Oral history interview with Willem De Looper, 1992 Jan. 26 and Feb. 29
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Willem De Looper, 1992 Jan. 26 and Feb. 29, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Interview with Willem de Looper
Conducted by Benjamin Forgey
At the Artist's Studio in Washington, D.C.
January 26 and February 29, 1992
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Willem de Looper on January 26 and February 29, 1992. The interview took place in Washington, D.C, and was conducted by Benjamin Forgey for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Willem de Lopper has reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
BENJAMIN FORGEY: Okay, we’re in the – what’s today’s date, Willem?
WILLEM DE LOOPER: I think it’s the –
MR. FORGEY: 26th or –
MR. DE LOOPER: Of January. Super Bowl day.
MR. FORGEY: Super Bowl day.
MR. DE LOOPER: 1992.
MR. FORGEY: We’re in de Looper’s studio in the St. Regis Apartment on California Street in Washington, DC.
Willem, how long have you been here in the St. Regis?
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, we’ve been in this building almost 25 years – I think 24. This has been my first big studio. When I had one before, it was a little place.
MR. FORGEY: I’m jumping ahead actually. Let’s start at the beginning –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, all right.
MR. FORGEY: Let’s go back up.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah.
MR. FORGEY: Where were you born and what date?
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, I was born in the Netherlands in October ’32 – October 30, 1932. I came to this country in October of 1950, so I’ve been here what? Well, 41 years now. I guess you want me to talk a little bit about how I lived in Holland and –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, describe – like describe – yeah, because we want –
MR. DE LOOPER: Having been born in the Netherlands in ’32 means that I was a young boy when the Second World War started. I guess I was six years old in 1940 when, you know, Holland was invaded by the Germans. And so I spent my early years in Holland during the war, which meant a rather restricted way of living obviously. And after the war I went to high school. I went to several high schools, because during the war we moved a lot.
MR. FORGEY: All within The Hague?
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, all within The Hague, yes. I lived in The Hague. I was born there. And –
MR. FORGEY: Describe your house.
MR. DE LOOPER: Okay.
MR. FORGEY: I mean, did you live in the same place for the first few years of your life or were you always –
MR. DE LOOPER: No. Interestingly enough, no. I was born in a section of The Hague that I don’t even really remember anymore. I have an older brother and an older sister. My sister is 7 years older than I, and my brother is 11 years older.
MR. FORGEY: What is your sister’s name?
MR. DE LOOPER: Her name is Annika. And my brother is Hans. And they now both live in Switzerland, and they’re retired. The reason I mention this is that, to a large extent, my brother and sister, being so much older than I was or were, brought me up, you see, for a great many years, and my brother, in fact, played a very important role in my life in that he was almost like a substitute father. That had to do both with the war and with the years right after that, because he caused me, in fact, to come to the United States. He gave me the opportunity to come to the United States.
MR. FORGEY: Describe your family, I mean your parents.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, right, okay. My father was a banker. We lived, in fact, during the years that I’m conscious – from about six years old when the war started – we lived in what you might describe as the northwest section of The Hague, and we lived upstairs from a small bank of which my father was director. And he had a co-director who did not live in the house obviously, but I lived there with my mother and my brother and sister. And this was very unusual in the sense that we were occupied by the Germans and the whole city was occupied. And we lived, in fact, in a section of the city that was where the Germans had their headquarters. So you had to have a visa to go in and out of the section, which obviously didn’t have much to do with me because I was so young, but certainly my parents and my brother and sister if they had to go to another part of the city or something like this. I don’t think there was any question of traveling to other parts of the country, although I don’t remember that so particularly. But we lived there surrounded, in other words, by German troops, which is kind of interesting. Certainly as a kid I both hated that but I mostly loved it to be quite frank, because, you know, soldiers are very interesting to young boys, and there was a lot of activity always with troops marching and tanks and all that sort of thing. That goes along with having lots of military people there.
MR. FORGEY: The Hague wasn’t destroyed in any way, was it? It was –
MR. DE LOOPER: It was destroyed at one point when, interestingly enough – we had a fairly severe bombardment, but, interestingly enough, it was by the British and it was done by mistake. It was one of those things –
MR. FORGEY: Was this during the –
MR. DE LOOPER: This was during the early years of the war. They had – the Germans had bombed Rotterdam very severely, and Holland being so small, you could, in fact, in The Hague see the clouds of smoke. You see, it was one of those kinds of things. The Hague itself was not bombed, except later on in the war in that there were some – I think they were B-2s or B-1s. I always forget. The ones that look like rockets that now go, you know, to the moon and things. They would be sent up by the Germans, and they were meant to go to England and often they would sort of fall back into the territories where they got started. So there were some fairly severe things like that that happened in The Hague. But on the whole it was not a real strife-storn city.
MR. FORGEY: You were, at that point then, during – while The Hague was occupied, you were going to going to school every day?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, right. I mean –
MR. FORGEY: Pretty normal.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, it was fairly normal. I think early on I went to the Montessori school, and I still have a picture of myself, strangely enough, which I guess the school took at that time, and I’m drawing in fact. I must have been five or six years old. And in the Montessori school you draw with these geometric sort of shapes, so it wasn’t freehand drawing or anything like that, but it’s kind of fun to look at now.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah?
MR. DE LOOPER: And, yes, that was fairly normal. And then my sister would take me to grade school, and it was one of those grade schools where they also had an upper – like a junior high, and she was going to that, so she would bring me and bring me back every day. So I think that was all fairly normal, and it was all done by walking the way I remember it. And – because it was not until I was a teenager or so that I had a bicycle. And, of course, Dutch people are pretty good with bicycles, as you know. So that was pretty normal. It came less normal as the war went on, because eventually we had to move, and I don’t know exactly what year that was, but even out of that sort of protected section. And the reason, of course, that we were allowed to live was that we – because of my father’s bank – we did business also with, you know, the Germans that were there and everybody else. So it was kind of an essential service that they –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – felt should be there, that should be allowed to be there, you see? But, yes, life was fairly normal for all of us. Towards the end it became a little hairy in the sense that obviously everything dried up, including food and so forth and we started feeling that quite a lot. And during the last year we had very severe hunger in the Netherlands. And we suffered –
MR. FORGEY: The winter of ’44-’45 –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And we suffered from that ourselves. The only other thing that we had was – of course that – and that involved my brother actually. My brother was of student age, you see? Of college student age. And so he, like so many other people in Holland, was, in fact, taken to Germany to do forced labor in a factory.
MR. FORGEY: I see.
MR. DE LOOPER: And this – I certainly observed all of that, because these people were all gathered up in public places, and then they were, in fact, marched, you know, down the avenue where we lived. And so he went to Berlin, and he worked in a factory of some sort. I’ve forgotten what exactly. Oh, he had something to do with making machinery or something like that. And in his particular case he became extremely ill. He had diphtheria, and so as a result of that he became – he almost died, and he became totally paralyzed.
MR. FORGEY: While he was in Germany?
MR. DE LOOPER: While he was in Germany. And interestingly enough – and, of course, all of this is a little bit vague to me because I was so young, but the Germans gave my parents permission to go to Berlin, and this was during the years that Berlin was being heavily bombed every day for instance. I know that. They went by train, and they were extremely courteous and all that, and they actually brought him back on a stretcher. He was – and that I do sort of remember. I mean, it’s true that my brother and sister sometimes remind me of this also, but I have an imprint on my mind of that – of we all went to the station then to welcome him back.
MR. FORGEY: Right. Well, you would have been about 13 at that –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And we were, you know, extremely shocked. We were more shocked. We didn’t know what to expect, you see? And he was in such bad shape that he couldn’t even talk, because even his tongue was paralyzed. So we did have that, and we did have occasionally some German troops that held what they called “Ratzias” [raids], which meant that they went, you know, on house-to-house searches and things like this. And they came into our house several times too. What they were basically doing was looking for, you know, young men or, in some cases, also for illegal things like having a radio or something, which you weren’t allowed to have. And so that’s really the way the war went in a sense. And so it did certainly affect me, but it affected me a little bit at a distance.
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: I mean, it was horrible to see my brother suffer the way he did.
MR. FORGEY: Absolutely.
MR. DE LOOPER: Fortunately, he was allowed – you know, he got help and all that. He turned out – he was better in a few years, miraculously. And that was a big deal obviously.
MR. FORGEY: Really.
MR. DE LOOPER: And –
MR. FORGEY: Tell me a little bit about your parents, your mother and father.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, my mother –
MR. FORGEY: Were they both – they were both Dutch?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes. Oh, sure, yes. My mother, whose maiden name is Huizinga, which –
MR. FORGEY: How do you spell that?
MR. DE LOOPER: Huizinga. H-U-I-Z-I-N-G-A. Well, you may have heard there’s a famous historian [Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)].
MR. FORGEY: Historian, of course.
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly. Well, it’s really that family, you see? And they come from the very north of the Netherlands called Groningen. It’s a province. I’ve never been there, but my mother used to talk about Groningen. And, in fact, it’s very close to the north of Germany, like Hamburg and where my wife now comes from, you see? And she early on went to Rotterdam and worked as a government something or other in an office, and I remember that she did a lot of swimming early in life and that sort of thing. But basically my mother was a housewife in the old-fashioned way. My father was a young bank clerk at the bank, which was very much larger than the little thing that we had on the avenue in The Hague where I grew up, and he worked there for many years. And he was – the way that looks, he was more or less picked to set up that bank and start it with a colleague in that section of The Hague where I then grew up. So we were, if you want to put it that way, white collar, you know, but to some extent self-made. Certainly my father advanced himself to that position, which was a nice position to have. And, of course, being in a very prominent part of The Hague as well, it brought us all in contact with, you know, more interesting people than it might have been.
MR. FORGEY: When you emphasized before the northwest section of The Hague, is that –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, well –
MR. FORGEY: How do you characterize that?
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, all I mean by that is more upper class.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: You’d see people with sometimes fairly large homes and that sort of thing, professional people. And I think that possibly in the area that I was born in The Hague it wasn’t quite as upper-class, although it was certainly, you know, very decently middle-class. And it was not lower class or anything like that. But, you see, that was really the best section of town. That’s more or less what I meant by that. Certainly the way we talk about that nowadays, especially in America, we also use it as a kind of a codeword for racial things, and it obviously had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Everybody was Dutch, and everybody was white, and, you know, that sort of thing.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: But it was just, as I say, professionals –
MR. FORGEY: When did your parents – how long did your parents live?
MR. DE LOOPER: They lived fairly long. My mother died when she was about 75, and my father, interestingly enough –
MR. FORGEY: When was that about?
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, that’s a good question. That’s about 20 years ago [ca. 1972]. And my father, interestingly enough, because he had – after he retired he had some physical problems and we never thought that he would, you know, become very old, but he became 88 years old.
MR. FORGEY: I see.
MR. DE LOOPER: And, in fact, the first time that he ever came to the United States was in 1980 when I was in this Golden Door exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum [The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976].
MR. FORGEY: Right, I remember that.
MR. DE LOOPER: Where he proudly stood next to my painting and a picture from my passport and the visa card which they had reproduced and said, “That’s my son.” [Laughter.] He met Joe Hirshhorn, and, oh, that was a great kick for him.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: He loved it. And my mother, in fact, came here much earlier. She was here in the early ‘50s because she was closer to my brother.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Because, quite frankly, what happened is that my parents, right after the war, split up.
MR. FORGEY: I see.
MR. DE LOOPER: They never officially were divorced, because that was one of those things that still happened then. You know, when people got very angry at each other, but they would – one of them would refuse – in my case my mother – to give the other a divorce because there was another woman involved and that sort of thing. And there were some pretty hard times, which also certainly affected me. I felt very often then as a young teenager as a football a little bit, you know, because I was caught in between.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: I had to go visit my father with the woman that he was living with at the time for instance, and there were some sons that she had, whom I got along with fine. They were very nice. And I liked her actually also. But it was extremely uncomfortable because my mother was so deeply hurt by this whole thing, and as a result also, as I pointed out earlier a little bit, you see, it also thrust my brother into a situation where my father had, in fact, sort of abandoned us, you see, to a large extent. I mean financially –
MR. FORGEY: You and your mother and your sister and brother were living together –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, yes. No, we were. Well, okay, that’s yes and no. My brother studied economics, and so he studied in Rotterdam, and when he –
MR. FORGEY: This is after the war I presume.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And during the war as well, I believe. But certainly after the war. And he got his, well, what you over there call a doctorandus, which is a Ph.D. without having written a thesis and you get “Drs” in front of your name instead of “Dr.” And after that he went into the Dutch Foreign Service for some years, and, in fact, I think he worked in The Hague for a while, maybe as long as a couple of years. I’m not sure about that. What I do remember is that after that he was sent out to Buenos Aires for the Dutch Government, you see, and he was there and he loved it there. It was, you know, just an enormous thing to him. But what I’m getting at is that, to some extent, quite frankly, with the breakup of my parents we – our financial situation became a lot worse. And fortunately my brother always had, you know, rather good-paying positions and all that, and he felt – and I’m very grateful to him, obviously, for that – very responsible where I was concerned, because I was the youngest, you see, and I was the one who was being kicked around a little bit, you see, both by the war and then the school systems, because every time we moved, which towards the end of the war was about four or perhaps five times in a very short period of time, I had to switch schools and all that and, you know, a kid sort of suffers from that obviously. And I was a lousy student, but I – I will know whether that was because, you know, my life was so unsettled or whether it was because I was stupid. I don’t know, you know?
MR. FORGEY: Well, it wasn’t because you’re stupid. All your friends will say that. [Laughter.]
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s what I hope anyway. But so in that sense, as I say, then he became a bit of a father figure to me, and he obviously stayed much closer to my mother as well because my mother also needed some help. Well, she stayed in The Hague.
My sister was early on pretty independent and even during the war had a boyfriend who was also of the same age as my brother in that, if he had been caught, he did not – he was not a student in college, but he was of that age. So he, in fact, hid out, you know, from being sent to Germany. And the way they did that – he did that with my sister, for at least a period of time – I don’t know exactly how long that lasted, a year, two years – they had a boat, a sailboat in fact, and they stayed on one of the better-known lakes in the Netherlands where people go sailing. And they lived there year round. But they – so they lived a fairly scary existence, but it was also, obviously, rather exciting, you see? And somehow he never got caught, and my sister early on – she must have been in her late teens when she really started living with him, and then eventually they got married. And I became fairly good buddies with him. He was also somebody who – he liked me as a younger – sort of as a younger brother or so of his or whatever, and I remember we went on some camping trips in, you know, modest proportions, like maybe two or three days or whatever, with a tent and various things, and then later on, of course – he was from a family that had a business, so after the war when nobody had cars, for instance, he was one of the first ones because he was really in that business which his father had started. He had a car for business, and he did that. I mean, you know, he went on trips and so forth, and he would occasionally take me along so that ultimately I also learned to drive from him because he always had cars of all sorts. So I learned to drive fairly early on, you see? He was exciting in –
MR. FORGEY: This would have been in the years immediately after the war –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – ’46, ’47.
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly.
MR. FORGEY: That kind of – mm-hmm.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And – but in the meantime, of course, I had then gone to high school.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And the first high school I went to is what they – what you – here would call – so, in other words, after I think it’s three years you can choose whether you go into the very more esoteric section where you learn the humanities including Latin and Greek and that sort of thing or you can go into the somewhat easier one with science and so forth. I never got that far at all. In fact, I think that I was only there for about one year. I didn’t, quite frankly –
MR. FORGEY: Where was this –
MR. DE LOOPER: This was in The Hague.
MR. FORGEY: In The Hague.
MR. DE LOOPER: And it’s also small. We’re talking really about a neighborhood where you walk from one thing to the – everything that I’ve told you so far is really – you know, it’s from here to, say, the cathedral or –
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and in between. And, in fact, as you well know, that’s even now like that in Europe. People just don’t move around quite as much as they do, and they tend to be very much married to their neighborhood and so forth and, therefore, also to a group of friends that sort of stay around through the decades even, you see? And so we’re talking about a school that was as far away as the other school would have been where I’d gone to a lower grade school, and it was just a couple of blocks away from that. But I did learn some, you know, general studies obviously, and languages. Languages, of course, you start early, very early, in Europe in any event.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And that’s also – I learned English, of course, to the best of everything, but I learned German and French, and I took a little Latin and a little Greek too. And I did terrible in those – Latin and Greek – although, interestingly enough, I was very fascinated by it. I always liked it. And, strangely enough, I learned certain things that have stood me in good stead later in life, even though I got bad grades in them, you know what I mean?
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: But as a result of the language, I spoke fluent English pretty much when I came here in 1950. French I did pretty well in, but, you know, there was no opportunity to keep it up. German I had a lot of trouble with, and that probably was a psychological thing, you know?
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: I had just terrible trouble with German. And –
MR. FORGEY: And you still do. [Laughs.]
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. I still do.
MR. FORGEY: Like me.
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, yeah, that’s right. I’ve never become fluent, and ironically, of course, I’m married to a German woman [Frauke Weber, married 1969], who is – well, part of the reason for that – you know, that’s a little different too. Also, I really I don’t believe – even with my brother and sister, you see, I speak English.
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: I dropped this whole Dutch thing. I really turned my back almost on my past when I came here.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: I don’t – I don’t know that I did that consciously. I did it somewhat consciously because I really – although – there were inklings that I might be able to stay, you see, early on.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, you –
MR. DE LOOPER: And I wanted to be an American, and I wanted to be –
MR. FORGEY: We’re at a good point here to – I mean, to get you to the United States, but I read in the interview you did with David Schaff [December 1977] –
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yes.
MR. FORGEY: – he asked you a question about early drawing and so on. You mentioned the Montessori, but why don’t you go back and tell –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, okay. Okay, in fact, my early art experience, and I was even talking to my wife about that a little bit this morning anticipating your interview, I do not remember that I ever set foot in a museum in the Netherlands at all. I mean, my family was like most families that artists seem to come out of, not basically interested in the arts. I mean, they might not put it the same way, but that’s the way I would put it. Of course, there was on top of that, you see, all the business with the war.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I don’t even know whether the museums in ’47 or ’48 in the Netherlands were operating very well. For all I know, they may have been closed. But even so, I don’t think that I would have necessarily gone, because also education nowadays is very different, certainly in this country but also worldwide. I mean, young people are just not schlepped to museums, and they certainly they weren’t in those years, whether it was in Europe or here. Certainly The Hague has a lot of wonderful museums, but I think I got to see them much later in life. So my only art experience was – well, it’s not really art experience. It was exposure to the United States, and that took form in two ways. We listened as soon as we could after the war to the AFN a lot and to the BBC, but the AFN –
MR. FORGEY: The AFN was the Armed Forces Network?
MR. DE LOOPER: Armed Forces Network, mm-hmm. Which was somewhere – I think it was in Stuttgart or somewhere, but I don’t remember exactly. And so this – I’m talking especially about my brother and I, who in that sense have more common than even my sister and certainly also my mother and father, because it stirred a real interest in popular music and jazz in my case and some jazz in my brother’s as well.
MR. FORGEY: They were playing a lot of jazz on the AFN?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, yes. And, of course, there were other stations that I would listen to. I would listen to Paris a lot. I was reading recently – they apparently still have that international program where they play it. Then my brother was always, early on, reading a lot of English and American books, and he has a big library, which he still has. And some of those books I poked through, you know? And then he started to subscribing to a lot of things that were American-oriented, so early on, you see, we had lots of subscriptions to The Saturday Evening – what is it?
MR. FORGEY: Post?
MR. DE LOOPER: – Post, Collier’s, and The New Yorker and things like this. And this continued. And so I became very early quite interested in America, which I also read about in books that are written for teenagers, you know?
MR. FORGEY: This is somewhat characteristic of your generation of European youth –
MR. DE LOOPER: I think so.
MR. FORGEY: – is it not?
MR. DE LOOPER: I think so.
MR. FORGEY: I mean, immediately after the war the –
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, no question. I mean, that whole thing. You see nowadays people would almost laugh at that, but I mean, you know, you have to look at it in perspective. I mean, also Americans – let’s face it – they were looked at – and Canadians and the British – they were looked at as liberators. They – you know, they liberated us from something pretty horrible, and – on top of that. And then they were all over the place. Well, the Americans were really not that visible – and the United States. But that culture was, see? And their culture was –
MR. FORGEY: You mean in the Netherlands?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, I think there were not too many American troops.
MR. FORGEY: Not – yeah, they were mainly in Germany –
MR. DE LOOPER: In the south. And we were – in our area after the war we were surrounded mostly by British and Canadian soldiers, and even Israeli troops. I remember that distinctly. And nobody’s ever heard of Israeli – I know there were guys who had the Israeli flag on their uniforms and all that. I was always fascinated by it, and I made early drawings of – terrible drawings, but anyway – you know, kids’ drawings – of these soldiers on their heavy-duty motorcycles, probably – whatever they were, Harleys or something. And they would wear these enormous belts to keep their insides in, you know? You’ve seen those. And I was just fascinated. That was one of my big aims: to one day be a soldier with a motorcycle. You know, that’s the –
MR. FORGEY: Yes, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – the kind of thing that you dream about.
MR. FORGEY: You did draw quite a bit as a youth, didn’t you?
MR. DE LOOPER: I did, and I – well, because I drew – that’s right. I started drawing what I was interested in as a kid, see? As a teenager. And that was, in my case, not so much sports. That came a little bit later, interestingly, when I came to the States. But it soldiers, and it was girls, and I would copy a lot of illustrations from these magazines, you see? And then, of course, jazz. Very early on I was really – I became really interested in jazz. And after a very short time I pretty much outdistanced everybody in that my tastes somehow became rather avant-garde, and I started out, say, with Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa and that sort of thing, but pretty soon I was listening to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and –
MR. FORGEY: Right at the time, yeah. That was the avant-garde, yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: That was really. And that’s the interesting thing, you
know, looking back on that, because, of course, when I came to the United States
–
and, in fact, those records are still there – I took a whole handful –
an armful – of 78s with me on the boat. You know, in those days you came
on a boat. And so that was one of my immediate inspirations. Also going to the
United States. You see, I grew up really wanting to go to the United States.
I mean, that was a dream, you see?
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so, in a sense, my brother made it possible by being able to sponsor – he had probably the same dream –
MR. FORGEY: At last reference, your brother was in Buenos Aires.
MR. DE LOOPER: Hmm? That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: Then he –
MR. DE LOOPER: And I think he stayed there about two years, if I’m not mistaken. And he was, you know, at the Dutch Embassy there. And when his tour of duty was over – and as far as I know this is accurate – he came back from Buenos Aires via the United States and, therefore, via Washington. And at that time – this is ’48, and ’48 – or it may have been ’49. It was ’49, I think. Anyway, in ’48 they had started two institutions which are still with us in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And he applied as an economist for both – they had openings in both organizations, and then he went back to Holland, and I assume that he went back to, you know, the Foreign Service there for a while. And then after whatever time that took, he was accepted in both organizations, and he picked the International Monetary Fund, being elitist I’m sure. [Laughs.] It’s a smaller organization, and you can –
MR. FORGEY: Right, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so that’s the way he came, you see? And so I am just assuming that to – although he has never voiced it quite the way I’m doing it, he also – I think he saw the United States as the place to be, although ultimately his ties to the Netherlands were much more – much stronger than mine and have remained that way. And he even, of course, went back to the United – to Europe to – after his retirement, although he didn’t go to Holland, which a lot of Dutch people don’t do for various reasons, including the climate I guess. But so – so only a year after that, you see, he sponsored my coming to the United States as a – on a visitor’s visa. And a visitor’s visa allows six months. And the way I remember it – and I think that sort of works out – I had it extended three times. And then I applied for the universities here. Well, of course I had not finished high school. In fact, the high school that I had in the Netherlands I hadn’t really done very well. But I had certain credits, and there was a lot of, you know – George Washington, he talked to them. I wound up at AU [American University] on probation, but I did make the probation. I had to have a C average, which I did maintain. And so that’s the way I got started here.
MR. FORGEY: When was it that you came?
MR. DE LOOPER: This was in October of 1950.
MR. FORGEY: Okay.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so I went –
MR. FORGEY: So you were – you spent – you arrived here in time for your 18th birthday I imagine.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, exactly. I had my – that’s right, exactly right. I had my – I was 17 when I was on the boat or something, and then a few weeks later I was 18. And so –
MR. FORGEY: What boat was that?
MR. DE LOOPER: It was the New Amsterdam. And, yeah, you know, nobody flew, I guess, in those days, right? I don’t remember – to the United States. I suppose of them did come on the Pan Am Clippers or whatever.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: But –
MR. FORGEY: Well, that’s the way you traveled at that time.
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s the way you traveled. That’s the way you traveled. And, yeah, I remember meeting at least one young guy from the Bronx who also liked jazz a lot, and so we – for some reason – I don’t know how we did that, but we played some of my records, I think.
MR. FORGEY: On the ship?
MR. DE LOOPER: On the ship. That’s the way I remember it. I’m – and – but then I obviously lost touch with him. I otherwise didn’t know anybody.
MR. FORGEY: You were able to buy these records in The Hague?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes. From my pocket money. And I remember still – you know, again – you see, nothing has – nothing changes, so the store that I bought them in is still there. Of course now they only sell rock and roll and that sort of thing. But, you know, they were 78s and they were fairly expensive.
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: But some of them have become collector’s items, I’m sure.
MR. FORGEY: I’m sure.
MR. DE LOOPER: But, you know – well, it’s fun. So that’s the way I got here.
MR. FORGEY: Okay, we’re – I’m going to change the tape – I’m going to reverse – get on the other side.
MR. DE LOOPER: Do an overlap?
MR. FORGEY: These are 45 minutes each, but before we do that for the transcriber –
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yes.
MR. FORGEY: – the spelling of the area in northern Holland where –
MR. DE LOOPER: Groningen.
MR. FORGEY: Groningen. How do you spell that?
MR. DE LOOPER: G-R-O –
MR. FORGEY: G-R-O –
MR. DE LOOPER: – N-I –
MR. FORGEY: Uh-huh.
MR. DE LOOPER: Let’s see. I have to write that out myself because I don’t – because also even when I – yeah, G-R-O-N-I-N-G-E-N.
MR. FORGEY: G-R-O-N-I-N-G-E-N. Groningen.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: I just remembered when you mentioned Huizinga he wrote –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah.
MR. FORGEY: – a book that I read when I was in college, The Waning of the Middle Ages –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, and the funny thing is the last time I – that’s right. And that’s – it’s a wonderful book.
MR. FORGEY: It’s still a classic.
MR. DE LOOPER: And the interesting thing is that I found the last time – see, I was – in August I was seeing my brother and sister in Switzerland where they now live, and they talked about another. And apparently the Huizingas were – that branch of the family – see, they were involved in art history and also they were involved with theology, and –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and, therefore, with Harvard University. Apparently one other – or it may be the same man – I may be confused about it – taught theology at Harvard.
MR. FORGEY: Uh-huh. I think not the same.
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, probably not the same, right. And so there was this vague thing about – they were always talking about Harvard and – but on the other hand, it’s interesting, too, because the Harvard collection of art, of course, is very deep in Dutch studies –
MR. FORGEY: Northern European and –
MR. DE LOOPER: – and Northern European. But also there was lots of Dutch art there.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And there’s lots of art history that comes out of there.
MR. FORGEY: Interesting, yeah. And the other spelling is the degree that your brother got – the doctorangen. [Mispronounces.] How do you – do you –
MR. DE LOOPER: Hmm, how would you spell that? I don’t know.
MR. FORGEY: I spelled it phonetically as “doctor rondus.” [Transcriber note: The spelling is actually “doctorandus.”]
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s exactly right.
MR. FORGEY: R-O-N-D-U-S.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: R-O-N-D-U-S.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. It’s just a title that doesn’t exist here.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, right. Right, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And –
MR. FORGEY: Okay, so I’m going to switch now.
[Audio break, tape change.]
MR. FORGEY: We’re recording again. Willem has just been showing me some old magazines. Among the other American magazines that you were reading or seeing at the time was Downbeat.
MR. DE LOOPER: Downbeat, yes. I think – I know there was a library of some sort. It must have been a USAI thing. And that was an old source of seeing American publications. And since I was interested in Jazz, I did read Downbeat, which, as I mentioned, was then kind of a tabloid, and was glossy paper, and that was certainly in the library there. I would devour that kind of stuff. The other thing that we had. That’s why it’s so interesting to me to having a German wife. The Netherlands is always, it still is, it’s much more oriented towards the English speaking, both the BBC gets listened to a lot and American culture gets listen to and read. It’s the kind of country where people, unlike in Germany for instance often don’t translate certain novels that are popular here because they learn how to read them in the original language. It’s not that they don’t do it, because of course, also the Reader’s Digest says you can get it in Dutch. But, a lot of people who are better schooled don’t bother with translations and they read it in the original language. I don’t see that quite as much in other countries in Europe and so –
With popular music, for instance, that all came out and as I said I used to listen to AFN and all those kinds of things and we had magazines, which were Dutch, they printed over the text of the popular tunes at the time. And they would have been the kind of stuff that was either very popular at that very moment in the United States or maybe a year or two before. And so as a kid already, as a teenager you see, I had learned a lot of English from trying to sing and understand what they were singing, and that sort of thing. So if you had Nat King Cole trio or something or what ever.
MR. FORGEY: The Four Freshmen.
MR. DE LOOPER: Well that came a little later.
MR. FORGEY: A little later.
MR. DE LOOPER: But yes, in other words, so you could relate to it better you see. They were not translated in to Dutch. So that was nice.
MR. FORGEY: Were you seeing any art magazines at that time?
MR. DE LOOPER: No, and I just remembered something else. Because even from Argentina somehow and certainly – my brother used to send me stuff too, and two things that pop up in my mind are little pocket books of something very American and that involved drawing and one of them was the cartoons of Bill Mauldin and they came out in these little pocket books that in those days cost like twenty-five cents or something like that.
MR. FORGEY: Right, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I still have them somewhere. And the second one was Li’l Abner. And that also was –
MR. FORGEY: Al Capp.
MR. DE LOOPER: Al Capp. Exactly. And again that’s the kind of thing I tried to draw, I tried to copy that sort of thing, and certainly Bill Mauldin, in that sense a big influence on me. But that’s not, I mean it’s terrific, but I don’t call it art.
MR. FORGEY: It’s exposure to American popular culture.
MR. DE LOOPER: And ultimately to drawing, people who really know how to draw. Fine art came later, quite frankly.
MR. FORGEY: This is the real end of side A tape 1.
[Audio break.]
MR. FORGEY: This is tape – side B, tape 1 of the Willem de Looper interview.
And we are now in Washington for your 18th birthday.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, that’s right. Well, okay, so, as I told you, I came on the boat, and my brother, who had a Studebaker, one of those cars that looked the same from the front and the back, which, you know, now I wish that we had kept it somewhere on a rack. It probably would be worth $50,000.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: He came to pick me up in New York. It’s funny, because I have sometimes thought whether there was at that time a New Jersey Turnpike or not. I have no idea, but –
MR. FORGEY: No, I don’t think so.
MR. DE LOOPER: I don’t think there was either.
MR. FORGEY: No, no. I think it was – New Jersey led the world in – there was the Pennsylvania Turnpike –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – and then the Jersey Turnpike opened up shortly thereafter.
MR. DE LOOPER: On the Eisenhower, perhaps?
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: Eisenhower started building all the roads.
MR. FORGEY: I think it preceded that – the National Highway Act – by some. That’s why they still call them the Jersey barriers. [Laughs.]
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, really? Yeah. Well, anyway, somehow we came to Washington.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And the fact is, you know, people often ask me to – over the years – I mean that’s sort of en passant, but, you know, “why you’re not in New York?” Well, one of the reasons was that my brother, who was my sponsor, was in Washington.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: If he had been in New York, I would have always been in New York. And who knows what would have happened then?
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: You can only, you know, speculate on that. But so we arrived in Washington –
MR. FORGEY: It’s even hard to speculate on it.
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, that’s right. You couldn’t. I mean, you really couldn’t, because even in mine – I mean, obviously I had no idea whatsoever that I ever would become an artist, and that developed over the next decade really. And even that went not in a straight line at all, but it went in a crooked sort of line altogether. And I will tell you about that. So the first period of time that I was here I was here just as a visitor because I couldn’t work and I couldn’t study either. And, quite frankly, we also, you know, hadn’t really worked that out. It was really almost like a respite for me, and it was something that we needed to get out of the way so that I could go to the United States. I think it’s possible that in the back of everybody’s mind was that perhaps, if all went well, that I would stay here, just as my brother, but he was only in this job for two years also. And he didn’t know that he was going to be there for 25 years either. So those things you can just not tell. But in any event – so the first three periods of the visitor’s visa I didn’t really do anything, and that particular time, of course, we were much more in touch with certain Dutch people who were here with the embassy –
MR. FORGEY: Where was your brother living at the time?
MR. DE LOOPER: He lived on – in the west – no, that’s – in the Birkshire, which is up on Massachusetts near American University. And then, of course, I wound up going to American University and so I just walked to work, which was about – to school, which was about five minutes away. So it was very handy. And we shared an apartment there and his car, his Studebaker, you know? And so we did certain things. And it was fairly soon or after that also my mother was here to visit and all that, but of course, that was all a bit of a burden for my brother too, because he had to finance most of it. But he somehow managed. And certainly in my mother's case it was never meant for her to stay, but – so, after a while, as I mentioned perhaps earlier, it seemed that perhaps I should stay and then do something, and doing something would mean to –
MR. FORGEY: Going to school.
MR. DE LOOPER: Going to school to continue my education, which was rudimentary, although it might have been more so. [Laughs.] In retrospect, I guess I still learned a lot even so, despite everything. And so I did go, and we went to various of the universities. And George Washington did not accept me because I didn’t have a high school diploma, and ultimately American University did accept me. And the first year I was on probation and I had to have a C average which I managed, which is kind of interesting. In certain things, of course, I was way ahead of other freshmen and in other things I wasn’t. Certainly in languages, for instance, which I had to do, I remember having to do rather advanced French for instance, which at that time I could cope with. And I still have some of the books, but I couldn’t hardly cope with that anymore now because I’ve forgotten most of my French, so – or, you know, to read heavy-duty kind of stuff, novels. But, you know, I managed. And, interestingly enough, I think, certainly in retrospect – and I touched upon that earlier – that I did want to become as Americanized as possible. I spoke good English, obviously also with an accent, which I have, although I could swear that I had less of an accent then, which is possible, because I was only then surrounded by Americans.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Because I’d even joined a fraternity, and I was – you know, I was rushed on the American University campus, and I think that was good for me ultimately, although it was a real – it was a fraternity that had mostly jocks and I was –
MR. FORGEY: What was the fraternity?
MR. DE LOOPER: It’s Phi Sigma Kappa. It’s still there, in fact, but I haven’t had anything to do with them for 30 years. But it was an interesting fraternity, I think by far the most interesting on campus. It was also, interestingly enough, the only – this is a total aside and has nothing to do with anything, but it was the only fraternity that accepted Jews. So we had some pretty interesting mix. We had a lot of basketball players. We had one guy who was a basketball player who was also on dope, and that’s in – you know, we’re talking about ’52, ’53, and stuff like this. And then –
MR. FORGEY: What do you mean “on dope”? He was smoking marijuana or –
MR. DE LOOPER: Marijuana and stuff, and maybe even some harder stuff occasionally. He was a real problem, but he was a, you know, very intelligent sort of person who could also play very good basketball sometimes. But he would also, you know, really get strung out.
And so it brought me into contact with, you know, Americans from all over the place.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Some of – our fraternity was also a little bit more New York-oriented than the others, and that was possibly because some of the Jewish members were really from New York and that – and it’s interesting to see how American University has developed over the years, and it attracts a lot of people from New York and so forth. So I was with those people. Most of them, the way I remember, were not really involved with the arts either. There was one basketball player who had a wife who also studied in the Art Department whom I saw many years later, and she had become an art administrator or director of a small museum on Long Island. But, anyway, it was an interesting environment. It was not a very intellectual – or far from it actually – fraternity. It was mostly parties and sports. And I was never a sports person, but interestingly enough, I did become interested in the first years of my life here in the United States – I became terribly interested in baseball by listening to the radio, you know? These are the good old days as everybody always talk about when a lot of baseball games were recreated by people like – I don’t know – Red Barber, people like that.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: You know? And so –
MR. FORGEY: Mel Allen.
MR. DE LOOPER: Mel Allen. And there was a guy here in Washington called Nat “the Cat” Albright.
MR. FORGEY: Nat “the Cat” Albright, mm-hmm.
MR. DE LOOPER: Who made all the sounds and all this stuff, and –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: Anyway, but I was – I became a real big baseball fan, and, as a result of being in this fraternity where everybody else was a – you know, many of them were athletes on the AU teams, I actually became – I got an “A,” you know a letter, because I became equipment manager of the baseball team.
MR. FORGEY: Of the AU baseball team?
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And so I actually went – I think it lasted one year or so.
MR. FORGEY: Uh-huh.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so I learned how to score and things like this. And so somewhere – this is where it ties in with the art – I started then – that became another area of interest, and so I have some, again, somewhat more advanced but still fairly primitive drawings of baseball players, you see? I used to then get involved in that. So –
MR. FORGEY: I’d love to spread all this stuff out some day and take a look at it.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah.
MR. FORGEY: We should do that.
MR. DE LOOPER: Okay, we’ll try to – I’ll have to sort of really put my mind to where any of that stuff is, but – so I started making that, and I – and one sheet is very clear in my mind, but I just don’t know exactly where it is, and it has not only drawings of these baseball players, but it has the scores and so forth next to it, you see? They were actual – there was a baseball team here in Washington as you know, the Senators. [Telephone rings.] And so all of that is in there. Can I just?
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, sure.
[Pause.]
MR. FORGEY: We have American University and baseball at the moment – baseball and art. So this sheet you were talking about?
MR. DE LOOPER: Right, so in other words it has – I was obviously drawing as I was listening to, you know, some of the games and things like this, and so you can see, you know, the scoring, which I’ve mostly forgotten, but – and the actual players were the Senators at that time who were playing somebody or other or whatever. I don’t know. I also remember, in fact, that I was very involved with the – you know, again, by radio in those years with the Brooklyn Dodgers –
MR. FORGEY: Interesting.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and rivalries, of course, that they had. So I knew the – the Dodgers, I guess, were really my favorite team for years.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, that’s interesting.
MR. DE LOOPER: Later on I –
MR. FORGEY: Did you go to Griffith Stadium at all or –
MR. DE LOOPER: I think I went once.
MR. FORGEY: Uh-huh.
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s – I don’t really – I’ve been to baseball perhaps twice or something like that in my whole life. It was not really – it was more a –
MR. FORGEY: You mean Major League Baseball?
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. It was more a conceptual thing than anything else. And I think also that later on the enthusiasm somehow disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. But what I’m also saying is that the – what I always did was the things that I was interested in, you see, I drew. And maybe that’s also a natural thing, but that’s why that happened at that time.
So at American University then. So I’ve started at American University, right? And I’ve gotten past my first year somehow.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I was studying – I was really going to be studying economics, which is, you know, my brother’s profession and sort of my father’s as well. And obviously, as I said, art had – still to that point was not playing any major role, although I was certainly interested in it and I had drawn for quite a number of years. But it was not seen as something that I was going to really follow up. And it is vague to me now whether I was actually already also taking a few art classes at AU. I probably did do that.
MR. FORGEY: In your freshman year or –
MR. DE LOOPER: Maybe in my second year –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I have a vague impression that I probably did, that I was interested enough to see, you know – also, because, quite frankly – and that’s sort of the crux of that – that this economics business was nothing for me at all. It was just a total disaster for me. I mean, I had just no mind to deal with that at all. And so I had – you know, I did badly in there. And that’s why ultimately, quite frankly, I didn’t do very well at American University either. I mean, I did – I was a little bit handicapped in that I had never even finished high school, but I was also really concentrating on something that I shouldn’t have been concentrating on. And I can only say in retrospect it was also because of a natural thing that happens. I mean, you know, people don’t want their sons to necessarily go into something – into the arts if they can do something more practical. And so, with an implied pressure perhaps or suggestions certainly from our family, you start studying something that you’re not –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – deeply interested in. And then, you know, since I was also not in a fraternity that encouraged studying very hard, it was not necessarily very good for me in that respect, so that I was originally of the class of ’55 and I graduated in ’57, you see? And the reason for that was that I actually – to put in bluntly, I flunked out of school, and so I had to sit out for a year and then was readmitted. And by that time I had made up my mind, and that’s why I think that I did take some art classes before and that by that time I had sort of figured out that that was probably the way I could go. Now, even there we’re not talking about fine art. I was always – for quite a long time I was interested in pursuing the drawing. You see, I was always drawing. I wasn’t really painting. And I was thinking in terms of pursuing the drawing so that perhaps I could make a living from that eventually and that means that I was probably thinking in terms of being an illustrator, you see, of some sort. And, in fact, even after I graduated, I pursued that further. And there I was lucky perhaps, because when I ultimately graduated in ’57 I was 25 years old, which is actually fairly late. And then the other thing that happened was – in retrospect again it looks like a total disaster – I got drafted in the American Army. And without making a peep or anything or making any attempt to go into graduate school, I just went.
MR. FORGEY: One didn’t do it then.
MR. DE LOOPER: One didn’t do it. So you’ve got to go up there –
MR. FORGEY: You got drafted, yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly. Well, I’m glad you said that, because I always say that to people and people don’t understand that too well. But nobody – nobody – dodged the draft. You got drafted, and that’s –
MR. FORGEY: I know. What I did was – I mean, I was – I had to go.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: I either – I was going to join for three years.
MR. DE LOOPER: Really?
MR. FORGEY: And then – the sergeant said, “Oh, I can only guarantee you 99 percent that you’ll take Russian at the language school out in California.”
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yes, right.
MR. FORGEY: And I thought about that other 1 percent, and this was a little later – this was just the beginning of Southeast Asia.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, exactly.
MR. FORGEY: And so I could drafted. I could join for three years, or – but I was really red hot to go in a way. I ended up in the Reserves. I thought, “Well, all right, I’m not going to get drafted.”
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, yeah, you see?
MR. FORGEY: So I was in the Reserves for six years.
MR. DE LOOPER: Okay. Well, I actually went on active duty for two years.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I do remember other people in the fraternity, for instance, getting drafted, and nobody, as you say yourself, nobody was dodging the draft –
MR. FORGEY: Well, this interesting commercial art that you’re referring to, you showed me earlier a letter you wrote right after getting out of the army –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – on November 6th, 1959, where you’re referring to –
MR. DE LOOPER: A job.
MR. FORGEY: A job, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: You – “In October of 1957 I was accepted in the advertising department of Kann’s Department Store in Washington, where I was to work with layouts and occasional illustration” –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – “illustrations. However, I was inducted into the army about a week later” –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – “from which I was honorably discharged on 20 October of” –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, that’s exactly what happened. I had forgotten the dates, and so I referred, too, to that same sheet. That’s exactly what happened, see? In other words, I was thinking then in terms more of illustration, although obviously I then became part of the Art Department –
MR. FORGEY: Well, yeah, let’s back up, because –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – now you’ve made this decision. You’ve had a year –
MR. DE LOOPER: But there are two things.
MR. FORGEY: You had a year off, and that year you spent here in Washington living with your brother.
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yeah. Right. I don’t remember what I did that year, except probably fret on how I should finish and get a BA, you see, and whether they would accept me again if I, you know – I talked – I remember talking to certain deans and stuff like this. That was a bit of a problem, okay?
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And – to be quite frank. And so I had to get back in there and – otherwise, I wouldn’t have finished college either, and there was never any question that, you know, you had to have a college education. I mean, you know, that’s just taken for granted. So, in order to – so I was allowed to reenter American University with a major in art, and that went very well, quite frankly. I mean, that was obviously perhaps also partly because of the layoff of a year. You see, I was doubly inspired, and I had to pull out these grades. And since a lot of them had to do with art – and it was just strictly fine arts. In those years American University also didn’t offer printmaking or design or anything. It was either drawing or painting, and that’s what you did. And that’s what I did. Oh, and they had sculpture too, which I didn’t take. And so that’s what I – I applied myself to that, and quite frankly, I was pretty good at it, you see, early on, because I saw a reference also in my files somewhere, and I remember that very distinctly. I still have stuff that I made at AU, and some of it I wouldn’t even be ashamed of at the moment. It turned out I could draw very well in an art way, you see? In other words, at American University the – obviously the teachers had something to do with it as well. The –
MR. FORGEY: Tell me a little bit about the department at that time.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, well, we had – basically had – basically four people – Bob Gates, Ben Summerford – Joe – Sarah Baker, and Bill Calfee. And you know all of these people as artists and/or teachers. The only ones still alive, I guess, are Calfee, who is very old and frail –
MR. FORGEY: And Summerford.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and Summerford. Summerford, I think was –
MR. FORGEY: He shows under the name “Ben” –
MR. DE LOOPER: Ben.
MR. FORGEY: But you call him –
MR. DE LOOPER: Joe. Everybody –
MR. FORGEY: I mean, everybody calls him Joe.
MR. DE LOOPER: We call him Joe, exactly. And he was by far the inspiration behind, as far as I’m concerned –
MR. FORGEY: Tell me –
MR. DE LOOPER: – a large part –
MR. FORGEY: Good. But let me –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah
MR. FORGEY: Just structure that department a little bit. I mean, you had studio courses and –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right. And –
MR. FORGEY: Tell me a little bit about the system of education there.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, okay. Well, all right, as you perhaps know – and some of this I actually found out later. In other words, the – because I wasn’t too aware of that.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: There was a little gallery there called the Watkins Gallery. And, strangely enough, now I’m involved in trying to get more art for Watkins Gallery. But Watkins Gallery was right on the campus opposite the Art Department, and the Art Department was very small. They had bad facilities. Even now the facilities are not very good.
MR. FORGEY: But they had what was a new building –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – that must have gone up in the ‘60s –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – after you left.
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right. But – so we had Quonset huts and various things, and that sort of thing. But basically you had – it was straight painting and it was straight drawing and sculpture. As I say, sculpture I was never involved in.
MR. FORGEY: Calfee was teaching the sculpture –
MR. DE LOOPER: He was teaching sculpture, and he also taught drawing, because I had him as a drawing teacher, for instance, as well as Sarah Baker. I remember how tough Calfee was. I mean, he was one of those of people who didn’t try to be particularly nice to a student. You know what I mean? If there was something to be criticized, he would be pretty open. And, you know, as a young person, you know, you sometimes take that a little bit hard. Joe Summerford is the great enthusiast there, and I – in my mind, I had learned more from Joe than from anybody, because he was the one who was the person who would give you assignments, whether you or other students doing the same thing – a still life or a figure or whatever – who would be very encouraging about – not only – he’s very verbal, as you probably know. He explains things very well. But more than anything, as I say, there was this enthusiasm about being a painter or being an artist that was very infectious. And I remember distinctly even some paintings that I’ve worked on where he would be so excited about the way you got off to a good start or something like this, and then much later I always remember – I don’t know whether I was in my last year or wherever – when he made a remark to me. He said, “You know, you’re going to be a real painter.”
MR. FORGEY: Ah!
MR. DE LOOPER: And that was – I mean, you know, I still remember that all those years, right?
MR. FORGEY: Really.
MR. DE LOOPER: I didn’t know what the hell I was doing at the time, but –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: And that was really – so that also shows, you see, that there was obviously a seed in my mind about being an artist. I think, you know, it’s very hard to analyze yourself, but I think obviously there were some indications at that point that I wanted to do that. But I was also practical, and there are also practical, you know, considerations about how you’re going to make a living. I mean, you obviously cannot have people take care of you for the rest of your life –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and that sort of thing. So – Sarah Baker was very conservative, and there used to be arguments, even at the time of the student shows for instance, you see. She was a very fine painter, as you – again, as you know, but she was much more conservative at that particular time than Ben and Gates. Gates was not a teacher that I remember with a great deal of – he was a good painter, but he really didn’t convey much to the students.
MR. FORGEY: Looking back, of course, all – we all – and as we have done many times, you look back and you can see –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – and the record is clear, the progression from the Phillips Collection to –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – American University. And a certain what we now even – even today still call an AU style or touch –
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly.
MR. FORGEY: – or feel.
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, absolutely.
MR. FORGEY: But my impression was that they were also – I mean, coming from the Phillips school and so on – that they were very interested in the avant-garde and they were looking at abstract –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – expressionism and trying –
MR. DE LOOPER: No –
MR. FORGEY: – to occupy a space –
MR. DE LOOPER: Different.
MR. FORGEY: – that was different –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – from that but wasn’t totally conservative or totally rejecting of the avant-garde.
MR. DE LOOPER: The way I see it, in fact, no. You know? I –
MR. FORGEY: But you were there, so I’m interested in how that –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, okay. So –
MR. FORGEY: – dialogue played out.
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right. The – as you know, I mean, one of the enthusiasms as it was at the Phillips, where he also taught, was the painting of Karl Knaths for instance. Then it shifted to [Willem] de Kooning. There was –
MR. FORGEY: That’s Knaths – K-N-A-T-H-S?
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. He is, of course, a hero – he was a hero of Duncan Phillips, and he collected some 40 of his paintings.
MR. FORGEY: Correct.
MR. DE LOOPER: I met him much, much later in life just because I was so curious. He – his paintings had never really interested me very much.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: But I found it so interesting, so in the early ‘60s I actually went up to Provincetown and met him and was quite impressed, you know, by him as a man and as a painter and all that, but in a different way than I would ever want to, you know, paint or that sort of thing.
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm.
MR. DE LOOPER: But, as you know, then the Watkins Gallery was, in fact, a place where some real things were shown –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and it just also goes to show how things in Washington itself, of course, have changed. In those days there weren’t too many places where you could see what was going on in New York, for instance, and I remember distinctly that there was a de Kooning woman that was actually shown at the Watkins Gallery of all places.
MR. FORGEY: While you were an undergraduate there?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
MR. FORGEY: Wow.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I just recently – as a matter of fact, I have a piece of paper proving that – somewhat later, but during the period that I was in the army for those two years – Vincent Melzac showed some of his collection at the Watkins Gallery, and that included some drawings by de Kooning, by Kline, and then also some indications of what would become the Washington Color things.
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: These were all very modest in scale.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And, in fact, as I say, somebody sent me those for another reason, and they have –
MR. FORGEY: Those what? What are you referring to?
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, the list of what was actually in the show, because I was trying to figure out for collecting reasons since now the Watkins Gallery is interested in updating its collection and so forth. I wanted to see what kind of connection they had with Melzac, you see?
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: With any of that. But these things were arranged by Ben Summerford and Bob Gates I’m sure and also a woman who at that time was the secretary at the Watkins Gallery, Helene McKinsey, and later –
MR. FORGEY: Right. Helene Herzbrun.
MR. DE LOOPER: – Helene Herzbrun –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – who then became a painter, and – well, she was, I’m sure, a painter then, but I know her as, you know, somebody who ran the gallery.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so they were looking around, and they were fairly adventurous, you see? And I think that, in fact – and the record would show that, you see – that in Washington you couldn’t really see very much of these things, possibly some things on whatever that outfit on Meridian Hill was called, you know, where some early interesting things were shown as an adjunct almost, I wouldn’t way to say in competition, to whatever was being shown at the Phillips Collection, which, of course, was not really avant-garde in that it didn’t show abstract expressionism for instance. And so these painters were interested in that. What is that called? You know what they call it. I even saw – I remember seeing – just put it on pause.
[Pause.]
MR. FORGEY: Well, we’ve been stumbling around and around.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: Our faulty memories. And we figured it out that the operation on Meridian Hill that Willem referred to was run by – was inaugurated by a man named Robert Richmond.
MR. DE LOOPER: Who was a poet.
MR. FORGEY: And what – who was a poet, and –
MR. DE LOOPER: And it was called the ICA.
MR. FORGEY: The ICA.
MR. DE LOOPER: And we don’t quite understand what it’s –
MR. FORGEY: It’s the International Cultural Association, something like that.
MR. DE LOOPER: Something like that.
MR. FORGEY: But it was known as the ICA. That’s how we’ve always –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – referred to it and so on.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I’m aware of it to some extent because I saw some fairly significant exhibitions, but not a lot of them. And that will come out again later when – also even when we get to talk about, you know, how I got started with – say, with Jefferson Place and vis-à-vis Sam, for instance, who was a few years ahead of me.
MR. FORGEY: Sam Gilliam, yeah, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And he showed up there, for instance. I’m pretty sure of that. And [Kenneth] Noland I think showed up there. But it was – that was a very interesting outfit, and – so anyway, which showed in earlier years as well what was to be seen of contemporary art, I think, in this city to perhaps a larger extent than anybody. But in any event we were really talking about Watkins, and Watkins Gallery did have some – I mean, everybody, of course, was very young also, and they were interested in showing what was going on between Karl Knaths, and that was – that turned out to be de Kooning and [Jack] Tworkov and people like that. And I seem to remember that a woman by de Kooning was actually shown at Watkins Gallery, that I have seen that. Now, that wouldn’t be actually that surprising, because we nowadays think of even a painting of – even a painting like that in terms of huge insurance values, and that painting at that time was probably worth a couple of thousand dollars or so.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And they were probably able to manage that. I do think, in fact, that is one of the reasons why they quickly got out of that business as well: that they could not afford to do it in small, you know, underpaid probably art department –
MR. FORGEY: But philosophically that makes a lot of sense. Tworkov – they were – they would be aligned more with the de Kooning type of –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, oh –
MR. FORGEY: – abstract expressionism.
MR. DE LOOPER: – absolutely.
MR. FORGEY: And a woman by de Kooning would be – would fit perfectly into their construct of what was possible in art.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And the way that was reflected, of course, was in the teachers – in the teachers in the sense that Bob Gates and also Ben Summerford himself, you see, from that early style where actually both of them were very on the influence of Karl Knaths and very cubist and very restrained sort of painting became much more gestural and they were obviously quite interested in what was going on in New York. And they’d probably seen a hell of a lot more of it than almost anybody, you see? And so, therefore, they – that became a part of their teaching as well. Now, I do, on the other hand, remember that nobody ever pushed anybody into any particular direction. That’s perhaps important to point out because in so many art departments you – since you asked me about American University and what kind of department it was, people were pretty much left on their – you know, to their own direction. Of course, with most students there is not a particular direction in any event, but, say, the more advanced ones, nobody was told to paint abstract pictures or gestural pictures versus something else. But you could see it, you know, as I say, in the – perhaps even in the faculty exhibitions for instance, which would show a more – an interest in the faculty that had the most to say that they were becoming more involved with what was really going on in New York.
That certainly would not have been the case with Sarah Baker, who was really in that sense stuck in the things that she was good at, which was the Paris school of the, you know, ‘20s and ‘30s and all that. And, in fact, that’s probably also why they would argue more about – at the time of probably the exhibitions at Watkins as well as student exhibitions which were – where it might show some artist, young artist, going into directions that Sarah Baker didn’t really approve of, you see? And since they were all fairly strong personalities, you would get these particular things hashed out. They were mostly resolved in the way of modernism rather than, you know, the old days, the Matisse-inspired sort of painting, which Sarah – which played a large role in Sarah’s work. But anyway that’s the way that went more or less.
I don’t remember that the things at the Watkins Gallery of such interest extended much beyond 1960.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And, in fact, I think that’s also, quite frankly, that after I graduated and went into my direction I frankly was never really interested after that in American University at all, because my own thinking became very different. The way I’ve always seen it is that, in fact – and you can fairly well see that in the leading artists who taught at American University too. They, themselves, became more – they turned their own – they turned their own backs on some of the things that they had been enthusiastic about, and they became more conservative. Certainly that’s true of Ben Summerford’s work. He’s a very fine painter, but he – his painting after a few years of being enthused by abstract expressionism, certainly the de Kooning kind of abstract expressionism, turned away from that all together. There was a short period where he became interested and, therefore, again allowed his students, even though as I said earlier he didn’t force anybody to paint in a particular way – but, you know, you pick up stuff from the people that you learn from, in Nicholas de Stael for instance and that sort of –
MR. FORGEY: Nicholas de Stael, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, very much so, right. And that was probably again also due to the fact that the Phillips Collection, which had a strong bond with the American University via the Watkins Collection and Gallery, started showing Nicholas de Stael with some of the outstanding paintings that that particular painter had done. And I think that was ultimately the solution to the thinking of perhaps Bob Gates and Summerford too, of a way of working basically with nature, rather even – rather than with the figure even, in a way that was more – it would have been interesting to see them pursue the abstract expressionist thing longer. And as I will point out to you, that after – during my stay in the army and afterwards, you see, it –
MR. FORGEY: Well, you’ve given a good portrait of AU at the moment that you were –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah.
MR. FORGEY: – an undergraduate there in ’57. That’s –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: That’s about what it was like.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: In ’57 yourself –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – as we just went through, you were – you had graduated, and you were about to accept a job here, and you got –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – drafted and –
MR. DE LOOPER: Okay.
MR. FORGEY: – went into the army.
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right. And so we were talking, in fact, that in those – I was thinking in terms of drawing more than anything else. And, in fact, many of the paintings that I did at AU were – they were basically drawings. I was very good at drawing right away, I remember, and of course, those were the first years that I’d ever drawn seriously and from live models and all that. That’s the way you learned. You didn’t learn to draw from casts or anything like this. I think that even the more conservative person, Sarah Baker for instance, didn’t have anybody draw –
MR. FORGEY: Did you ever – I mean, did – were they plein air painters at all? I mean, did you ever go outside –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, we did. We did. I – in fact, I still have some things that we did at Great Falls, so that was certainly – and later on, you see, I was there when Bill Woodward was an undergraduate too, and Frank Wright. Frank Wright I never knew very much, and I think that must be – he was probably a year or two years ahead of me, I think. And he may have gone for an MA. And I think perhaps even Woodward did.
MR. FORGEY: Yes, I think so.
MR. DE LOOPER: But Bill Woodward and I had – we shared a studio. We – during – certainly during the last year I was there, I was pretty much independent, and I think in itself it means that they didn’t really have to look after me. They had –
MR. FORGEY: When you say you shared a studio, the setup was you –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, we had – in a Quonset hut in the basement we both had a little studio. It was separated by a wall and a little window with a curtain over it, and Bill Woodward was on one side and I was on the other one. And so we pretty much painted on projects of our own choosing. And the way I remember it, I think it was at that point probably Bob Gates, who was the senior advisor or something like that – but since he wasn’t the kind of person who would – he would more just approve of what you were doing rather than he would try to guide you.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I think the other way you can look at it is that I think both Woodward and myself – and I don’t remember anybody else, but we were pretty much independent. So it probably also means that we were rather more advanced than everybody else and that they just decided, you know, “These guys can just paint and then we’ll look at it and grade it at the end of the year or so, but basically they’re going to get an A anyway.” You know? That kind of thing. You have to be practical about it.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, absolutely.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so I did also in those years become friends with Woodward, and that continued. In fact, that’s the way I ultimately got my job at the Phillips – just by pure coincidence. But if you want me to, I can try to be –
MR. FORGEY: Tell me – well –
MR. DE LOOPER: – logical with the drawing, see?
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, please.
MR. DE LOOPER: So many of the paintings that I did – I did some paintings, you know, from the figure – and Cezanne was a big thing with Summerford, and I must say, as I said earlier, that Ben Summerford’s classes I remember more than anything.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: They were the most substantial, certainly to me. And that was partly because of his enthusiasm and partly also because he could explain things so well about early art. And he – it’s a very traditional art department. I still – I think it still is. But that’s both good and bad. It’s – it also means that you get a very good grounding –
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so when –
MR. FORGEY: I can see where, as for you at that stage of your life, to go through Cezanne in a systematic fashion –
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly.
MR. FORGEY: – would be – absolutely be revelatory –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, I think so. Right. And it’s never been the kind of art department – and it still isn’t – where they, perhaps too early, make students really experiment before they know what they’re doing, you see? And so – anyway, so I drew a lot, and also the – even the paintings that I made were often – first of all, a lot of it was done on paper rather than on canvas, although I did do some on canvas. And that obviously had something to do also with money in that canvas is more expensive. But I used to make a lot of drawings of the figure and landscapes and so forth, including the ones at Great Falls, that were drawings but they were also – they involved a lot of color, but they involved very-thinned-down-with-turpentine oil paint, and I see that now as actually starting something that I have really continued for the rest of my life. I’ve always been interested in thinned-down paint. There are some exceptions to that, including some fairly recent stuff where I do some of the opposite, but I keep doing some of the same thing even now, you see?
MR. FORGEY: Absolutely.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so those were the kind of things that I exhibited at that time.
MR. FORGEY: I saw here a reference to something that was interesting. You referred to –
MR. DE LOOPER: The student show?
MR. FORGEY: Well, you referred to your area art shows –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes.
MR. FORGEY: – such as the Washington Market Exhibit, I believe, in 1956 –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – the Bader Gallery and a place I’ve never heard of – Abbott’s in Georgetown –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well –
MR. FORGEY: – “where I had a one-man show of my drawings.” What was that?
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, I had forgotten that actually until I found that sheet. It was some sort of little gallery which is – the way I remember it is it’s sort of in a neighborhood where there are little – where the – opposite from the Texaco station. And it was just a tiny little gallery. I think this was, of course, after I graduated. I did go around with early stuff, and I found some people that were, you know, willing to show it. And I did have a show of drawings –
MR. FORGEY: But you graduated in ’57, right?
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. What year is that –
MR. FORGEY: I’m not so sure this would be before you graduated, because you went into the –
MR. DE LOOPER: No, no –
MR. FORGEY: I mean after you graduated. Or immediately after, it would have had to have been.
MR. DE LOOPER: Do you think it was before?
MR. FORGEY: Well –
MR. DE LOOPER: No?
MR. FORGEY: – if you graduate, say, in June –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – you’re in the army by –
MR. DE LOOPER: October.
MR. FORGEY: – October.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right, I was.
MR. FORGEY: So, I mean, there is this – in ’57 there were a few months –
MR. DE LOOPER: Okay, it’s possible that I went immediately around with some things.
MR. FORGEY: Right, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Certainly the Franz Bader Gallery – that’s not surprising at all. See, Franz Bader had the bookshop, of course, at that time.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And he was one of the people willing to take a chance on some things that artists, especially also the ones that came out of AU, would do. And these things were drawings, and maybe some of them had some color, but I think they were mostly black and white.
MR. FORGEY: Mostly black and white?
MR. DE LOOPER: I think so.
MR. FORGEY: Not these oil-washed drawings that you referred to?
MR. DE LOOPER: Possible a couple of them, and they were framed up, and he – you know, these things were not necessarily hanging on the wall. I think they were more in bins. You know that sort of thing?
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And that’s at Bader’s?
MR. DE LOOPER: At Bader’s.
MR. FORGEY: But this place – at the Abbott, you actually had a layout and you –
MR. DE LOOPER: I actually had stuff on the wall, and my memory of that is very vague, but they must have been obviously these big – because that’s what I was doing – figure drawings. And there may not have been a lot of them, and I don’t really remember the circumstances of that.
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm, do you show any landscapes either at Bader’s or there?
MR. DE LOOPER: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It was mostly all figures, because by that time I also then – you see, I was still thinking in terms of illustrating. And then the illustrating thing – and that’s why I ultimately got that job, which then I didn’t have to fill because I went in the army.
MR. FORGEY: By good fortune, I guess.
MR. DE LOOPER: Probably by good fortune, certainly in retrospect you see.
MR. FORGEY: Well, you wouldn’t have stayed there very long. [Laughs.]
MR. DE LOOPER: No, probably not. But it would have provided me with a –
MR. FORGEY: A little money, sure.
MR. DE LOOPER: Because obviously I was also – you see, until I went in the army I was sharing an apartment with my brother. It was his apartment.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: So it was also time for me to do something and go live somewhere –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and get a job or whatever. And I was very interested in pursuing the drawing, and I was very interested in fashion illustration. And, well – so you have both an element of naiveté in that you have to obviously be trained to do that, and I thought I could do that without – you know, just with a natural way of being able to draw the figure very well. And that, of course, didn’t work out at all. But that was something that I thought about for quite a long time, and that’s, in fact, the way I got even into Kann’s Department Store, which is like a Hecht’s or –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – or a Lansburgh’s or anything like this. And I had – even I –
MR. FORGEY: I remember Kann’s. It was still open when I came to town in ’64.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes. Oh, yeah, it was a big department store.
MR. FORGEY: Big department store down where Market Square is today.
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly. Exactly.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: And so, anyway – and even in the fashion drawings, see, I had actually a hero, or I should say heroine, because there was a woman illustrator at that time who illustrated, and her name was Dorothy Hood, and she was the top illustrator in America I’m sure. And that was because she – now, I’ve forgotten whether at that time Bloomingdale’s existed in New York. I’m not –
MR. FORGEY: Hmm, yeah, I don’t know.
MR. DE LOOPER: But she illustrated for something like that, and my brother read The New York Times obviously, so I saw these things, and they were really magnificent. And they were the kind of drawings that I could relate to in that they were – basically they were line drawings, and then with some washes. And as you can even see behind you, I have liked to draw that way, you know, with serious drawings over the years as well. And some of these are pretty early.
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm.
MR. DE LOOPER: But, you know – and – anyway, so I thought I could get into that kind of thing, but of course illustration, when you really start looking into that, is all tricks, and she was a master at this and she was – I talked later to other people, because then I went around to other advertising departments, you see, and talked to people who could, in fact, sort of give me pointers and that sort of thing. And so they all sort of, you know, laughed at this, that you could do this, you know, just by some kind of genius that you might have, you see? You had to train, and you also had to know what I had never known, for instance, about illustration or ads for that matter. Any ad for a refrigerator or something like this – it’s all – for a newspaper it’s all whited-out and things are –
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: The drawings. And I was that naïve, you see? They don’t look anything like drawings at all. They look like drawings that somebody took a brush of white paint and yellow paint and stickum and all kinds of stuff to. And they – you know? And that was, of course, not the kind of drawing that I wanted to do. I wanted to just draw them like Picasso.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah, they would be ruining your work of art.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. And so anyway – so for quite a long time I thought I could do that, but then it became – and so ultimately I was accepted in this advertising department, and I would have probably just done, you know, some dumb clothes that they wanted to sell, and I would have picked up some of these tricks, but I would have become an illustrator –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – rather than anything else. And so I think that the army save me from that in – certain in retrospect –
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm.
MR. DE LOOPER: – and that I was kid of lucky. I was –
MR. FORGEY: It saved you from – [audio break, tape change] –
MR. FORGEY: This is side A, tape 2, Willem de Looper, same day, same place.
Willem and I were getting into some heavy theological waters having to do with predestination and such –
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yeah.
MR. FORGEY: – such difficult topics. We’ll drop them. We’re at Kann’s – or the escape from. We’re at the US Army getting your induction notice.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right. Okay, well, anyway, to put that into fairly simple terms is I was in for two years. People obviously always even now think, you know, how weird that you went into the American Army because you weren’t a citizen, but anyway, people just don’t know how this – how alert the American government is drafting even – [laughs] – you know, alien –
MR. FORGEY: You weren’t a citizen of course, no.
MR. DE LOOPER: No, I was not. No.
MR. FORGEY: At that time. Are you now?
MR. DE LOOPER: You had to ask. No, I’m not.
MR. FORGEY: Okay.
MR. DE LOOPER: But that’s another – that’s one of my big secrets, you see? But that’s all right.
MR. FORGEY: Oh, well, it’s no longer a secret, Willem.
MR. DE LOOPER: I know. I know. It’s no big secret, but that’s the only really dumb thing that I did. When I was in the army I should have just become a citizen then. I didn’t do it. You know, I could have – I had two years to do it, see?
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: But anyway –
MR. FORGEY: Where did you do your basic training?
MR. DE LOOPER: Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And – which was – you know, it was – I mean, the whole thing – the whole army experience was a real mixed bag, okay? For me it was perhaps even a little bit more bizarre than for somebody who had been born here, although I suppose, because you get exposed to the kind of people that you cannot even imagine, you know, are alive. [Laughs.] I mean, there are some dreadful characters that you run into, but on the other hand, also very wonderful people that you have something in common. I mean, all I’m saying here is that in the army you meet people, as somebody coming out of a city perhaps especially and having some culture, who have no culture of any kind, or at least not the way you understand it. And that’s very disconcerting. Or people from –
MR. FORGEY: Well, really – I mean, basic training is a shock to anybody.
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, of course it is. I mean, it’s – you know, it was horrible in many ways. It was also exciting. I – you know, I try to – I’m one of those people who tries to look at the good side. I had a friend in the army who has become a fairly well-known artist himself. His name is Sigmund Abeles.
MR. FORGEY: Mm-hmm. Chicago? No –
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, he originally came from South Carolina, I think, and he – I believe he lives more in Upstate New York –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: – or something like this. And he is primarily a printmaker. He’s a figurative artist, but he’s a pretty good one. And –
MR. FORGEY: You met him in the army?
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yeah. We were in the same company or something –
MR. FORGEY: In basic training?
MR. DE LOOPER: I think so. I’m pretty sure. And one of the things that we did is, with the few hours of free time that you have in those situations, is that we drew. And so we had something in common. I still have drawings that I did in the army, in fact. That’s when I started – I kept on drawing quite seriously, and throughout the two years that I was in the army I drew a lot. And in basic training it was partly – [laughs] – some of the – it was interesting. I was already – I think that he too, although he was obviously my age – I somewhere have some drawings that I did when I was in Fort Jackson, I think, and later when I came out and was in Fort Dix or something. And so the subjects were – they were all men, and they were in some ways more psychologically burdened than figures that I would otherwise have drawn or have drawn since. You know –
MR. FORGEY: I’d love to see them.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah, yeah, well –
MR. FORGEY: I’m not sure of the quality or –
MR. DE LOOPER: Right.
MR. FORGEY: – did you think ironically or otherwise –
MR. DE LOOPER: No, I didn’t think about –
MR. FORGEY: – of “Back to Malden” for example.
MR. DE LOOPER: No, not at all. They were – what I did was, not only in basic training but later also, I drew a lot of fellow soldiers, and what I started doing early on also – but I don’t have any record of that, because that I gave away; the other ones were in little sketchbooks or something or loose pieces of paper – but what I started doing very soon, and that was also a way to make a bond with other people, some of whom as I indicated I had really nothing in common with at all – say small-town, you know, farm boys or something like that or whether they were the Midwest or from the Deep South or something, you know, people in some cases who could barely speak well, and you know, that sort of thing –
MR. FORGEY: Absolutely.
MR. DE LOOPER: And that’s the kind of shock that you get when you get drafted, because you’re in with everybody, and so it’s a very interesting experience, to say the least. I mean, it’s very hard on you, but it’s also exhilarating in some ways. And you do try to get along with your fellow soldier, you know, even although you might in some cases consider him, you know, an animal or something like this. And, in fact, you meet some people that you have not imagined are almost animal-like. I met some later – even in Germany I remember –
MR. FORGEY: You tend to take – I think you have to be distanced from it somewhat, but –
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah.
MR. FORGEY: – but I know you start taking military training seriously.
MR. DE LOOPER: Oh, yeah.
MR. FORGEY: I don’t know if this is relevant to this particular interview –
MR. DE LOOPER: No – oh, absolutely.
MR. FORGEY: – but you take it seriously because you’re learning how to kill.
MR. DE LOOPER: Well, that’s right. That’s right. But the – okay, but – so what I did do is I early on, since I liked to – loved to draw, I started also asking people for pictures that they had in their wallets, say, of their wives or girlfriends, and I started making drawings of these. Whether they resembled any of these people, I don’t know. But that was kind of a big hit.
MR. FORGEY: Would you give – and you’d give them –
MR. DE LOOPER: I would just give – oh, sure. It was not, you know, for money or anything like this. It was a way of not only passing the time and for me also to practice my drawing I suppose, but it was also, as I indicated –
MR. FORGEY: A way to socialize.
MR. DE LOOPER: – as a way of socializing, you see? And it was ultimately kind of fun. But I do have some drawings, as I say, of fellow soldiers and that sort of thing. And Abeles was – I think, began possibly a little bit more advanced. He was – I don’t know, but he drew also. And some of the figures, in retrospect, looked like the kind of stuff that he may have drawn or something. They’re a little different from his style in other things. So I was in basic training, and then I was supposed to be sent to – the whole company was supposed to be sent to Korea. The Korean War, of course, was over, but as we are now aware, even in ’92 there are still American soldiers in Korea. So it was just one of those, you know, draws at –
MR. FORGEY: Europe or Germany – Europe or –
MR. DE LOOPER: That’s right.
MR. FORGEY: – Korea.
MR. DE LOOPER: Far East, right. And it was Korea. And so the whole company, in fact, got orders, and they were already cut for Korea. And for some strange reason they were withdrawn, and we didn’t go to Korea and we went – well, it’s not quite that simple. At – when I was in – after I had – when I was still at Fort Jackson, the Hungarian uprising [1956] had started.
MR. FORGEY: Yes.
MR. DE LOOPER: And as a result of it, many Hungarians and others had joined the armed forces. In fact, it was talked about often in kind of – in cynical terms in the American Army in that their ticket to come to the United States was to sign up for a long time in the infantry –
MR. FORGEY: Right
MR. DE LOOPER: – in the American Army. And, you know, obviously a lot of these guys, after – especially when they had to go through infantry training and then knew that they still had stay in for three or four years or something, got a little bit bitter. But the main point that I wanted to make was that they didn’t speak English in most cases, or not English very well. And some of us who had college training were picked to teach them English by rote. And I was one of the people that they picked, because in the army, you know, when you are there, you do – ultimately you hang out with the people that have something in common with you, and in my case it was they were also people that were college graduates, some of whom, as I think you referred to that earlier, went to language schools and so forth, and some went into intelligence. And I was – partly because I was a foreigner, I could not apply for OTS, for instance, which is Officer Training School, and I didn’t qualify for a lot of things like intelligence training and that sort of thing, which I might have gotten because I had a BA, you see? Whereas many of the other people were high school dropouts even, or whatever.
So I started actually doing that. And for several months I taught English to Hungarians. And it was really kind of interesting. What you did was you would write things on the blackboard and you would have them repeat it and that sort of thing. Actually it didn’t last very long, because then the orders again came – and they call come from the Pentagon, you see, by some unknown hand, so your whole future is in – really in somebody else’s hand – and then I was sent to Germany instead, you know, rather than Korea. I was, of course, very happy to have gotten out of Korea in the first place by choosing to be a teacher, and by having made that choice, you see, I would have been there for the rest of my two years –
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: – in South Carolina. But, you know, then these orders came, and I was sent to Germany with the rest of the company. And so I was stationed in the south of Germany near Stuttgart in a place called Ludwigsburg and spent the rest of my – I guess it’s basically a year and a half really by that time in Germany. And this is where I became more and more interested in art, because what I was – I was a – I was in a headquarters company of a helicopter battalion, but I obviously had nothing to do with a helicopter myself. In fact, few of us had. What we all did were – we were clerk typists, which means, for somebody who doesn’t know that, that you’re basically just an office worker and you have a 9:00 to 5:00 or 8:00 to 5:00 job and you type things which have to do with the company.
MR. FORGEY: File a lot.
MR. DE LOOPER: You file, and you – well, I made the daily report always, or at least for a long time I did that. And I even wound up driving a colonel for a while, because the other thing that we all had – it was a transportation company, you see? So everybody – it was filled with – everybody – it was a trucking and jeep kind of company. So we all drove a truck as well, and so we were assigned to – I was assigned to a three-quarter-ton truck, which I always rather enjoyed driving. But basically you worked in an office. So it also meant, in turn, that at 5:00 in the afternoon you could put on your civilian clothes and you could either go into –
MR. FORGEY: And you had probably three weekends out of four off.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right, right. And then occasionally, unlike infantry companies or so, which have to go into the field all the time for training and all that – and it was a fairly soft life to be quite frank, within the circumstances that you’re in the army. And so at 5:00 you’re off. So what do you do after that with your free time? Well, you can go drinking beer, which of course you do also, but – and you can go into the town, and that all depends on the small amount of money that you have too, how much – how often you can do that. And then so, for me, one of the things that I became very much involved with is a service club that was on the kaserne in fact. What do they call that? What do you call that? The post.
MR. FORGEY: The base.
MR. DE LOOPER: The base.
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: And it was – the thing was kind of an interesting one. It was called Flak Kaserne, and it belonged at one time to what’s his name? The great German Luftwaffe general. I think of his name. Goering? The big, fat one, yeah.
MR. FORGEY: The Luftwaffe? Yeah, Goering.
MR. DE LOOPER: Yeah. And that’s the –
MR. FORGEY: Flak Kaserne?
MR. DE LOOPER: Flak, Flak,
MR. FORGEY: How do you spell that?
MR. DE LOOPER: F-L-A-K, like –
MR. FORGEY: Oh, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: You know? Right. Like the stuff that they shoot down plans with, I suppose.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: Flak. Anyway, so that’s the base. It’s a fairly small base. But anyway – so the whole base was just covered with trucks rather than with helicopters. The helicopters were – I think that had once a helicopter ride. That’s all. But anyway – and that’s also the way I got to – as a driver, you see, I also wound up driving the colonel who was the commander of the post from time to time and that sort of thing. But, so, the point of it all is that after 5:00 I spent a lot of time in the service club, which was well-equipped, and it was equipped with an art shop, or an art facility and also a photography lab. And I did even take some photography at that time. I mean, I learned under the guidance of a local German who ran the photography shop how to develop black and white pictures that I took and so forth – mostly of people, you know, and that sort of thing. And – but in the service club I spent a lot of time, and of course the service club – you, having been in the army, you know what that is like. I mean, you do also lots of other stuff, like dancing and bowling and bingo and all that sort of stuff.
MR. FORGEY: Ping-pong was always good.
MR. DE LOOPER: Ping-pong. Right. All those things. But we – the craft shop was run by a German woman who had materials for you to work with, you see? And there were a number of us who went there fairly regularly to paint, and they didn’t have oil paint I remember, because I painted with printing ink, which is soluble in turpentine. And so I continued this kind of thing that I had really started at AU, where the paintings are really almost like drawings but they’re filled in with color, but again with a very thinned-down sort of thing. I made one – she even had a lithograph press, but it was very primitive. And I made one lithograph in the army. But I spent a lot of time there. So I made lots of drawings and lots of work.
I was – all the time, of course, I continued to have an interest in drawing, and again I started hanging out with people that were similar to myself in education and interests. And it meant that at that point also we went into Ludwigsburg and also into Stuttgart, which had a museum and it had – it had even an opera and it had other, you know, cultural things which we occasionally did. Not all the time. You know, I don’t want to over-exaggerate it, but certainly we were exposed to some of it. And there were others that I befriended who were also artists and they liked to draw, and so we went drawing for instance. And I have some things of that nature too. And that was mostly drawings in the neighborhood of – there was a castle for instance. There was a beautiful park. And we – there were certain structures in there that were nice to draw and that sort of thing. And all the time I was also still drawing people in the – in their uniform or, you know, lying on their bunks and that sort of thing.
But in the service club the other thing that was very interesting was that they had American magazines and they had Art News.
MR. FORGEY: Uh-huh.
MR. DE LOOPER: And those were the great years of Art News. And –
MR. FORGEY: Or Painter, Painting.
MR. DE LOOPER: Right, exactly.
MR. FORGEY: “Jackson Pollock paints a picture.” That kind of –
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly. Well, I don’t know if they ever had Jackson Pollock himself, but they –
MR. FORGEY: That’s the famous example, I think, in the early ‘50s, was –
MR. DE LOOPER: Exactly. They had a lot of those, and –
MR. FORGEY: Great feature actually.
MR. DE LOOPER: And the interesting thing is that still have some of those magazines that I –
MR. FORGEY: Yeah.
MR. DE LOOPER: – was either given or snitched them, I’m not sure. But the way – I certainly remember it. I started reading these kinds of things, you see? And you could – through articles like that you could actually see an artist who was creating his picture. And this made a big impact on me. And then in 1958 I think it was, much of the – a very important thing happened where American art was concerned. There was a World’s Fair. In Brussels?
MR. FORGEY: Brussels, right.
MR. DE LOOPER: And I actually went there, and I saw a lot of the American art that had come from New York, you see? De Kooning, Pollock, Kline, Smith – all those people. And that was the way I see it: as a very important event for me, because I actually saw this stuff. I – whether I understood it or not, I don’t know. I probably had an inkling because I’d been reading some of those articles.
MR. FORGEY: But you were –
MR. DE LOOPER: But I was really taken by that. And certainly I find those experiences to be very crucial in my even deciding that, you know, when I came out that I would become a painter rather than anything else. But in those years, you know, I wasn’t even thinking of going into commercial art anymore.
MR. FORGEY: Right.
MR. DE LOOPER: I must say that I didn’t have any clear conception of what I would really do when I came out of the army, but it was really then that the real interest in real art developed. So that was terrific to see all that stuff in Brussels, and it seems like a long time ago. It is a long time ago. But – and to think how new that art still was, because that was, in some cases, only, you know, maybe five or ten years at the most after it had been created. Perhaps some of those paintings – yeah, I think Pollock (1912-1956) was probably still alive or something like that.
MR. FORGEY: I don’t think in ’58.
MR. DE LOOPER: Maybe he wasn’t, but he was barely dead by then. But Kline certainly was, and – you know, and all those people – Guston – all those people were in it. It was quite a stupendous thing. It – I sort of vaguely remember that the press in America – Time Magazine, Life Magazine – they all had stories, most of them probably not very favorable, but still – because it was still very controversial, all that stuff. It still is to some extent, I guess. [Laughs.] But – not for the artist, but with the general public. It was a big thing, you know?
MR. FORGEY: Yeah
MR. DE LOOPER: And I’m so happy to have seen that, you know? So –
MR. FORGEY: I can understand that.
MR. DE LOOPER: So –
MR. FORGEY: So you’re saying you – there’s a good chance –
MR. DE LOOPER: In some – right.
MR. FORGEY: – this worked out pretty well, this period in Germany?
MR. DE LOOPER: Yes, I think so. I really think so, because I think I think it just gave me a couple of years to really –
MR. FORGEY: And –
MR. DE LOOPER: – sort of think in some terms –
MR. FORGEY: Did you ever consider staying in Europe when you got out?
MR. DE LOOPER: No, never. Never.
MR. FORGEY: Never?
MR. DE LOOPER: No. What had happened on a personal level was that I had actually gotten married to a girl whom I had known before in Holland before I came to the United States, you see? And I had not been back until –
MR. FORGEY: Who was that?
MR. DE LOOPER: She was a girl that I knew in The Hague, you see, who had not gone to the same school, but we all knew – we all lived on the street around the corner from where I lived. And we were sort of a gang of, you know, teenagers who used to spend a lot of time together, and we used to dance and things like this and listen to American records and that sort of thing. And so it was the first time I had been back in Holland, and quite frankly, I sort of made a pretty big mistake that way, I guess, again certainly in retrospect, but I married – I had always been very fond of her, but in the years before I went to the United States – she was a touch older than I was and certainly went out with boys that were older than I was. You know how it is, especially when you’re a teenager. If a girl goes out even with a guy who’s two years older, it seems like she’s going out with an old man, you know? Whereas later on in life that all telescopes a little bit. But, you know, it was one of those kind of things. And so not only did I go back to the United – to Holland for the first time seeing my parents, but I also took up this particular friendship and we decided to get married. So we got married in the army in Germany but never lived together, because I was just a – I lived in a, you know, barracks. And, of course, I had n