Transcript
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Lois A. Bingham on April 16, 1981. The interview took was conducted by Estill Curtis "Buck" Pennington for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
The original transcript was edited. In 2024 the Archives retranscribed the original audio and attempted to create a verbatim transcript. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
[00:00:03.03]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: One.
[Recorder stops; restarts.]
We can start by talking about your own background, where you were born.
[00:00:19.59]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, I was born in Iowa Falls, Iowa. And my father and mother moved to—well, moved to the house next door to his family, a house that was built for them while he was teaching at Ellsworth College. And then the next year, they moved to Cambridge, where he went into graduate school in psychology, and was one of the first generation of the animal behaviorists.
[00:01:00.27]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Uh-huh [affirmative].
[00:01:03.71]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And then? Let's see. I guess he went into World War I, and we went to Washington. And in Washington, he was working with the testing, setting up the tests for Army personnel. I know that I was a guinea pig many, many times over during those years. The IQs were carefully kept on all of us. [Laughs.]
[00:01:43.10]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: On all the children in your family?
[00:01:44.57]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Absolutely.
[00:01:45.32]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And he tested you?
[00:01:48.18]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And the thing that—I loved most of it, but I hated the arithmetic, or any mention of numbers. And to this day, I don't like that part of—well, even telephone numbers.
[00:02:06.43]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Can you balance your checkbook?
[00:02:07.63]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I can balance my checkbook. I can do it if I'm writing. I don't do it if I listen, if I have to repeat it. And I find that I reverse numbers. I get all the numbers in, but they're not in the same order.
[00:02:22.18]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Sort of numerically dyslexic.
[00:02:24.98]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So let's see. From there—
[00:02:30.43]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So you left Washington.
[00:02:31.75]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Now, we were in Washington until 1923, I think. And during that time, my father had gotten a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins, and then we went to Middletown, Connecticut, where he was on the faculty at Wesleyan University, and a few years later, went to Yale to set up the primate laboratory for their psychology department. And he had four children, and four chimpanzees, as we were too often told. All primates.
[00:03:13.76]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Four children and four chimps.
[00:03:16.66]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Eight primates. So in New Haven, I began to get acquainted with art, perhaps for the first time, and had a good art teacher there.
[00:03:37.93]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: You were taking drawing instruction or painting instruction yourself?
[00:03:43.79]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yes. And also began to see more than I had before. In 1925—no. It was later than that. In 1925, we bought a house in New Hampshire. And it was up there with the Yerkes—Professor Yerkes had been Dad's professor at Harvard. And he became head of the department at Yale. So he was in charge of the projects that my father was working on. And he took the chimps to New Hampshire and fixed his barn over for that.
[00:04:27.91]
So my father went up and just continued his year's work, only in the open air of the New Hampshire farmland. And he was learning at that time that chimps had a language which could be interpreted by humans, and that there was a communication set up. And as children, we learned that, too. And we could talk to the chimps. We could call them. We could tell them that "here are some blueberries" or "get down out of that tree," you know? And it was an interesting summer experience for all of us. That went on for about three or four years. And in 1929, my father and mother went to Africa to trail gorillas in the Congo. And at that time, the children were left in Europe. And that was where I got my major exposure to museums.
[00:05:31.17]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So you stayed behind in Europe.
[00:05:33.43]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yes.
[00:05:34.03]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Where did you stay?
[00:05:35.79]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: In France most of the time.
[00:05:38.02]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Were you at schools or with friends?
[00:05:41.19]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: No. My brothers were in private schools part of the time, but I was resident in the neighborhood. And we had a car, and did a lot of local traveling back and forth through the countryside, learned a little French, and went over to Morocco, Algeria, and had a little experience there. And that was my first experience with the ruins of ancient Rome.
[00:06:21.14]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Ah. Exciting.
[00:06:22.25]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It was.
[00:06:23.23]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Is this in Tunisia?
[00:06:25.06]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That was, yes, mm-hmm [affirmative]. No. That was in Algeria.
[00:06:29.89]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
[00:06:32.12]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So I think that's where my interest was really spiked. And I came back all fired for an art career. When I went to college, of course I took art.
[00:06:48.86]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Where were you in college?
[00:06:50.40]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Oberlin.
[00:06:55.43]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What led you to choose Oberlin?
[00:06:59.48]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It was a co-ed school. I'd had friends who had been there. I don't know. It was one of those times when I would have liked to have had some guidance from my parents who said, "It's your choice. You pick it." This, of course, happened during the Depression. And starting college during the Depression was a little bit difficult. And the idea of an art career seemed not very practical. And the result was that I decided that I was going to do that, but I'd cover my bets. And so I carried a double major. And the other was in English. You can always teach English. You have to read, and you have to write.
[00:07:59.18]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: That's right.
[00:08:00.04]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So if I couldn't do anything with the art, then I would have done it. I would have been an English teacher. But my senior year, I was asked to take over a high school class in Oberlin when the art teacher had to leave. So I agreed to do it if I could have—instead of being paid for it, as they offered, if I could have college credit for having done practice teaching. And then before that term was out, I had some visitors from the county school system who came in. And I thought they were just looking over the high school in general, and had stopped in to see me en route. But what they were doing was looking me over for a possible new position, an art teacher. Now they had never had an art teacher in the county schools. And they had somebody with a bright idea at a time when it was not very practical. [Laughs.]
[00:09:13.36]
I was hired to service about eight or ten schools. And it wasn't until I reported back for duty in September that I discovered that not only didn't I have a real job, I had to sell myself and make the jobs. I had to go to PTA meetings, and get up and tell the parents why they had to support art for their kids. And it was a little difficult when you think that nobody had money at that time. And this art was something that you really could get along without. One of the schools was in the steel mining district—a steel-making district. And the steel mills were not exactly the cultural background that makes parents interested in this sort of program for schools. But we had no turn-downs. And so we had eight schools I spent time in, varying amounts from half a day to every afternoon in one school.
[00:10:52.76]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Teaching art, too?
[00:10:54.07]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And this was teaching art to everyone from grade one through high school. And that went on for three years while I was doing my master's at Oberlin. And I lived in Oberlin as a base. And then I also did a little bit of teaching for the department there.
[00:11:21.15]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Your MA work at Oberlin was in art studio or—
[00:11:25.05]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: History.
[00:11:25.44]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Art history.
[00:11:25.97]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And then I was told that if I wanted to go—if I was interested in a teaching position in—again, in studio, not art history, which is what I wanted, Chambersburg College in Pennsylvania—no, Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, had an opening. Well, again, it wasn't an opening. They wanted a department. And so I had been suggested as a person who would set up a department of practicing art for them. I went out for the interview, and I got it. And I was there then for about three years. And by that time, I figured that the students that I had had during that time were better than I was, and that I was ready to move on and hopefully get into history of art somewhere.
[00:12:26.46]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: With whom did you study at Oberlin in your master's program?
[00:12:30.74]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Clarence Ward, primarily. My master's work was in medieval architecture since he was an architectural historian.
[00:12:40.26]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did you have to write a thesis?
[00:12:41.92]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Oh, yes.
[00:12:43.45]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What was yours on?
[00:12:45.76]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Medieval military architecture.
[00:12:47.71]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Medieval military architecture. In what location?
[00:12:53.04]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Europe. Chuck Parkhurst, who is the assistant director at the National Gallery, was also a graduate student there at that time. And he eventually succeeded Clarence Ward as head of the department.
[00:13:15.42]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So then you went on to Pennsylvania.
[00:13:18.69]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, when I got a department started there. I did get a chance to do some substitute teaching when Eleanor Warfield, who was the art historian, was hospitalized for a while. And that was great fun. [They laugh.]
[00:13:42.48]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And then you went to Yale?
[00:13:44.81]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, when I turned in my resignation, they refused to accept it. And they said, well, I had just gotten the department started. I couldn't walk out on it at that point. I said, well, if they wanted me to continue, then I had to do something to improve my skills. So how about a year's leave of absence? That was okay. I figured that if they could get a substitute for a year, maybe that person then could stay on, which is what happened.
[00:14:12.31]
And I had that year at Yale graduate school in studio work. But at the same time, I could do the assignments a lot faster than the younger people could, so I was having a lot of extra time on my hands. And it was the outbreak of the war, so I signed up. Well, there was a bulletin board announcement that anyone who was interested in taking a course in camouflage should add their name to the list, so I signed. And one day a couple of people came around and asked questions while I was in the studio. And I got in. I was one of three of the Yale students who was accepted for the camouflage course that was being given to industrial plants all over the country. And they could send in their representatives to learn how to camouflage their plants against enemy air attack.
[00:15:23.09]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did you have to get a security clearance?
[00:15:25.88]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: No. No. You didn't have to get a security clearance just to learn how to cover it. [They laugh.] How to throw the nets around and splash the paint. But if you had gotten a job to do a plant afterwards, then you would have had to have had your clearance. But the rest of—except for the three students, it was a very, very high-class, professional group of students. I got to know them—members of the architectural faculty. And as a result of that, I asked if I couldn't take a course in their architectural department. And I was the first woman admitted to the Yale Architectural Department.
[00:16:19.59]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Oh.
[00:16:23.34]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: But after I finished the two courses that I took there, I was used as a draftsman by a glider factory in town because they had a lot of good craftsmen who could do work, beautiful work, but they could not read blueprints. So what I had to do was to convert a two-dimensional blueprint into a three-dimensional drawing so that they could see the object that they were building, but have all the specifications on that three-dimensional drawing. So that was how I was occupied for about a little less than a year.
[00:17:19.04]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And this was in New Haven?
[00:17:20.07]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That was in New Haven. It was Bristol Aeronautics. And then I came down to Washington to visit, and of course went to the National Gallery. As I went in, I ran into one of my professors from Oberlin. And he said, "What are you doing here?" And I said, "Well, I came to see Chuck Parkhurst." And he said, "Oh, Chuck's in the Navy. Come in and see me." And before I left, I'd been hired at the National Gallery as a docent. So I now was in history of art.
[00:17:49.17]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: You had finally gotten out of the studio that you'd been trying to escape from.
[00:17:53.04]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So, from the studio to—well, the studio I haven't been in since. So for—let's see, that was—the gallery had been open about a year and a half at that point.
[00:18:10.12]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: The Pope Building that they now refer to as the West Wing.
[00:18:15.09]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That's right.
[00:18:15.61]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: The older building.
[00:18:18.70]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And I was there for about ten years.
[00:18:24.06]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did it look different then than it looks now? Was the setup different?
[00:18:33.04]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Now, in what way?
[00:18:34.57]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: In the old building, were the rooms of paintings set out as they are now, or were there different setups for schools? There was very little modern art.
[00:18:46.75]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, there's very little change in that. When the gallery opened, I think that no one who went as a visitor would realize that it wasn't totally open, but behind the galleries that were open to the public, there was immense space still to be converted into galleries. As they needed more space, then they'd finish off another gallery and just open it up, too. And in those days, we had a basketball court, a couple of tennis courts, badminton. And after hours, we'd go up into this beautiful open space and had great recreation.
[00:19:33.62]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Almost fulfilling classical Greek notions of art and sport existing side-by-side.
[00:19:39.92]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: But I understand now that that's practically gone, so the gallery is to the public much larger. It was also a much smaller staff at that time. The interesting thing to me, though—I think perhaps the most interesting part of my National Gallery experience was opening up art to people who had never seen it, who never knew what it was. An example—early in the morning—well, the gallery opened at ten [a.m.] so it would have been right after it opened—I was up in the gallery preparing for a lecture, and there was a man who I had seen walking through the gallery all by himself—tall, lean, bent forward, head down, looking at everything as he passed it. He came up to me and he said, "Excuse me, could you tell me the difference between this art and what I see in magazines?"
[00:21:25.18]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Could you? [Sneezes.] Could you?
[00:21:29.87]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, we had a very interesting talk for about half an hour. He went away very contented and saying that he'd be back, and he was going to bring his wife back with him. The gallery when it was first opened had a hard time getting to be known as the National Gallery of Art. Everyone called it the Mellon Gallery. Taxi drivers, visitors, everyone came to see the million-dollar Mellon Gallery. And some of them were afraid to come in. And they had the feeling that art was not for them. It was for some—it was a very special kind of thing for only certain special people.
[00:22:18.17]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because the building was so opulent.
[00:22:20.08]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, not only that, but because of their—oh, their training, or their custom, and their lack of exposure to it, and the fact they didn't know anything about art, but had maybe read about it or heard about it, but had not been exposed to it directly. And they just didn't feel that it was for them. Well, the Mellon Gallery though, which was a national gallery and was for the people, began to make an impression. And I think it made a great deal of difference in this country so far as the general public was concerned.
[00:23:04.82]
The education department was an adult education department. And it was a very sophisticated type of lecturing that we did both in the gallery and in the auditorium. And during the war, when Washington was jammed with people, people without homes, people who were transients, people who had no place to go on weekends when their free time came, they began to come to the gallery.
[00:23:47.19]
And it was at that time that the musical concerts on Sunday evenings became so popular. Richard Bales had a concert every Sunday night during the war, just the way he does today. And people could come in and stay until ten o'clock in the evening. And we didn't have the Kennedy Center. The National Theater was, I think, the only live theater in the city. Concerts were few and far between. The National Gallery was offering something for the general public in the cultural line that they couldn't get anyplace else. It became a place where people went regularly.
For instance, when we were doing gallery talks, we'd get so that we'd know who would be there on Thursday or who would be there on Tuesday. One year—I was going to go to Europe that summer. And oh, along about April or May, one of my colleagues came into the office and said, "I understand that you haven't had any new clothes this year. Are you saving to go to Europe?" That's the kind of public we had. It was very personal, and we got—they knew us very well.
[00:25:23.13]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Were you planning—this wasn't during the war you were thinking of going to Europe?
[00:25:26.52]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: This was in 1950—right afterwards. So we'd go down on the street. Even after I left the National Gallery, on the street, people would stop me and say, "I miss you." And I might not know them. I might not recognize them, but they knew me.
[00:25:49.69]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because they had heard you give your talks.
[00:25:52.00]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So frequently.
[00:25:53.08]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did you give tours as a docent?
[00:25:55.21]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I did all of it, everything.
[00:26:01.55]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did you work your way up into the hierarchy of that office? You began as a docent. And did you move into the administration aspect, too?
[00:26:10.94]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yes. There was a point at which I was—well, I had been the assistant—what is it?
[00:26:30.21]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Information specialist?
[00:26:31.93]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: No. I think it was before we had those. The head of the department had left. And I had been the assistant. I was offered the job as head of the department. And just to show you what different attitude I had at that time from what is current today, I said, no, I didn't think so. I thought that, in this case, it ought to be a man. And I thought, for very good reason at that point, because we had a difficult administration, and I felt that bringing in a man who was considered their peer would be a little better for the advancement of the office. Well, I don't know that the office has changed very much over the years. It's not what I had hoped for. But in any case, we got a man, and we were no better—perhaps not as well off as if I had said okay, and taken it. But let's see.
[00:27:43.22]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So then you stayed there until 1954. Is that right?
[00:27:50.85]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: '55. The early part of '55. I think it was that January. There had been an ICOM meeting in New York, and then they had gone to Baltimore. And they were traveling by special bus and coming to Washington. And there was to be a luncheon in our cafeteria there, a special lunch set up for them. And it snowed. And the buses were delayed. And they got in about, oh, very late for lunch but glad to get in out of the cold snowstorm.
[00:28:38.17]
When everyone was seated, the staff then found their places, and I was seated at a table with Richard Brecker, who was with the Department of State and then had moved into the U.S. Information Agency, which was brand new that year, set up under President Eisenhower. And the agency was taking over all of the cultural activities of the Department of State and propaganda information.
[00:29:16.96]
And Dick Brecker was head of the exhibits branch. And as we sat at lunch and chatted about this, that, and the other thing, he said, "I think we should have some art exhibitions. How about coming and doing art exhibitions for us?" I said, "Well, I want to know more about your program first." He said, "Well, come along with me." And he took me right over that afternoon, showed me around, and took me into the personnel office, told the officer there to do a job description. I guess it was about three months, whatever it took to get my clearance through, and I was at work in USIA.
[00:30:07.46]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Which had taken over from the State Department the responsibility for cultural exhibits, and for Voice of America activities, and the sort of general—
[00:30:22.36]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And setting up the cultural offices in all of the countries abroad. And the USIA office here in Washington was really a supply station—what was needed, what kind of backup was required for keeping this operation going worldwide. Art exhibitions were rather frowned upon at this time because—see, that would have been—we were talking about '55 now. And it was, oh, close to ten years before, the Department of State had sent out a few exhibitions of American art that they had purchased so that they could travel them indefinitely. One of these exhibitions was in Europe when one of our senators was over there. And he saw it. And he was incensed. He thought it was radical, revolutionary.
[00:31:33.95]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What was the show?
[00:31:35.44]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It was just a collection of paintings of very conservative work. Very little non-objective or abstract work had even started at that time. But he didn't like it. It was just not his idea of good pictorial art. It was showing the tendency towards abstract. Marin was in it; Stuart Davis, that group, all good artists. And the upshot was that he came back and kicked up such a fuss that the exhibition was withdrawn. The Department of State was no longer going to handle art exhibitions. It would no longer purchase art.
[00:32:30.88]
So when the cultural activities were moved to USIA, and they wanted to start art exhibitions there, no one could find any reason for USIA not doing it. There had been no instruction to them. It had only been to the Department of State. So we started at that time. And one of the very first exhibitions that we sent out was one of 19th century American landscape. And how conservative can you be? Nobody could say anything about that wouldn't be okay.
[00:33:12.47]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So there really was a concern on the part of federal agencies about the image abroad that American art would create?
[00:33:21.44]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Absolutely.
[00:33:22.12]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And the artists, like Caesar's wife, had to be above suspicion and above doubt.
[00:33:31.73]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: More so than that indicates. We got into—well, I did not know it before I went in, but I found it very quickly thereafter that we could not use in our exhibitions any artist who had not been cleared, so to speak. If anyone was on the House un-American Activities List, they were out. So how do I go about putting art exhibitions together, and censoring the content of the exhibitions, and not letting anyone know that we were censoring, because, at that time, if anyone found out that we were censoring an art exhibition, we would have been finished. From, well, I guess it was about four years that we managed, the exhibitions began to get a little bit more contemporary.
[00:34:47.70]
We had one exhibition of 19th and early 20th century painting that had a very successful tour in Europe. It got rave reviews. In Germany, one of the reviews in an exceptionally good paper said, "This is beautiful. It's fine. It's excellent. We're glad to see it, but it's rather grandfatherly art. What do you have that's more current?" We got similar, not such explicit comment from other places. And I began to collect these so that I could say, "We have to do something that is more contemporary."
[00:35:44.85]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Isn't that interesting comment on that time, because, really, in the time in which we live, the big blockbuster traveling shows and the shows in which there's really a tremendous amount of interest are the historical shows like the Alexander show, and Luminism, and the interest in the Splendor of Dresden show, so there seems to be a greater interest in the antique. And what you seem to be suggesting is that, in this period, there was a great interest in contemporary art and modern art.
[00:36:13.46]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Okay. But at that time, nobody knew very much about what was going on over here.
[00:36:20.07]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Oh, in our modern art.
[00:36:21.01]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: In our modern art. There were no traveling shows, if you think back to the '50s. That was a period when just a few exhibitions were being traveled by the Museum of Modern Art. They were probably the ones who broke the ground in this field. They had a program of exchange of sending exhibitions to Latin America. Nelson Rockefeller had been influential in that.
[00:36:59.86]
Annemarie Pope had set up at the Smithsonian institution the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, more commonly called SITES. She established that. And she was doing under contract, exhibitions, small exhibitions that could go to places, oh, smaller towns, not necessarily big museums. USIA was trying to reach a little beyond that. I think Annemarie's shows had not necessarily been original art. I think she had done photographic shows. And I could be wrong in this, but in any case, they were not large, original art exhibitions.
[00:38:02.67]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So how did you select your artists?
[00:38:07.20]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: We selected—first of all, it was decided that we would not have a one-person selection. And we used so-called juries. And there would be three or four people selected to select the art that would go into an exhibition. That meant that—well, what it came down to was sort of a watered-down taste. And it became just a document of something of the times, but without really a specific statement of taste.
[00:38:52.73]
Now as long as you were working with a jury, there were ways of suggesting that maybe another painting or another artist would be a better solution, or make a better contribution to this exhibition. And somehow it worked, and I didn't have any problems. And I avoided the use of any of these artists whom I knew to be—who would raise the red flag. There was an exhibition that we were asked to do for an international labor conference in Geneva.
[00:39:43.52]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What year was this?
[00:39:45.19]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I'm trying to remember. [They laugh.] I think it must have been around '57, '58. In any case, the theme of the exhibition was labor in art. And I went to the policy makers of USIA and said, "Surely we can do a very good exhibition of labor in art, but we can't do it unless we use Ben Shahn, since he is not only one of the most prolific in that area but also the best known internationally. And if Ben Shahn is left out of this, it will be a very obvious omission, and there will be questions asked. And I don't choose to do an exhibition of labor in art unless we can use Ben Shahn and a couple of others of that ilk." So I got permission to do it.
[00:41:00.66]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: From the USIA?
[00:41:02.29]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: USIA. Now in New York, when I'd go up to look for something for an exhibition, or ask, or want to borrow something, or just learn about what's going on, I never identified myself when I went into a gallery. I didn't identify myself as being with the government. I learned very quickly that that was a turnoff. There would be a short response to whatever my questions were, and then the person would absolutely disappear, and I would have no further help.
[00:41:49.16]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because of their fear of being—
[00:41:51.18]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, they had no use for the government, and they were not going to have the government tampering in art. It took quite a little while to develop confidence in the program, but they still were certain that we were censoring. But with Labor in Art, the first thing I did was to go straight to Downtown Gallery, and Edith Halpert, who was the dean of the dealers at that time, and a very outspoken lady. So I went in and told her that I needed to have some information about certain Ben Shahns, and where they were, and those that might be available for loan.
[END OF TRACK AAA_bingha81_2660_m]
[00:00:08.98]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And Edith Halpert looked at me very sharply and made no comment, but took me to her archives and showed me the Shahn books. And I said, "Now, after I have selected the ones that I'm interested in for this show, would you be willing to indicate whether or not you thought they would be available for loan?" And I told her what the exhibition was and where it would be going. And she said, "Bring them in to me."
So about 45 minutes, an hour later, I went in, and she checked to see what I had picked. And she had to see whether or not she approved of my selection before she decided whether she'd go on. And then, having passed that little hurdle, she said, "No, this one won't be available. That belongs to so-and-so, and they never lend. And I wouldn't persuade them to lend, either. So you can skip the ones that belong to the Museum of Modern Art." And then, she did point out the ones that she thought could be borrowed.
[00:01:27.48]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So you were primarily borrowing works of art for these shows?
[00:01:31.08]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Always.
[00:01:31.77]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Always borrowing.
[00:01:32.76]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: We were not purchasing at this time at all. And this meant that we had access to much better works of art than we would ever be able to afford to buy. We wouldn't have been permitted to buy anything with government funds after the previous experience. But we put that exhibition together. And because we had permission to use these artists, there was no flurry of any kind about it and no repercussions. And the fact that there were no repercussions made it easier the next time to include some of them. And it was just gradually shown that there was no—they should have heard of this, and that these were among our very good artists whom we should be proud of.
[00:02:45.51]
We thought we were getting along, making our point, and clearing the way for exhibitions that were not subject to censorship. But there was an exhibition that we did that the American Federation of Arts was doing. And I think it was the last 20 years of American art that they were working on. And when the list of artists was completed, it had to come down to USIA for approval. And it was handled very badly, and I couldn't do anything about it.
[00:03:37.08]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Was this the "100 American Artists" show?
[00:03:39.72]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: No. This one never happened. And it turned out that there were a number of artists on it whom USIA security people decided should not be included. And it reached—they handled it so badly that it came to the point where the Board of the American Federation of Arts, their attorney, and I with a USIA attorney, and a couple of other officers of USIA met in New York, and there was a real confrontation. And the upshot of it was that the exhibition was canceled.
[00:04:35.78]
AFA was threatening to sue the government, sue the USIA, which never happened. But another exhibition that was also in the works at that time was a sculpture exhibition which Andrew Ritchie was selecting. He had selected it. He had selected it; he had written his catalog. And I thought that it was okay until somebody got ahold of the list of artists, and kicked up a great big fuss, and this exhibition was canceled.
[00:05:26.79]
It was about the same time that an exhibition had been prepared by Sports Illustrated and American Federation of Arts to go to—well, it was to travel in this country. It was called "Sport in Art." And then, we were to pick it up and send it to Australia for the Olympic games at the end of it. We got to Dallas, and there were some ladies who decided that it was a subversive show and there were subversive artists included and they didn't want their community taste and morals run down.
[00:06:21.51]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What was in the show?
[00:06:22.59]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: What is that?
[00:06:23.88]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: What was in the show?
[00:06:25.62]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Oh, just paintings of people performing various sports. But one of the paintings was by Shahn. One was by—oh, who's the other one? Oh, I shouldn't even start this one. I can't give you the names of the artists in it. I'd have to—I have to check that.
[00:06:55.15]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: That's all right.
[00:06:55.54]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: There were about three or four. And what they did was to stand in front of the paintings and not let people see them.
[00:07:01.68]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] Good old Dallas.
[00:07:05.45]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It was so ridiculous. But this had TIME-LIFE behind it. And TIME really picked up and made and did a big job on publicizing this ridiculous event. The museum was picketed, and all. And with all of that, USIA decided that it could not tolerate—they couldn't risk sending the show to Australia and sponsoring it for that time. So we had all—we had these three cancellations, then practically together. There were a lot of meetings where USIA was taken to task, one of them for treating one of the great men of the art world, Andrew Ritchie, as they had. He never should be treated that way.
And I remember in this meeting the Director of USIA had said—well, one of the complaints was that he was not notified except by a curt telegram. And that's what USIA did, was just telegraph him. And I had been told I should not communicate with him, that they would handle it. And I couldn't do that. I couldn't make the call from inside the agency. I went out to a telephone booth, and I called him long distance on my own and said that he was going to get a telegram. And I just had to tell him this first, even though I had been instructed not to.
[00:09:05.12]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: I think that was very brave of you.
[00:09:08.25]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So in this meeting, now, when USIA is being taken to task for his treatment of Andrew Ritchie and the way he was manhandled—the director had the nerve to stand up there and say, "Oh, but he was told. Ms. Bingham called him herself."
[00:09:29.43]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] That wasn't very fair.
[00:09:37.14]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So anyhow, he thought he was getting out of it nicely that way. [Laughs.]
[00:09:41.64]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: The thing that I find so interesting about this period is that the things that you were telling me lead me to believe that the period of the 1950s was one in which there was a great deal of suspicion between the private sector and government.
[00:09:56.85]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Absolutely.
[00:09:57.48]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: In which government held the private sector suspect. And in which the people, the private sector, and especially the art community, felt that the government was operating in primarily an oppressive role. And I find this terribly ironic in the aftermath of a war to end totalitarianism. Do you associate this with this? Is this the so-called Cold War climate that we hear so much about? Or do you associate it more with McCarthyism?
[00:10:25.11]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: This was McCarthyism. And it took—well, the way we eventually got over this business of the private sector not trusting the government and not cooperating with the government—Nobody would lend anything, for instance, to the government. Who's the government? What do they care? It had to be, they'd lend it to me. I would be responsible for it. And it meant building up trust in me. It meant building up trust in the way we handle works of art. It was in a period when, as I said before, traveling exhibitions were very few and far between. We didn't know very much about how to prepare things for travel. Nobody knew whether they would be safe. But if I could travel an exhibition and bring it home free without damage, that's so much to the good. And that means that the loans the next time would be easier.
[00:11:50.99]
I remember we were having trouble with getting some loans. I don't remember what the exhibition was. But the chief of the exhibition division was Robert Savard at that time. And he didn't believe that people wouldn't lend to the government. And I said, "Well, Bob, just pick up the phone. Here's the number and I'll call and see if so-and-so will lend this painting." And he started out with the idea that it's an honor to be asked to lend your painting off of your dining room wall to a traveling exhibition for a year, maybe a little longer. And it will be going to umpteen places where I can't even tell you what the museums are that it will be shown in or whether they will be adequately—whether the works of art can be handled adequately. He gave up very quickly because it was not lending to the government. None of these patriotic approaches would work.
[00:13:16.11]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So there was a great deal of—it really did have to be patched together. It's almost a miracle that there were traveling exhibitions.
[00:13:24.56]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, it was. The first big exhibition that I was responsible for sending abroad was the 150th anniversary of the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. We had a selection. We didn't send—couldn't send the whole exhibition, but we did a very large selection from the big exhibition. And it traveled through Europe. And that was the summer when I was going to Europe.
[00:14:09.88]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: That would have been 19—
[00:14:10.36]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: 1955, I think it was. And I went—I was on vacation, and ready to come home, in Paris, two days before my flight. And I got a phone call from Washington, saying—the curator, whom we had expected to take the exhibition down in Ostend couldn't do it. Would I go up and take it down and pack it and get it on its way to Stockholm? So I did. I had stopped on my way over to see the exhibition when it had arrived from, I think, Innsbruck. And Stefan Munsing was—you know Stefan, don't you?
[00:15:04.47]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Yes. He's on our [inaudible].
[00:15:05.19]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Stefan was the USIA USIS Cultural Affairs Officer who had traveled with it to Ostend. And one of the things that—by a fluke I had insisted on, and why I don't know, because I didn't know enough about transportation anywhere to have sense about what would be required to get something safely through. But it was traveling by rail under a special cover and attached to a passenger train so that it would not be offloaded in a freight yard somewhere. We'd made those arrangements.
But Stefan had to go up to—he was going up to install it in Ostend. And I asked him to ride the train with it. And if he hadn't, that show would have been lost somewhere in Germany, because as soon as it was attached to the passenger train, it began to slow them down. And the engineer was furious. He wanted to keep his time schedule. And he was not being able to do it with this freight car attached. And they pulled into a station, and he ordered the car detached. And Stefan, fortunately, with his fluent German, talked it back on. [Laughs.] And every time they stopped, he got out and watched the car to be sure they did not—unbuckle it? Un-what?
[00:16:43.27]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: I suppose unhitch. [They laugh.] De-train.
[00:16:51.49]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Right. It got up to Ostend. Now, that was—when I saw it up there arrive, I was horrified, because it was the first exhibition that I had anything to do with regard to preparing it, preparing it for travel. And I had gone up to New York. Well, first, who do you pick to pack an exhibition? The only place I knew at that time was the place that the National Gallery had used, and that was Budworth.
[00:17:26.50]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Budworth.
[00:17:27.46]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So I went to Budworth. And yes, they would pack it. When I went up to check it, they had it on the street. And I wanted to see how they were packed. They were standing in—crates were just standing up outside the building on the street. And when I went in to see how they were packed inside, they flopped one of them down on the cement sidewalk, unscrewed the top, and here are these great big frames, gold leaf frames with their corners wrapped in the battens made out of excelsior, covered with brown paper, stapled together. And then, wrapped—each corner wrapped. And that was it. Each was in its own case. Well, I didn't know enough to say, "This isn't adequate."
[00:18:28.24]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: This won't do.
[00:18:29.14]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I was telling the professionals. I couldn't tell the professionals when I didn't know anything about it. But when I got to Ostend and saw it after it had been shown—been opened and closed, and opened and closed, about three times by then, the brown paper was breaking, excelsior was all over everything, the padding had been reduced to practically nothing. And why there wasn't more damage to those frames, I'll never know. So we had to get a vacuum and clean up everything. [They laugh.] Get things dusted off with feather dusters.
[00:19:08.71]
And then, when it came time to repacking—so now, here I was in Paris asked to go back to repack it, and all I could think of was this mess up there. And where did I get more excelsior, or more whatever it was that it took to pad it and get it on its way. I think that's why Stefan didn't come back to do it. [They laugh.] So I had to find somebody who could do corners. And we did it—I don't think they used excelsior. They had something else. I forgotten what. One place and one time when I received an exhibition back where padding or the packing materials had been lost, came back packed in popcorn. So I couldn't get it through customs.
[00:20:02.11]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because there was food on it.
[00:20:04.49]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And they had to put it through a fumigation chamber before they let me have it. [Estill laughs.] But in this case—
[00:20:13.28]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Our Madonna of popcorn.
[00:20:16.06]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That was the one and only exhibition that Budworth packed for us. And it was after that that I really settled down to do some research on it. And I found that the Museum of Modern Art was using Seven Santini Brothers. So I went and talked to Seven Santini Brothers.
[00:20:35.41]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Seven Santini?
[00:20:36.82]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: The Seven Santini Brothers.
[00:20:39.64]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] They were retired acrobats.
[00:20:43.34]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: They certainly sounded like it. And it was one of those brothers, I think it's the son of one of the brothers, the original brothers, that decided that fine arts packing was going to be something that would be good to go into. So he had persuaded the company to let him set up a shop on West 49th Street. And the Museum of Modern Art at that time had taken on a full floor where they could prepare their exhibitions for travel, and pack them and do all kinds of things. And then, Santini did the carpentry or whatever they called for.
[00:21:26.69]
And I went in, and Santini said that they had just made an experimental case for the museum, which was a slotted case for packing several paintings into a single case, each with its own slot, that had been tailored to the size of the piece that would go into it, and the frame. And they were padded with felt so that they could slide in without damaging the frame. So we did that next exhibition. We sent out like that. And when it came back, Lou Santini and I were on the floor when the crates were being opened.
And I took out frame after frame, or checked frame after frame, and they were all askew. And the crate itself had gone a little askew so that it was no longer true. Something had been dropped on it, or jammed. And the braces had not kept it from being pushed out of shape. So when it was pushed out of the shape, all the frames inside were jammed, you see, and moved that way. And their corners, not irrevocably damaged, but it was not right. And I can remember I remember so well standing there and saying, "We can't do this, Lou." And he just stood there with his thinking cap on, and he said, "No." He said, "What's missing is shock absorbency." So we worked on several different possibilities for that protection.
[00:23:27.30]
We came up with a way of putting the case together, first of all, that was more—that was sturdier than what had been done before, using battens that reinforced it. And on the interior, sliding in a whole new section that contained the slots so that—and there would be a cushion between the case—the exterior shell of the case and the interior section that contained the slots. So with the battens reinforcing it, the interlocking corners and with this new interior, we were getting along pretty well. The frames did not come back out of shape. The cases came through okay. Except one, where a forklift had gone through the side and had missed everything on the inside.
[00:24:46.13]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Gosh.
[00:24:46.91]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yeah, weren't we lucky?
[00:24:48.32]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: You were lucky on that one.
[00:24:50.03]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: But that also changed the kind of material that we used. And we did not use the plywood because of this. It was too fragile. And too many things would poke through it. I know that there are a lot of places that still use that. But this was our reason for not using it. And there was one further thing that we discovered, of course, it's always by trial and error, and that is the dampness, rain, snow, whatever, had to be—the exterior of the cases had to be—the exterior shell had to be put together in such a way that you weren't building a pocket on top of the case that would hold water.
[00:25:43.20]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Yes.
[00:25:44.58]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: You had to have your battens, your reinforcements placed in such a way that it didn't hold water on them. And the seams always had to be overlapped in such a way that it didn't drain into the case, but would go out. And then, the case—the faces of the doors were inset so that it's not just a face—a wooden face that screwed on; it's a wooden face that has a built-out portion that will fit exactly into the opening, so that when you push it in, you've got a totally sealed face.
[00:26:44.91]
And then, we began to get good results. And the result—now, during this time, one of our big problems had been insurance. How do you get insurance? It was the first—one of the first things that I faced when I went into USIA because I went in and asked about insurance for this 150-year anniversary show in Pennsylvania Academy, which was millions. And I was told, "Oh, we don't insure. The government is a self-insurer."
I said, "We're finished right now. We can't possibly do an exhibition—borrow an exhibition like this unless we can carry insurance on it." Because if anyone collects from the government, which is a self-insurer, it first has to sue the government. And so somebody has a frame damaged, maybe it's $15 damage, they want that frame repaired. They want us to repair it and they want it to come back in good condition. But they aren't going to sue the government for $15. So they'll never lend again.
[00:28:09.73]
Now, if it's a picture that's—if it's a painting that needs restoration, the same thing is true. So Richard Brecker had a young friend here who was an agent with McLaughlin firm. And he came over, and we talked about it, and we explained what the problems were and what we would need in the way of insurance. And we talked about what the hazards were as we saw them at that time. And he got—he insured them. I think he was probably the first of the Fine Arts brokers. And he's Huntington T. Block. Do you know him?
[00:29:09.02]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: I know the firm.
[00:29:10.62]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So eventually, he broke off from McLaughlin and became a fine arts specialist. And he's been doing all big shows from coast to coast ever since.
[00:29:28.63]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So you had enormous technical problems to confront.
[00:29:31.56]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yes, we did. But one of the things, though, that was good for us was that Bucky Block knew what we were doing to try to improve everything—all the technicalities as we went along. And he also was impressed with the very small damages that occurred. In fact, many of the shows came back with nothing. Absolutely in pristine shape. And so our rates went down. And we were getting lower rates than anyone else, because of our record in handling. And even though shows have been traveling over the world, they'd come back in good shape. And it irks me today to hear people say, "Oh, you can't travel that. That's too fragile." We've traveled fragile things from here to China and back. Ceramic exhibitions.
[00:31:01.80]
We had a print exhibition. This is one where—well, a print exhibition put together by the Library of Congress out of the library's own collection. Beautiful show. Went to the Far East. And it was a print by Mauricio Lasansky of "Raphael, My Son," whichever son it was. And that one is still owed to the Library of Congress. They have not been reimbursed. Now, the insurance arrangement with the Library of Congress was that if anything happened, it would be reimbursed in-kind. They didn't want to be paid a sum. They wanted somebody to go out and find another print of that edition and buy it and give it to them as the replacement for the one that was lost.
[00:32:17.21]
And it's very smart, because the scarcer they are, the higher the price is, and you can't replace it for the purchase price. Well, the addition of that one is not filled. You could probably have, I think, in the addition, maybe another eight or ten. But Lasansky will only print them as needed. And he refused to print up one for the Library of Congress, even though USIA would have bought it at that time to return, because of Vietnam.
[00:32:58.38]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: It was lost? Was it damaged or destroyed?
[00:33:01.23]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It was damaged. I think maybe it was just damaged. But what happened was that this exhibition was going to Inchon. In Inchon Harbor, the boats cannot go up to a dock, and they're offloaded out in the harbor onto barges. So as the boat—as the case—one case was transferred from the boat to the barge, it missed, and it went into the harbor. Well, they fished it up. But of course, seawater had gotten into the case. And almost all of them in that case were damaged by seawater, and one of them was a Mauricio Lasansky. So he said he would not do anything until after the Vietnam was—thing was settled. And by that time, I no longer felt I had responsibility for it. I had tried. I went up to see him once in Maine. "Got anything else?" I could have anything else I wanted, but not that.
[00:34:29.68]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] He'd let you do a whole show, but he wouldn't replace to the library.
[00:34:34.54]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Oh, no not until the government did something about Vietnam.
[00:34:40.66]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Sometimes I think that that's something almost peculiarly American, because now we move into the age of Vietnam where an American artist refuses to cooperate because of the political action. And that's not much of a European tradition, really. It seems to be that only here are we so—is the art community so set against public policy that it causes problems in the '50s with McCarthy, and then in the '60s with the Vietnam War, and the '70s with Nixon. Lord only knows what it'll be next, probably the cutbacks.
[00:35:14.90]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Nixon.
[00:35:15.68]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And Nixon. But the situation in—I can't imagine that happening in England. I can't imagine that happening in France, even.
[00:35:25.07]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It can't happen—I can't imagine it happening anywhere except here. And it reminds me of '68—no '70. 1970. Venice Biennale. Peg and I were over there to get it set up. And it was a difficult one because we had—[Dog barking.] We had artists. [Dog barking.]
[Recorder stops; restarts.]
[00:35:57.48]
Well, we had a number of artists over there doing workshops and demonstrations and presses set up. And a silk screenshot was out in the patio, open air, and people were always stopped and looked. And when the prints were just laid out on the bricks of the patio to dry. And Bill Weege was the silkscreen person. And one day, I was back in our office at the residence end of Venice and I got a telephone call from the Pavilion. Peg.
She said, "Bill Weege is printing some posters that say 'Impeach Nixon 1970.'" And she said she had found them lying out there on the patio. A couple of Americans who—older American tourists were there with a camera, and they were apparently trying to take a picture of this obscene poster. And the poster was of three nude women, one with the hands over the mouth, one over the eyes, and one over the ears. And you recognize it.
[00:37:39.53]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Hear no, speak no, see no evil.
[00:37:42.86]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So Peg said that she had just managed to manipulate herself between the posters and the camera until this man had given up, and they had gone on. But she said, "I know we're going to hear about this, and it can't go on." And I said, "Well, did you ask Bill to stop?" And she said, "Yes, and he refused." So I said, "Well, let me talk to him." And Bill came to the phone, but was very uncooperative. And I said, "Well, for today, just close up shop. Don't do any more printing and I'll see you at the Consulate." The artists were all staying at the Consulate—the old Consulate building that was not used otherwise. I said, "I'll meet you there at five o'clock."
[00:38:32.10]
So I went over to see him, and we talked about this. And he said, "You told me there would be no censorship." And I said, "Well, Bill, I don't know whether this is censorship or not. But to me, it's just good common sense. This is a program that we want to continue. And you're expressing political objection to the president in a country where it really doesn't have any effect on anybody except Americans." I said, "How would you feel if an Italian came over—or an Italian living in our country started putting up posters about their president? Would it have any meaning for you?" And he said, "No, it wouldn't." I think that's changed today, too, because I think it would have effect. In fact, we've seen such posters around Washington now, but not at that time.
[00:39:38.60]
And in the end, he allowed us [inaudible] he wouldn't do any more, and would think over whether or not this was right or wrong for him. And I said that if he felt that he couldn't go along with our point of view on it that he had—we had his ticket, and he could go home. He had his whole family there. [Dog barks.]
[00:40:09.37]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Let's—
[END OF TRACK AAA_bingha81_2661_m]
[00:00:04.26]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [In progress]—Nixon poster.
[00:00:12.24]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Peg and I had to go to Yugoslavia that same night. We'd been putting that off for too long. And they'd been expecting us for at least a week. So when I got there, one of the very best cultural officers I know in the service was there, a good friend. And I told him about this thing. And I said that I felt as though I had to tell Dr. Taylor, who was brand new at the National Collection of Fine Arts at that time. And I didn't know him well. But I still felt that he ought to know what was going on, and especially since I felt there was a good chance that Bill Weege would not stay with the program. And that meant that maybe we'd have to find a substitute or go without him.
[00:01:20.02]
He said, "Use our telephone, please," and had his secretary put a call through. And in the meantime, I was in—he had taken us in to see the ambassador. And I was with the ambassador when the call came through from Washington. So I went into another room. And they closed the door to give me privacy. However, when I was telling Dr. Taylor about this, Dr. Taylor said, "I can't hear you. I can't hear you." And I then said—I was telling him that the poster read 'Impeach Nixon.' He said, "I don't understand." So then I said, I-M-P." He said, "I know. I know." And he said, "Forget it, pay no attention to it."
[00:02:22.40]
I couldn't believe it. I said okay, and I hung up. He hadn't wanted to hear it. He didn't think it was important. And I went back to—I opened the door. And the ambassador, the cultural affairs officer, Peg, the secretary almost fell on top of me. [Laughs.] And the ambassador said, "Is everything all right?" And I said, "Yes, thank you." And we went back. And we finished our meeting. And afterwards, I told Bill what had happened. And I said, "I don't believe it. This just isn't true. I didn't hear it." He said, "Put it in writing. And I will see that it gets to Washington."
So I put it in writing. And the next day, he typed it himself. It was a Saturday. He typed it and got it in the pouch to Washington. It was a letter to Taylor with copies to some of the USIA State Department people. In the fall—I don't know, October maybe—the exhibition had been closed. And the letters began coming in about "Impeach Nixon." We had to answer them. Taylor never mentioned them, even though he saw all of it. I don't know. I never knew what he thought about it. There it was.
[00:04:17.00]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] It must not have bothered him.
[00:04:19.35]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Well, I think it bothered him. I think he learned from it. I don't think it would ever happen that way again. I think he was just too new. He hadn't been exposed to it.
[00:04:36.78]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Let's back up just one minute and cover the business of the exhibition in 1954 that launched the Berlin Congress Hall. Who asked you to work on that project?
[00:04:52.59]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That was Eleanor Dulles. She was the German desk officer, economic advisor, and in charge of the project for the building of the Berlin Congress Hall, which was right on the edge of West Berlin, and designed to attract East Berliners. And it was to be an international hall for all kinds of conferences. And they had designed in it a space which could be used for exhibitions. And she wanted an exhibition that had something to say about the United States.
And there was a man here who had done an exhibition of American architecture, which he had proposed for this. And she had sent it over to me to have the brochure description of the exhibition, and asked what I thought about it. And she said, "Bring it, and come back. And come to a meeting at such and such a time and report on your reactions." It was a large meeting. It was everybody who had something to do with the congress hall was there, probably 20 or 25 people. Long, long conference table, Eleanor sitting at the end of it like a little, old owl. She wore glasses that made her look even more owl-like.
[00:06:30.50]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: [Laughs.] Owlish.
[00:06:33.74]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And, oh, lots of business went on. And then pretty soon, she asked about this exhibition. And I said, "Well, I thought that there ought to be something that would be better for the Germans than this, because I thought it was a good introduction to American architecture. And it was just fine for the American people who needed to know about their American architecture. But Germans know all there is to know about American architecture. And they know a lot more than we do."
[00:07:10.01]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because of the Bauhaus.
[00:07:12.24]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And I thought that it would be just a little bit less than appropriate to send that. What would you send? So, just off the top of my head, I said, "I would send something that showed the size of this country, the scope of culture, the many cultures that make up this country, the people from all over the world that have come here and found homes, so that we have, within our country, as many nationalities as there are in Europe. Our country is larger than Europe. Our country also has all the features that you can find in any place in the world, from the desert to the mountains. And it's these things that make us unique."
[00:08:07.31]
She said, "What kind of an exhibition?" Well, "The Family of Man" had been on at the Museum of Modern Art not too long before that. And I said I thought it ought to be of the scope of the Museum of Modern Art's "Family of Man." It should have with it things that would relieve just the photographic aspect. It should be more alive than that. For instance, in the section where you have Pennsylvania Dutch, you can show photographs of their farms and photographs of their costuming. But let's have some of the original art, the toleware, the baptismal certificates, the wedding plates. And do that for each of the segments of the country where you have nationality that has brought its folkways and mores with it. And so that's what we did.
[00:09:15.99]
Well, first of all, she said, "I like it. Do it." I said, "But, Mrs. Dulles, that's not my specialty. I don't know anything about putting together a photographic exhibition. I don't know where you get photographs to do what I'm talking about. I don't know who would design an exhibition such as I'm thinking about." She said, "Well, could you find out?" I said, "Of course, I could find out if I had money enough." I said, "That's an expensive show." And she said, "How much?" Off the top of my head without the vaguest idea of how accurate it was, I said, "$150,000." And in those days, that was a huge, huge amount. Well, we did it for $100,000. And we got Nancy Newhall as the photographic researcher, who had a fantastic memory of photographs.
[00:10:42.69]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Her husband had been photographic historian.
[00:10:46.96]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: He was. And he was head of Eastman House at that time.
[00:10:50.08]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Right.
[00:10:51.16]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: But she was a photographic memory book.
[00:10:57.22]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: That's interesting.
[00:10:57.82]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: She knew the photographers. And she knew what they had done. And she knew the kind of work that each specialized in. She knew them personally, and could persuade them to do whatever she wanted. Now, in addition to that, she was a good friend of Ansel Adams. So Ansel Adams did all of the printing of the photographs that went into the show. So he was our photographer, photographer-printer, and enlarger, too. And Herbert Bayer was the designer. And he was the designer for Walter Paepcke's Aspen when they were building that up as a resort. So and, no—Herbert Bayer was not only a good designer. he was a German-American citizen of long standing. But he was German-born and had been at the Bauhaus.
[00:12:09.66]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Wow.
[00:12:11.05]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: So we were doing a show for Germany. And it just seemed appropriate to use him. And he was a fabulous designer, too. He didn't feel he had time for it. He had a time schedule that it would have to fit into. So Nancy was the key to the whole thing, though. She had to select the photographs. We had the outline of what we wanted, the parts of the country to be covered, the cultures that would be covered. She had to find out where the illustrations of this could be found. And then the photographs would have to be copied by Ansel Adams, and then done to scale, whatever scale Herbert Bayer decided he needed for his installation. But nothing could be done until Nancy picked the show.
[00:13:12.93]
So what happened was that Nancy couldn't make up her mind. She was finding photographs that were just beautiful and fabulous. And all of them had to be included. She ended up with three suitcases full of photographs. And what we did, she couldn't make up her mind about any of this. And I said, "Well, all right. We'll meet at Ansel's in San Francisco. And we will together work this out." Unfortunately, Nancy was an alcoholic. I didn't know it. Ansel probably knew it. I'm sure he had to know it. But he had never told me. And this apparently was why she couldn't make up her mind. But she did have beautiful photographs that she had collected. So Nancy and her three suitcases of photographs arrived.
[00:14:16.22]
And I met her and Ansel. And we stayed in Ansel's Polaroid house. He had two houses that were connected by a very short, little walkway. The roofs almost met. But their doors opened into each other. And his house was, oh, it was beautiful, a beautiful little cottage that was cathedral ceiling for the living area. And then over the bathroom and kitchen utility area, they had a gallery bedroom. The Polaroid house was the conventional house. But it was Polaroid house because he was doing the research. And he was doing the testing of Polaroid color film when they were in the process of making.
[00:15:19.10]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Oh, wow.
[00:15:20.04]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And so that was the house where he had his labs. And that was supported by that. So that also was their guest house. And Nancy and I had bedrooms up in that house. And in the morning, we would be awakened by beautiful, beautiful music coming out of Ansel's main house or his cathedral living room. And he had a fantastic amplifying system, which he could turn on from his bed. And then that was the way we woke up in the morning. And the next thing we knew, almost on top of that, he would be at the door with cups of coffee for us. And breakfast was ready almost as soon as we could get there. We had breakfast. And then we started to work.
[00:16:11.93]
And Nancy and I would sit—I would sit. And Nancy would go through photograph after photograph after photograph. And she'd lay them out this way and that way. And then when I saw something that I liked, and when she began to hesitate, we would pick. But we spent, I think, three or four days there. And that was all I could do. And I was getting telephone calls from Herbert Bayer saying, "You've got to be here. And this week is all we have. If you can't have it here this weekend, I can't do the job." So we didn't have it quite finished.
But by that time, I knew what Ansel could do, and what his ideas were with regard to blow-ups and size and quality of print that he needed. So I moved with Nancy to Aspen, and we took rooms in their Meadow Lodge, and continued working. And I was feeding sections to Herbert at the same time, so he could start designing. And then he needed to have more information about available material. He was going to build the installation in Germany rather than ship it over. And he needed to know what the available materials were, and where it could be done and who could fabricate it and so forth. He couldn't go. He didn't have time to go. I said, "Well, why don't we send Joella?" His wife. And she knew. She could ask all the questions he wanted asked.
[00:17:54.47]
So he finally decided that was okay. Joella had neither a passport nor a clearance, and she needed both for this. Oh, well, one thing led to another. And we got both of them through the State Department in three days, and she was on her way to Germany. So she got that. I finally got the photographic selection from Nancy. Herbert was left to do his installation designs and get his specifications ready to send to Germany. And then Nancy and I started out to get the original works of art that would go with the exhibition for each section.
[00:18:44.01]
And, well, I don't know. I wish I had kept tabs of Cutty Sark. We couldn't check in without a bottle of Cutty Sark. And the problem was—my problem was always to see that nothing—that that did not come out until after noon, sometime after mid-day. And the longer I could keep it away, keep her away from it, and keep her occupied and her mind on something else, the more successful I felt I had been. [They laugh.] So you start early and work as long as you can until—but it's over by five o'clock. There was no night work.
[00:19:32.67]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Because she was too—
[00:19:35.01]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: She never really was incoherent or drunk in the conventional sense. But it was no longer—there was no longer any decision making.
[00:19:52.31]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And the show was called "A Nation of Nations."
[00:19:55.73]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That's right.
[00:19:57.00]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: And I found that very interesting in light of the appropriation of that title for the show at the National Museum of American History.
[00:20:07.67]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I was a little startled when I heard it too. [Laughs.]
[00:20:12.47]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Do you think they had selected that from your title?
[00:20:14.66]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: I have no idea. I have no idea where they got it. But it is an appropriate title for this country.
[00:20:21.35]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: It is, very much.
[00:20:23.36]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And the other part of the exhibition was that we used no text. We used captions from Walt Whitman.
[00:20:32.18]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Oh, how lovely.
[00:20:34.47]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: It really was. It was a spectacular show that was used in Berlin Congress Hall. And it was so successful there that the Germans traveled it all over the country. And the photographs where—what's the German photo show, their annual—oh, I can't think of the name of it. But it's a very famous photographic exhibition. And the prize went to one of Ansel's huge blow-ups, which they had asked to have included in it. And the Germans were just amazed because they could not see how you could blow up, from a 35-millimeter film, a life-size, more than life-size mural without having the grainy quality apparent.
[00:21:48.82]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Yes.
[00:21:49.30]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: And they were just smooth, black, velvety tones.
[00:21:54.01]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: So it was extremely popular at a time in which Berlin was really just beginning to get substantially rebuilt by this point. I guess.
[00:22:02.54]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: That's right.
[00:22:02.98]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Did you go over to Berlin?
[00:22:04.57]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: No.
[00:22:07.78]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: It interests me very much that Ms. Dulles' interest, no doubt, was in reinforcing the notion of a new German state to replace the one that had been done in by the war, in some ways.
[00:22:21.21]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Yes. She had, of course, her interest in the economics. But I think her reason for this was to make us more human in their eyes, and to let them know a little bit more about us as people.
[00:22:48.19]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Well, we can conclude this session at this point, and at our next session, pick up on the actual history of the offices, and your involvement and observations on the various Biennales.
[00:23:04.90]
LOIS A. BINGHAM: Okay.
[00:23:05.38]
ESTILL CURTIS PENNINGTON: Thank you.
[END OF TRACK AAA_bingha81_2662_m]
[END OF INTERVIEW.]
