Interview with Don Baum
Conducted by Sue Ann Kendall
In Chicago, IL
January 31, 1986
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Don Baum on January 31, 1986. The interview took place in Chicago, IL, and was conducted by Sue Ann Kendall for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview
DON BAUM: DON BAUM
SUE ANN KENDALL: SUE ANN KENDALL
[Tape 1, side A]
SUE ANN KENDALL: Don, I would like to go back, way back, in your life and talk to you about
your childhood, in hopes of getting information about you as person and you
as an artist. I know you were born in 1922.
DON BAUM: Right.
SUE ANN KENDALL: In Michigan.
DON BAUM: Escanaba, Michigan.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And where is Escanaba?
DON BAUM: Escanaba is a town in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which is actually
north of the U.P., north of Wisconsin. I was born there because my grandfather
came there as a Russian Jewish immigrant, and as a tinsmith, when that was very
little settled. He traveled around in that part of the country as a tinsmith,
essentially. And then at a certain point after he succeeded up to some financial
level (chuckles), he started a hardware store.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And this was in Escanaba?
DON BAUM: This was in Escanaba.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And how big a place was this?
DON BAUM: Well, there were about 18,000 people in Escanaba at the time that
I grew up there. Then my father, on his death, took over his hardware store.
So that’s the background. My father came from a very large family. Most
did not stay in the area. I know very little about them. I mean, I knew the
aunts and uncles but I don’t know much about background or anything, other
than that. And my mother’s family came from, well, the south originally,
and then to Indiana. That’s a probably English and Welsh background. And
my maternal grandfather was a first settler in another part of the Upper Peninsula,
Trenary, Michigan, where he and his twin brother opened a general store. But
he was also a jack of many trades and eventually settled in another little town.
But I remember a lot of sort of awareness about, well, nature isn’t quite
the right word, but he was a kind of outdoors person, hunted and fished—also
a very generous man, my grandfather. It was always a very wonderful experience
to go to visit them when I was a child because there was always something going
on that was different than my life in Escanaba. My mother was one of three girls
and a boy. I was much closer to her family because they also stayed around there,
and I used to spend my summers visiting them. They also were kind of pioneers,
in a sense, because they had bought land out on Lake Superior, a very beautiful
and rather remote place is where they built places. I used to spend almost all
of my summers on Lake Superior or around that area, when I was a kid.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s supposed to be beautiful country.
DON BAUM: It is. It still is beautiful, but it is unfortunately changing as
a lot of these wild areas have become parks and campgrounds.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Is there any of your family still up there?
DON BAUM: Yes, I have two brothers, one a year older and one two years younger.
They both live in Escanaba and they both have families and so forth. And I have
a sister who’s ten years younger than I am who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
who is a teacher.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. About when was it that your grandfather came from Russia?
Do you have any recollection of dates?
DON BAUM: Well, I remember him, and so. . . I must have been. . . I was born
in 1922, and he died within a few years after that. I would think it was around
1900 or slightly before that. But I really don’t know, and I’ve
never heard anybody in my family talk about that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Do you remember him as a tinsmith?
DON BAUM: No, no. Because by that time he had this hardware store established and
it was very successful, and he was doing very well, and so forth.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you ever help out in the store?
DON BAUM: No, very little. Both of my brothers did, but, see, I was the middle
child and somehow or another that meant I didn’t have to do that, and
I didn’t particularly want to. But it is interesting that I think probably
of the three of us I’m the only one who really is involved in making things,
or using tools, or anything like that. It’s kind of funny. Because my
youngest brother—he’s retired—but he was an insurance salesman,
insurance man, and my oldest brother was a drug salesman _____ _____.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So you really went off in a different direction?
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And was there any art in your parents’ background or in your family
at all?
DON BAUM: No. I can’t think of anything that was particularly stimulating.
I think my first interest in that occurred when I was in high school. Escanaba
was really pretty provincial and, although there was an art teacher, the kinds
of activities which we were involved in. . . I remember making a puppet for
a puppet show, and I remember painting some sets for a Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta, or something like that. And that was sort of all there was. I actually,
while I was in high school, was mostly interested in writing.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Really! But now in grade school, you weren’t one of these kids who
started drawing at the age of four and went from there?
DON BAUM: No, I don’t remember much about [it]. I don’t remember
much about that at all. I was editor, co-editor of this school paper, and worked
on that for several years, and worked at the Daily Press in Escanaba as a kind
of a co-op worker. So I was very interested in journalism. But when it came
time to go away to college, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do,
and so I went to Michigan State University—or as it was then, Michigan
State College at East Lansing—in hotel administration.
SUE ANN KENDALL: For heaven’s sakes. (chuckles)
DON BAUM: Which, I don’t even know, at this. . . I think it was a sort
of a desperate move. I felt I had to decide. I think it was expected of me that
I make some decision as to what I wanted to do—or why I was going to college.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, to justify it.
DON BAUM: And it was, although my father was very helpful, especially during
those two years—although I worked all through my college career; I had
jobs, and sometimes a number of them at one time. But he was very helpful and
encouraging, and I guess I might have done that in a sense to make him feel
that I was on the track of something rather specific and concrete. And I’m
not even sure at that point that I really knew anything else about what I wanted
to do. When I got to Michigan State, I really don’t know what sort of
triggered it, but I took a course in painting from Kathryn Winckler. She was
one of the art professors there, and she and her friend Alma Goetsch had a Frank
Lloyd Wright house in Okemos. It was part of a project for faculty members that
was never completed, but a number of the houses were built. She was a very generous
lady and sometimes we went out and painted watercolors, and afterwards she would
sometimes invite us to her house, and it was the first time I’d ever really
seen what I would call architecture. I mean, I’d been in a lot of houses,
but. . . (laughter)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Buildings, but not architecture.
DON BAUM: Right, yeah. And I was very, very impressed by it. So then I began
to take other art courses. The two years that I was there I probably took about
four art courses, including, I think, one semester of a survey and the rest
of it were _____ drawing or painting classes—in the meantime, struggling
with this hotel administration effort, which consisted of subjects like chemistry
and accounting and so on. Well, I liked foods and nutrition because I enjoyed
cooking and I’m still very interested in that. But by the end of the first
year, I was beginning to be sort of doubtful, but I didn’t really still
know what was happening. Then we had to work in hotels during the summer as
part of the curriculum, and I got a job at the Beverly Shores Hotel in Indiana.
It’s now gone, but it was a very small, very nice hotel. I got a summer
job there, which is what we had to do. So I spent that summer in this area,
and I came to Chicago several times, but I don’t even then especially
remember going to the Art Institute or anything like that. I might have, but
I don’t remember it. Then I went back to Michigan State, and another year
of sheer torture while I failed econ [economics— Ed.]—or failed
accounting and got D in econ, and. . . (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: It was not your shining hour.
DON BAUM: Retook chemistry, and I can’t remember. But I was enjoying very
much my classes in literature, and then also the few courses which I took in
art. So I felt, you know, this is ridiculous. But I had to work again in a hotel
as part of the hotel ad program, and I hadn’t really, I still didn’t
know what was happening. So I got a job in Chicago at the. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: This is your second summer?
DON BAUM: Yeah. At the St. Clair Hotel, which now has another name, but it’s
up on the near north side by the Contemporary Museum. It’s Ohio, maybe
and. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s right where I’m staying.
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, it might. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: At the Ridgemont. It must be right in there.
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, it might. . . Well, the Ridgemont was the Eastgate, wasn’t
it?
SUE ANN KENDALL: I don’t know.
DON BAUM: Yeah. See, there were two hotels there, and one was the Eastgate and
one was the St. Clair. Anyway, it was a terrible job. I mean, it was just totally
beyond me. It was no good. I was the head of the food commissary and the place
was just filthy, and there were a lot of teenage kids that knew more about how
to screw the customers. (uproarious laughter) Anyway, I stayed about three weeks,
and I. . . You know, Chicago was overwhelming. I didn’t know anybody.
So at the end of about three weeks, I called my father up and I said, “I’m
just so fed up with this. I can’t really hack it.” And he said,
“Well, why don’t you come home and see if you can get a summer job
here, and we can talk about it.” And I said, “Well, that’s
fine, but,” I said, “if I come home, I want to come back here and
go to the School of the Art Institute in the fall.
SUE ANN KENDALL: How did you know that?
DON BAUM: Well, I don’t know. By that time, somehow or another, this had
crept into my consciousness, and I knew by then that I wanted to go to the Art
Institute.
SUE ANN KENDALL: What did he say to that?
DON BAUM: Well, he said, “Okay.”
SUE ANN KENDALL: I was going to ask you, what did your parents think of you
taking those classes in art at Michigan State? Were they pretty _____?
DON BAUM: Well, they didn’t seem to have any particular reactions to them,
and well, there was never much discussion about them. So I came back—it
was during the war—and I went to the School of the Art Institute to register
and I met David Aaron, who was also entering. He was from Bridgeport, Connecticut,
and we just became friends and found a place to live together. So then for a
number of years, we shared different places, and we both went to school and
did our thing. Then we moved to 645 North Michigan Avenue, which is long gone,
but it was one of the last mansions on Michigan Avenue, and it was run by a
very curious couple named Major and Mrs. Allen. He was maybe a former retired
army major or something. But they ran this place in a kind of, well, almost
like a nineteenth century salon in a way. They had at least one a week and sometimes
several times, “evenings,” and they would have somebody who they
knew—or even somebody who lived in the house, because everybody who lived
there was an artist or an architect or something or other.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Fascinating.
DON BAUM: It was a wonderful atmosphere in a way, especially for a young person,
and they’d have these “evenings.” You could go or not. They’d
serve food, and it was like two dollars, or something like that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Lovely, yeah.
DON BAUM: For a long time I really did enjoy it. It was a chance to meet people, but
also to sort of see what other people, outside of my student involvement. .
. But also, David and I had a top floor studio in this house. And across the
hall lived Ethel Spears.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Ohh.
DON BAUM: She was a very close friend of Kathleen Blackshear, and Kathleen was one
of the teachers of the School of the Art Institute, and I was in her classes.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, yeah.
DON BAUM: I felt immediately a sort of bond with her, and she was very, very
open to young people, especially I think if she felt they were at least interested
in her. Anyway, she was a very important influence and I continued to know her
from that time, really until she left Chicago, because. . . Later I was a teacher
and I was using the Art Institute slide department; she was also using it. We
just became very good friends. But I think she was real important and she encouraged
me to enter exhibitions and to work independently outside of what I was doing
for school.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. But it must have been a real support for you, in a way, that maybe
you weren’t aware of, to be in a living situation like that with other
people who were professionally in the arts in some way.
DON BAUM: Yes, that’s right. I had begun to meet other artists and so, you know,
it was a very good period. Well. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Excuse me, were those people patrons of the arts in Chicago?
DON BAUM: No. No. The people that I met were beginning artists or in some cases people
working in the fields in art.
SUE ANN KENDALL: No, no. I meant the major and his wife.
DON BAUM: Were they? Not really. But they liked music and art, and they were
sort of nineteenth century. A lot of people. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Their whole approach and the salon _____ _____.
DON BAUM: That’s also where I met Miyoko Ito.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Ohh.
DON BAUM: See, she lived there. And Ralph Rapson, the architect, lived there.
There were always distinguished kinds of people—later it became more distinguished
people, in any case, that lived there.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Who else? Can you think of others who lived there?
DON BAUM: Oh, Ralph and. . . There were some. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: It must have been quite a large place.
DON BAUM: Yeah, it was. There were sometimes, you know, there must have been
about ten, twelve to fifteen apartments. Well, they were sometimes just rooms,
but everybody had kitchen facilities of some kind or another.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Really.
DON BAUM: And it was built before the fire department or anything else concerned themselves
about problems of safety.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. (laughter)
DON BAUM: But it was essentially very efficiently run. No, I don’t remember
offhand anyone besides. . . See, there was a woman named Zada Clark; she was
a commercial artist, but she was important, and she knew a lot of artists and
I met them at her place. But Miyo [Miyoko Ito—Ed.] and Ralph were the
two probably that I knew the best. And we became, Miyo and I became friends
then, and until she died we saw each other, sometimes a great deal, depending
on different periods.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. But that represents, at that time, the younger generation of artists
that would grow up in Chicago, whereas most of the next generation—after
say Weisenborn. . .
DON BAUM: Yes, yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: . . .all of those people.
DON BAUM: See, first of all, I’m chronologically somewhat younger.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh yes, indeed.
DON BAUM: But also, I didn’t meet a lot of those people, although eventually
I did, until I went to the University of Chicago, in 1943 or. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, so this was more an Art Institute school crowd, perhaps?
DON BAUM: Yeah, and David Aaron and I had a lot of student friends at the school,
none of whom I’ve had particular contact with since. In fact, I don’t
remember anybody particularly from my days at the School of the Art Institute,
except David. We knew a lot of different people at the time, saw a lot of different
people, but I don’t remember the names of anyone in particular. I left
there after a year and went to the Institute of Design. Part of that was because
I felt—outside of Kathleen Blackshear—I did not like the school.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I was going to ask you what your experience was there.
DON BAUM: Well, you know, I had figure drawing, and, well, I just didn’t particularly
enjoy it. I had a design class and I hated that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Was it too conservative?
DON BAUM: Well, it seemed so. . . I guess it was probably because it was so conservative,
but it seemed so sort of tiresome, so involved with discipline and so little
involved in any kind of expressiveness.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Almost an academic approach?
DON BAUM: Academic, yeah. Whereas Kathleen, in both her art history—and
the first semester I was there Helen Gardner taught the survey, so she was my
first teacher.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That must have been wonderful.
DON BAUM: Well, it was very interesting, because, of course, she’d written this
book, but she was pretty old by then. And then Kathleen taught this class which
she later continued for many years; it was called Design Lecture when I was
there, and I think it was the most important kind of school experience I had,
because she was primarily interested in the twentieth century movements, and
she talked about them, both in her art history classes and also in this Design
Lecture class. She had no interest in the Renaissance or the Baroque period
or anything like that—and not much really in the sort of classical, traditional
history of art. But she was very interested in the twentieth century. So what
happened was that we would be given assignments which we did at home, and then
we brought the work back into the class, and she simply critiqued everything
in front of the class. Everybody brought their work back, and she talked about
it. She was all for, you know, any kind of experimentation with materials, and
at the same time very interested in what the meaning of it was, you know, what
kind of symbolism. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, content.
DON BAUM: . . .might be involved and the content and so forth. I think it was
the most formative early art experience which I had. It was totally different
from the sort of thing that happened in these other classes. Anyway, I got the
feeling that somehow or another, it wasn’t what I wanted. So I left there
and I registered at the School of Design, as it was then called. I started in
the summer, and I was the only new student. I don’t think there were more
than about twelve students there; I don’t know, you know, it was during
the war, they were in the Chez Paris [night club—Ed.] over on West—or
on East Ontario. When I started I was the only new student, and so I had this
kind of tutoring from Moholy Nagy. I mean, every morning—or almost every
morning—I’d go into his office and he’d talk to me about plastics.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh, I see. (laughs)
DON BAUM: Well, see, I began to wonder if I was in the right place again because.
. . (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: From food _____ to plastics, huh?
DON BAUM: Right, right. But, you know, it was a whole new world, and of course it
struck me as if the Institute of Design had taken art teaching out of the academy
and sort of put it into context with the technology of _____ _____. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Of real life.
DON BAUM: Of real life, yeah. I had a number of very good teachers there, besides
Moholy. In fact, under Moholy, I worked on this—they tried to give students
problems which came out of some real [leader] industry or something. There were
two brothers that had some kind of cancer that. . . They were farmers and they
couldn’t— I’ve forgotten what this is called—but anyway,
they couldn’t take sunlight. So I was given this project to make these
two masks for them out of this particular kind of plastic. This was a very difficult
thing for me, because it. . . They had a very big machine shop, but it required
all of kinds of techniques, but there was a guy there and he helped me. I finally
completed these two things, and they were successful.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So they required you to actually construct, not just design something,
but actually to carry it through.
DON BAUM: Carry it through. That was very typical of I.D. too. And then we all worked
in a basic workshop, and everybody made a hand sculpture. That was part of the
Bauhaus point of view; that was one of the first projects anybody did. That
was a good experience, in another way, because I learned a lot about materials
and techniques in a way that I would never have learned.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Very different than the Art Institute, it sounds like.
DON BAUM: Yeah. There was no art history and no figure drawing. And Johannes
Mohlzahn, who was, I thought, a wonderful artist. . . I don’t know what
ever really happened to him, but he came from Germany and had been associated
with the Bauhaus there; he taught Visual Fundamentals. And in Visual Fundamentals,
you know, you work with line and color, et cetera.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, design.
DON BAUM: But it’s the Bauhaus approach, and it was really the basis of a lot
of teaching that goes on in contemporary art today. And he was also a very generous
person and I was seeing his paintings, going to his house, getting to know him,
and working in class and trying very hard to sort of grasp the concepts that
he. . . And I found that very rich. But I don’t know. . . Well, first
of all, I was working in a defense plant, and it was pretty hard, because I
had a full-time job at night, and then I’d go to school during the day.
I don’t quite know how it came over me, but I began to get more and more
interested in knowing more about art history. So in fall of ‘44, I moved
to Hyde Park, lived on 57th Street in a room, and registered at the University
of Chicago. Since I’d had two years of college, I had to take three comprehensives
to satisfy the requirements for the degree that was then being given, which
was this Ph.B. degree. That’s the Hutchins degree, Bachelor of Philosophy.
It was a three-year degree. Hutchins, you know, believed in this. It was the
Hutchins plan. You took these courses and then took comprehensives at the end
of the year. That was what your grade was. Well, I had three or four of those.
I had biological science, I had two in humanities, and one in foreign language,
in French.
SUE ANN KENDALL: It was basically a well-rounded liberal arts program.
DON BAUM: Yeah, but also this University of Chicago plan, where you don’t
have to go to class, or you didn’t have to take any tests, but at the
end of the year, you had to go and sit in the gymnasium and write these comprehensives.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: I had applied for admission to the master’s program in art history
at that time. I was accepted, and so I began to take. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Now, wait. When you first came to the University of Chicago,
you immediately applied for the master’s, or did you. . .
DON BAUM: Yes, because, see, I only had these X number of courses to complete the
Ph.B. degree.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I see what you mean.
DON BAUM: And at that time, what they really wanted you to do is to take the Ph.B.
and then go immediately into the master’s program, so they didn’t
really give a four-year B.A. at that point.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: So I started taking art history courses, and the first course I took—I
was just ill-advised by someone—was a course in Chinese painting, and
it was rather advanced; it was a three-or four-hundred-level class, taught by
a guy who was a very famous authority in Chinese. . . Well, I had no experience
with Asian art at all. And so I sat in on the class, and at the end (chuckles),
again, unknowingly. . . He asked if we wanted to take the exam. Well, about
two people out of this class raised their hand, so I raised my hand. I thought,
“Well, how else do you get a grade?” So I took this exam; well,
of course, I failed the exam miserably because, I mean, it was impossible information
for me at that time.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, yeah.
DON BAUM: But I didn’t feel terribly bad about that, because I didn’t
feel especially drawn to Chinese art—or to Oriental art, in any case.
So I went on and began to take all the regular courses: medieval art and ancient
art, and very little twentieth century art.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Hmm.
DON BAUM: In the meantime, I was. . . A number of things happened. For about
two years I had been showing my work in various artists’ groups, or a
couple of times in little galleries, and I had a painting in the Chicago and
Vicinity show in 1946 or something like that. So I felt like something was going
on, that as far as becoming an artist, that was sort of going along side by
side with this other _____.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And this was pretty much on your own at this point?
DON BAUM: Yeah, right.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You were supporting yourself, as well?
DON BAUM: Yeah, I’d worked, I had several jobs. I worked in hotels all around
Chicago _____ _____.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That hotel training came in handy? (laughter)
DON BAUM: Hotel training! Boy. . . And I worked at the university and, you know,
I just always had jobs of one kind or another, and. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Doing what besides hotel work?
DON BAUM: Oh, I worked at the information desk at the University of Chicago,
and I worked in a hospital, in the office. I had secretarial skills, you know.
Because I’d worked on the newspaper I knew how to type, and I’d
taken shorthand or something like that, although I don’t remember I ever
used that very much. But I’d had some experience, so it all sort of worked
out. Then I began to meet, in Hyde Park, a whole group of older artists, including
Gertrude Abercrombie and Margot Andreas, who’s a close friend of mine—and
a lot of people. Then through Gertrude, a lot of other people.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Like. . .
DON BAUM: [Well], I’m trying to think. See, she was very much into. . . One
of the things that happened was that I moved into an apartment, a different
place. I moved around in Hyde Park, and eventually into an apartment on 57th
Street that was right around the corner from where Gertrude Abercrombie lived.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Was it the Hyde Park Art Colony?
DON BAUM: Well, 57th. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: 57th Street Art Colony.
DON BAUM: No, I knew people who lived there and I went there a lot.
SUE ANN KENDALL: What was it like by that point?
DON BAUM: Well, it was sort of on its last legs, I would say.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s what I thought.
DON BAUM: There weren’t really any very good artists _____. There were
some curiosities, but it was always a sort of social place for people to meet.
Gertrude was very much interested in contemporary music and jazz. And she had
gotten to know, early on, a lot of musicians. So almost every Saturday night
there was a jam session at her house, and the famous, great people came. I mean,
Dizzy [Gillespie—Ed.], and Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughn, and, you
know, and everyone came to the house. And lots of people who were interested
in it, so it was very exciting. And also artists: Emerson Woelffer, Felix Ruvolo,
some wonderful photographers. Well, there’s Frank. . .
[Tape 1, side B]
DON BAUM: . . .about the sort of social life which I encountered at that time,
and which I think was very important for me, to have. . . Well, first of all,
most of these people were older than I was, and they were more established,
so it was a kind of an opportunity to get an idea of what people were doing,
or what they were like, who had sort of gotten there. And also they were very
interesting and brilliant and sort of [lively].
SUE ANN KENDALL: This was pretty much at Gertrude’s place that all this occurred?
DON BAUM: Yeah, and, you see, there were also a lot of writers involved, and
I had elected when I was at the University of Chicago, to take a minor in English,
in literature. In fact, I took a number of courses in English literature, on
Henry James, and Carlyle. And there was a group of writers in the area that
I knew, and so it was a very, very stimulating period for me. I feel like everything
kind of opened up there, and I think. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: In the mid forties, is when you’re talking about?
DON BAUM: Yeah. And then of course that continued into the early fifties, because
I continued to go to school. . . Actually, I didn’t really sever my connections
(chuckles) with the University of Chicago until about 1950.
SUE ANN KENDALL: How wonderful, though, to have had the [opportunity] to keep going.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and I never finished anything [degrees—Ed.]. I got involved
in a number of different thesis projects in the art department. And at that
time, it was very heavily a sort of German scholars’ program.
SUE ANN KENDALL: When you say “art” you really mean art history, right?
DON BAUM: Art history.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah. The old traditional. . .
DON BAUM: Ulrich Middeldorf was the chairman of the department, and then later
Otto von Simpson, and. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: So you had a very solid training. You may not have finished, but you must
have been very solid in the old world sense of art history.
DON BAUM: Yeah, right. Well, I loved art history then, and I still do.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, uh huh.
DON BAUM: I mean, it’s still a passion of mine to sit down. . . And I have never
regretted it. First of all, I’ve never regretted going to the University
of Chicago, because I think that in a sense I did the right thing. I needed
to have a certain kind of intellectual development.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Intellectual basis, I would think.
DON BAUM: And I hadn’t had it, you know. I went to school in a small town, I
went to the Art Institute. But you didn’t, none of that happened in those
kinds of environments.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Well, the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Chicago was
very stimulating.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and it was really very rich at that particular time. So there
were a lot of things going on, and I felt very stimulated by it, and. . . And,
too, I worked rather consistently during those years and exhibited and had little
shows, and so forth, and sold work. I had a couple of sales at my apartment
or something, and people that I’d met came over and they bought things.
It’s very funny; I sometimes go to someone’s house, and I see something
I did in 1949, or something like that. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Uh huh, there it is.
DON BAUM: . . .which they bought for $15, you know. I could care less about that,
but it’s sort of fun to see things. They’re like little peas dropped
along the trail, I mean, or something like that. (laughter)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right! I wanted to ask you, you spoke a little bit about your work when
you were at the School of Design.
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: What they asked you to do was fairly practical. You know, meeting some
need, _____ _____. . .
DON BAUM: Yes, actually in a certain way it’s rather curious, because it also
had, it was really more of a discipline kind of thing, not too different in
approach to the Art Institute, but still involved with this kind of learning
of certain types of technical things.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Which you also need to put things together.
DON BAUM: Yeah, but I liked the kinds of ways of thinking and looking at them
in a way that I felt was the new way as compared with the Art Institute’s
old way.
SUE ANN KENDALL: In work that you did at that time outside of classwork—this is back
at the Institute of Design [probably meant School of Design—Ed.]—what
were you doing? What kinds of things at that time?
DON BAUM: Well, I was making. . . Well, first of all, they were all essentially images
of things: people, events. . . I could show you some of these things if you’re.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, well, I was just curious.
DON BAUM: I don’t know. Well, Ed [Maser], who was in the art history department
at the university, and the director of the Smart Gallery—he’s just
recently retired—he and I were classmates at the UC in the art history
department. And I remember, during that time, I made this drawing of him, which
he reminded me of the other night, that he came over to where I lived and I
made this drawing of him, which is a very—I think I was very interested
in Matisse and—I’m trying to think of what other artists I was specifically
sort of interested in. Matisse, I think, was probably one of the first.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Any of the Bauhaus people, European Bauhaus people?
DON BAUM: No. See, I never really was interested in the formalism. I mean, I
admired Moholy’s work and I admired Mohlzahn’s work, but their work
in some ways is so different; they’re not. . . Moholy, although, you know,
they’re formalist, they’re also very personal statements. And Mohlzahn’s
were even more that way. And even though we saw a lot of other things, it was
not. . . See, I still had this background in the Dada, Surrealist area that
I’d gotten through Kathleen Blackshear. Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Came from Kathleen then?
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You brought that with you to the School of Design?
DON BAUM: And I still have that, as a very strong sort of background.
SUE ANN KENDALL: How did that tie into Moholy, when he was working with you?
DON BAUM: Well, it wasn’t so remote, because of course the Bauhaus had, there’d
been a certain kind of flirtation, and some of the people who were connected
with it were also involved in some of it.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: So there were evidences of that. But, see, I didn’t stay there very
long either, so it didn’t. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah. Then I want to ask you, when you came to the University of Chicago
and really studied art history for the first time in any kind of comprehensive
way, how did that change your work—or did it?
DON BAUM: In a lot of ways I don’t think it really did. I don’t
remember making rather specific references back and forth. They seemed to be
somewhat separated—partly because I had been working during that period.
You know, I just had continued to make things, and so what I was doing seemed
appropriate to continue with, but. . . I didn’t make any particular connections,
although what I was doing I would say was sort of, you know, it might have a
little Cubism or Surrealism or, you know, had these vestiges of. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: But studying ancient art or Renaissance or whatever, all of that didn’t
seem to connect to your own artmaking.
DON BAUM: No, and I didn’t feel any real strong. . . The areas that I liked
the most were Medieval art, and I liked particularly Romanesque sculpture, and.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh, yeah. The architecture too, or mostly sculpture?
DON BAUM: Yes, and the architecture, and then the northern Renaissance painting: [Roger—Ed.]
Van der Weyden and Memling, van Eyck. Those were the two areas that I really
enjoyed. And I got involved in these thesis topics. The first one which I attempted—and
I started it under Middeldorf, and Middeldorf went on leave, I guess, after
the first year—was the symbolism of Paul Gauguin.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh! Mmm.
DON BAUM: Well, it was a kind of a disaster in a way, because I had been, and
was at that time, and continued for probably four years, in a rather classical
psychoanalysis. And so my kind of involvement, as I got into the Gauguin material,
was to look at it from that point of view. And of course it began to be quite
revelatory. I think, now, in the current literature, there’s all kinds
of stuff which makes this apparent, that it does add. Well, both Middeldorf
and then later von Simpson were just absolutely negative about the whole idea.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Your approaching it that way.
DON BAUM: Yeah. They did not, Middeldorf simply said, “This cannot add
anything to art history. It’s. . .” And he essentially attempted
to discourage me. I had had, fortunately, the support of a very well known psychoanalyst
in Chicago, not my doctor, but somebody who was interested in the idea of people
who were involved with psychoanalysis working with art and literature. And she
was very helpful. So I didn’t feel like what I was saying or doing was
really off the track. I had begun of course to read Freud, and I had, you know,
there were a lot of sort of connections that were going on. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, you were going through the process yourself.
DON BAUM: . . .and I was going through the process myself. Well, when Middeldorf left,
then I suddenly was shifted over to Otto von Simpson. Well, von Simpson is a
wonderful and brilliant man, and so forth, but he was a Jesuit, and the idea
of this psychoanalytic approach to Gauguin was. . . [both break up laughing]
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yes.
DON BAUM: I know it was a [riot]. It’s so stupid now that I. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: I think it’s marvelous, though, the juxtaposition of everything.
. . Your psychoanalysis, and his Jesuit background, that’s. . .
DON BAUM: But, you know, if I’d any sense I probably would have just realized
it, you know, like, “This is not going to work.” But I was. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did he try to work with you?
DON BAUM: Not really. I mean they’d. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Or was it just beyond his comprehension?
DON BAUM: Well, they’d go along with me for a while, but then when it came right
down to it, they really did not accept any of the theses that, what I was trying
to say.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Do you have any of that material that you wrote?
DON BAUM: No, I don’t. And I feel sort of badly about it, but somewhere along
the line, I just lost all that stuff.
SUE ANN KENDALL: It’s fascinating. Yeah, it’s too bad.
DON BAUM: Yeah. So then I was really sort of pretty much told that if I wanted
to finish this degree that I had to change my topic, and so Middeldorf persuaded
me to change my topic from that to the color in Gauguin, Gauguin’s color.
Where did it come from? _____ _____ some, you know, just your typical art historical
topic.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: But I wasn’t interested in it at all. Somehow or another, it
just seemed sort of remote to me, but I started to work on it, and Middeldorf
kept telling me to look at the English wallpaper designs. Well, I think at that
point he was really thinking about some of those arts and crafts movement people.
I don’t really know; I never got into it; I never could figure out what
that was all about. (laughter) But I worked on that again for a while, and then
I was again sort of up against the wall, and. . . Josh Taylor had come here,
and he became my advisor. I think at this point—that must have been in
the late forties, about 1948, because I had started to teach. I had a part-time
teaching job at Roosevelt that I started in 1948, and then I became a full-time
instructor in 1949. But I continued to sort of work on this because I got pressure
from Roosevelt University, because all I had was a Ph.B. degree.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You really needed something beyond that.
DON BAUM: I really needed this degree.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah.
DON BAUM: And I had done all the coursework, and I had taken the reading exam, and
I had, you know. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: You got that far, right.
DON BAUM: . . .I had everything except this thesis project. And so at that point I
again switched my thesis topic to a kind of survey of the history of monotypes.
There was nothing.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh my gosh! (chuckles)
DON BAUM: Nobody had ever. . . Well, Gauguin did monotypes.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, yeah.
DON BAUM: You know, and very beautiful.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh yes. But this was a historical look at monotypes _____ _____.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and nobody had done any work on them. There were bits and pieces.
Well, I was making monotypes. So, you know, I could always, it always had to
tie in. (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Ties in, right.
DON BAUM: But I really got very interested in that subject. But in the meantime, I’d
gotten, you know, I was a full-time teacher, and the first few years of teaching
are very difficult.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Sure.
DON BAUM: And I was in analysis and was struggling with that. I was working
a lot, and in a sense, for that period, for an artist of my age and with very
little. . . I was fairly successful. I mean, I didn’t ever make a lot
of money, but I sold things and people liked them, and I’d enter exhibitions
and get in. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: You weren’t getting negative feedback.
DON BAUM: Yeah. (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: But you were getting some reinforcement for that, so it was okay.
DON BAUM: So anyway, I just finally abandoned the thesis thing altogether, and
I persuaded them at Roosevelt that because I had established myself as an artist
that that was sufficient qualification. Well, it was a big issue, but somehow
or another—and I still sort of wonder about it, because even then the
pressure for degrees was on—but they went along with it. And so. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: You were there a long time, so. . .
DON BAUM: I was there a very long time, that’s right. And so they kind of quit,
I mean, I just finally went one day, in the early fifties probably, and said,
“Look, I’m not going to finish this thing, and here’s the
way you have to look at it.”
SUE ANN KENDALL: Fire me now or take me.
DON BAUM: “If you want me to stay here, I think you have to accept me
on my professional qualification as an artist,” and I said, “I don’t
think that that’s so unusual. . .”
SUE ANN KENDALL: Because you were basically teaching art, studio classes, weren’t
you?
DON BAUM: Yeah, but I was also teaching the survey in art history and occasionally
an art history class.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I see.
DON BAUM: And I did that almost till the last year; I occasionally taught an
art history class. I don’t feel like I’m a full-fledged art historian,
although I love art history, and. . . Only certain areas really interested me.
I did a course on Symbolism just a couple years before I left, and I really
loved that because I’d been in Belgium and Holland and I’d seen
this work, and nobody around Chicago knew anything about it. In fact, Sue Taylor,
who is. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, I know who you mean.
DON BAUM: She was one of my students, and I think I did succeed in transmitting to
some extent my fascination with the Symbolists, and she’s continued. She’s
working on a Ph.D. on Emile at Bernard now.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm! And she’s writing for the Sun Times now, too,
[of Chicago], or I heard that she was going to do that.
DON BAUM: Yeah, yeah. So the thing sort of got itself straightened out. And
in the meantime, in the early fifties, I went to Europe for the first time.
I went to France, Italy, and Spain, and that was a very significant experience
for me.
SUE ANN KENDALL: How so?
DON BAUM: Well, I loved to travel, and I have a great deal of curiosity about
what other people, what other lives are like. Being in Paris and sort of seeing
the things which I saw then was just terribly important for me. And I came back,
it turned out that the airline I went on—one of these cut-rate things—failed,
went bankrupt, while I was in Italy or Spain or somewhere. And so I came back
to Paris and it was going to be, it took almost a month before I could get another,
and I finally got it worked out in another way. But in the meantime I started
to work there. I hadn’t really intended to do any work, but I got started
making some drawings and things. And when I came back I started to paint, and
I began to make some paintings that were directly connected with my experience,
particularly in Spain and Italy, these sort of. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: They were connected with what? I didn’t. . .
DON BAUM: Spain and Italy. You know that catalogue, you have that red [catalogue:
Don Baum, Hyde Park Art Center, 1981—Ed.]. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, there’s a reproduction of a painting there called Spain,
which is the first major thing which I did when I came back.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: And that really ties in directly. I mean, I was fascinated by the intensity
of religious feeling and mysticism attached with the. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: In the southern Latin countries, especially.
DON BAUM: Yes, yes, and particularly in Spain, which was very untouristed. And
it was a very stimulating and also almost frightening experience to go there,
because I didn’t speak Spanish, and I didn’t know, and 1952 was
a difficult time to be there. It was fairly soon after the war, and there weren’t
a lot of tourists and so on.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s for sure.
DON BAUM: But all of that. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: All the ritual, I mean, the Catholic church is _____ _____.
. .
DON BAUM: Yeah, and see, I didn’t know anything about that really.
SUE ANN KENDALL: It wasn’t your heritage so you wouldn’t have, yeah.
DON BAUM: No, no.
SUE ANN KENDALL: But it is a fascinating. . . They’re so literal, a lot of the ritual
objects and so on. They _____ _____. . .
DON BAUM: Yeah, and, you know, I was intrigued by altar pieces and votive things,
this kind of fetishism to encounter in that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: That was a very significant experience for me. And then I went back
a couple of years later—I think it was in ‘54—and traveled
extensively, again I went around through Spain and France and Italy.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, did you get to the Romanesque churches, I assume.
DON BAUM: I went to a lot of those, because, you know, that’s still one of my
great loves.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Me too! I didn’t realize that.
DON BAUM: It’s so interesting.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah. It’s one of mine. The whole pilgrimage to St. Jacques de Compostela
and all of those on the route.
DON BAUM: Yeah, um hmm, um hmm.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, wonderful. And at that time, I’m sure it was quite a different
experience than it is today.
DON BAUM: Yeah, it was. And I haven’t. . . Well, the last time I was in
Spain—I guess it must be about ten years ago—it seemed different.
But when I came back, in the early fifties—or in ‘54—I was
teaching at Roosevelt, and I was using the Art Institute slide collection, because
we didn’t have a slide collection. I used to go there every day, or almost
every other day, and I’d see Kathleen Blackshear, and it was great. And
Whitney Halstead was a friend of mine. I knew a lot of artists at that point.
Also I had begun to teach at the Hyde Park Art Center, and I met this young
woman, Alice Shaddle. We got married in 1955. And we lived on 57th Street in
this big fourth-floor walkup apartment that I’d had for a number of years.
Within the year, my son was born, and it didn’t seem logical at that point
to try to live there anymore. We didn’t have any money, but succeeded
in. . . We found out about this. . . This is very interesting, because my interest
in architecture goes back to Michigan State. I had been interested in Wright.
When I came to Chicago I knew there were Wright buildings, and I went to see
the Robie House, and to see the Oak Park houses. I got interested in Sullivan
because of teaching at Roosevelt. And of course this was a sort of package,
these two people. So at the time that we decided we would look for a house to
live in, it turned out that this Frank Lloyd Wright house, the [George—Ed.]
Blossom House, was on the market. It was surprisingly, even though it’s
a very large house, within our price range—that is, by borrowing money,
we could manage it. So we bought this house and we moved in there.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I didn’t know that.
DON BAUM: And my ex-wife. . . Alice lives there still. So my children, you know, both
grew up there. But it was all a part of this early experience. I would never
have known much about that if it hadn’t been. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: But that goes back to Michigan, that interest?
DON BAUM: Yeah, it goes back to my days at Michigan [State University].
SUE ANN KENDALL: I didn’t realize that. I didn’t know you had lived
there. One question I had too was your work in psychoanalysis. Were you aware
of how that affected your work?
DON BAUM: Oh yeah. And I think that’s a very important subject, because.
. . It so happens that the post-war years —and mine began a little bit
earlier—my father died at a certain point in there, and I can’t
remember when it was. It was probably about 1950, because the reason I went
to Europe the first time was because he left me a small bequest, and I just
had this money, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to go to Europe.”
But he was, I hadn’t really known him very well. He died a rather long
and painful death of cancer. I was troubled by it, and that was really when
I started in on this rather severe classical analysis—although I’d
gone to a lot of therapists prior to that, sort of trying to resolve things.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So it wasn’t until almost. . .
DON BAUM: I think it was about 1950 that I started.
SUE ANN KENDALL: . . .1950 that you actually seriously got into psychoanalysis.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and that’s when I think, because it was right after he died.
He either died in 1949 or 1950. . . And as soon as I came back. . . In fact,
I had seen my doctor prior to his death, and he said, “Look, you know,
he may live for months and this is not a good time to start, so we’ll
wait until afterwards.” And I said “Fine.” So that’s
how that all happened to work out that way.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You were in your late twenties at that time, is that right? Mid to late
twenties.
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, I was, I think I was 27 when I got married. That was in
19. . . Is that right, 1955? No, I must have been 29. Yeah, I was. [sotto voce:—
Ed.] 1922.
SUE ANN KENDALL: ‘22, right. Let’s see, what is that? (laughs) In 1952, you
would have been 30, right?
DON BAUM: Oh, I must have been that old.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So then, I was trying to put together when you were _____.
_____ your age and psychoanalysis, it meant you were really doing a lot of self-exploration.
Death precipitates that.
DON BAUM: And I had met a number of people who were involved—June Leaf,
for example, who had also had a lot of analysis and therapy and so forth. We
became very good friends in the fifties because she came back to Chicago—or
was in Chicago at that time, and finished her degree at Roosevelt, and then
went to the School of. . . I guess she then went to the Institute of Design
and took a masters there, and then she taught at the School of the Art Institute.
We were very close friends. I saw a great deal of her during that period, and
we always shared some of our artistic ideas. She was also a friend of Leon Golub,
and it turned out of course that Leon had had, as far as I know, a lot of therapy
and went through analysis. And there were some other people. Probably George
Cohen. I wouldn’t vouch for these things, but. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. It was in the air.
DON BAUM: . . .in the air. I think it was enormously important. There was a lot of
conversation about it. There was a lot of writing about it in some of the literary
journals. And a lot of, it seemed to sort of be opening up. I feel like a certain
kind of methodology that I have about my own work—my dependence on intuition,
the sort of experimentation which led to discovering my images in my own work—came
directly out of that kind of psychoanalytic experience.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Can you be more specific?
DON BAUM: Well, for instance, I worked primarily in what would still be considered
probably experimental mediums—with monoprints and collage, and sometimes
even those combined. It wasn’t until about 1952 that I began to sort of
paint in a way that I felt was sort of related to some of this other, more experimental,
work. But it was this dependence upon the accident, upon intuition. It’s
the Surrealist sort of approach.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Dada or Surrealism?
DON BAUM: But you see, it tied in completely with this investigation that psychoanalysis
prompted.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did it justify to you in an intellectual way your approach to your work,
or make you aware of it? I mean, it seems to me maybe you were already doing
that?
DON BAUM: Yeah, it was supported. And I understood it. But you know, in a Freudian.
. . My doctor was essentially a Freudian. I wouldn’t say that he was a
rigid or strict Freudian, but he was basically that, and he wasn’t interested
in. . . He never looked at my work once during these many years that I went
there. But I talked about it all the time, and it was always kind of a core
of. . . Because I recognized the way in which certain things became apparent
in my work that were also concerns of mine in my efforts to understand my unconscious—you
know, how it functioned, and so forth. So there was a very direct connection
with that. And I felt at the time that at least for me, that was as significant
an education for an artist as any kind of academic experiences I’d had.
I mean, it was the philosophical basis of my work as an artist.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, self-knowledge, in a way.
DON BAUM: Yeah, right, inside.
SUE ANN KENDALL: As a person, as an artist, insight, all of that kind of thing.
DON BAUM: Yeah, yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You had by that point had the art historical background, to a certain extent
at least, and then you were adding another whole dimension, it seems to me.
DON BAUM: Right. And you see, I’d been interested in this whole Gauguin thing,
and, you know, it just went. The whole kind of came together. And June was very
much involved in somewhat the same way. And so we talked and talked about this
kind of stuff. As I said, there were other people around that were experiencing
the same thing.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You seemed to—from what you say, you really were very aware of the
role this was playing in your work at the time.
DON BAUM: Yeah, I felt that there was a very direct connection.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, so sorting that out didn’t take away. I mean, sometimes they
get it all sorted out, then there’s nothing left for the art. There’s
nothing left to put into the art. That doesn’t seem to be the case with
you.
DON BAUM: No, it wasn’t. And I was saying last night, I had some friends here.
[pounding on something—Ed.] Sue Taylor, in fact, was here with Chris Lyon
and his wife Debra [Pearlman—Ed.]. . . Oh, she has another name because
she’s also a painter. It was a sort of an accident. We were supposed to
go to her [Sue Taylor’s—DB], house for dinner, and then at the last
[Tape 2, Side A]
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, I think what I was saying, too, was that it has to do
with the fact that I had, without really thinking about it, begun to work almost
entirely within these kind of experimental techniques, particularly collage.
And with collage, I would feel that, as I was working, that I had whatever I
needed in my environment and in my studio, and that it was just there. It was
a matter of at some point just seeing and recognizing it: “Oh, that’s
exactly what I need!” And part of that has to do with the whole idea of
the transformation of objects that. . . Well, I always think about this statement
that Picasso made about that bull’s head, which is made from a bicycle
seat and handle bars. He said, “Someday, you know, it’ll be on a
trash pile, and someone’ll come along, and say, “That’s just
what I need for my bicycle.” Well, that point of view I think is something
which has always interested me.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And Breton too, I should think.
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: The sewing machine and umbrella, that statement.
DON BAUM: Yeah. And I felt really related to the—that’s a Surrealist
point of view in way—and that whole idea.
SUE ANN KENDALL: At what point did you—first of all you, and then others in Chicago—become
aware of what was going on in New York? And what kind of an influence was that,
if any?
DON BAUM: Well, I had begun to go to New York in the [fifties— DB]. I
guess I’d gone to New York before I went to Europe the first time. I had
a good friend that lived there and I went and spent some. . . I think the first
summer after I taught. That’s possible. Because I ran out of money, and
I had to get a job, and I sold underwear at Saks, 34th Street. [laughter] It
was a dreary job.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I think a history of your jobs would be fascinating. [more laughter]
DON BAUM: The hundreds of them. And I really became aware. . . Well, I was interested
in. . . I do not have, even though I feel that I am myself an artist who’s
involved in images and so on, I do not have any feelings that pure, more formal
approaches are something which are remote from me at all. I recall, for example,
just some. . . Well, I remember a show that Katharine Kuh did at the Art Institute,
a Rothko show. [I remember] it was the first time Rothko really had been seen
here, and there were about ten of them in this tiny gallery. I was so impressed
by it.
SUE ANN KENDALL: When was that?
DON BAUM: Well, it must have been in the early fifties. Yeah, she was there. And she,
Katharine Kuh, was a very open person, and she was very nice to me. In fact,
the first show I had in New York was at the Ruth White Gallery, with another
Chicago artist named Regina Kirschner. And that was partly due to my connection
with Katharine Kuh. She knew Ruth White and. . . Anyway, it wasn’t a terrifically
sucessful venture, but it was a good thing for me to have experienced. But,
you see, I felt about Abstract Expressionism that in many ways the points of
view that were being expressed were not dissimilar because it was the same dependence
on intuition, and same belief in the accident, and all of this kind of Surrealist
background.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s what I wondered, yeah. You tied into that.
DON BAUM: Yeah. And so I have a very strong kind of feeling, sympathetic feeling,
and interest in the art of that particular time—although I felt that it
was very dissimilar from anything which I would probably ever do or express.
I didn’t feel drawn to it in that way. And I never have rejected formal
art at all, because, I mean, to see a great Mondrian is fabulous to me. But
I think that’s partly because I studied art history and I have an appreciation
for, you know, a very broad spectrum of artists’ representations. I didn’t
have any need to reject it, whereas later on in the sixties, you know, with
the Hairy Who groups, and some of these other artists, I think they had rather
definite feelings about a kind of rejection of New York. I didn’t experience
that in that way. And even though I felt more akin to what they were doing,
I still didn’t feel it was necessary to deprive myself, in a sense, of.
. . It’s like, I had never had any Renaissance art or Baroque art at the
School of the Art Institute in the survey class—which was an ancient to
modern sort of thing—because it was just left out.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s peculiar.
DON BAUM: Because Kathleen Blackshear didn’t like it.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh, she didn’t like it, I see.
DON BAUM: So there wasn’t, and so I had never. . . Then I did have the opportunity
when I was at the university to not only study that, but really get into it.
And I enjoyed it enormously. I loved, I mean, I went to Rome once just to look
at the Baroque churches and things of that kind. So I feel capable of responding
to a very large variety of _____ _____.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Were you aware, though, in the late forties, of what was going on
in New York, since Abstract Expressionism at that time wasn’t codified
so to speak—they weren’t talking about Jackson Pollock and his analysis
yet, all of that.
DON BAUM: Right.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you sense the connection, or did you know some of the people that were
there? And did you sense a connection with that _____.
DON BAUM: I never knew any of them, but I. . . I was in about three or four
of the Momentum shows. They brought all these people—Motherwell came here
once.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: And I remember going out for a drink with Motherwell after a jurying session
or something, and I was very impressed by him. There were contacts of that kind.
And I did know the work, and was very moved by it, even then, although I can’t
remember specifics.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, right. But there was no one here who was really doing that kind
of work.
DON BAUM: No, there really wasn’t.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Was there much talk about it? I mean, I suppose at that point
one was not so aware that it going to be the movement of that decade, but. .
.
DON BAUM: Yeah. I think there was. Because, you see, these Momentum people made great
efforts to get people from the East particularly—Betty Parsons, Joseph
Albers, and Motherwell. I was trying to think who some of the other people were.
But they came here and, you know. . . Momentum was so kind of exciting and important,
I think, for Chicago artists who participated in it, that we always wanted to
know who the jurors were. Then we sort of made connections about, found out
about really what sort of things they actually did. I don’t think I was
influenced by it in any way, except that I felt somewhat akin to their process,
and I liked it. I mean, I liked the energy, and the scale, and all of these
things, and it seemed very new to me. Of course, it was all prior to the sort
of thing that we now think of as Chicago art, you know.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: There were, you know, artists who were attempting to work in that
way. As a matter of fact—now, I should take that back—the year,
the first two years—I got married in I think 1955, and the first two years
that I was married I was still painting and I was painting really what were
sort of Abstract Expressionist paintings, although they were portraits.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Really? Uh huh.
DON BAUM: Which many of them did. You know, at a certain point, there were portraits
that were done. Anyway, I made those things. And then I began to get increasingly
dissatisfied with the limitations of paint and canvas. It didn’t, it really
didn’t satisfy my needs to sort of discover my images in this more intuitive
way. There was something just too physically involving in the process. So I
began to make collages, and then they in turn. . . And my wife was also very
much interested in collage, so we felt very akin in our work. I began to make
three-dimensional objects of found materials.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Was she too doing that? I don’t know her work.
DON BAUM: Yes. In fact, a lot of her early work. . . But you see, she had the
much more traditional kind of experience at the School of the Art Institute
and was, for instance, very much involved in printmaking—and painting.
But she also made collages. And today, of course, her work is very directly
related to collage and to this kind of made objects.
SUE ANN KENDALL: But so, was that when you really started getting into the three-dimensional
collages?
DON BAUM: Yeah. And I began to put things into the surface of the painting too. I
put newspapers and cloth and I made things out of, I sewed cloth onto canvases,
and things like that. So it was the desire to escape from the tradition of painting
as it normally is employed, and to find other ways, other beings.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Were you selling much at that point?
DON BAUM: Yeah. I’ve sold, you know, off and on throughout my life.
SUE ANN KENDALL: All the time, _____.
DON BAUM: Yeah. Not vast quantities and never for very much money, but. . . (chuckles)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you ever want to not have to teach and just do your art?
DON BAUM: No, I never thought much about it. First of all, by that time, we
had two children, I guess, or we had one, and then two. Maria is five years
younger than Charles. And we had this big house, and it was an enormous responsibility.
SUE ANN KENDALL: (chuckles) Yes.
DON BAUM: And so it was necessary to work. I not only taught full time, but I also
often. . . I taught at the Hyde Park Art Center, and for a while I taught at
a senior citizen’s group at the Bernard Horwich Center, a course on modern
art. I did one of these Ford Foundation discussion groups on modern art that
Katharine Kuh had been very much involved in organizing. Hayakawa had this group,
and then he left, and then I took it on the second year. It was very interesting.
But I did a lot of things that were connected. But teaching always was—and
I could say that with no problem at all—a very important thing for me
to do. I felt very good about it. I loved the context. I loved seeing, you know,
what people did. It was not anything which I ever felt. . . I never felt the
desire particularly to not do that and to just paint. I always did both of them.
I mean, I somehow had this sort of, I had some kind of. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: It sounds somehow that it gives you energy.
DON BAUM: Yeah, it did _____, I think.
SUE ANN KENDALL: It doesn’t drain you.
DON BAUM: I think it did give me energy. And I didn’t teach in the summer, so
I’d have that. I had all these vacations, so it worked out pretty well.
It got hairy at a certain point, because Alice also wanted to teach, and we
needed the income. So she also taught. She taught at Roosevelt. She also taught
at the Hyde Park Art Center. And it turned into a kind of a nightmare because
we were on these shifts.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Too much.
DON BAUM: There was just too many things going on, and I don’t think it
was a healthy thing for our relationship, but, anyway, that’s what we
did for quite a long time. Just to sort of make ends meet, you know. To have
a car. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, when you have kids and all those responsibilities and the house and
each going your own direction, it’s tough.
DON BAUM: So it got quite difficult. So that, and then of course, in 19, I guess it
was in about 1970, we were divorced.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: Then I didn’t work for quite a long time because I didn’t have
anyplace to work, and on weekends I saw my kids, and I taught during the day,
and I had _____. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, it’s a difficult period.
DON BAUM: Yeah. I think it’s the usual sort of problems.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Unfortunately, many of us have been there.
DON BAUM: Yeah. Right.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Most unfortunate. And I forget the date now, but in the late fifties you
really got more involved with the Hyde Park Art Center.
DON BAUM: Yeah. I started to teach there in about 1952 or ‘53. I think
it was. . . I’ll bet it was before. . . Well, it was at least at that
time, because when I went to Europe in 1954, the ladies in my class gave me
this passport case, and I sort of date it from that particular time. The Art
Center had been here on 57th Street in a storefront, and had been in several
such places, and it was really sort of a ladies’s club for the faculty
wives and so on. They made watercolors. And I taught this class. But it didn’t
really have an exhibition program. Then they moved. They got a new director
and they moved over to the old department store on 57th Street, and that’s—or
on 55th Street—and that was where I began to do exhibitions. We really
had a gallery, and. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Doing the curating. Before we get into the real specifics of your
curating there, it would appear from the amount of curating that you did, that
it took an enormous amount of energy, along with your teaching and everything
else. Did you, I mean, I’ve already asked you about the teaching, but
did you sometimes feel that you didn’t have time to get to your art, and
simply couldn’t produce as much, or was that really how you wanted things
at that point?
DON BAUM: Well, it didn’t seem to interfere. I mean, I continued to work all
through that period, and to show—I showed in shows at the Art Center.
And I had things in other places and I had exhibitions. . . I mean, it didn’t
really seem to interfere. I hadn’t, now that I think about it, I had boundless
energy. (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: I was going to say, the amount of creative energy that you put out through
those years amazes me, and that’s what I wanted to ask you. But you did
manage to keep going in terms of the artwork that you wanted to do.
DON BAUM: Yeah. It was hard at times, and I didn’t produce as much as I would
have liked to. But I have, my methods are. . I mean, I’m not a going-into-the-studio-every-morning-and-working.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: You don’t work nine to five?
DON BAUM: I am no nine-to-fiver at all. And there are periods when I don’t work
at all. I mean, when I just came back from Indonesia, I felt somehow filled
with some kind of new information—I didn’t quite know what to do
with it—and nothing seemed very right to me about working. I tried to
work, and then I just quit. I thought, “Well, you know, it’s just,
you’re not ready for it.” Then, about a couple weeks ago, I started
again just fine.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You started again. It seems you respect your intuitions, and your needs.
DON BAUM: Well I, yeah, I’ve learned that there’s no point in trying
to force it. It doesn’t function, so I don’t do that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Back to, again before we get more into the Hyde Park Center and so on,
back to the fifties. Was Katharine Kuh a major influence on you, or how well
did you know her?
DON BAUM: I knew her pretty well. See, that was beginning to be towards the
end of her work at the Art Institute. And I met her actually through Gertrude.
She was the one that asked me to do this Ford Foundation thing, and she was
the one that helped me with this show in New York. There were some problems
with that, and she just stepped right in. I would see her from time to time.
We did a TV show together once, on some works of art that we particularly admired.
I had a painting by Delfino Garcia, a Mexican painter, a wonderful thing which
I no longer have—he was a very kind of interesting guy. And she had a
little Lachaise, and we sat on this TV program and talked about these things.
It was fun. I liked her enormously. She was so bright, and so—at least
for that period—I think very well informed in a sort of art historical
way. That was important to me. Then Fred Sweet, who was the curator of twentieth
century art. . . I think Katharine Kuh. . . Maybe he was the curator of American
art and she was twentieth century, or something like that. But at that time,
I almost always got into the Chicago show, Chicago and Vicinity show, and I
was in the American show twice, and that was really through Fred Sweet who was
the curator of American art. So I was establishing myself as an artist in a
way that I felt very comfortable about.
SUE ANN KENDALL: It seems like you were accepted both by the establishment—meaning
the Art Institute, which represented conservatism here, certainly earlier on.
. .
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: . . .and also by—your work in Hyde Park—I guess I would say,
the more radical side of the art world here.
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So you managed to keep both of those sides going in a way that. . . I’m
thinking of the earlier people here who reacted so violently against the Art
Institute, such as the Weisenborn crowd and all of those things that they did.
DON BAUM: Yeah, well see, I knew about that, and I belonged to a couple of organizations
which were always getting petitions or something of that sort, but it didn’t.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Which ones, do you remember?
DON BAUM: Well, the Artists’ League of the Midwest. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: When was that formed? I don’t know about that.
DON BAUM: Well, that must have been in the forties, and I don’t remember. .
. I have some catalogues and stuff from that group, but they showed around in
different places, and they were a lot of these established Chicago artists,
most of them much older than I. And so. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: No-Jury was long dead by that point, anyway, wasn’t _____ _____ exhibitions?
DON BAUM: Yeah, well, there was one big No-Jury show at Navy Pier, and I was in that.
But I think that was considerably later. But there were some No-Jury shows.
And of course then the Momentum shows, which were a reaction against the Art
Institute, those things came along and they were [very good]. I felt that—and
I still feel this way, even though the art world in Chicago, or probably any
other major city, is so complex because it’s made up of not only artists,
but of people who are involved with art in other ways: museum people, critics.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Dealers.
DON BAUM: . . .dealers, you know, and the whole thing. I always was sort of
interested in the whole thing and not in myself and how I was going to get there
necessarily but, you know, what the whole thing was really sort of constructed
of.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, the whole context.
DON BAUM: And I knew, just accidentally probably, I began to know people from all
of these different levels of. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you know the critic Bulliet at all?
DON BAUM: No, but I remember reading them and also Eleanor Jewett, you know, who was
the. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Was she still around?
DON BAUM: Yeah, she was around during the early years. I think she may have reviewed
a show or two that I was in.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Uh huh, because Bulliet died early fifties, I think ‘51, and. . .
DON BAUM: Yeah, and she was out of it by the fifties, I think.
SUE ANN KENDALL: By then too, right.
DON BAUM: And then of course, there was a whole new breed of people, but, that. .
. I wanted to go back for just a minute, because I think that there’s
something that I didn’t say that I still feel was important, which is
that this experience of taking literature classes at the University of Chicago
was important, but it actually begins earlier than that, because when I was
at Michigan State, I happened to have a very fine teacher in that area. I got
very excited about writing at that time, and I began to write short stories
and poems and so forth. In fact I submitted a short story to the New Yorker
magazine that I wrote when I was at Michigan State University, and they returned
it to me, sort of suggesting I rework it, and maybe resubmit it. Well, I never
did it, but anyway it was a very encouraging. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: But it wasn’t a flat rejection then.
DON BAUM: It wasn’t a rejection.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That’s marvelous!
DON BAUM: And so I continued to write. I can’t do it at all at this point. It’s
sort of interesting; I don’t want to do it.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Really.
DON BAUM: But I did continue to do it. But it also was the contacts which I
had with writers: Wendell Wilcox, who lived on 57th Street and was a very, I
think, informative person—very, very widely read and an interest in sort
of curious literature. Anyway, it stimulated me, and I always read, and have
for all my life. I’m primarily interested in fiction, and I’m primarily
interested—I mean, I’ve read of lot of earlier writers—but
I’m primarily interested in contemporary fiction or twentieth century
fiction. Some people have been especially significant to me, among them, among
whom was Djuna Barnes, whose book Night Wood, you may have known. But I staggered
into Djuna Barnes in the early fifties, and felt akin to the point of view and
imagery and so on. Well, I had become familiar with Gertrude Stein and James
Joyce and had read some of both of them, but Djuna Barnes seemed to me to be
much more, someone that was much more available—to me. [probably meant
accessible— Ed.] And in fact I made, you know, some works which were directly
related to that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh really.
DON BAUM: To her and to that particular book. And then over the years that’s
been something. . . I feel as perhaps influenced in some ways by certain kinds
of literary—not that the work is illustrative of that, but that it comes
from some sort of awareness of certain writers and attitudes which are expressive.
It still is very important to me.
SUE ANN KENDALL: What other people have you read?
DON BAUM: Oh, I read very widely. But it is primarily fiction, and I like all the.
. . I’m just trying to think of. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Like through the sixties, was there anybody in particular you were reading
then?
DON BAUM: Well, yes, there were a lot of them. See, I read almost all of James,
and I read most of. . . And some of that. . . That was probably earlier, because
that must have been when I was really involved at the University of Chicago.
[thoughtful pause] Isn’t that funny, I can’t think. Taos, I keep
thinking, he lived in Taos. . . American writer, beard. . . [D. H. Lawrence—Ed.]
I don’t think anybody reads him now. Well, if. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: What about now? What do you read now?
DON BAUM: Oh, just all sorts of things, mostly contemporary writing, Iris Murdock,
and some of the. . . I like the Australian writers, I like Patrick White, and
some of those people. I can’t think about that, and I don’t know
why I really want to go back and bring it up, but it’s such a constant
and ongoing source of pleasure, and I think. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: When did you stop writing yourself? You said you don’t
do it now at all. Did you do it beyond Michigan and the University of Chicago?
Or did you not write at all at the University of Chicago?
DON BAUM: Well, I think when I went to the University of Chicago, my interests were
directed outward, and also I shared an apartment with the fellow who was in
the English department and was a writer.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Ah hah.
DON BAUM: And I think, and it was very stimulating, but I think that it made it sort
of, I mean, I read all that time, but I had no real desire to write anything,
because I was constantly hearing about his writing and his efforts at that,
so it just became a secondary. . . And now, for some reason, Richard Loving
recently asked me to write something for this artists’ writing thing that
he’s doing, and I said maybe. But then I started to write something and
I just got, you know, it’s just not there.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Just, you can’t do it all.
DON BAUM: No. And I don’t care really. I mean, it’s just. . . If
it were easy, as it once was, I think I’d probably be still involved in
it.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Sure.
[Interruption in taping]
SUE ANN KENDALL: Are there other things that you would like to talk about, in general, before
we go on to a later period?
DON BAUM: Well, I think so. One of them is that I really have this kind—have
had for a long time—an intense curiosity about creativity, and about creative
people. I always feel like there’s something to learn from them, and something
which. . . I guess I felt enriched by knowing them. I think that led me into
this curatorial role, which I finally got very involved in, because. . . I think
I was ready at a certain point to function in that particular way, because I’d
had so many experiences with people in different art forms: musicians and painters
and sculptors—and writers. So that I must have felt like I had. . . I
didn’t—no way consciously—think about the fact that I had
a kind of insight into visual arts of other people, but I think eventually that
came out, and it was about this sort of curiosity. I’m very intrigued
by, well, the uniqueness and the innovation which I feel is what is important
in a work of art. Whether it’s an image or not an image, that doesn’t.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.
DON BAUM: Or what kind of a work, but that. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: How it’s manifested isn’t the question, right.
DON BAUM: Yeah, isn’t important; it’s about this sort of special uniqueness
which artists express.
[Tape 2, side B]
SUE ANN KENDALL: Does that curiosity go back to anything, anyone else in your
family when you were growing up, who had the same kind of interest?
DON BAUM: [pauses, thinking]
SUE ANN KENDALL: Or just you?
DON BAUM: I don’t. . . Yeah. I don’t make any connections with that.
Neither of my brothers have any real interest nor insight into—certainly
not into my work, and not in general. Of course they’ve spent their lives
in a relatively small town and they’ve been, I would say, in the business
world, in a sense. And my sister [Lucy Spriggs—DB], who is as I mentioned
to you earlier ten years younger than I am, she was very important to me but
in a different way.
[Interruption to answer telephone]
DON BAUM: My parents at the time that she was born, I think. . . See, she was
born ten years after I was, and I think it was just a typical example of one
of these late-life babies then. They were at their sort of prime, and they were
very social and loved to entertain and go out and so forth. Anyway, I have a
good deal of experience helping to raise this young child; I mean, I was very
interested. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah, ten years older, sure.
DON BAUM: . . .I was ten years old, and so forth. We have a very established
relationship and she’s very, of my family, the one I would say that’s
sort of sympathetic to me. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Kindred spirit.
DON BAUM: . . .and understands, you know, what I’m doing and she always
looks at my work and it’s been a very important thing. Because she, you
know, left this small town, as I did, and has lived in Oberlin, where she went
to school. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Oh yeah.
DON BAUM: . . .and to Ann Arbor, which is where she lives now. Her husband is
an administrator in the school, and she’s a teacher. She went back to
school and got her teaching degree. She was interested in music when she first
went to Oberlin, which was on my suggestion. Anyway, so that’s been a.
. . I have this uncle who was a painter in Ravenna, Ohio, and he was quite established
there. And I went to visit them several times, because I was very curious about
it, but I never liked the work. He was a landscape painter, and I just never
had any sort of feelings of connection with him. So I didn’t, among my
family I didn’t feel like I ever really had any special connections or
feelings _____ _____.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Were your parents involved in cultural things? You had this
intense curiosity about a lot of different cultural things, and I wondered if
that came from [them].
DON BAUM: Well, that all actually, I think, emerged later. Because there wasn’t
anything.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, that’s true.
DON BAUM: You know, that was the point; there just wasn’t anything there.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And they may not have had time in their lives.
DON BAUM: No.
SUE ANN KENDALL: They were probably struggling to just exist.
DON BAUM: There wasn’t very much. When I left Escanaba when I was eighteen
and went to Michigan State, I pretty much knew that I was not coming back there.
I was very anxious to go to a city.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Sounds like me.
DON BAUM: When I got to Chicago, I thought, “This is where I want to be.
I want to live in Chicago, and I’m going to try to be an artist, and I’m
going to go to school, and I’m going to do this and this and this.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And you’ve done it.
DON BAUM: And then it all happened, yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Uh huh, well, they say if you set out to do it, you can do
it, so that’s wonderful.
DATE: MAY 13, 1986
[Tape 3, side A]
DON BAUM: Well, we were going to talk about my work, right?
SUE ANN KENDALL: Yeah. I was going to ask you. . . It seems like you’re
both a finder and a maker, in the sense that you use a lot of—or have
in the past, certainly—used a lot of objects that you find.
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Were you fascinated with objects and trinkets and so on as
a child?
DON BAUM: (pauses) Yes. No one has ever asked me that question before, but it’s
absolutely true. (laughter)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm! What kind of things did you collect?
DON BAUM: Well, I can’t. . . Various sorts of things come to mind, but
I do remember that even as a young child I was always very interested in curious
and small discarded objects, I guess, of various sorts. So that’s been
a preoccupation of mine. I haven’t really thought about it, but throughout
my life I realize that I’ve enjoyed. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you like collect shells or things like that?
DON BAUM: Well, actually I don’t remember thinking about it as collecting.
I mean, I had a stamp collection, but that was, you know, that’s so typical
of a teenager, I think, to have that. But the other kinds of things I didn’t
really. . . I mean, I guess I thought of it more as being these sort of treasures
that were usually unique objects of one sort or [another—Ed.]. Well, shall
I tell you an anecdote?
SUE ANN KENDALL: Sure.
DON BAUM: Which is very funny. . . One Easter—I must have been about ten
years old—but we always got Easter baskets and eggs and things. Anyway,
one of these colored eggs which I got in my Easter basket one year had a stencil
on it of a crucified Jesus—a purple stencil on it. And I think the egg
was pink; I can’t remember, but anyway I just fell madly in love with
this object. And I kept it for a very long time, I mean, maybe a matter of a
couple of years. And my brother, my oldest brother, in one of our frequent controversies
(chuckles) picked it up and threw it out the window and destroyed it. (laughter)
Well, it was, I mean, it must have been a traumatic experience or something.
I don’t even know why at this point; I’ve never thought about it,
really, until recently. But that’s the sort of object that I seem to have
attached almost a rather obsessional maybe even fetishistic sort of connection
with. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: And he realized that. He _____ _____.
DON BAUM: He realized it. It was a deliberate selection on his part, I felt
very sure. But there were all kinds of things like that, and I think, especially
after I came to Chicago to live, and where I had a kind of a permanent sort
of residence—one apartment after another, but they were permanent—I
just kept adding to this sort of acquisition, all sorts of things.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Large things? Or small things?
DON BAUM: Well, mostly smaller things. I was very interested in Victorian objects,
but they were usually small things—iron stoneware, and things of that
sort. This is very funny. I haven’t thought about this for such a long
time, but I know that every time I moved I kept being appalled by the amount
of debris that I had accumulated. But you see I didn’t really. . . I worked
with collage from, oh, in that resume, that first. . . [searching for paper—Ed.]
Oh, here. Maybe it’s in this.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Here’s the resume.
DON BAUM: Yeah. In 1952, I had an exhibition in Chicago at The 750 Studio, which
is long defunct, and it was a kind of off-the-beaten path place, sort of a semi-basement.
And this woman, Ginger Ellis, who had started this, was just one of these people
who felt the need to show artists’ work that she liked, and I had no particular
reputation there, but anyway she gave me this exhibition and I worked towards
it. It was all collages. And I think it was the first time I felt like I’d
really had a show that meant something. But I had begun to use collage of all
sorts. I often altered papers, in one way or another. And at that time I was
also making monotypes, so I often made monotypes and then cut them up and used
them in these collages. Most of them were quite small, but some of them had
as sort of adjuncts to them Victorian frames that functioned as a part of the
work. I remember, for example, there were two pieces. . . I have these, in fact
I still have these two frames; I somehow can’t—see that’s
an example of this collecting—I can’t. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Can’t get rid of them.
DON BAUM: Can’t get rid of them, because they’re too important in
some way. (chuckles) But one of them had a burnt wood oval frame. It’s
set into an old Victorian frame that had acorns all around the edge that was
very nice—is very nice—and then inside, where the picture would
have been, there was a deep box, and in that was the works of a clock. So I
had begun to make these somewhat three-dimensional objects, but I still didn’t
think about them as being three-dimensional, really; they were just a kind of
an extension of collage. And after I went to Spain—the first time, or
to Europe and particularly I think Spain was impressive for me—I came
back and worked on these large paintings, like the one which I referred to earlier,
the one called Spain, and then there were a whole series of things in which
I kept adding materials to the surface of the canvas. I’d put newspaper
down and then paint over it, and more newspaper, and I built up these very rich,
rough surfaces. I think it’s sort of interesting because of some of the
other kinds of things that people were doing at the time. Leon’s [Golub—DB]
paintings were already beginning to have this very rich surface texture. I don’t
know, it was something that was kind of. . . I didn’t feel it at the time,
but now in retrospect, it seems like there must have been some sort of effort
to make the surface of the painting have a kind of validity of its own.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Of its own, yeah.
DON BAUM: And that’s interesting, because last night I went to this panel
discussion—three of the former Hyde Park Art Center artists, Ray Yoshida,
Christina Ramberg, and Phil Hanson—and they spoke at a panel last night
at the Contemporary Museum. And they felt that their students had become much
more interested in the surfaces of their works. And, you know, it was a kind
of curious coincidence to think about that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: But anyway, I began at that time to feel very dissatisfied with the
surface, the flatness of the. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Just a plain painted surface.
DON BAUM: Yeah. . . So I started to make these three-dimensional assemblages.
And I had this studio in the coachhouse of the house where Alice and I lived,
so I had just unlimited space to collect and keep.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. Do you collect fragments of things?
DON BAUM: Oh yeah. Mostly. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you do it as a child too? Were you attracted to fragments
of things as well? Just any kind of objects?
DON BAUM: It’s very funny. I have a kind of block about all that, I guess,
because, you see, as a young person I had almost no contact with anything that
resembled works of art, I mean. . . I took art in high school, but we made puppets.
I don’t remember much about it. I don’t remember knowing anything
about modern art or anything like that until I left there and went to Michigan
State University. So that whatever it was that intrigued me at that time, it
was very hit or miss, and I don’t really remember what the things were.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Do you know what it was, for instance, about the Easter egg
that you liked? Was it the visual or was it the crucifixion?
DON BAUM: Well, I think it was a combination of things. First of all, I think
it had a kind of an air of mystery for me, and part of that was because of the
image. You know, I have no particular religious affiliations at this particular
time in my life, and at that time I didn’t really either. I went to the
Presbyterian church, because that’s where we were sent as children. And
I found it very cold and. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Dry.
DON BAUM: . . .dry, and I never felt any connection with the legends or any
aspect of it in particular. But I think even then I was very fascinated by what
I felt was a sort of exoticism of Catholism. And this town where I grew up was
about half French and Irish-Catholic and about half Scandinavian. It was settled
by these two groups.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Very different groups.
DON BAUM: And there were large, very large Catholic churches, several Catholic
schools in this town. And many of my friends, you know, were Catholic. And I
remember going to midnight mass when I was in high school. There were some things
of that sort, you know. I was very interested in that.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Part of the ritual was intriguing.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and I think. . . You see, later I think these same kinds of
feelings surfaced, for example in Spain, and also in Italy. . . And in France.
But where I suddenly felt very convinced by the fact that, not that Jesus lives
or anything of that sort, but that the sort of needs that people have—have
had—for this kind of higher power, and that, as a result of this, you
see this kind of incredible creativity that must result in this sort of thing.
Anyway, it really interested me. I felt, you know, that seeing, as I did for
the first time, the great Gothic and Romanesque churches, and so on, I just
found it fascinating that there had been, at least, a culture in which these
things could be produced. It seems very special to me. So I think that whole
thing kind of surfaced again. In fact, when I came back after that, I began
to make some shrine-like objects. And I was very much interested in things like
votive objects [and reliquaries—DB]. I bought in Spain these wax limbs
[legs, arms, noses, etc.—DB] and other objects which you could buy and,
you know, have them blessed and give them to the church, and so forth. But I
brought a number of those things back and used them in constructions, over the
years. So it’s been a sort of an undercurrent in my work, and I don’t
know what that means exactly, but. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, it ties into Surrealism.
DON BAUM: Yeah, it ties into Surrealism. And you see, it was a kind of an exotic
thing for me; it isn’t about the religious content, particularly.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Right, right.
DON BAUM: But on the other hand, of course, when I went to the University of
Chicago, I became even more intensely interested because I studied art history
and took courses in iconography and began to really be aware of how complex
and how fascinating—how rich—this source of material had been historically,
and really could still be, and I felt it still had this sort of vitality and
energy. But anyway, to go back to what I was saying, this business about being
dissatisfied with surface was really kind of a crisis, in a way, and I felt,
after I started to work with three-dimensional objects, I felt very free. It
was a real breakthrough, in a sense. I think I sort of wanted to do that for
some time, and it was real important. Anyway, from then on, I made things. .
. I used to collect things from all kinds of sources: natural materials, which
I have always been very much interested in. I used to spend part of my summers
up, of course, on Lake Superior, so I’d pick up wood and weathered this
or thats. But I also went to junk stores. All the time. And that’s, of
course, something which is very characteristic of a lot of Chicago artists.
A lot of their life has been spent in Maxwell Street on Sunday mornings. (laughs)
And I wouldn’t have anything particularly in mind when I started out,
but I’d often find things that would be useful to me. And they could be
made out of almost any material. I guess even then, though, I was very unwilling
to use plastic, but there was still, you know, at that point there were still
things made out of wood and metal and glass.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You’re talking about the fifties now.
DON BAUM: Yeah. So plastic didn’t have the kind of problems that it does
in. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, right, the proliferation of plastic was a little later.
DON BAUM: Yeah, right.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And no, of course, it’s more prevalent than anything
else. So you went from that show in ‘52 into doing pretty much three-dimensional,
more three-dimensional things.
DON BAUM: Yeah. And for a long time I incorporated surfaces which I created.
I got very much interested in rubbings. Once when I was in Paris, I did a whole
series of collages that were made from rubbings from the Jardin des Plantes,
particularly of ginko trees, but some exotic—rather, relatively exotic—sorts
of trees. And then combined those with some 19th century engravings. You see,
at that time, I was aware, I think, of [Max—DB] Ernst, and I’ve.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Montage and. . .
DON BAUM: Yeah, and I knew, because I had gone to the school of the Art Institute,
and I knew, you know, the sort of importance of these experimental techniques—and
I was using them. But I just continued to work with these things. I made a lot
of pieces at that time that are kind of architectural in character. It’s
odd, but I think of them now in relation to my work at the present time, as
being closer. They were mostly made of wood, and they were often kind of free-standing,
sometimes including some element of imagery, but at times even being very dependent
upon the materials themselves. They were not—again, in retrospect—I
feel like. . . I just didn’t realized what I was doing, but I think they
were very good. But I destroyed most of them. Because nobody was interested
in them. (chuckles) You know, they were like not _____. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Just not important.
DON BAUM: Yeah. So. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Do have any?
DON BAUM: No, I don’t have any. Fortunately, I have slides of most of
them, but most of them are gone.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I’d like to see them sometime. They were just kind of
experiments, though, in other words.
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You looked at them more as experiments than as. . .
DON BAUM: Well, I didn’t feel they were experiments, but I just felt like
I had to make them. I made quite a few three-dimensional kinds of sculpture
objects which were made out of rolling pins, these wooden potato mashers, and
objects of that kind that. . . Well, I think they’re very interesting,
and I still have slides of some of those, but I don’t have any of the
work and I don’t think. . . Very little of it is around. There’s
a few things that people that I knew at that time acquired, but there’s
very little. . . Well, just for an example in relation to material. . . Oh,
I know. Okay, what happened there is that I then began to get interested in
using dolls.
SUE ANN KENDALL: I was going to ask you about the dolls next.
DON BAUM: And in things. And I think the first piece I ever made, and the name
of the piece—which as far as I know still exists—was The First Doll,
and it was a very funny kind of combination of circumstances. But when my son
Charles was about three, maybe, Alice and I and June Leaf went to Washington,
D.C. And some friends of ours, the Claviers, were living in Chicago at that
time, and they stayed in our apartment, took care of Charles, and loaned us
their car—well, I can’t believe it now. (laughs) How anyone could
be so generous. But it was great. And we went to Washington. Well, we wanted
to bring something back for Charles, and we happened to be going by this doll
store. I had never even seen a doll store, you know, antique dolls and so on,
and we went in and there was this marvelous boy doll—this credible papier-mache
head—and it was very wonderful. So I bought it and brought it back to
him. He was little and he liked it, and it was fun. But somehow, over the years,
that thing got sort of wrecked, but the head was wonderful, and there was still
enough of the body—I don’t think there were arms and legs left.
Anyway, that was the first doll that I ever used, that particular one, and that
was in this construction, which was in a box—it was rather brilliant in
color. And it had a lot of painted areas and a few other things in it. But from
then on, I began to work with dolls, and I did lots of different sorts of things.
I think my feelings about it are somewhat similar to this. . . Well, it certainly
relates to this kind of fascination with religion as a sort of a myth or an
exotic mythology. And dolls began to have similar kind of meaning because obviously
they represent human beings. In a sense, there’s a kind of potential manipulation—or
not necessarily—well, that word is all right—but it is possible
for dolls to have this kind of special sort of psychological significance. I
didn’t really think about what this psycho. . .you know, what it would
be in relation to one or another, but I certainly consciously was dealing with
relationships between human beings, by using kind of fetishistic objects.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, children do that, and I’m wondering if your children
playing with dolls had anything to do with it. Those dolls become very real
to them.
DON BAUM: Yeah. I don’t recall that. Charles was really not especially
interested in toys or dolls of that kind. He’s very much interested in
cars and tractors and things of that sort. (laughs)
SUE ANN KENDALL: The typical boy things.
DON BAUM: Yeah, and Maria, you know, I don’t remember much about that
either. I know that I bought her dolls because I thought it was very important.
(laughter)
SUE ANN KENDALL: Maybe they were bought for you more than for her.
DON BAUM: Yeah, very possible. But, you know, I think one of the things which
I should talk about in relation to my work, and especially as I start talking
about that aspect of it, is that when I started at the University of Chicago
in about 1944, my father died. And he died fairly young. . . Actually took a
long time, but it was a very traumatic experience for me. I was already teaching
at Roosevelt. I had just started to teach there, and I felt very troubled by
this. I decided that I should do something rather seriously about it in terms
of some kind of therapy or psychoanalysis or something. I had been very aware
of that. I don’t quite know how it happened, but just in terms of people
that I met, I had made several efforts to engage myself in some kind of searching
in that particular way. But nothing had panned out. Well, at this particular
time, I’m not absolutely certain how I ever encountered the doctor that
I did, but anyway, his name is Morris Sklansky. He’s still practicing
in Chicago. And I started seeing him on a very frequent basis. I think I went
four days a week when I started, and I went off and on to him for about three
years. Very regularly. Fortunately at that time, it was, I think, even part
of the beginning may have been in a clinic situation, because he’s about
the same age as I am, and he was probably very young. . . In any case, it was
just something which I felt was absolutely necessary, because I felt like, in
a way, for me, psychoanalysis was like the higher degree that I needed. (chuckles)
Not necessarily the degree, but the experience was what I thought was more significant,
maybe more valuable, finally in the long run, than any kind of academic experience
which I had. But it made a great deal. . . It really, this kind of investigation
really led to a lot of things in my work, and I was aware of it, and I felt
very fluid about that. What’s very fascinating about it is Dr. Sklansky
is—I wouldn’t say he’s a straight Freudian—but he’s
basically a Freudian. I think, like all intelligent psychoanalysts today, you
know, there’s all kinds of things which enter into that. It’s not
one linear process. But one of his rules—and there were very few—but
one of his rules was that I didn’t show him my work. I could talk about
it, but I didn’t show it to him. Well, that’s always interested
me since that time, because I think what it forced me to do was to come to terms
with the content and the imagery in my work. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: You had to talk about it.
DON BAUM: . . .in a conscious way. I had to formulate what I really thought
I was doing with these. . . And I think that that was very important, perhaps
more important than any of the academic sort of background, at least at that
particular time. It really was significant. So anyway, this kind of doll stuff
has a definite relationship to that—although I can’t say, you know,
that I thought that I was, you know, “This is a mommy doll, and that’s
a daddy doll,” or anything like that. But it was just that I would put
them into relationships. Well, you see, for instance, this piece, The Babies
of della Robbia, which is in the Museum of Contemporary Art collection now.
But that’s fairly early and it’s interestingly related to this kind
of religious imagery. But it also begins to deal with some of this other information.
. . Now, many of them are much more specific in terms of. . . And there’s
another one I know in here [searching through book—Ed.] Well, for instance,
that one: Mr. and Mrs. Ballin.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm.
DON BAUM: Well, you know, that has obviously sexual connotations, and it, I
think the fact that it’s a skull, you know, I mean it refers to certain
passages of life and certain sorts of feelings that all human beings experience.
But it’s a way, it was a way for me, in a sense, to investigate these
things, and I suppose, you know, to some extent, art is for an artist. There’s
always a kind of catharsis. It has a cathartic sort of meaning as well.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You work through feelings via your art.
DON BAUM: Yeah. And then I did an entire exhibition of works—actually
it was a portion of a show at the Hyde Park Art Center, but I had about 25,
30 pieces in it—which were all just couples. And this was. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Dolls?
DON BAUM: Yeah, dolls. That [________—Ed.] was in the show. And so was
this one, which is in the Art Institute now [________—Ed.].
SUE ANN KENDALL: Uh huh.
DON BAUM: They were couples. And I remember it very well, because at the time
of the. . . I’m trying to think who might have been in that show, but
it seems to me Ed Flood was, and. . . I can’t recall offhand who the other
artists were. But at the time of the installation, none of these things had
any names. And we had this absolutely marvelous time naming them these different
people. (laughter) _____ they also, it’s like Rose—well, I don’t.
. .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you give them titles then before the show?
DON BAUM: Yeah, see, this is Clint and Clara. Yeah, they were all. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Were these real people?
DON BAUM: Well, mostly not. You know, I don’t think there were any references
to any particular. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Let me ask you: Once you take the object and you’re dealing
with this content, whatever it is, how much are you aware of working through
formal problems as well. . .
DON BAUM: Very aware. In fact, most of my process is—on the superficial
level—to be concerned with the formal problems, and to permit the intuitive
and the unconscious level to operate with this. . . I mean, I feel that they
work together in this way, but I don’t start out with preconceptions.
And almost everything is developed in a sort of in-process way. That is, I start
out with some thing, and then I add another thing, and so forth and so on. But
always with this concern and interest in the formal organization of it. But
not as a means to an end in any sense. I mean. . . The formal aspect of any
of my things is always a result of the intuitive process.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Well, there has to be a certain free-flowing quality in that
intuitive process, and I’m wondering if the psychoanalysis allowed you
to let that process [happen].
DON BAUM: Well, I’m sure of it. See, I feel very much that way. . . In
a sense, I learned something about utilizing this vast area that all human beings
have, and I’m making it function for me, through that process. I think
it’s absolutely directly related.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Do you use dreams at all?
DON BAUM: Not really, because dreams are really a very different manifestation,
I think, of the unconscious than a free-association process. It isn’t
that I don’t value dreams; I do very much. But they don’t seem to.
. . They never particularly provide me with any imagery. But you see, I was
also at this time very much interested in reading people—I mentioned earlier
Djuna Barnes. And I read Joyce and Stein at this time. So I was very much interested
in the writing in which this sort of stream-of-consciousness process was apparent.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm. I wondered about that, if there was a connection there.
. .
DON BAUM: Yeah, um hmm. I always have felt very moved by literature, you know,
I always feel like I have a kind of kinship with it. In fact, when I was at
the University of Chicago, I had a minor in English. . .
[Tape 3, side B]
DON BAUM: We were talking about literature. I think that the connection is a
parallel sort of experience, that literature, writing, has for me, but it isn’t
a direct influence. You know, I mentioned Djuna Barnes because I felt that her
imagery, in Nightwood, for example, is some of the most potent and evocative
of visual imagery of almost any writing of that particular period. I think Stein
and Joyce are both absolutely marvelous, but they don’t do that. They
don’t produce those effects. And of course, there are. . . I also read
a lot of the French writers—French surrealist writers—and some of
the poetry. And I studied French at the University of Chicago at that time,
and we read quite a lot of French Symbolist poetry, and I was very taken with
it. Of course, there again, it’s a lot of imagery that was very suggestive.
But I think I was fascinated by the mysteriousness of it, the enigmatic nature
of it. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Um hmm, what it can evoke.
DON BAUM: Yeah, the evocative quality. But. . . And occasionally I made things
in relation to works and things by Djuna Barnes. There’s a. . . The Horwich’s
have a piece called Nightwood, which is direct, sort of. But mostly it’s
a kind of a parallel thing. And I still read a great deal. I’m very interested
in. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Does some of your imagery come from that reading, do you think? You said
dreams don’t provide the imagery. Or is it the objects themselves, like
the dolls, sitting in front of you.
DON BAUM: The objects, the objects are the origin of the imagery, really. You
see, for instance, since I’ve started to make these houses, I went to
Haiti, and I was so excited about it, because here were all these things which
I felt very involved with. All this voodoo stuff, and all of this kind of magic,
and this culture which seemed like something from another period of time. Anyway,
the last day that we were there. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: And what year was this? Excuse me.
DON BAUM: It was about, oh, it must be about eight years ago, approximately.
I went with a small group, and Paul Waggoner—who was at that time a dealer
here in Chicago, and had a gallery that showed mostly Haitian art—he went
with us. He knew people, and we went and visited some voodoo priests and all
that sort of thing. Anyway, on the last day, I picked up this piece of wood
on the ground that was part of the stands that they had built for the carnival.
This is just a fragment. It’s about this big [gesturing— Ed.]; in
fact, it’s in there in the house, because I’ve always kept it. I
got home with this thing, and I felt immediately that this was like this magic.
It’s just a piece of painted wood about three or four inches by five inches.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And it has some kind of magic [potential].
DON BAUM: And so that’s an example of the sort of germ of something. Then
I made this piece which incorporated it. But that’s often the way I start
with things. It’s very funny. Recently, a west coast art dealer has. .
. [He’s, She’s] a collector of cups by artists. And she likes my
work. In fact, she bought a piece of mine. But she’s been asking me for
about four years to make this piece for her. Well, so far—and it’s
funny, I think about it a lot—but so far, I have never found any object,
any cup, or any way of making it, something, that has this particular evocative
quality. So, you know.
SUE ANN KENDALL: So you can’t do it until this happens.
DON BAUM: I can’t do it. Yeah. I’ve just put that aside. (chuckles) Someday.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You jumped ahead to your house images, and I think we could
go over that a little bit. You had a fairly long break in doing work in the
seventies, is that right?
DON BAUM: Yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: And then when you came back into working again, you went to the house imagery,
and I’m curious to explore first of all the break, and then when you did
start working again, why the house? Why the change?
DON BAUM: Well, you see. . . I’m trying to think exactly when it was,
because I’m real vague about dates. My son is now thirty years old, and
he was about fifteen, so it’s been fifteen years, I guess, since I separated
from my wife—and eventually divorced. And I had the studio, but since
I departed, I had to live somewhere and I lived in hotels for a couple of, for
a while, and then I moved into this building—over there, the 1700 East
Fifty-Sixth Street Building—I lived there for several years, but I had
a one-bedroom apartment, and I just didn’t. . . Also I tried to resolve
what life was all about at that time, and how I felt about it. . . Every Sunday,
I saw my children—for many years. That was the arrangement that we had,
you know. And then I worked. I worked at the Illinois Arts Council and I taught
at Roosevelt and was involved still in the Hyde Park Art Center, so I really
didn’t have any time. And I didn’t have any place. So I only made
about two things in a period of about eight years.
SUE ANN KENDALL: You didn’t work through any of the [issues] through an art _____
_____ process.
DON BAUM: No. It was very strange, but it was really a kind of period of reassessment
and coming to terms with things, that I just had to go through. I didn’t
even particularly miss it, at that time. I mean, I was just so busy, and I had
so much on my mind, so many problems that had to be resolved, that that just
had to stop at that point. And it was a physical thing as well as an emotional
thing. And then I bought this apartment and moved here, and I decided that I
would set up this studio.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Excuse me, had you done the dolls up until you had the [divorce].
DON BAUM: Yes, all of that preceded, yeah.
SUE ANN KENDALL: That was pretty much clear through about ‘72.
DON BAUM: And you see this whole series of things which are these relationship images—these
dolls, couples and so forth—that’s all related to this effort to
resolve some of these conflicts, feelings and so forth, that were. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: That marriage brings up?
DON BAUM: Yes, that marriage brings. And dissolution of that marriage. . .
SUE ANN KENDALL: Or the dissolvement of it, right.
DON BAUM: And so I began to. . . The first summer, I think, after I lived here, I
went north, and I started to walk regularly every day on the beach, on Lake
Superior, and I started to pick up these pieces of wood,