table. I respond to that. And I say,
“Oop, well maybe that’s it. Maybe I should consider that.”
So I’m very aware visually of what’s going on in front of me. Because
any one of my works is nothing more than a series of decisions.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, you said that.
FLETCHER BENTON: You can’t always say that about painting because. . . .
[Interruption in taping]
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . because in painting, you know . . . it’s not true of all painting,
certainly, but the Abstract Expressionist school or the New York school, there
were a lot of accidents that happened, a lot of. . . . I mean that was part
of the excitement of it. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, absolutely.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . is to set yourself in motion, and see what happens. So
you can’t say, altogether, that a painting is a series of decisions. You
could, I suppose, say a painting is a series of decisions because an accident
happened and the artist had to make a decision whether to keep it or not—and
in that case, yes. Whereas my work is definitely a chain of events, a chain
of very definite decisions. One, I have to decide the shape that I’m going
to use. Two, if I don’t have that shape in my bone pile, I have to make
it. And three, I have to find a place for it. Now I may make the shape before
I find a place for it. Or I may have a place for it and then have to make the
shape. Or find the shape. So there is no way that one of my pieces is not a
series of very deliberate decisions.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you’re open to fortuitous accidents or surprise.
FLETCHER BENTON: Exactly. If a piece slips and falls, as I said, or if. . .
. You know, I have a banana form, my banana form, which is an elongated D, and
I’m playing around with. I’m holding it up, saying, “Well
now, would that look good there, or should it be down here?” and then
all of a sudden, I go from that top of the sculpture to the bottom, and say,
“Wait a minute! I’ll put it down here. That’s fine.”
So in my case that’s discovery. It’s not an accident; it’s
a discovery. They’re kind of different, you know. Can I say one other
thing?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: In the process of my work, now, the discovery takes place during the process
of finding all this stuff to put together.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: It becomes an immediate thing. Prior to that, I was working
out everything in Folded Circle and Folded Square in maquette form, and then
it was made. Not true in these steel watercolors. It is. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s a big change.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s right. It is not a predetermined thing. If we were talking
the Folded Square or Folded Circle works, there was no chance for accident there,
really. I mean, sometimes there was a little discovery, but I was manipulating
things that were limited, they were, there was no chance for the arbitrary to
come into play. And you might say, “Well, that’s a safe arena to
work in,” and it is. It’s also very confining. And to get anything
at all, you’ve got to go beyond the very confines of what it is. I didn’t
mean to interrupt you, but I just wanted to point that out that in the Steel
Watercolors, Steel Drawings, and the truck and geo pieces, all of the work after
Balanced/Unbalanced definitely happened at the bench from the bone pile.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean by the bone pile?
FLETCHER BENTON: The bone pile is a table I have of rejected things—miscellaneous tubing
extractions, extrusions. Not extractions. [chuckles] I’ve extracted [fifth]
dimensions from extrusions. Tubing, rods, square stock. Probably fifty percent
of the bone pile are failures from previous starts.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What you just said actually ties in precisely with what I was
going to ask. There is an artist, again, whom we both admire. I believe that
you actually went to pay a visit. He lives in Southern California. His name
is John McLaughlin. Who carried, I think, to the extreme, or really to the conclusion,
the idea of removing all accidents from his imagery, removing anything that
was unexpected. Everything in John’s work—and incidentally I sat
and interviewed him some years ago—everything is very, very simple, very
elegant, very beautiful forms and relationships—geometry, if you will,
that which interests you. Everything in his composition, it was his attempt,
his desire, to make all the decisions previous to creating the object, the image.
FLETCHER BENTON: You mean to painting it, to executing it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes, that’s an important distinction you’ve made. He would work
on small pieces of paper, as you may know, and cut out colored pieces of paper,
and arrange them in small scale. The painting was simply a working out of what
intellectually, conceptually, had already taken place.
FLETCHER BENTON: Um hmm.
PAUL KARLSTROM: We’re not going to get into a discussion of John McLaughlin’s
work, but certainly that methodology is of interest. Of course I’m asking
you about that in connection with your work. But secondly, beyond that, with
John there was a desire, which is opposite of Abstract Expressionism—and
consider that he was developing his mature work right in the heyday of Abstract
Expressionism—but this opposite goal of his was to remove every evidence,
indication of the artist’s hand. And I won’t go so far as to say
personality or mind; that’s not true. I don’t think he could remove
that, but of the hand. The presence of the artist. And this ties in with, for
him, a notion, which is Oriental, of the void. [And that] gets into some philosophical
things. I’m sorry, I’m making a very long question.
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What I’m doing is trying to describe a situation, an artist
whom I know you admire, and I would like to know what connections you may see,
or may have seen, between yourself, your work, and John, his work. What led
you to go see him.
FLETCHER BENTON: The. . . . And it was a big trip then. I had two little baby kids screaming
in the car.
PAUL KARLSTROM: When was it? Excuse me.
FLETCHER BENTON: It was probably. . . . My son was. . . . It was probably ‘68, I would
say.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you drove down to Dana Point.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. I did. From San Francisco. What I feel about John McLaughlin’s
work I’m sure is what. . . . Oops, I let the word out, didn’t I.
The reason I went to see him is I got such a good feeling about looking at his
work. Nothing more than that. I mean, it just, I was, I was seduced by his work.
I guess that’s the art word they use, isn’t it? Not about him. .
. .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: It was right. I’d look at McLaughlin’s work, and
it. . . . Again, it goes back to some of the feelings I have about a good work
of art has to be something that cannot have anything removed from it and still
be the same thing. And that’s not, I mean, there’s a hell of a lot
of art out there you can remove several things from, and it still is the same.
In some cases better. Not true with McLaughlin. And I respect that, and I certainly
respond to it, because it is the thing that I’m constantly confronted
with. I mentioned yesterday that I will take a work of art way beyond the stopping
point—and I do this deliberately, when I’m down on the bench, putting
this, holding these things together and getting them stuck on there, I’ll
go. . . . In a way, I’ll say, in my mind, “Okay, you’re real
close. It’s just about there. In fact, maybe it is there. But I don’t
know for sure. I’m gonna go a little farther.” Going beyond, for
me, reinforces. . . . It’s the other guy standing there that’s gonna
hit me over the head that I was telling you about, he’s gonna say, “Wait
a minute. You went too far. You went past the sign.” So you go back to
where the sign was, because that was the right road—or that’s the
end of the road, or whatever. So that to me the subtracting process of a piece
is infinitely important. I mean, it is so very important. And I found that when
I had failed to do that, the works—and I keep ‘em around with me
a long time. Most of the works are here for quite a while before they go away.
Because if I tire of the work then I’ve missed something. So I keep ‘em
around. And I’ve found that the ones I tire of are the ones that I didn’t
take beyond, “Whoa.” I didn’t go beyond “whoa.”
So, and with McLaughlin when I viewed his work, I always felt, you know, “To
get to whoa he had to go beyond, and he had to come back.” You don’t
get to whoa—whoa meaning stop, of course—you don’t get to
whoa, you don’t know it’s whoa until you’ve gone beyond it.
Do you know what I’m saying? Does that make any sense to you?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sure, sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: In other words, how do you know when to stop if you don’t go beyond
the stopping point?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Maybe, maybe he could tell. I don’t know.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter, but when I look
at these works, I always sense this guy got there in the final analysis by subtracting,
by going back to whoa.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [I don’t believe he went beyond.]
FLETCHER BENTON: It doesn’t matter, does it? But the point is, he got to, I mean, he
stopped right on the line.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: He didn’t go two inches over the line, or two inches before the line.
He wasn’t somewhere within the ballpark, or he [chuckles], you know, he
didn’t slide past first base and just nick it. You know, he’s dead
on it. Every one of his pieces felt that way to me. Some I liked more than others,
but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel they were dead on.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you saw in his work something to which you were aspiring in your work.
FLETCHER BENTON: Not consciously. I didn’t make that association. The truth is I didn’t.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And at that time you didn’t, _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: But I responded. I mean I was respectfully responsive.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But the way you describe his work now, and what you admired, is what earlier
on the tape you were describing as a goal of your own. But whether you were
aware of it or not at the time, it does seem that you see an affinity. Interestingly
enough—and I may as well say this and give you the benefit of not qualifying
or denying—but of all the artists we’ve talked about—many
sculptors, many painters—it seems to me, I sense that you have more of
a feeling of kinship with the painter John McLaughlin than with most of the
sculptors, say working in the Bay Area, or anywhere else for that matter.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. I have more affinity with painters than sculptors, definitely.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Of course McLaughlin is a very special kind of painter.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, he is, was entirely counter to the main stream of that time.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Doggedly so, as a matter of fact.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, there was [Josef] Albers, and McLaughlin. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, and. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . [Ben] Nicholson. Do you know much about his work?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Not a lot. I know him, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: Boy, God, he was, he was a. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: You like him too.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh boy. I dream about him. I mean. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Really?
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t, I probably shouldn’t talk too much about his work because
I haven’t seen that much, but what I’ve seen stops me cold every
time. Like McLaughlin. Stops me, you know. I go through a museum probably like
a lot of people I know do. I don’t know if you do or not, but I go through
very quickly.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, exactly.
FLETCHER BENTON: I walk quite a nice pace. Maybe three miles an hour. Bobbie,
my wife, toots along at one tenth of a mile an hour, reading every label. I
go through a museum and an exhibition looking for a stopper. I’m looking
for something to reach out and say, “Hey, man, slow down. Look, take a
look here.” It’s gotta be a shirt grabber, you know. I know there’s
little things in each work, but. . . . You know what I’m talking about?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Sure.
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s something that just stops you. . . Or you walk past it and you
say, “Wait a minute. There’s something.” And then you go back,
you look at it again. Maybe you start to leave, but then you check the label,
and the date, the title, and all this other stuff. McLaughlin always did that
to me. And so did Nicholson.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Where did you see McLaughlin’s work. Do you remember? I mean, how
did you become familiar with it?
FLETCHER BENTON: I saw it at the L.A. County, and I saw it at a gallery down there. Was it
David Stuart?
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you didn’t here, actually in San Francisco? You saw it. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No. No, I saw it there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay. Well, he showed with Felix [Landau].
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, Felix. That’s right, that’s where it was. Around the corner
in La Cienega _____ _____ one area.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, yeah. At Melrose and La Cienega.
FLETCHER BENTON: See, I was showing with Esther Robles [Gallery] right across the street.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, you showed with Esther!
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, everybody shows with Esther maybe, except McLaughlin.
PAUL KARLSTROM: We’ll have to talk about that later.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, boy.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, tell me, tell me about your visit with McLaughlin. Did you call ahead,
or write him a note, or. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I did call ahead, and I was scared to death. I knew that he was a very private
man.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s true.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I want to tell you about it because it was a nice. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I want to hear about it.
FLETCHER BENTON: To get down there, I can’t remember who was with me,
but there was Bobbie. . . . And, you know, I made an error. I said two children.
I think she was pregnant with Ashley, and Fletcher was two and a half years
old.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So that would have been what year?
FLETCHER BENTON: That would have been ‘64, ‘65, ‘66, ‘67.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: Early ‘67. I think she was pregnant with Ashley. And we had another
couple with us, and I, son of a gun, I can’t remember who it was. Doesn’t
even really matter.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It wasn’t the DeLaps, was it?
FLETCHER BENTON: Tony DeLap, no.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Because you know he also is a great admirer. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I didn’t know that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah!
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I don’t remember who it was. But we had an old Nash
Rambler called the Blue Mas [Maserati—Ed.], and we were in the Blue Mas,
and I had hauled down a whole bunch of my kinetic art to Esther Roble’s
for a show on top of the Blue Mas. Knowing I was gonna do that, I called McLaughlin.
He said he’d see me. We drove down there, pulled up in front of the house,
and his house was one of the classic California row houses. Vintage 1958, maybe.
Or, I don’t know, ‘50, or something, but. . . . Very small, funny
little porch, stoop. Two, three steps. Inside I remember the knotty pine. The
living room was done in bamboo—I think it was bamboo furniture. I know
the fabric was, it looked like lanai furniture. It was green with. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Floral?
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . floral, with a green background. Wife was sort of a Florida type,
retired type.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Florida. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Red cheeks, and maybe tight curly blue hair.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: And John was quiet. Unassuming! Lord, he was unassuming. And
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to bring in Fletcher, who
was a very hyper child. I didn’t want him crying and running through the
house, and I think I said to Bobbie, “Wait in the car,” or something
like that. It also gave me excuse to come look, say hello, satisfy myself and
leave, and not get, put him in a position where he had to entertain us all afternoon.
. . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . which I did not want to do. So then, I remember the living room, and
some way or another we got around to the studio, and he said, “The studio’s
upstairs in one of the bedrooms.” So we went up this very tight little
spec[ulation—Ed.] house stairs. You know, it was about the size of a normal
forty shirt.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Kind of [small].
FLETCHER BENTON: And walked up the stairs, got to the top and went to the bedroom, which
had, I think it was in the front of the, facing out the front of the house,
if I remember correctly. His studio faced the street. And it had the, it was
right underneath the eaves. So you had this slanted ceiling coming down. The
side walls were about five and a half, six feet, high. And then it hit the roof,
and then the roof went up, and in the center of the room maybe you had ten,
eleven feet. Or less. It must have been less, because it was a small room.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Easels sitting there. I didn’t see the cut paper on the
table. He maybe did that in the kitchen, I don’t know. But this was strictly
a place where he sat down and rendered. . . . He rendered his thoughts. He didn’t
paint them; he rendered them, you know. He dealt with the edge. He spent hours
making the edge, making the edge, the edge—you know what I mean—the
edge. And there he was. I can’t remember if I read this, or he said to
me—I may have asked him; I probably did—he said that he was a mathematician,
or he taught math or something. Maybe you can, you interviewed him, you know
more than I do. He was a math teacher. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: And a language teacher, and. . . . I forget some of the details.
FLETCHER BENTON: Was he at MIT or did he go to MIT, or how did MIT get involved?
PAUL KARLSTROM: I forget. Well, he was in Boston. He. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: [He] had something to do with MIT.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: He either went to school or he taught there or something.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think he was an engineer, but. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I forget. I’ve even written about him, and that shows how great my
memory is. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, he’s the sort of person where it doesn’t matter. I mean,
you’re in his presence and he’s sitting there, quiet, attentive,
polite—insignificant, really. Yet there’s no denying [chuckles]
that he’s the guy that went upstairs there and dealt with those edges.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So he took you up there and then showed you his. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . studio, which was a converted bedroom.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Did he seem, did he seem interested in you at all and in your work, or.
. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t think so.
PAUL KARLSTROM: He was just being hospitable and gracious ‘cause you. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. But, oh, the furniture! I went out to the car, and I said, “My
God!” I don’t think Bobbie did, went up there. I think I just went
up with him. And I wish to hell I knew who else was with us, but I don’t
think they went either. John and I went upstairs. And it was not that big a
bedroom. It was not ten or eleven feet to the peak; it was much smaller. With
a tiny little bedroom. Probably was the master bedroom, but very tiny. For a
queen size, max. Not king. Came back to the car, and I said, “Bobbie,
God, you know, I’ve met this great man and I saw some of his pieces.”
I said, “You wouldn’t believe that this guy that can paint those
edges and deal with that incredible state of mind can live in that house.”
I mean, this house had. . . . It was so common, and the taste of it all was
so sickening. With this bamboo, bent bamboo lanai furniture with the green fabric
and the palm leaves or whatever the hell they were. Awful, awful, awful.
PAUL KARLSTROM: He’s also a golfer, by the way.
FLETCHER BENTON: He was a golfer?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh yeah. He was a big golfer.
FLETCHER BENTON: But here this man would go upstairs. . . . And the knotty pine walls. And
his studio—if I am not mistaken, and I’d bet on it—had knotty
pine walls! And the boards going up the, underneath of the roof, knotty pine.
Varnished knotty pine.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What did that suggest to you?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, it suggested that obviously his studio didn’t make any difference.
He could be painting under a tree. [laughs] Or, you know, in a woodshed or something.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That it was an internal, entirely internal art, right?
FLETCHER BENTON: But you would think that a man who was dealing with such sensitive proportions,
such sensitive proportions, and such delicate relationships of dark and light—I’m
not even gonna use the word color—would need to have a white surrounding.
I mean, he could have painted the knotty pine white.
PAUL KARLSTROM: White. Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: But this guy was beyond all that. He was somewhere else.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I would suggest, or it occurs to me, that here is a big divergence
between Fletcher Benton and John McLaughlin. I would like to suggest this for
you to think about—and maybe we can talk about it a little bit later—that
this surprised you, seeing this man whom you had met through the work, and then
[chuckles] you meet him in person in his lair, in his habitat, which in no way
matched. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Nothing!
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . in no way matched the man or the art. I would think that you could
never say that of Fletcher Benton. I think the reason that. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: He’s probably more secure than I am. I’m very insecure. I need
the white walls. [laughing]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you said it.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s a good point.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You said it; I didn’t.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s a good point. And his hair was cut and it was very nicely combed
back, no sideburns. [chuckling] You know, I mean, he looked like a high school
teacher, you’re right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: That’s interesting. Well, I’m certainly a great admirer of John
McLaughlin, but he’s not the subject of this interview, but if you. .
. .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, but I think he relates.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, I think so very, very definitely so. And without overemphasizing this
point, your reaction to his environment, his working situation, and your. .
. . It sounds to me as if you were just bewildered by the fact that this guy,
this unassuming guy, could go off into this fairly awful studio and so authoritatively,
without any mistakes, really, express a vision, or a thought. And it seems to
me that you have spent a good part of your career trying to create for yourself
a world, and a working environment—not the least of which is this studio
on Dore Street in the south of Market kind of industrial section—that
would match what you’re after in your work. Or what your work’s
about.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, hopefully. . . . Hopefully it’s not quite that way.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well. What do you think?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I think I was wherever I am now before the building.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: The building was very important to me. I had outgrown my other building.
There was no more room there. We were building sculpture on top of sculpture—literally.
I can show you photographs [of this]. I had to get a bigger space. And what
happened was I had the opportunity to control my own space. It didn’t
start out that way. I was going to put another floor in my old warehouse. So
when I had this opportunity, I couldn’t slough it off.
[Tape 6, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: You started to tell us a little bit about the circumstances
leading to this studio, the place where you work and which also has, like a
loft, studio and living space, which you use sometimes, but basically I gather
you entertain here. What does all this mean to you? How did it come about and
what does it represent to you?
FLETCHER BENTON: It came about because I ran out of space in the other building. I mean,
it was just a very practical situation, and there was no way that I could enlarge
my other building, third floor, put a third floor on it without tremendous financial
commitment and problems with the city. My wife and I had wanted to move and
live in the studio, and we thought we could put a third floor on my other warehouse
and do that, but it just didn’t work out. And I was driving to work one
day and I found these four lots here in the alley of Dore Street.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is that how you pronounce it: Dore-ay? [rhymes with foray—Ed.]
FLETCHER BENTON: Dore-ay, yeah. I think so.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I called on it. They told me the price. I almost fell over,
but in a matter of a day or two I adjusted to, you know, just how much things
had changed down here. Because I was one of the first artists south of Market
Street, contemporary artists.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I came down here in ‘63 with Onno DeReuder, a Dutchman who opened
up the San Francisco Art Foundry. We moved into the building together years
ago. So I’ve been around this area for all that time. I bought the lot,
and, I don’t know, a year and a half later built this building. And I
was going to put in just a rectangular warehouse, and I got involved with an
architect, which was probably a big mistake. Not probably. It was. And he tried
to talk me into fancy windows and catwalks and glass walls and all that baloney,
and I said, you know, “Look, all I want’s a rectangular warehouse.”
But when I saw the model of the rectangular warehouse, there was this big flat
roof, and I said, “My God, you know, we gotta do something with the roof,
so let’s put an apartment up there.” That’s how the apartment
happened. ‘Cause I thought, you know, if you’ve got the building
and the roof you’ve already got the foundation so it’s just a matter
of a few walls and some sheetrock and, boom, apartment. Of course that philosophy
can go on forever because there’s always a roof on a roof on a roof on
a roof. But we did stop at the third floor. So that’s how the apartment
happened. Bobbie and I were going to move in here and live within the space
and all that stuff, and the building got very severe lawsuits. Contractor went
bankrupt. It took us four years to finish it, instead of seven months.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [sotto voce:] God!
FLETCHER BENTON: It was the worst, one of the worst possible things that could
happen to an artist. Well, all of a sudden, you know, you. . . . I was without
a studio. The other building had been sold. I was out on the street. That’s
when I started doing the watercolors, because I had nothing else to do, except.
. . . You know, you can do watercolors on a, in a chair!
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And not knowing at that time that the watercolors were later on going to
tell me where to go. And just let me say thank God, thank you, God, that this
is another one of those wonderful things about being, being an artist: You never
know where you’re going. It’s like finding some beautiful place
from the air, flying over, and you look down and say, “My God, that’s
beautiful. Let’s stop here.” And you stop and you start walking
through the forest and you discover all the things you didn’t even think
were there. And that’s what happened with the watercolors. I came into
the building. I was totally disrupted. Two years had passed, no work had been
done, my continuity was broken, and I was trying to find a place to start, and
I knew. . . . And I knew from past experiences that when an artist is in trouble—at
least when this artist is in trouble—it’s always best to get back
here to the place where you were feeling the best about your work, repeat some
of that, pick up from there, and hope that your direction and momentum will
carry you someplace. And I did that, and the someplace was this body of work
called Steel Watercolors.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And you’re still doing the Steel Watercolors.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh yeah, I. . . . Funny thing, after many—I’ve
done many small watercolors—I’m just really getting cranked up.
Because from the Steel Watercolors came all the Steel Drawings, came the Spring-Its,
came Truck’N Geos, and all of a sudden I’ve gone from flat planes—Folded
Circle, Folded Square—to the volumetric fat, sort of chubby pieces—Balanced/Unbalanced—to
the very linear drawing, open, immediate Steel Watercolors, which led into Indians,
Whole Pieces, Truck ‘N Geo, and I don’t know where it’s gonna
go from there. And the nice thing about it is I don’t really leave a group
of work unattended. I will go back and do a Balanced/Unbalanced piece because
it keeps me . . . keeps me stimulated to do a Folded Circle and go back to the
Steel Watercolor, because in my mind they’re all together. And I feel
that one in a way can refresh the other. So. . . . But my main concentration
is Steel Watercolors now. We’re finishing up some big pieces downstairs,
and the little bit of extra money I make on that’s gonna be spent immediately
on the production of maybe five to six quite large Steel Watercolors.
PAUL KARLSTROM: The Steel Watercolors seem to be the result of a particularly fertile phase
or circumstances and series of events, including the studio—or the delay
in the building of the studio—in your life, and you seem to be . . . very
happy about them. You seem to be comfortable, pleased that these circumstances
came together to allow you to do these pieces. In connection with them you’ve
mentioned drawing and space, and it’s true; they are very linear. And
is that how you think of them? How do you think of them? How would you describe
the Steel Watercolors, if you were forced to do so. What describes them? What,
what are they for you?
FLETCHER BENTON: Those are tough questions. [chuckles] P.J., those are tough questions. [laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, you know. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I never think about what this is to me. I do it for pleasure.
You know, I’m always seeking the next high, the next little bit of pleasure,
the next. . . . Honestly, I’m not trying to sidestep your question, but
there’s no. . . . I mean I’m a builder. I was born a builder. There
are builders and there are nonbuilders in this life. There are users and nonusers.
God made me a builder, and I’m a builder, whether I’m building paintings.
. . . Which is very interesting to use that word, because when I painted I built
a painting. I didn’t paint a painting. I didn’t create a painting.
I built a painting. And I think most paintings are built—which is a whole
‘nother subject. [pauses] You hadn’t thought of that one before,
have you? But it’s true. For instance, if you look at Motherwell, his
large Spanish—what were they called? The Spanish Revolution _____. . .
. [Elegies to the Spanish Republic]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Spanish Civil War.
FLETCHER BENTON: Civil War paintings. Those were paintings that were built.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, um hmm. Constructed?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, built.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Built? How do you differentiate? _____ _____.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, they were composed. . . . See, if you compose something you build
it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, composing is building. Putting together. Constructing. It’s.
. . . So. As opposed to the realist people, who don’t build. They render,
and alter, but they do not build.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, in the. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But anyway, that’s a whole ‘nother. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: In the Steel Watercolors, you feel. . . . Actually I’m not looking
for anything particularly profound about this. I was just thinking in a technical
sense, or within the vocabulary of making art, the term you use is drawing.
FLETCHER BENTON: They’re drawings; that’s true.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Uh huh.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think of them as drawings so that they. . . . Sometimes drawings can be
mindless. These are not mindless. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying
to. . . . Gosh, I’m repeating myself, but I’m trying to get a good
Caesar salad—which we had for lunch, didn’t we? I did.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You did.
FLETCHER BENTON: _____, it was wonderful. Thank you very much.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You’re welcome. [laughing]
FLETCHER BENTON: But, you know, it’s, I’m working for a sense of order, harmony,
pleasure. I’m a decadent [soul, sucker], you know, I. . . . [laughs] [Just]
don’t know what else to say. I want it to be. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: But your work doesn’t look that way. You see this is. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: [laughs] I’m decadent.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You’re decadent. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Right, no.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . and the work does not look decadent, and so. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, you know what I meant by that. If you work for pleasure and you work
for, you know, all that stuff, it sounds decadent, doesn’t it? No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Perhaps, perhaps. Although I think. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, I wish I could say to you there was some great goal I was
working for. I’m working for a very high order of things. The higher order.
I suppose it’s very zen, it’s very this or that, but it’s
a higher order that cannot be really described. I know it. . . . It’s
like my son. You know, he used to tell me when he was in his teens—and
even before that; I think it happened maybe when he was nine or ten, I think.
“What’s going on, Fletcher? What about this or that?” He said,
“Dad, I’ll let you know when it happens.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: No, that’s a great line. “I’ll let you know when it happens.”
I said, “I don’t want to know when it happens. I mean, give me a
break. Let me know before it happens, you know. I don’t want you callin’
me up in the middle of the night, and say, `Well, Dad, it happened.’ I
mean, it’s too late!”
PAUL KARLSTROM: [laughs]
FLETCHER BENTON: But in a way that I could say is true of my work. I’ll
let you know when it’s finished, where I’m going.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What about, going back to when you started. . . . Or earlier on, not when
you started necessarily. When you were, when you went into the university, and
you went in ‘54, returned to the university, right?
FLETCHER BENTON: [nods affirmatively?]
PAUL KARLSTROM: And you were there till ‘58. Well, no that’s. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, ‘56.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, ‘56. You received your B.F.A. and all that, and this was before,
immediately before coming out again to San Francisco.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You spent several years there.
FLETCHER BENTON: Hm. [almost a snort—Trans.]
PAUL KARLSTROM: What happened? What difference did it make? What about, did that make any
difference in your career as an artist?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, it’s a great question. I went to college and finished college
for my father, mother. I didn’t need to be in college. It was, where I
went to school was at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It was called the little
Harvard of the Midwest. It was full of sororities, fraternities, and football
games, and a lot of beer, and the. . . . I mean, they had everything there but
the bearskin coats and the. . . . What was that thing that Rudy Vallee talked
through? The megaphone?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: But I mean it sort of had that feeling, and it was, for somebody
who’d been in the service, seen a little bit of the world, to go back
to this sort of thing was . . . was odd! I mean, I can’t say I overjoiced
[sic] about the five or six years I spent there. But I didn’t want to
disappoint my parents. And getting that degree was important. And I got it.
Took me five years of schooling and six years of the total thing, to get that
four-year degree, and. . . . But when I was there I was constantly in trouble.
The art department was pathetic. I mean, it was, it was. . . . The head of the
department was a watercolorist that went to Vermont in the summer and painted
trees, birch trees, and water ponds, ducks quacking over the pond, fluffy clouds.
And his name was [________—Ed.] Hodgin. He was an okay guy, but he was
an uptight, stodgy dude. He was the head of the department and I was a very
aggressive student. I was into painting. I was a good painter. I may have been
the best painter there. I painted every single day, with maybe the exception
of one or two days on the weekend. But during the week I was down there going
at it. And they had quonset huts that were built for the Second World War ROTC,
and those quonset huts were our studios. And at that time you couldn’t
work past six o’clock. Six o’clock they locked everything up and
that was it. I used to break into the place. I had a window unlocked. And I’d
be in there painting till two, three, four in the morning, and the police would
catch me in there, and they’d file a complaint against Hodgins and the
art department. And I found out about five years ago from an ex-teacher, Richard
Clark, that on two occasions at faculty meetings, executive faculty meetings,
they tried to get me thrown out of school for going in there and working all
night. I mean, I wasn’t drinking beer, wasn’t doing. . . . I was
painting! And I must say that I was a bit of a problem with those guys because
they weren’t used to a student that was aggressive, that was trying to
get something done. They were used to these, these other circumstances. And
I remember, when I graduated I had a meeting with the dean and I complained
about the school not having a graduate program. Raised a lot of hell about it.
Two years later they had a graduate program. I don’t know if I helped
or not, but I certainly expressed myself that it was a pity that this was not
the case. There were maybe one or two teachers there that had any idea at all
about the guts of it all. And Richard Clark was maybe one. One definitely was
Edwin [Fullweiter], and the closest he came to the real world was he did watercolors
Four Times magazine. Remember Four Times magazine?
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: A little tiny thing that you found in the dentist’s office that said
Four Times on it. [chuckles]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I don’t remember that.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, God. So it was a very isolated art department. When I came
out of there I wasn’t much farther along than after that, those four first
prizes at the county fair when I was fourteen years old. Really. That’s
my school years.
PAUL KARLSTROM: From the standpoint of progress as an artist, then it didn’t have
much influence at all, but what about. . . . Presumably you went through a full
course, majoring in art, right?
FLETCHER BENTON: [nods?—Ed.]
PAUL KARLSTROM: And do you feel that much from that, _____ _____?
FLETCHER BENTON: No. You see, I didn’t need to be motivated and I didn’t
need the camaraderie. I’d already. . . . I mean, from very early years
I’d been doing my little bit downstairs in the basement. I mean, I was
already disciplined enough that I didn’t need that support system.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you feel. . . . Well, you did this to an extent to please your parents.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. And when I came out here, I got in graduate school at San Francisco
State. Nepote, Alexander Nepote was out there at the time. And after two or
three months as a graduate student, we were stretching canvases with rabbit-skin
glue, and we were going through all this same. . . . [claps hands] And finally,
I went to Nepote, and I said, “I’m finished here.” And he
said, “Well, why are you quitting?” Because I’d already shown
locally. I’d had one-man shows. I mean, I was not. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: You know. I said, “Well, I, God, you guys haven’t anything to
teach me.” He said, “Well, you know, we’d like you to stay
in this department.” I said, “No. I quit.” And that was it.
Finished. No more education. It was a waste of time, because if you have ants
in your pants, you don’t need school. School gets in the way of a guy
that’s got ants in his pants.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I was going to ask you about that, because that is an interesting
question that keeps arising. A lot of artists in the Bay Area make a living
by teaching, but if you get them, usually off the record in conversation, in
many cases they will raise that very issue: Is it necessary, is it useful, is
it important for an artist to. . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No! [laughs] I don’t think it makes an artist a better artist to teach
school, no.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, no, what I mean is though, what about the students? What are they
going to gain, what do they gain?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, in California it’s good because most of the schools up here
have practicing artists working.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you think that contact is useful and beneficial.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think it’s very good for the students, but it’s
very confining for the teachers because the institution, the [Dumke] institution
that controls the state junior and university college system here, sees it as
a teaching place. And in fine arts, you know, there’s a certain amount
of kickin’ ass, you know. You’ve gotta. . . . These students are
there, and they’re just sorta doin’ their time to get the degree,
and if you can get in there, and if you can really kick ‘em in the butt,
and say, “Look, you’re not gonna see me for a month, but by God
in a month you better show up with work ‘cause I’m comin’
after you. We’re gonna have a critique and I’m gonna tear you apart.”
Well, that’s very good for the student I think. It gives the student a
chance to go off on their own, think about it, do some work, bring it in, and
stand there and deal with what the teacher has to say. But that goes against
the grain of the whole teaching system in California—or any state. They
say you’ve gotta spend X number of contact hours a week with your students.
So the danger is that. The professional artist. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Not to the student but to the artist/teacher.
FLETCHER BENTON: To both, I think.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh.
FLETCHER BENTON: I think to both. In the state school system, you’ve gotta,
you get a lot of very immature art majors, [but]. . . . You know, for instance,
the San Francisco Art Institute, that’s what they do over there. They
say, “Look, I’ll see you in a month. Show me something.” Well,
that’s not all bad. I think it’s a lousy place to go for undergraduate
school, but I think there comes a time when every art person who wants to stay
in college has to be dealt with that way. And I got in a lot of trouble, and
I was very close to being fired two or three times because I refused to be a
part of the system. I was never student-evaluated, in all those years, nineteen
years, I never was student-evaluated. I just told them I will not do it. I don’t
care what the students think of me. And if I did, I’d give ‘em all
A’s and I’d be the greatest guy on campus. But I simply don’t
care. But the system is based on that sort of bullshit. Which might be good
in English literature or science or something else, but in the arts it. . .
.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Does it belong in the university then?
FLETCHER BENTON: Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe art doesn’t belong in the university.
PAUL KARLSTROM: With due respect. . . . Obviously both of us sitting here think that it’s
an important area of human endeavor, but the situation you described. . . .
In a sense one could say that it exists as a patronage system for artists; it
provides an income. It’s one of the ways many Bay Area artists have survived,
have produced a regular income. One could question—especially in a place
like the Art Institute—the value to student, is that the only way to get
this experience, this contact? Maybe it holds them back. But one thing’s
for sure. They’re paying very, very high fees. And is that the only way
to do it? Is that the only way to have. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I just read an interesting thing on David Park last night. He never even
finished high school. Did you know that?
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, but I’m not surprised. I don’t see that it’s [necessary].
FLETCHER BENTON: He was really quite a guy. I didn’t know that much about him. I never
met him. He was still around, I just never met him.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Did you hear about him?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. But I didn’t know who he was, and I knew a couple of his pictures.
That was about it. He was damn, a damn good painter. Boy, that guy was okay.
[Interruption in taping]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why don’t you tell me about the magic man?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, you know, I’m enjoying this interview because I’m
discovering, or I’m putting into words some discoveries about myself that
there was no need for me to sit down and question. I mean, I do what I do, and
it either makes it or fails. But, you know, in talking to you, you press me,
and I don’t have answers for some very simple questions you have. But
I do. . . . Well, I suppose, that for me going to my studio and letting it happen
is what it is all about. I usually get an idea or a. . . . Not an idea, no,
that’s not, that’s not the right word. I get a. . . I get a notion.
That’s a good word. I get a notion about something. Like I have a notion
what’s going to happen at John Berggruen’s show. I have a notion
because I’m working with some drawings that I did in 1981. But I have
no way that I could begin to tell you how I’m going to present this, how
it’s going to be completed. Now I believe in hope, I believe in God, and
I believe in trust. And the trust part of all this is me getting to the studio
every day. Not so much now, but it was a few years ago. I still spend five days
a week here, sometimes more. If, I suppose if I wasn’t married I’d
be here seven days. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . which wouldn’t be all so bad. But I have this philosophy
that if the artist goes to his studio, with nothing on his mind, the very fact
that he is in the studio, he is sitting there with a chain of events that have
made his studio whatever it is, that there is a superior thing that happens
to most artists. I call it the Magic Man; you can call it whatever you want.
But he sort of makes the rounds, you know. Goes around, sees everybody from
time to time, lays one [me, your]. You know, there have been several times I’ve
been sitting thinking about something totally unrelated, and bang! I get a tremendous
jolt that, oh! that’s the answer. I won’t even be thinking about
the problem, but the answer appears. And I know that’s not peculiar to
me; everybody has had those experiences. But in terms of the studio, when that
happens, to me that’s the Magic Man. He’s just come by, and he’s
laid it on me. If I am not in the studio, if I don’t come to the studio,
if I’m elsewhere, I don’t think these things would happen as much.
So I go there and I wait in my studio for something to happen. I don’t
go there knowing what’s going to happen. And each time I get going on
something, I’m going at it with not the foggiest idea where I’m
going to end up. I have certain momentums that I’m dealing with that are
basically already in progress within myself that are taking me, leading me along,
that are pushing me in a certain direction, but I don’t know what’s
going to happen that day. But I know that if I present myself there at the studio,
if I leave myself open, that something will happen. I’ve believed that
my whole life. And it does. Because for me boredom is the most powerful creative
spirit that I’ve ever experienced. All I need to do is get good and bored—and
I can get that very quickly—and I start, I start doing something. It’s
just like an automatic, automatic thing. I need to entertain myself. Maybe,
maybe I’ve just said it there. Maybe just this whole thing is nothing
more than self-entertainment. Who knows? I do find it entertaining. It’s
pleasurable. There’s, there are certainly struggles. I mean, I’m
not, you know, just going along without some hurt and some of the other things.
But, yeah, it’s entertainment. Maybe that’s it, Paul. After. . .
.
PAUL KARLSTROM: After all that, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . seven tapes, maybe that’s it! [laughing]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, is that then what you offer people, through your work?
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t know. May be. I’ll tell you this, that I love to fight.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that’s what I gather from your. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: We were talking about it. I mean, I love to get in there and slug it out,
whether it’s physically or. . . . You know, I don’t go around. .
. . I’m not particularly strong either, but I like the battle. I like
the challenge. The challenge, maybe that’s a better word. And every time
I get down to the bone pile and the table down there, I go to war, I go to battle.
It’s not a vacation. I don’t go there and sit there and wait for
lovely things to happen. It’s a struggle. Every piece starts out with
confrontation. There’s no way I can avoid that. That is, that is just
as sure as anything. I start off with a base plate and a couple things to get.
. . . I have to go beyond three in order to get to the point where I can make
a choice. You can’t make a choice between two, because you only have one.
So I always start off with three somethings. Then I can add to that or eliminate,
but from that moment on, it is, it is to win. And to win is that wonderful feeling,
and in the process there’s a lot of entertainment. I whistle a lot when
I work.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s like the seven dwarfs. [chuckles] [referring to “Whistle
While You Work,” a song from Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs]
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, it’s awful, it’s awful.
[Tape 7, side A]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now, it was interesting what you were saying a few minutes ago. Interesting
to me, anyway. That you enjoy the challenge, engaging the work, or the struggle.
. . . The struggle. The process, is what you’re talking about.
FLETCHER BENTON: Not so much the process, no.
PAUL KARLSTROM: The interaction, the activity. Is that right?
FLETCHER BENTON: Getting from start to finish. The process, if you’re referring to
the process, the welding part, the sanding. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: You’re talking about the creative process, yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that’s what I mean.
FLETCHER BENTON: All right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: The process of moving from concept—or even a vague idea of where you’re
gonna end up—getting from here to there. That’s what I mean by the
process.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, okay, all right.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And this makes me wonder, is that what you hope is revealed
in the work of art? Here’s the work of art then, a document of this process
for you.
FLETCHER BENTON: I hadn’t ever thought of it that way.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well?
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s a good question. I don’t think so. I don’t think
my work shows the travel map, as do Diebenkorn’s paintings. I mean, you
can follow to some degree—I don’t know, maybe more superficial in
his later work—you can follow the trip to some degree. In my work, you
can follow the trip if I don’t cover up the grinding marks. But as soon
as I cover up the grinding marks, the trip is covered up.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you talk about your work as a series of decisions.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Is that right?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And presumably, to a sensitive observer, perhaps, some of those
decisions would be evident. And that’s asking a lot of an observer, because
basically what you’re creating something, as you’ve described, where
there’s neither too much, too little, that if anything were changed, taken
away or added, that there would be something wrong. And that’s the way
you described what you were shooting for. Presumably, or perhaps, the sensitive
observer could become involved in looking at your work, in thinking about decisions
that were made. Why is this piece, which has no reference to anything in nature
as far as I could see, except geometric shapes, why does it look the way it
looks? What are we looking at, by the way. It’s sitting on your big glass
coffee table here, there is a piece that. . . . Well, it’s not a Steel
Watercolor. It, well, it’s not colored, it’s not. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, but there are Steel Watercolors that were not painted.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, so it’s a Steel Drawing.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, it’s a Steel Watercolor, only it’s not painted.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay. All right. It could be. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Now, I just have to correct that because. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: It could be painted, right?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: This very piece could be painted.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. But it will not.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It will not.
FLETCHER BENTON: Because it’s a maquette. It’s the maquette for the big 18-foot
piece down in the front room.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah. Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: This one will never be painted. That I’m for sure of.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What’s it called? The maquette for. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s Steel Watercolor number something.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, and, right, you don’t know. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t even know. You know, I started to try to title
my works, because it’s always more romantic to have a title for . . .
than a number. I mean, people get off on titles. And just for the fun of it,
I tried it. I had two pieces up here. That one is Black Iris, not named after.
. . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which one’s that?
FLETCHER BENTON: This one over here.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Ah hah, okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s certainly not named after [Georgia] O’Keeffe’s Black
Iris. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: No.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . but it was just Black Iris. And another one I called China Moon. And
when I told. . . . And that’s The Yellow Banana over there. So those three
had. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Which one’s Yellow Banana?
FLETCHER BENTON: The one over there by the. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, I see The Yellow Banana, you’ve got. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But people just really got turned on. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: If they had titles.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . if they had titles. And I said, “Well,” they said, “what’s
the title of this?” and I said, “That’s Number 32.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: They don’t like that.
FLETCHER BENTON: No, they didn’t like that at all.
PAUL KARLSTROM: They’d rather have Number 31. [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: Now, if I’d have said, “This is The Stairway to Paradise and
that’s Number 32, all of a sudden, that’s 32, and this has a title.
So I mean, I’m not very smart. I should reach into myself and give every
piece some sort of title. A lot of artists go the dictionary and they go through
Greek mythology, or they do, you know. . . . Ah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right. Well, there’s a problem with that, because then that does direct,
it creates a reference.
FLETCHER BENTON: There is, that’s true. With a title you create a reference and they
say, “Where’s the moon?”
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: Or “Where’s the yellow banana?” or “where’s
black iris?” or where’s Ulysses, or whatever, you know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What’s the. . . . Does the one that we were looking at yesterday,
which you’ve moved now over there, and we talked about it on the tape,
does that have a title?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, but let’s get a title for it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s a wonderful piece, by the way.
FLETCHER BENTON: Here’s a chance for us to both be on [record]. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I love that piece; it’s a wonderful piece.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . as doing, as titling a Fletcher Benton.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay.
FLETCHER BENTON: If you can’t think of it now, keep it in mind. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, let’s think about it.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . and we’ll put it on tape, and we, and you can title that piece,
because that’s how much titles mean to me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, we, that’s a good way to make a point, actually.
[chuckles] So we’ll work on it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Not that you can’t come up with a good title; I didn’t mean
this. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, no, I understand, so your point is that it’s about that arbitrary.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Almost anything I would come up with would be, it’s the same to you.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I think that’s true of any artist in any artist’s work.
A title is as arbitrary as the signature. It has no meaning whatsoever except
for cataloging, except for historians, and except for the ego of the people
who buy it. They say, “Oh, yes, that’s my . . .” whatever.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, let’s get back to the, to the other point, when I called our
attention to this number something-or-other—you don’t remember the
number—right here in front of us on the coffee table and if you look at
it carefully, if you bother to try to become involved with that piece, to pay
attention—and most people don’t, by the way. I’m sure you
realize this.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think it’s the unusual person that pauses to try to establish a
relationship with an object. They’ll usually look very quickly and then
look away. And maybe it leaves a little impression, but it’s not something
that they really look at. Okay, let’s say that somebody does that. They’re
going to begin, the viewer’s going to begin to ask questions why. Why
this, why that? Why the steps? Why the triangle, the circle at that place? Why
did the artist do. . . . There’s a banana that’s not painted down
at the bottom.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s right. Actually that’s a D.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And there’s a vocabulary in there that if the viewer is. . . . It’s
a what?
FLETCHER BENTON: A D. It’s a big, elongated D.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right, right.
FLETCHER BENTON: But it’s also, could be a privy moon, could be a banana
for jello.
PAUL KARLSTROM: What I’m suggesting. . . . I do believe that the viewer, more in the
case of a work like this, which is nonobjective, than in a representational
painting, where the information is given and familiar, more in this case, is
going to try to find ways to comprehend, to apprehend. And in so doing, they’re
probably gonna try to second-guess the artist. It seems to me there may be with
that response or effort on the part of the viewer, a move towards participating
in process which involves decision, coming from A to B. I mean, you must think
about how somebody responds to your work, when they bother to look at it, and
what it is they’re responding to. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Actually I don’t question why they respond to it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Or how they get a handle on it, no?
FLETCHER BENTON: I’ve never asked that question, like, “Why are you buying this
piece instead of that piece?” I’m gonna do that the next time. I’ve
never done that. Because there’s a lot to choose from here, and I say,
you know, they’ll say, “Well, you know, I want this piece.”
Then I’m gonna say, “Why did you choose this piece over that piece?”
and see what happens. It’s gonna be interesting. But I have never done
that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It just seems to me that if people are interested in the way
you had assembled these forms they’re going to wonder why. It’s
nonobjective and there has to be, they believe there has to be a reason for
arranging things in a certain way, constructing, composing.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, gravity. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: And so that becomes part of the meaning of the work, perhaps, is what I’m
saying.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, gravity does play an honest role in what I do. I mean, if you look
at my Steel Watercolors, you’ll see that there’s not too much that
is defying gravity in an illogical way, where I’m counting on the strength
of the weld to be ridiculous about the positioning of the geometry. Oh boy,
what a mouthful! So there is a, there is somewhat a logic, somewhat a logic.
For instance, this shepherd’s staff here, this snake, or whatever you
want to call it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Uh huh.
FLETCHER BENTON: If it were removed, it wouldn’t be the same sculpture, right? No,
it wouldn’t.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, it wouldn’t.
FLETCHER BENTON: Because it’s too important to the total piece. Whether you like the
piece or not doesn’t matter. But also it logically is holding the stairs
up.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah, that’s right.
FLETCHER BENTON: From falling over. So as I put these things together, I must say that the
practical part of me is in automatic.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm. Yeah, because of physics and things like that, certain things couldn’t
be.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, that’s right. And. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Gee, that’s an orderly. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t want to deal with that because it doesn’t interest me.
Now, for instance, here. This feather, which could be a banana, is leaning against
the pole. It’s also bracing it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now this one has a name. We’re looking at. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: This is Black Iris.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: This orange circle is stopped here. These feathers are attached.
They’re hanging fairly plumb. You know, they’re not doing some wild
thing out here, [or, where]. . . . Not that one couldn’t do that; it’s
just it’s not within my interest. These things logically wouldn’t
really be in that position without some connection to something. So here’s
this, this line which has a certain romantic curve about it, at least for me,
and it, and so on. Well, I just happen to like this piece, and I just feel that
if I removed this feather, the piece isn’t going to work. I mean, that
feather is there for a very important reason to the composition. It’s
supportive, it’s a part of the family, it’s locked into its place.
When I was painting, I never had that feeling. And it was one of the most frustrating
things about my painting, because I would work on a painting day after day after
day, and I would come back day after day. I’d be a different person day
after day, and I’d see the damn picture differently, and it never, I could
never get ‘em finished. I mean, it was very hard for me to get finished.
I just sort of took them as far as I could take them, and the very process of
being, of falling out of love with the damn picture was the end of it. You know,
it was a love affair from start to finish, and when I just got bored, finished,
there was no more, no more interest, the thing was done. It wasn’t like
it had. . . . Do you know what I’m trying to say? It wasn’t like
there was a finish for the sake of “that’s as much as I can do to
it.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Whereas in these sculpture pieces, once I go past whoa, and
I can come back and find whoa, then, then it is finished and I can abandon that
piece. And when I abandon a piece—which I could never do with my paintings,
damn it—but when I can abandon a piece, I can be very objective about
it. I can sit back and talk to you about these pieces. They don’t, I mean,
they don’t have to be my pieces. They can be just a piece. Because that
thing is done. It’s out of my life. It’s finished. I never felt
that with my two-dimensional work. There was always one more thing I could do
to it. There was one more adjustment, there. . . . You know what I mean? I don’t
how other artists have spoken to you about that process, but in sculpture there
comes a point where you have to give it—this is real corny; you’ve
heard it before—but you’ve got to give birth to the damn thing,
you know. You’ve got to get it on its way. Painting and sculpture are
as far removed as any two things that you could possibly think of. They’re
as removed as swimming and walking. Yet people chuck them together. They say,
“Well, you know, painting and sculpture, those are the fine arts.”
Oh, God, I mean, they don’t even. . . . There’s no connection. No
connection. Sculpture reacts within the space. And there’s no way that
once you have been in a room where there’s a sculpture that with the lights
out you can ignore the fact that it’s there. Maybe we talked about this
earlier, I don’t know, but I was talking to somebody about it recently.
You see, painting is magic. Painting is magic. It’s illusionary. It doesn’t
exist. It’s a fool-your-eye situation. No matter what, you can’t
get around behind it. It’s illusionary. It doesn’t exist really.
When the lights are out, that painting is gone. A piece of sculpture is just
the reverse of that. If the lights are out you can still touch it. You can get
around behind it. You can feel it up. Hah, hah!
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckling]
FLETCHER BENTON: You can feel right up that old skirt. You can feel it up; you can get the
essence of it. It occupies space, therefore is totally real. I mean, you bump
your knee against a piece of steel sculpture, damn it you’re sore for
two or three days. There’s nothing illusionary about it. It’s there,
period. And having done both painting and sculpture, that part of the process
of being a sculptor is very rewarding. I mean, I find very stimulating. And
I said at the lecture that you introduced me at [“Eye of the Artist”
series. California Palace of the Legion of Honor] that, in the very end, I said,
“I love painting,” and I do love painting. I mean that sincerely.
I love painting. I wish I could be a painter. It’s never gonna happen
for me. But those guys who stay with three-dimensional form, in the traditional
sense of. . . . I’m not talking about piling bricks up in a pile of sand
and string and what-have-you, broken twigs. I’m talking about, you know,
heavy metal stuff.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I believe—and I will, I’d be happy to defend it—that
we are the chosen few. The commitment to sculpture is one that is more real
than the commitment to painting. And therefore embodies a whole different set
of realities. It’s not a dream state. It’s not. . . . Does that
make any sense to you? I mean, painting to me was always in some other place.
You know, I was reaching out for it, I was trying to capture it, I was trying
to get ahold of it. Now I’m not anti-painting by any means. Not only do
I love painting, not only would I love to be a painter, but some of the most
exciting experiences of my life have been painting. Much more so than sculpture.
PAUL KARLSTROM: But. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: But the guys that are still hanging in there, have made the commitment to
sculpture in its bare-bones sense, are the chosen few. I mean, that’s
just the way I feel about it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You keep using the term “bone.” You talk about the
bone yard, you talk about. . . . And it seems to me this is revealing some connection,
or may be revealing a connection with sculpture, the idea of the basic structure,
the human skeleton, the bone, that with which you build, that which holds it
up.
FLETCHER BENTON: [chuckling] I hadn’t thought of that, but it could also be after the
flesh and everything else is gone, what is left but the bones?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, I don’t know.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I mean, the essense is [revealed through reduction].
FLETCHER BENTON: [laughing] That’s really reaching out there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Anyway we’ll set that aside for a moment. I’m intrigued by this
concern you have, or awareness, of the difference between painting and sculpture
and this, not schizophrenia exactly but this dichotomy. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It’s close.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles] This dichotomy in your own experience and concern. And it strikes
me that these Steel Watercolors, perhaps more than anything else in your work,
represent a synthesis of the two interests and concerns. Color of course is
one aspect of it, and reminds one of painting; indeed comes from the watercolors.
It’s not exclusive to painting certainly. But also, although as we move
these Steel Watercolors around on the table, they change, as part of the posing,
and then you change the composition, and that’s a property of sculpture,
which the painting doesn’t have. But nonetheless. . . . Still, at any
of those given points, these works seem to be a combination of the two, and
I gather that they represent that for you, as a way to realize those interests.
Is that true?
FLETCHER BENTON: I just plain don’t know. The only thing I can say is that I thought
I could, I thought I could always return to painting. I thought it was something
that I could pick up where I left off. And I can’t. I keep going back
and trying, but it doesn’t work. And I’m disappointed, because dammit,
that pushing that paint around on the canvas was a wonderful thing. I mean,
I really liked that a lot. You know, mixing colors and seeing secondaries happen,
and especially—I mean, I try to do it in my painted Steel Watercolors—where
you’ll—boy oh boy—where you can slip in an orange next to
some muted color, some bizarre color, and you get this wow! this, this, it’s
like drinking bubbly water, but it’s in the retina. You get this wonderful
discovery response to color. I mean, boy! I liked that a lot when I was painting.
And I guess I get it in the sculpture in that as you walk around the sculpture
you discover new relationships, and it’s somewhat the same but not exactly.
[It] affects a different part of my head. You know, I’m reaching for the
artist . . . the Impressionist, Vuillard. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: [Eduard] Vuillard, yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . is a typical example of this effervescence, retinal effervescence
of color. That guy could make it happen for me.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I used to, I used to work for that gaseous sort of wonderful,
tingling sense of color. Well, you don’t get that in sculpture, so that’s
all there is to that. I mean, you can’t. . . . I thought I could have
both. I really did. And I kept stopping sculpture to go back to the painting.
I did the kinetic artwork hoping I could find some different way to express
a two-dimensional painting, and it didn’t fly. So, you know, it’s
not gonna happen for me in this life. It’s just not. I may paint still
lifes. I still have an easel and a palette and the colors, and I squirt ‘em
on every once in while. Maybe I’ll do some still lifes. That’s a
good way to get [it] out of your system, wouldn’t you say?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Maybe. Maybe so.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I still can’t quite give up on this, though. The fact that you call
these painted works Steel Watercolors suggests that you are seeking. . . . You
want it both ways.
FLETCHER BENTON: I want it all. That’s right. [laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: But you don’t feel that, in fact, that quite achieves it. In other
words you recognize, what? That they finally still are sculpture.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes. They’re not paintings. You know, the only guy that
I know right off the bat—and I’m sure there are many—is one
of my favorite sculptors, Robert Hudson. He is the one guy who is able to take
painting and sculpture equally together. And he’s the only one I know
of that I have respect for. And I’m sorry for those that I don’t
know about. But Robert Hudson can take a—this is a very difficult problem,
artistically difficult—to take a solid form. . . . He’ll take a
cube, he’ll dissect and dissolve the very volume of that cube by making
it a painting, by taking the three-dimensional surface and having it go away.
And all of a sudden you perceive it as an illusionary painting, as. . . . I
don’t mean illusionary paintings, in that there is a group of illusionary
painters. What I mean to say is he’s dissolved the volumetric weight,
cube, and has made it, has made it false, has made it not exist as a solid cube,
but has deceived the eye as painting deceives the eye. The only guy, if you
think about it, that can do it. On the other hand, when he does these large
paintings, he’s not. . . . I mean, in a way he’s sort of, well,
he’s taken a long walk [from?] Kandinsky; there’s no question about
that. But you don’t get the sense that his paintings are trying to give
you through perspective and this and that the illusion of three-dimensional
form so much. You know what I’m saying there?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s very interesting. So he is a master, in my mind. Plus he will
come along—you talk about dichotomy—he’ll come along and hang
a bunch of feathers on a steel cube, which has been painted to look like something
else. I mean it’s . . . why do the cube in the first place?
PAUL KARLSTROM: You’re often described as a constructivist. The term is bandied around
in connection with your work, and that of others, other sculptors. Again [Thomas]
Albright invokes this term. And I would be interested to know what that term
means to you in, well, number one, in an art historical sense, or who does that,
who do you associate with that? But secondly, in terms of application. Do you
think that that is a useful term in connection with your work, the forms that
you create?
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I’m not even sure what a constructivist is anymore because it’s
been misused so often. Would it be fair to say that a constructivist is a builder?
Put things, builds things up, or builds things, I mean, not up maybe, but puts
things together to build them? Is that a constructivist?
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I suppose so. I guess I’m thinking more in connection
with early twentieth century. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: For example. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . in some Bauhaus-related artists.
FLETCHER BENTON: Sure. So you’re talking about Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: A lot of them were Dutch.
FLETCHER BENTON: Right. You’re talking about the Italian Futurists? [Balla?]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, a little less so. But what about Kandinsky? Let’s just take
Kandinsky, and you know some of his series. I can think of some that actually
look a bit like your watercolors, if you want to know the truth.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, Kandinsky was, was a painter. Malevich was a composer.
You don’t see a painterly feeling in Malevich.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, [no, right].
FLETCHER BENTON: And we often play a game which Ann [Karlstrom] and you and
I’ll have to play some night, and that is if you were in the twenty-second
century writing a book on twentieth-century art, you were commissioned to do
it, and you only had ten artists to write [about], which ten would they be?
The interesting thing is part, about that game is that I have to agree with
Robert Hughes [Shock of the New—Ed.] in that constructivism was the last
original art form that we know about so far. That anything after that was just
rehash. And since I do accept that, and if I were to put someone in my ten that
was from the constructivist or Bauhaus period, who would it be? Would it be
Kandinsky or would it be Malevich, some days it’s Kandinsky, and some
days it’s Malevich. I think Malevich was infinitely more consistent. I
think Kandinsky was the teacher. And the support of much of what he did was
what he had written, and his teaching, his influence, through the Bauhaus group.
It would be hard for me to, I mean, it would be very difficult for me to choose
which one of those I felt most important, if I had to choose. But since we don’t
have to here, I think they’re both important, but I think Kandinsky definitely
had the sense of a painter. I mean, he liked the tactile quality of mixing it
up and putting it on and, you know. Not true of Malevich.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I suspect then that you do feel some kinship with that circle, that phenomenon—and
I don’t feel necessarily any one of the artists has a direct influence,
but their interests and concerns, that you relate yourself more to that. . .
. There are only a few traditions within modern art. This is clearly one of
them.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah. Okay. Yes, I would say that I belong, I belong in the twenties and
thirties. Much of the Steel Watercolors in my mind as I started doing them some
time ago, I’d seen, I had seen quite a bit of work from the constructivist
period, and I do find that that’s where I am.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I mean, if you were to say, “Fletcher, where are you? Where can I
find you?” I’d say, “Look in the twenties and thirties.”
That’s where I am now. Maybe I’m never going to get out of there,
but that’s where I am. But there’s something about that basic discipline
that the Bauhaus group [preached] that our world might be better if it had [chuckles]
some of these controlled things. I mean, I really don’t agree with it
that much. I mean, the Swedish people have pink jail. . . .
[Tape 7, side B]
PAUL KARLSTROM: I don’t think we want to pursue the notion of Swedish
pink jailhouses. [said with a smile—Ed.]
FLETCHER BENTON: Okay.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, okay? [laughs]
FLETCHER BENTON: [chuckles] I do fit there. I don’t take as seriously
this business “The world’s going to be better if there are pink
jails.” But I definitely build my stuff.
PAUL KARLSTROM: One of the things. . . . I don’t know if I want to push
this very far; that’s for sure. But in much Bauhaus-related constructivist,
design-connected—we’ll use that term—work there seems to be
a lack of warmth often, a lack of a sense of humor.
FLETCHER BENTON: That’s true.
PAUL KARLSTROM: This is not the case, I think, with your work.
FLETCHER BENTON: I hope not.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And I don’t think it’s the case with some others
[involved]. Certainly we can think of certain artists, Europeans, and in a few
cases American, that have a really wonderful sense of humor and playfulness
in their work. Now one of them is—hardly a constructivist, but is. . .
.
FLETCHER BENTON: [Jean] Tingley.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, right, and then I’m thinking of Bauhaus-related,
non-constructivist, Paul Klee.
FLETCHER BENTON: Oh, yes.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And then, getting closer to home, and closer to sculpture, there’s
[Alexander] Calder. And we were talking a little bit about Calder at lunch,
and I’d be interested to have your thoughts on Calder, how you would describe
him, and what, again, what kinship if any you might feel with him.
FLETCHER BENTON: I had the chance to meet Calder before he died and I didn’t
go to Europe to do it, and I regret it. He, to me, was one of the few sculptors
who did, who worked, did a lot of work, maintained his childhood. He protected
it, he maintained it, he nurtured it, he. . . . He just really is about tops
in sculpture for guys who could do that. He kept his privacy, above all. He,
to my knowledge, didn’t have workers in the studio. So I think he, I think
his contribution was a deadend. I mean it’s awfully hard to pick up where
Calder left off. [chuckling] And maybe I’m repeating myself. I hope not.
But it’s just as dangerous to think that anybody could pick up where [Jackson]
Pollock left off. You know, both these guys did wonderful things, and that’s
about it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So these are the definitive statements? You know, that’s
it. They capped it. That is the statement, in your opinion, in those areas.
FLETCHER BENTON: I hope my work is seen, especially the. . . . After the Folded
Square pieces, they were serious pieces. I mean, there’s some humor in
them, but in a way they were more Bauhaus than anything else I had done, the
Circles and Squares. They were deliberate, deliberately trying to solve a very
hard problem I set for myself. One was breaking a flat circle into something
that was interesting, three-dimensional. And the other was the square, which
is infinitely and forever connected to the circle. I think the circle represents
the first thing that man ever worshipped to any degree. And in the worshipping
of the circle, we had the square. That’s the uptight, sort of somewhat
civilized part of, you know, the eternal circle. But in my mind it’s the
chicken and egg thing. And I wanted to set forth a problem in both those where
I had to make something out of a given, without funny stuff, without any adding
to or subtracting from. All I could do was cut, fold out, and redesignate the
parts. But that in the final analysis they had to fall back into a complete
and given circle and/or complete and given square. Well, when I got that out
of my system, and really felt a little more secure—I’ve said this
before in lectures—the Folded Circle and Folded Square works were my first
steps outside of the kinetic world, and they were the first steps into the three-dimensional
world, and I was damn insecure. I was very insecure. And in a way both the circle
and the square were my security blanket. I mean, I was sort of going along sucking
on my pacifier and feeling my blanket. But when I got into the more arbitrary
statements of Balanced/ Unbalanced—which also had alphabet forms in them;
there’s the wedge piece over there—I was then able, I was then moving
shapes not from a given source, but separate shapes. . . . I was, I could deal
with them in a way that didn’t have to conform to something. You know,
to a prestated thing.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Then, with the Steel Watercolors, they go even further, because
I was dealing less with volume and more with line, and I was dealing with fat
and skinny, rather than just sort of fat and volumetric. Constructivists Edward
Lucie-Smith tied me in with [Max Bill]. Getting back to flatness, getting back
to total control, and getting back to art form that is serious without personality,
without humor, without anything. Without love. I’m not, I don’t
belong with Max Bill. I mean, that’s. . . . I just don’t belong
there.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And you don’t want to belong there.
FLETCHER BENTON: I don’t care. But, no, I don’t want to belong;
that’s true. But I mean, he worked in such tight confines that. . . .
And he’s like a guy walking down the street with the wrong size underwear
on. I mean, his balls must have hurt a lot. No, I’m not tied to Max Bill
at all. My work is getting freer, less connected to the circle and the square
certainly. And I’m having more fun, and hopefully in the process they’re
taking on some of this sense of security about, about what I’m up to.
I’d be the first to admit that the highly polished surfaces on the Folded
Circle Ring series, the bronzes; the very sophisticated patinas, which I developed
myself—they were low-heat patinas; and all of those things were, was the
only way really I could step into the world of three-dimension at the time.
I was pretty well beat up. When I quit doing kinetic work, I was totally beat
up. Not pretty well, but totally. It’s. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why? Why. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I had seven galleries throughout the world.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: I had galleries. . . . I had three in South America, I had
one in Los Angeles, one in New York, one in San Francisco—there’s
six—I had one in Brussels—seven—and I. . . . Yeah, that’s
it, seven. And I called ‘em up and I said, “It’s all over.
No more work.” And my career was at the very peak at the time. I suppose
that was a good time to move on, but I was aware that I was not interested in
going any further. There was nothing, there was no kick left. I just didn’t.
. . . It was finished. And I’m, I’m great at saying, “Look,
I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” Now I’m not saying that I am
a good person to say, “I made a mistake and I’m sorry; that’s
why I quit kinetic art.” That’s not it at all. But I’m the
first person to say, “Look, I took kinetic art as far as I want to go.
It’s finished. If you think Fletcher Benton’s gonna sit around here
at the peak of his career, at 45 or whatever the hell it was, and keep on doing
something because the world want’s to buy it, you’re sorely mistaken.”
‘Cause I’m not made that way, Paul. That is not the way I am made
at all.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you have pressure exerted on you?
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, sure I did. I had two little kids. I had a lot of rent.
PAUL KARLSTROM: No, well, I mean from dealers.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I’m getting to that.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh.
FLETCHER BENTON: And I had pressure from dealers, oh yes. They said, “Well,
what are you doing? You’re wrecking your career.” And I said, “Look,
it’s my career. You didn’t get me to the point where I even had
a choice of wrecking it, so, you know, just get out of my way.” So there
was a period of two or three years where I had no gallery representation. I
had no idea what the hell was going to come. But, you know, I truly believed
in that thing I told you, the little story about the Magic Man, that all I had
to do was get bored, go to the studio—or go to the studio and get bored,
I guess the better way to do it—and something was gonna happen. Maybe
it wasn’t going to go anywhere, but it was going to satisfy me. So I don’t
think that I’m going to have that problem again. I don’t think there’s
going to be throwing on the brakes and taking a 180-degree turn again. These,
where I am now, I think there, I think it’s, it’s where I want to
be. You know, I’m not forcing myself in any way to do anything. I’m
here for very natural reasons. By natural I mean I’m here because of circumstances,
and I don’t intend to crank out the same work year after year after year,
and I want the public to know that I am not going to look the same in 1996 as
I look now, and it may be totally different work. I may be onto something that
would be hard to even connect to Folded Circle, Folded Square. But hopefully
the sense of it all will be somewhat another link in the chain.
PAUL KARLSTROM: The kinetic work, in retrospect—and acknowledging that
that’s certainly what made you famous. I mean, you just were sort of catapulted,
I think, into prominence, international prominence, because of these works.
So it’s obvious that that was a contribution to your career, or at least
a factor, in your. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: A big one.
PAUL KARLSTROM: A big factor. But beyond that, what role did the kinetic involvement
play for you?
FLETCHER BENTON: Okay. I think that the kinetic involvement, the later pieces,
the color pieces, I didn’t need to make as many as I made. I think I kept
trying to get, to push it farther, and I wasn’t willing to go into a higher
technology, as I told you earlier; I was working with the most basic Wilbur
Wright bicycle stuff. And there were certain limits within that, that I really
reached those limits before I knew I’d reached them. Maybe the art people
saw it, and said, “Look, Benton’s reached his limits there,”
or whatever. But I think in the kinetic pieces, the early pieces that were so
systematic, that went from one dot to two dots and back to one dot. That’s
all there was to ‘em. But there was something, at least for me there was
enough there that it was okay. Then I went into the machine pieces, of which
there were maybe twenty, twenty-five pieces, that’s all. Twenty pieces.
Kaleidoscopes and graphic things that were—by graphic I mean plastic things,
graphic things that were in motion that created a sort of a changing composition—were
rather sophisticated in terms of what was going on in the kinetic world. There
was nobody else working that way. Nor was there anyone else working with the
transparencies when I first started it. There was a Swedish guy picked up on
it later. The Swiss did a watch that was a straight ripoff from one of my Continuous
Radius Triangle pieces, but so what. But the thing is, it may have been over
before I knew it, and if there are any regrets, it’s that, that I may
not have seen the end of the road when I should have. I don’t regret the
kinetic work. I don’t know how important it is. I would say, compared
to what I’m doing now, it’s probably not even important. I don’t
think it made a great art statement. It was not making the statement that I
had hoped. [But] I think it reflected where I was at that time. I think the
machine pieces came closer to where I am now than the sprayed-on lacquers, and
the light pieces. I did a whole series of light pieces, dealing with what I
called the Dopler principle in light. Where one would get the sense that the
light coming from a distance, coming to you, passing beyond you, and going away
as the Dopler thing is about sound, you know, the pitch of sound. I may have
made fifteen or twenty of those. Well, I could have probably made one and done
it. But what happened was the principle remained the same in each piece, and
where I was getting my thrills was in changing the box in which this thing functioned.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right.
FLETCHER BENTON: I even had a huge one that rolled back and forth on a big track
hanging from the ceiling. But [a part, apart] of the machine art, there’s
a little film left somewhere—I have it at home—of a show that I
had at the San Francisco Art Institute, of my first kinetic show, that really
knocked people off their pins here. I mean, they just had never seen anything
like it. I had a sculpture that hung from the ceiling, and I had the track—it
was like a curtain rod—but the track hung from the ceiling, but it went
into a rather irregular tracing around the gallery. And hanging down from that,
on a stem, were two cylinders which had light, color change, and sound in them.
And at the top of the rod that hooked onto the track was a motor, and this thing
traveled all around the gallery. It was like an upside-down train. And it had
a little noise mechanism on it. And I remember during the opening people were
jammed in there, and having drinks, and all of a sudden you’d hear this
thing go off, and it would run into somebody that was standing there drinking,
but it wasn’t really fast. It was in very slow. . . . We had one wall
that it finally, when it got through the gallery, would pass right through the
wall. We had the same shape cut out in the wall, and this thing just fit in
that negative space and traveled right through the wall. Well, those machine
pieces I am most proud of. And maybe one or two of the color pieces. The Continuous
Radius Triangle, and maybe one of the early striped pieces, the one [collector]
Hunk Anderson has, the maquette for the Oakland [Museum] window. Now that I
look back on it, there was really no need to go beyond that. But I didn’t
know at that time. You know, I didn’t realize maybe that I was at the
whoa place—we were talking about whoa earlier.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: So I went way beyond whoa. But on the other hand I feel that
I. . . . I just feel that getting all that out of my system was wonderful. It’s
finished, it’s gone, it’s history, and I’m better for it.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It’s interesting that that for which you’re still,
I guess, best known—at least outside of this area—is something that
you feel, well, represented simply a phase in your development, as something
you had to go through but certainly you wouldn’t point to that as the
definitive. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . the essential Fletcher Benton.
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: It is interesting though how in [the] coming together of a certain
expression and a time, and at that time what you happen to be doing, for whatever
reasons, you pursued these interests and created these forms that fit in and
were picked up, and whatever it is now, moves. It moves. [chuckles, realizing
he’s made a pun—Ed.]
FLETCHER BENTON: Probably. . . . Right, it moves. [chuckles] Probably the tightest
show I ever had was that show at Gump’s. I wish to hell I had that show,
pieces left of it, I have one piece.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now, is the same one that was taken down?
FLETCHER BENTON: They took down.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why don’t you, why don’t you tell a little bit about
that, in the. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: Well. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: I’d like you to start, if you would, by describing the
pieces and what you were trying to do with them, or why you made them the way
you did. They sound charming.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, oh, it was a lot of fun. I’d gone to Europe in
1959 and ‘60 after I was teaching at Arts and Crafts. I was there for
one semester. I went over to Europe. I did the Cite ‘ University thing.
Fulbright students arrived there and they were so full of college I couldn’t
stand it, and I took a studio outside of Paris and did some very large watercolors
that were later shown in New York. And I hung around Paris for a while, came
back to New York, had a bad thing there, couldn’t make it work, and it
was, it was a cold winter in 1960, and I ended up in Ohio, from there recuperated,
got rid of my gingivitis and went on back to California. And I got back here
and I just felt that my painting was. . . . I felt second-rate. You know, I
think every artist—God, I hope every artist has had this experience, because
it’s very refreshing, in retrospect—but you feel second-rate. And,
you know, like I told you earlier, Joan Brown and Manuel [Neri] and all these
people were doing such exciting things, and [I’d see them] then I’d
come home in my studio and look at my paintings, and I’d think, “Oh,
Christ. You know, this can’t go on.”
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: And I met Charlie Mattox at the time and Charlie Mattox was
fiddling around with some graphic stuff, and he was a framer then. He was doing
some motorized things. It kind of turned me on, and—pardon the pun. .
. .
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: . . . and I thought, “Well, you know, I’m gonna
try to do this with the figure,” and I remember telling Helen Henninger
that I had a few works, I wanted her to come and see ‘em, and I said,
“There’s some animation. It’s almost like where Walt Disney
was,” and I don’t know why I said that, because there was no relationship
whatsoever, but. . . . What I was doing was I was taking canvas and I was painting
very geometric shapes, like a target—no relationship to [Kenneth] Noland—but
I was doing a target and I was using a lot of silver paint at that time, with
white and then the primary colors—again back to the guy that had the used
farm machinery. And each painting had a figure that was about nine inches tall
cut out of balsa wood. It was a hunk of balsa wood that was three-quarters an
inch thick, three inches wide, seven or eight or ten inches long, and I carved
out these figures. They were actually my wife.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
FLETCHER BENTON: I’ve never told anybody this before. I’d just met
Bobbie. We weren’t married at that time, but we knew we were going to
be. And these were stylistic [stylized] interpretations of her. The hair. .
. .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. Are these based on figure
drawings then?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, they were. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Just really. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: It just was a very stylized figure. It was two legs, a torso,
two arms, and a head. But no detail. It was almost like a cutout silhouette.
The arms were always—not always—yes, they were—all out in
this position. It was this figure. It was like. . . . This was the figure. [demonstrating—Ed.]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm, um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: Arms out to the, horizontal to the floor, legs spread apart,
looking straight ahead, the hair was cut short, hair was black, there was a
red line through the hair—Bobbie had a little bit of red in her hair,
so I just did it by putting a red line through this black hair. The face, there
was nothing on the face. Let’s see, did I have. . . . There was, I don’t
think there was a face. For nipples, there were two little red spots for nipples.
Underneath the arms there were black hair, and black pubic hair. And that was
it. The figure itself was painted alizeran crimson with white mixed in it, and
that gives you that shocking pink color. So they were painted this pink. And
that was it. They had been cut out with a knife so that it was not a bandsaw
cut like a cookie.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right, um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: But it had been, the edges had been cut, but then I’d
gone in and smoothed off and whittled off the edges so that they were slightly
round.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So it’s almost modeled.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yes, somewhat modeled. And these figures were in this show.
. . . Gosh, and there was no photos either, dammit. I was so upset when the
show came down that I destroyed most of the work. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Ohh. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: This figure, the same figure—Bobby—was doing all
sorts of things. I had hanging from the ceiling a trapeze, very small trapeze.
It was maybe six inches wide at the bar, but had a rod that went up to the ceiling.
And she was hanging on this bar, swinging back and forth. And I had a little
motor up there that made this thing. . . . Here she was swinging back and forth.
And all the guys at Gumps, they just loved this circus idea, and they had made
large felt banners, with the circus feeling about it. And the gallery was done
like a circus tent.
PAUL KARLSTROM: You must have loved it.
FLETCHER BENTON: Well, I did. I didn’t expect all that, but that’s
what they did, and that was what the installation was about. And at that time,
I was not familiar with Calder’s circus, so this wasn’t even related
to it in any way.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: So I had Bobbie also on a tightwire that went clear across
the gallery, and she was standing on a bicycle, unicycle, with her arms out.
Coming out her arms were long steel rods that are used in model airplanes. They’re
called piano rods. They’re steel rods. And I had fish weights on each
one of those, so that she was balanced there, you know. And she was on this
unicycle. I had her in an airplane. I built this funny biplane, and she sitting
in the cockpit, with a, I had a little silk scarf off the top of her head, and
we had a fan up there, and the fan blowing this scarf, and the propeller was
going around on the airplane. I had her on several canvases, which, one you
saw in my lecture, where she was doing. . . . There were two of her, and she
was doing the cancan, one leg was moving back and forth.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Right, right.
FLETCHER BENTON: There must have been, I don’t know, fifteen to twenty
Bobbies in that show, in all sorts of very funny things, you know. Not sexual
at all. There’s nothing. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: My God! Well, the woman who was running Gump’s at that
time was an uptight old lady. She was probably in her sixties, seventies maybe.
Just about shit when she walked in there and saw all these pink, shocking pink.
. . . Penis-head pink. Well, even pinker than that, but I’d really got
to her. And she put the kaybosh [kibosh] on the show. We installed it on Friday.
Saturday morning I went down to see how it looked. ‘Cause I was tired,
[I left] the installation [before all] of the panels were up, so I had. . .
. There was nothing there; it was all down! And I was so shocked. And Richard
Gump, I knew him at the time, and he. . . . He is great guy. He, he is a terrific
guy. He spent a couple weeks in jail protesting the arrest of a prostitute in
North Beach. I mean, that’s the kind of guy he was, and to have some bag
like that down there, dictating the. . . . So anyway, I got a lawyer, Chauncey
McKeever, who was involved in the arts. He’s still around. He was involved
in the arts, and I went to Chauncey, and said, “Let’s sue ‘em,”
so we sued Gump’s, and Richard came over, and we sat in the studio and
drank, and he said, “Oh, shit, Fletcher, what are you doing this for?”
and I said, “Dammit, you. . .” So we decided. . . . It got in the
papers. Jim Monte did a big article in Artforum about it, and, you know, and
finally after two or three weeks, I’d calmed down enough and Richard called
me up and said, “Look,” he says, “we’ll do. . . .”
I had this huge five-panel painting, huge picture of a landscape of from the
Valley of the Moon, and it was painted as if you were on an airplane just coming
into a landing strip, so you had this vast panorama. He said, “Fletcher,
we’ll put your big painting up and we’ll do this, and we’ll
do that, and let’s just forget this thing.” So by that time, I was
so. . . . I’d given away all my paints. I mean, I hung it up right there
and then. That was it. So we, he put the painting up, we forgot the whole thing,
and then that’s when I started doing the basic geometric shapes of one
dot becoming two dots, or two dots becoming three dots, or a cross becoming
a zigzag, and so on and so on. I’ll show you photos later. The difference
between those motorized wall pieces and the Gumps show was that the Gumps show
was made up of wigwag motors. These were motors that were used in liquor stores
for those. . . . They still use ‘em. You go into a liquor store and you.
. . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: [demonstrates]
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah, those things that wiggle.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Yeah.
FLETCHER BENTON: They’re battery-driven little motors. And I had gotten
a bunch of ‘em from a liquor store. So the Gumps show was all battery
powered. The painting hung on the wall, the batteries were behind it, inside
of the stretcher bars of the back of the canvas, and here this thing’s
moving in, you know, you didn’t see any wires or anything. But then when
I decided that I was never going to paint again, I got some timing motors, which
were 110 power, and the kinetic, Fletcher Benton kinetic artist began. And that’s
how it started. It was not, I didn’t ever set out to do it, but that’s
how it happened. And the Gumps show to this day, it just really tears me up
that some of those pieces didn’t survive. You know, it’s just too
bad. Too bad for me. Not that they had any worth to anybody else, it’s
just that. . . . What was left from that show was in my old studio. I was in
Europe—this was some years later—and I told the guys to move me
to the new building while we were gone. That stuff, and including the piece
that was at that Art Institute that went through the wall, that I was telling
you about.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Um hmm.
FLETCHER BENTON: All went to the dump by mistake.
PAUL KARLSTROM: By mistake!
FLETCHER BENTON: By mistake. Now, [so] it’s all gone.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So you didn’t then in your disappointment destroy these
works from the Gumps show?
FLETCHER BENTON: No, no. But they were shoved aside, and not taken care of,
and then ended up at the dump.
PAUL KARLSTROM: And then it’s not like David Park. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No.
PAUL KARLSTROM: . . . who supposedly tore up all his [Abstract Expressionist
work]. . . .
FLETCHER BENTON: No, not at all.
PAUL KARLSTROM: So in a sense Bobbie pushed you, or the experience with that
show, that Bobbie really introduced you to the kinetic thing, in a sense.
FLETCHER BENTON: The love affair with Bobbie, our courtship, was very responsible
for what happened to me, yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: See, and I’ve been saying that your work was very closely
tied to your life.
FLETCHER BENTON: Yeah.
PAUL KARLSTROM: I think what. . . . We’re running out of tape, and I think
we probably should wrap. There are more things to pursue, and we’ll have
another opportunity to do that, but I think that this is a good core of information,
at least for this stage, so on behalf of the Archives, Fletcher, I want to thank
you.
FLETCHER BENTON: Thank you, for lunch.
PAUL KARLSTROM: [chuckles]
END OF INTERVIEW
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Fletcher Benton, 1989 May 2-4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
