Oral history interview with Walker Hancock, 1977 July 22 - Aug. 15

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 Walker Hancock, 1977 July 22 - Aug. 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Walker Hancock
Conducted by Robert Brown
In Gloucester, Massachusetts
July 22, 1977

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Walker Hancock on July 22, 1977. The interview was conducted in Gloucester, Massachusetts by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

ROBRT BROWN: I’d like to ask you first to perhaps discuss your growing up in St. Louis and some of your education, your family, or the early influences on you, particularly those that may have led to your later career as a sculptor.

WALKER HANCOCK: My father was a lawyer, and my mother a very talented artist. She would have been a very good professional artist if in those days ladies had been allowed to go on with their education. As it was she was allowed to attend the St. Louis School of Fine Arts until she reached the point where she should have gone into the life class, and that was where she had to stop. Her father was an ear, nose, and throat specialist; he was in fact, the first such specialist west of the Mississippi River. It was the kind of family that clung to conventions, and it was very easy to see why my mother’s career was stopped at that point.

I began to model in kindergarten and kept it up. I think all through grammar school I must have been making a great nuisance of myself with my sculpture because it made enough of a stir for me to be called to stay after school one day by a teacher. I was something like eleven years old, possibly twelve. She said, “Walker I want to talk with you, seriously I think you are a very intelligent boy.” Of course, being called intelligent I was immediately so flattered and receptive that when she said, “I know that you are intelligent enough to realize that you could never make a living as a sculptor.” Then, I was convinced. But I think I was only convinced for about twenty-four hours because I’m sure I was back at it two days later.

ROBERT BROWN: What were you doing?

WALKER HANCOCK: I was doing animals largely, and in the eighth grade I remember doing a masterful model of the Parthenon, for which I used fluted curtain rods for the columns and supplied all the sculpture in the pediments. Completely restored and colored. So, I was in very deep, before I finished grammar school.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, this was not only sculpture. Did you have an interest in Greek culture, or classical culture?

WALKER HANCOCK: The subject fascinated me, of course, mythology and all of that, but in the superficial way that it would a youngster. Then I went on to high school and took an art course there, which in the public schools in St. Louis, in those days, was extraordinarily good. I had a teacher in high school that really taught me most of what I know about design, and all that I know about lettering, and that kind of thing, and gave me the impetus to go on and learn what she didn’t give me.

ROBERT BROWN: How was the approach? Was this a recognized system that she used?

WALKER HANCOCK: It was apparently the system that was commonly used by all the teachers of art in that day. We were taught the elements of design, rhythm, theory of color. We didn’t do very much in three dimensions but it was all very, very sound, and as I look back on it, I can’t find any fault in the approach.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, did this approach lock you or suggest that certain styles in art were better than others or was it much freer and more open than that?

WALKER HANCOCK: I have a feeling that there was nothing in it that locked us into anything at all. It simply opened our eyes to the fact that there were rules of composition that worked, and certain rhythms that worked, certain colors that went well together, and there was nothing in it that was in the least limiting: in fact, it was liberating. I was really in debt to the public school system in St. Louis.

And, with all that, there were very few boys, at that time, who took the art course. Those were the days when they taught Greek and Latin in high school, and I wished I had studied Greek but I didn’t, I studied some Latin. What I missed by taking the art course rather than some scientific course, it is hard for me to say. It was a great gain certainly.

ROBERT BROWN: Did your parents back you in your wish to take the art course?

WALKER HANCOCK: It was a very interesting situation with my parents. Father, who was originally a Virginian and had worked his way through the University of Virginia—I think graduated having done the law course there in half the time that anybody else had ever done it—was, of course, eager for me to be a lawyer. He made no attempt to conceal that but he was interested, though I think uneasy, at the thought of having an artist in the family. It was going to be a problem to him, I could see that. And, my mother was simply very happy to see me doing it.

And by the greatest good luck, when I was in my second year of high school—I was about fifteen years old—I won a prize, in a national competition, for a medal for the St. Louis Art League. This was an anonymous arrangement so that nobody knew who was getting the prize. And, when I got the second prize I think my father really began to take me seriously, at that point, and he was clearly pleased about it, proud and never did anything to dissuade me from going on, never. He hoped that I would spend four years in college, at Washington University. I managed to make myself spend a year there, mostly in art school, and some of it in some English classes. I did go to the University of Wisconsin for two summer courses in languages. So that was the extent of my college career.

ROBERT BROWN: You did go right after high school, into Washington University?

WALKER HANCOCK: For a year, yes. Of course, I had had an interval at the very close of the war, as a summer cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, which had also been my father’s school. It was a very brief, and to me, very disagreeable experience.

ROBERT BROWN: Your father wanted you to do this?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, and it was a very sensible thing to do, because the war was still on, the First World War, and if it had continued it would have given me a great advantage. I could have gone in as an officer, not as a rookie but the war ended, and then I came—then I went into the art school there.

ROBERT BROWN: Well now, when you went to Art School at Washington University were you ahead of your fellow students having done all of this work?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I was, because I had had the advantage of going to the art school Wednesday afternoon while I was in high school, or Wednesday evening I think it was, and all day Saturday during the whole high school experience. So that I had already pretty much of a head start by the time I gave my whole time to the Art School.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you go in then primarily to study sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you also required to take drawing?

WALKER HANCOCK: I was required to draw, and I drew, and drew from the antique, and then finally, I applied to be admitted to the life class, and was. And that went on for a while as I continued to model. Then I had the very good experience of helping as an apprentice my teacher Victor Holm, for a summer. Victor Holm had been one of Augustus St. Gauden’s apprentices. He was an extremely skilled modeler, and so, I suppose I got at second-had a great deal of the St. Gauden’s attitude toward technique, actual technique, I think.

ROBERT BROWN: Can you characterize any of that?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I can. There was a great deal more use of the toothed loop-tool than I later thought to feel the best way. When I went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts I dropped a good deal of that. But, that apparently—the use of the tool—and a great deal of reliance on light and shadow, not dependence on it but extreme amount of interest in it; color, so-called color, produced by light and shadow.

ROBERT BROWN: As a way of conveying appearance as well as expressions? This as opposed to what in sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: This as opposed to using both eyes wide open, seeing the form as truly in the round, without much regard to the shadow, and letting the shadow result. I think that there is a real difference there, I think that under Charles Grafly we began to think of light and shade as the result of form, whereas under Victor Holm I’m sure I was persuaded that light and shade had a great deal to do with producing the form. That’s the main difference.

ROBERT BROWN: You set up light and shade arrangements in your sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, and in those days, we were taught drawing in a way that I am sure is passé at the present, which was to draw the shapes as shadows. You would outline the figure, lay in the shadows, according to the shape, and we saw the form result, and that was very persuasive, sometimes.

ROBERT BROWN: And was outline kept to a minimum in the drawings?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, but I remember under Carpenter, one of our very skilled draftsmen there, actually outlining the shadows, and filling them in. Very different.

ROBERT BROWN: At that point, were both the sculptural version and the drawing very appealing to you, or were you a bit uneasy with it even then?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, I wasn’t uneasy with it, I was enormously interested in it. I was always impatient to get into modeling class, but I had plenty of patience to stay with the drawing.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned what you sculptors call ‘color,’ in terms of light and shade, but what about hue as in painting, you know, were you ever very much trained or involved in painting?

WALKER HANCOCK: We left the word ‘hue’ behind us when we left high school! There was a great deal of discussion of color and hue there. But actually color—I began to lose interest in for its own sake—after I left high school.

ROBERT BROWN: And you were able, at Washington University, to concentrate particularly in sculpture and drawing.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, by that time almost entirely sculpture.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you a pretty gregarious student, I mean did you mix a lot with your fellow students, discuss these things?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes, oh, yes. We had … It was very congenial, and in those days congenial in a way which I think is fairly rare these days, because the pull of all the different directions was not being felt in the art school. It was generally accepted that there were standards that were to be observed. You wanted your work to be good, and that the main difference between work was good and bad, and you were all trying to do good work. As I taught later on I could see it developing: the tensions between students who had been influenced in this direction in one exhibition and that direction at another exhibition, and who really at sometimes were almost at sword’s point with each other because they were so persuaded that the other one was wrong. We had nothing of that kind. It was a very happy time to be in art school, actually.

ROBERT BROWN: Would you say that there was, generally accepted, one standard?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes, there was.

ROBERT BROWN: And that the difference, say, between the St. Gauden’s school of shadow and that which you learned from Grafly, was, comparatively speaking, minor?

WALKER HANCOCK: Actually, it was so minor that when I mentioned it to Grafly, I said, “You know, in St. Louis I got the habit of working with wire tools scraping over the surface,” which, by the way, was in imitation of the treatment of stone: the wire tool in modeling was the equivalent of the gradine in stone—I think that is how it came about. And I told Grafly that I was a little worried because his students and he himself used mostly the hand, the fingers, but mostly the palm of the hand to push the clay around. He smiled, and said, “Well, the thing is to get the shape right, isn’t it?” That was about all that it amounted to. The technique was the superficial consideration.

ROBERT BROWN: By this point, was your father’s esteem for what you were doing quite high?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, he began to enter into the thing with great enthusiasm, and was very much pleased when I went to Rome. Father—I had four sisters—and my father, although he was a very prominent lawyer in St. Louis, felt it quite a struggle to educate a whole family.

ROBERT BROWN: Were most of the students at Washington University still women, in the arts?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, actually in modeling class there were more men than women, at that time. But, of course, in high school this would have been the thing that boys didn’t go in for very much. But in art school the majority of the students, I would say, fully half of them, at least, were men.

ROBERT BROWN: At this point you had—in terms of say, your peers, your friends, same age or roughly the same age—you’re wanting to be an artist had prestige with them? What was the male attitude, at that time, toward say, going on to be an artist?

WALKER HANCOCK: By that time you are in. I was in art school, of course, surrounded by people who wanted to do the same thing.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you go directly then from Washington University to the Pennsylvania Academy?

WALKER HANCOCK: I went—

ROBERT BROWN: You had the summer schooling in Wisconsin, but that was just a brief interlude. How did happen that you went to Philadelphia?

WALKER HANCOCK: I went to Philadelphia because at that time Grafly was considered the instructor of sculpture in this country. He was considered without any question the greatest teacher. And there wasn’t very much question as to where one should go if you could go to Philadelphia. And I came—

ROBERT BROWN: Was it about 1921?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I think 1920, but I would have to look up the date. I told you about my first visit here, didn’t I?

ROBERT BROWN: Well I’d like to hear—that’s what I’d like to. So you knew that Grafly, [you] wanted to go there because he was the preeminent teacher, you were already accepted in the school?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And then you came east. Had you ever been east before?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, I had never been this far east before, and I came to his studio with the thought of calling on him before going to the class in Philadelphia.

ROBERT BROWN: His studio here in Gloucester?

WALKER HANCOCK: That was the summer in which I had worked as an apprentice in St. Louis, to help save up money to bring me east, so I couldn’t spend the summer in his studio as he invited me to, very kindly, having seen some photographs of my work. When I came, I fell in love with Folly Cove, as it was in those days, very primitive and beautiful, and found the way to his house, and suddenly was very timid about going to see the great man. I hadn’t foreseen that I would be embarrassed, but I was, and as I waited to have courage, I walked up and down the side street past his orchard, came around in front again and saw him sitting on the porch, by that time, and that made matters worse because I couldn’t confront the thought of those steps, and introducing myself. So, I walked back, and pulled an apple from his tree, and in the end, went back to Philadelphia without seeing him here.

ROBERT BROWN: And yet he had welcomed your coming?

WALKER HANCOCK: He had asked me to come, he had invited me, yes, it was very stupid. You go through an age where you are like that I guess.

ROBERT BROWN: Had you heard at all what he was like?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I had heard that he was rather formidable, he was a taciturn man, and not easy, not very easy. And I think that frightened me a little bit. So I—there I was in the class in Philadelphia when he came in for the first time, and he came straight to the stand, where I was working, and said, “What is your name?” and I said, “Hancock,” and he said, “Oh, you’re the chap from St. Louis,” and I said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Well, Hancock just look at this figure, and look at the model, remember that the neck belongs to the back and that the line of the spine, reaches over the shoulders like a boy reaching over the fence for apples.” Of course, this staggered me (Hancock laughs) and I was unable to answer, but I’ve never forgotten that. He hadn’t seen me; it was just characteristic of the way that he would give criticism, some homely little simile that would make you remember.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you blend into his teaching very easily then?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Could you describe his approach? You mentioned that he said do the form and then let the light and shadow follow.

WALKER HANCOCK: His approach was always from the inside out. And I think there is in that, to a degree, some explanation of the difference between the St. Gauden's approach, as I inherited it, and his. Because we were very much engaged with how the surface affected the form, in St. Louis. Whereas in Philadelphia we were taught that the body consists of three solids: the head, the thorax and the pelvis; and there were other solids attached to those solids. The word “solid” was so much used, and we began to think of form as material added solids, solids added to solids. If you cut in you did it almost apologetically, you know. You were cutting into a solid. I think that was the basis of the approach.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you see fairly soon differences in your own work? As a result?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, very quickly.

ROBERT BROWN: What were they, can you remember?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I think that probably expressed them. I think my work gained a certain ….

ROBERT BROWN: A solidity? (laughter)

WALKER HANCOCK: Regard for volume that it didn’t have, wouldn’t have had if I had gone on that way. And, in fact I suppose, it has been a lasting influence, because I am still much more interested in sculpture that expresses weight and the value of the solid material than I am in some of the expressionists which make the most of the voids. As interesting as I find them, and as greatly as I enjoy, oh, for instance the early work of Calder, I wouldn’t want to have done them myself. I like to look at them, but it’s not my feeling about how I would like to work, so.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find this—that you thought more in those terms of solid?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. And in composition as a result we thought more in terms of moving around a spiral, rather that purely frontal conception.

ROBERT BROWN: The works could be seen with equal interest from any angle. Was this something you grasped and could achieve right away?

WALKER HANCOCK: It was something we worked very hard for, very consciously, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Always from a model, or most of the time?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, we depended a great deal upon models and I still do, to quite an extent, because my own experience had been that, when I discard the model and I work from my own inventiveness, such as it is, I drop into a kind of stereotype that the presence of life seems to help avoid. The — just the suggestion of the movement of the human being does something for you—it helps spark your work in a way that the conventional or remembered anatomy doesn’t do.

ROBERT BROWN: What role do you think the very physical—the expressiveness of a living model—has in your work? Does that have an effect on you also as you work? The fact that it is a living and breathing thing, it’s not static?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. To a degree that has an effect. I find that if you invent what you think is a perfectly wonderful pose, and then try to get a model into the pose, he or she can’t get into it to begin with. What the model does may be so much more interesting in some respect that you in the end give your original composition a little fillip, a little something, that it wouldn’t have had. These figures for instance I could have done perfectly well from memory or even from photographs, but I did them here, in the studio, just outside with the actual player going through those motions again and again, so that I could see what the authentic fall was, and what the authentic jump was, and what the natural way for one to affect another might be. The result is really much more lively than a thing that you’d just sit down and make up.

ROBERT BROWN: I am wondering in the approach of Grafly, building up solids, was there a danger of perhaps, not for you, but for others, in creating rather lumpy, dead figures?

WALKER HANCOCK: I don’t think so because, he too, was so enormously interested in movement and in the expression of the figure. He had a great deal always to say about the expression of a pose. I don’t recall the work of any students of my day that became lumpy or dead.

ROBERT BROWN: Now, at the Pennsylvania Academy, did you—was this your principal course, the modeling course with Grafly, was there other work?

WALKER HANCOCK: There was other work. Well, there was the anatomy class and for that I was lucky enough to be under George Bridgeman for a while. That was quite a fascinating experience.
RG: Was he a very marvelous teacher?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, very exciting, and amusing, made everybody have a good time. I had of course studied anatomy in St. Louis, and done a little dissecting, very little, watched it, and then there was perspective, which we all had to pass examinations in. And, we weren’t required to do any drawing except a Saturday morning sketch class. The rest of it was all modeling, and he would come weekly, and later on once every fortnight to criticize everything that we had done in the meantime, including compositions.

ROBERT BROWN: This was Grafly?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, he liked to assign subjects, and later on he brought in John Harbison, the architect from Paul Cret’s office who assigned us architectural problems, and would lecture to us on the requirements, the architectural requirements, of the situation, and then criticize our efforts at solving the problem. Very, very good experience.

ROBERT BROWN: Had you had that experience at all before?

WALKER HANCOCK: No.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find it difficult initially, or did you—judging from your later career you must have found it quite fascinating?

WALKER HANCOCK: I found it fascinating, and not difficult, because I could see at once the reasonableness f everything in it. Harbison was very good at explaining why.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, how would he do it, what for example?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, he did it in part by example, by bringing in photographs of similar problems, successfully solved. And, explaining why they were successfully solved. And, I think that we were very quickly enlightened. (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: Now, of course the photographs can exaggerate, or call attention, did he also then take you out to look in Philadelphia, to look at a few examples, from the street?

WALKER HANCOCK: We didn’t do that, I wish we had. Often, though, they were buildings that we were familiar with.

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of problems would Grafly set up?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, his were much more likely to be expressive of abstract ideas. You know, the Joy of Spring, I don’t mean that that was one of them, but that was the kind of subject that he might have thought of giving to us, whereas Harbison’s problems were always very specific: place given, the meaning of the thing prescribed, the material, the size, all those things went into it. Much better disciplined, of course.

ROBERT BROWN: Which, the latter?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: The other practically would make you into a sculptor who would just go down to a gallery or something, with his work, I suppose?

WALKER HANCOCK: Exactly, and of course there never could be a perfect resolution of the other problem, because it left both instructor and student still feeling the way he felt originally. I remember (laughs) I think one subject that he assigned us was “the storm,” and one young woman brought in a composition which Grafly didn’t think expressed “storm,” and he said, “Is that the way a storm strikes you?” And she said, “I’ve never been struck by a storm,” and so there they were. (laughter) He couldn’t tell her how she would feel if she had been struck by a storm, and it ended simply by a discussion of the arrangement of the masses. Not very satisfactory.

ROBERT BROWN: But, he did continue it with her on it, on a kind of formalistic basis, the theme, the expressiveness, was hopeless there?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, hopeless.

ROBERT BROWN: This was all done in terms of the human figure?

WALKER HANCOCK: Always. We did animals too. But it was always figures. We had never any exercise in abstract design. I tried to introduce it while I was an instructor there, and I found it very hard going. They weren’t interested.

ROBERT BROWN: You were there through 1925; summers you were up here near Grafly’s studio, here in Folly Cove, Gloucester.

WALKER HANCOCK: Then in 1925 I went to Rome, and spent three years there.

ROBERT BROWN: Back to your summers. How were they different from the winters? Were you working pretty steadily summers as well on your sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I worked in his studio here.

ROBERT BROWN: And he welcomed that, he invited you to come, various students?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, he was perfectly wonderful. He invited me and sometimes one other student, but I was usually there alone. He had an assistant, Clyde Bathurst, a middle-aged man, rather sad, disappointed individual who had wanted to be a sculptor, but had never accomplished very much. He did a good deal of the work like making armatures and keeping the place clean and developing photographs and that kind of thing. But, at that time, he was working on the Mead Memorial, so I had the experience of doing my own work, and watching him do his. And, also had the fun of listening in on conversations with such people as Paul Wayland Bartlett who would drop in, that kind of thing; it was very nice.

ROBERT BROWN: He would leave you to your own work?

WALKER HANCOCK: Entirely my own work.

ROBERT BROWN: Did he give you formal critiques from time to time?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, once in a while he would stop and suggest something. Very seldom. He preferred to let me see the thing through.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you set up your own problems, as they call it today?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, they were simply figures. I had titles for them of course, I modeled figures; I modeled one head. One of the things I did was a problem that was put to me by Ralph Adams Cram.

ROBERT BROWN: Whom you knew, or you met?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I knew him by that time very well. I don’t remember just how I first met him, but he was interested in finding a young sculptor who would do ecclesiastical work. And, he was making—he was overhauling St. James Church in New York. One of the things that he planned to do was to design a reredos with an ornate, Christ and two adoring angels, Christ in the vesica. So he assigned me this as a problem to see what I would do with it, and so I spent one summer working pretty much on that.

ROBERT BROWN: Up here, in Grafly’s studio?

WALKER HANCOCK: Grafly was away most of that time, or I think he would have frowned on my doing a thing as archeologically-oriented as that, because, after all, it was to fit into a Gothic church. Cram wasn’t going to let it be anything but Gothic.

ROBERT BROWN: And Grafly was no antiquarian?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, he was rather the opposite. He was very suspicious of interest in historic styles. Very. He wanted sculpture to be American, not to be like anything that had been done in Europe, if possible, to get away from it. But Cram—this was a summer after I had been on a traveling scholarship to Europe, after my second trip to Europe, that’s what it was. I had come back loaded with postcards of all the great sculpture of the cathedrals of France. I had plenty to steal from while I was doing this thing. When it was finished I took it to Cram and I was really astonished at the interview I had with him. I brought it out and, when I took it to Mr. Cram’s office, he looked at it and he said, “Well, the vesica is wrong. They are never dished; they are always flat. Now what you should have done before you got to work on this was to refer to some such work as this.” He turned to Kingsley Porter’s Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Trail and brought down a copy, and thumbed it through, and by the greatest good luck turned to the very sculpture that I had been stealing from, which was the Christ of Cahors, with a very deeply dished vesica. And he said, “See, there you are, you were exactly right, just right, that’s just the way it should have been,” and (laughs) I was amazed. (laughs again)

ROBERT BROWN: So, did you finally tell him that that was your source?

WALKER HANCOCK: I don’t remember, but I think I was trying hard to be polite as possible then. (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: But, he was a very outspoken man, very decisive?

WALKER HANCOCK: He said that very day, I remember him saying, “Two things I hate, Protestantism and paganism.” (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: What did he mean by that exactly?

WALKER HANCOCK: I think he meant Protestantism in the form that is common in this country. He still liked the trappings of Catholicism in his Protestantism, and of course he—and as far as paganism was concerned, he really was upset at my going to Rome. He said, “You’ll come back a pagan.” Then he thought a little while and said, “Well, there’s Donatello anyway, isn’t there?” (laughs) This was the way he reconciled himself to my going to Europe.

ROBERT BROWN: That was as far forward as he could go?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, exactly.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you see Cram, at various times through the years?

WALKER HANCOCK: I saw him after I came back from Rome, here, occasionally. I didn’t see him in his office. By that time, John Angel had come from England, and he was, of course, just the answer to Cram’s problem. He was experienced.

ROBERT BROWN: From what you could see was Cram’s very—oversaw every last detail of his work?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Would he—would you like ever to have worked for him as an architectural sculptor?

WALKER HANCOCK: No. No. It would have been very limiting, I could see. And very archaeological. It would have been founded on the books.

ROBERT BROWN: Whereas you at this point, ascribed to Grafly’s idea of the—to work from the model …

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, yes. I wanted to be—to be freer, from tradition and that.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned a bit earlier that during your time at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1921 to ’25 or so, you were given summer scholarships to travel to Europe.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, twice.

ROBERT BROWN: Can you describe a bit those two times?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, indeed I can. They were traveling scholarships, they were given to us to cover as many miles and see as much art as was possible. And the money was a very small fund, but it was enough to see us through, three or even four months if we were careful. So the first trip I began by landing in Scotland, and going down that wonderful row of cathedrals on the east side of England, and London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and the obvious places, and across France.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you sketching as you went along?

WALKER HANCOCK: I did, because in those days we hadn’t got the camera habit, as we have now, which I think is—So the things that I saw and sketched in those days I remember better than the things that I photographed even five or six years ago.

ROBERT BROWN: More time absorbing?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. And we sketched in museums and oddly enough that was an advantage, because in those days you weren’t allowed to photograph in museums. And, you had to leave your camera at the door, and if you wanted to remember the thing, you had to draw it, and you were allowed to do that. And, so then through France and the cathedrals within reach of Paris, through Dijon, Switzerland, and down as far as Naples, Paestum actually, I went all the way to Paestum that first year, and then—

ROBERT BROWN: Why did you want to go there, to see the buildings?

WALKER HANCOCK: To see the temples, yes, and I went out to do the Great Amalfi Drive, and I’m glad I did it in those days rather than now, and then—

ROBERT BROWN: You were hard working you’d say, during these tours?

WALKER HANCOCK: We worked hard, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You worked, particularly looking at one period or another, is that it?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, no. No, I think that was the wonderful thing, it was a period of discovery. We did our share of reading beforehand, and we knew a bit what to look for.

ROBERT BROWN: You traveled with fellow students?

WALKER HANCOCK: On and off, I did most of it alone, as a matter of fact, but we would meet, the friends would meet along the way, and go to museums together, have meals together, and then separate, and—

ROBERT BROWN: Did you run into your European counterparts?

WALKER HANCOCK: On the second trip, I did. The first was a rather lonely trip. It didn’t feel lonely, I was only too glad to be free. The second trip, I took the loop, I went from—the first trip I came back by way of Provence and saw something of Provence before coming home, and then the second trip, I went to England again, but the loop was in the other direction, and went into Germany, and back into Italy, and then to Spain, and back to Paris through Spain. So I had two ovals that covered the situation.

ROBERT BROWN: And then on the second trip you did meet some European sculptors.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. On the way. Well for instance, on one trip, must have been the second, I had an awfully nice encounter with the Bourdelle—Antoine Bourdelle was away but I had the courage to go to his apartment where Mrs.—Madame Bourdelle was perfectly charming. It was astonishing to see the wife of a great sculptor like that, who must be besieged by students constantly, take the time to be as charming to me as she was. And, then I had also the fascinating experience of presenting a letter to Marcel Dupree, I think it was that year … [a blank interval occurs here in tape] … Experiences like that that were just—I think it must be fairly rare nowadays, I don’t know—

ROBERT BROWN: Now, had Grafly suggested that you look up Bourdelle?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, oh no. He made no suggestions whatsoever, about our trips. None. And when the time came for me to compete for the Rome prize, he was quite against my going, which was—made me sad, because I admired him so much, and I didn’t want to offend him. But, he said, “If you go to Rome you will come back a stylist, you will be just like the rest of them,” so he didn’t give me a letter of recommendation.

ROBERT BROWN: Were his warnings well-founded, perhaps not in your case, but—

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, what he saw was students of his like Paul Manship who went over modelers, and came back carvers. Now not literally carvers, in the sense that they change from clay to marble, but their style looked as though they had, their treatment of the material was hardened up to correspond to the material, it was a new interest just beginning in this country of adapting one’s work to the material that it was in. I think—

ROBERT BROWN: There hadn’t been much regard for that before?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, and in fact, it was simply accepted among the sculptors who did larger work that they would produce the plaster model and somebody else would produce the clay. Or they would produce a large model for a medal, and somebody lese would make a mechanical reduction of it. And the result was the marble sculpture began to look a bit soft, and the medallic work began to look rather out of scale, rather too fine, and people like Manship, he was—Karl Bitter was the first of the men who perhaps experimented with the idea of making a stone monument look as it if had been carved in stone, and Manship at the same time, or nearly, in Europe, the Academy in Rome, Greece picked up the idea from Archaic art, obviously, of making bronze look as if it had been chased and making marble look as if it had been carved and not modeled and brought about a certain simplification of form, a certain sharpness of detail. In medals, it meant working in very small models so that the amount of reduction was after all, not too much taken advantage of. That your scale was nearly adapted to the final size, and that of course had so many ramifications, and when then the men like John Flanagan and all of them—Zorach, everybody, began to just take stones, boulders carve them. That was I think logical conclusion, logical development of these first very discrete suggestions that bronze is a hard material, and so is stone.

ROBERT BROWN: And yet a different kind of material. Now, was this one of the things that Grafly feared that you would—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, Grafly didn’t see it that way, Grafly himself had been a tombstone carver. He had carved before he had modeled, and I suppose to him modeling was a kind of a—a graduation, a progression from carving, because to him it represented it the fact that he was a sculptor, and not a tombstone carver. He was always very prejudiced against—

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think it was perhaps because in modeling you could be extremely manipulative?

WALKER HANCOCK: Grafly was frankly fascinated by the quality of French clay, by the beautiful fluidity of the—fluidity almost more than plasticity. It had this lovely sensitive response to anything your hand could suggest, and I think, I think that fascinated him. I had a wart here once, we used to use this part of the hand, the palm, a great deal, and I said, “Mr. Grafly, look at this,” and he said, “Oh, fine, cultivate that, you could do something with that.” (laughs) That is just as far a cry as you could imagine from the sort of thing that the so-called stylists were doing at that time.

ROBERT BROWN: He called them stylists, and you are now. Do you think that is because of the fact, for example Manship very distinctly developed stylizing didn’t he?

WALKER HANCOCK: He you see was under suspicion as far as Grafly was concerned, because he based his style quite frankly on the archaic Greek examples and the Indian, East Indian sculpture, that he saw. I think to Manship the first trip to Greece was the moment of revelation for him, when he saw all these wonderful, wonderful direct developments of—using hard materials, with the tools that they had.

ROBERT BROWN: Now, you did in fact go to Rome then, in ’25?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: And were you pretty much on your own when you got to the academy?

WALKER HANCOCK: You were entirely on your own except that in those days you were required to spend one month of the year doing a collaborative problem, which brought together a painter, a sculptor, an architect, and a landscape architect. Three teams they had, and we competed with each other in the solution of a given problem.

ROBERT BROWN: Which would be of what sort? Generally.

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I can show you one here.

ROBERT BROWN: The projects were of the type that were in the [a blank occurs here in the original transcript] tradition. Generally of classical structures?

WALKER HANCOCK: They were always classical, at that time, there was a very strong influence at the American Academy in Rome. Nothing exactly prescribed, nothing said, it was simply a matter of atmosphere, it was in the air, what was approved generally, and that produced in the case of one or two of the architects, abetted by their painters and sculptors, a modest rebellion once in a while. An architect would suddenly be brave enough to leave off a molding, and that was practically a revolution. We were given to feel Baroque, the wonderful Baroque painting and sculpture in Rome, was perhaps not the best thing, and even Hellenistic sculpture, Hellenistic Greek sculpture was not the best Greek sculpture.

ROBERT BROWN: It was decadent, or… ?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, it was a little too.

ROBERT BROWN: The people who gave you this feeling, were what the director of the Academy? Who was then the director?

WALKER HANCOCK: Wonderful man he was too, Gorham Philip Stevens, who had been in McKim White’s office. He felt strongly of course that Greek architecture was the great architecture and he himself was such a fascinating lecturer on the subject of Greek architecture and the wonderful examples of Roman architecture such as the Hadrian Villa.
[Brown flips tape]

WALKER HANCOCK: Such enthusiasms can be very contagious after all, and also such lack of interest as he showed, but there was, as I say, no coercion, and as far as our own individual work which occupied the other eleven months of the year, as far as that was concerned it was no direct effort to persuade us to do one sort of thing or another. We were required to do a certain amount of work.

ROBERT BROWN: They would check to see—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, that you were busy, and that you were there for three years. It wasn’t a case of your having to prove to them that you were good enough to be allowed to stay on as is the case now.

ROBERT BROWN: What kind of work were you doing on your own at that point? Did you begin to change from what you had been doing in Philadelphia?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I began by doing a head in marble carving it directly, I carved a [a blank occurs here in the original transcript] in marble, I did a certain amount of carving really seriously for the first time in my life, and then I did a seven foot figure. I did small decorated figures, I did quite a number of things, all pretty much—something that came pretty near the Pompeian tradition. (laughs) But—

ROBERT BROWN: You mean lively figures these were?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, but one thing that we had which was invaluable, and I think people don’t understand it now who send youngsters abroad, or even middle-aged people abroad except something to be shown as a result from there sojourn there. We weren’t pushed into solving a specific thing. I was doing a very large figure, I did that little tondo I showed you, and at the same time I did the head of a daughter, son or daughter of the local American consul in marble. At the end of that first year, that was the only thing that was done and ready for exhibition, and the Italian papers had a great deal to say about that. I remember that it said, Mr. [blank in transcript] said, “Il busto e abbastanza carino pero e possibile que questo sia il frutto di avano di lavoro.” And it did seem a little strange that the fruit of a year’s work, would be just this little marble bust, but I had been working very hard—

ROBERT BROWN: The others were just in the preparatory stages—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, but the next year when the tondo was shown I had a fascinating conversation with the King about that, which was in the end a criticism that has served me well for the rest of my life. You were very inclined to produce fairly eclectic looking things when you were surrounded by all these influences and fascinating styles, and the mood to experiment, you know. And, I had brought together in this revision of the tondo that I had done for Cram, quite a number of influences, and the King that year, always opened, he always opened the exhibition, it was a ceremonial affair, and he often went around with the Queen and ambassador and their retinue and said very little. But, this year he had expressed a desire to talk with some of the men and initiated, and—and when he came to this piece that I had done, he said, “I see you are fond of Romanesque art,” and I said that I was. And he said, “Have you ever been to Toscanella?” They called it Toscanella in those days, and I said that I had been there. And he said that “There are two Romanesque churches there, and I have asked to have the roofs restored, they were leaking, can you tell me if they have been?” And of course I couldn’t. Then he said, “What stone will this be executed in?” and I said, “I thought I would like to have it in the Pietri di Triani,” a lovely cream-colored stone. He said, “I don’t know that stone, but I know the Cathedral of Triani very well, and that has a beautiful Romanesque door, (laughs) and”—Then he said, “Now this Gloria that you have, those Serus heads are they not a Renaissance motif?” And I thought perhaps they were I wasn’t sure, and he said, “There is in St. Mark’s in Venice a Gloria in which stars have been used.” I have never been able to find that, but he did say that. And then he said, “I think the hair of those angels is Gothic, would you say it’s Gothic? And the [blank in transcript] certainly are Gothic, and the Christ’s drapery is where I see that you are fond of Romanesque.” And then he said, “And the clouds that the angels are leaning on, are they not Chinese?” (laughs) At that point I suppose I was blushing. (laughs) Noticeably at any rate. And he said, “But you have combined it all very harmoniously, and that is what matters.” And of course I realized that wasn’t all that mattered, but it turned out to be a very useful criticism, a very important point.

ROBERT BROWN: Golly, you must have been quite flabbergasted.

WALKER HANCOCK: I was, I was. Because he was known after all as an artillery officer who was interested in [blank in transcript] matics.

ROBERT BROWN: So that was perhaps one of the most important criticisms that you got while you were in Rome.

WALKER HANCOCK: It is very interesting how you do use criticisms that you come by very unexpectedly, accidentally, that was of course an extraordinary example. But, I remember having, hearing other artists quoted, and getting pointers secondhand, for instance I knew, Jean de Savage quite well, and I liked him immensely, but it was one of his assistants who said to me, “You know Jean said to me something once about background space, that I’ve always found useful,” and I said, “What was it?” And he said, “He says that a good background space almost invariably has two or more bodies connected by necks,” and then he showed me what that meant. It is kind of hard to put in works, but if you draw areas that are connected by narrow, narrower widths, you get much more interesting shapes, and simply open triangles or circles or bladder shapes, or what not.

ROBERT BROWN: In the end it helps to coalesce the whole thing too, doesn’t it?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, and it is always almost invariably true if you look at the wonderful design of the Greek vases, almost always you will find the background spaces have that characteristic. Little things like that, that your friends let drop, long after you should have discovered them for yourself, you know.

ROBERT BROWN: But, you were meanwhile discovering an awful lot on your own.

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, I think you do, and I think there is a great deal that you should discover for yourself, you never actually get into words, you just find yourself doing certain things almost unconsciously.

ROBERT BROWN: By this time were you feeling very confident, and confident in yourself? Perhaps you always have.

WALKER HANCOCK: I don’t think I ever did. I think that is one of the things that is a problem with some people, I always, this is a terrible thing to confess, but even when I was having the best time with what I was doing, happiest about it, almost one might say proudest of it, had the feeling that somebody else could do it better. I think that had to do perhaps with the way [we] were instructed in our day, we very seldom were told that we were doing well. We were told what mistakes we were making. Once in a while your instructor would say, “Not bad, that’s really not bad,” and I think the greatest compliment I ever got from Grafly was when I had done a little figure up here and he said, “Well, you won’t ever be ashamed of that.” But there was never any real encouragement in the form of patting on the back, and saying, “You know you did that better than anybody I know,” none of that kind of thing, it was always a search for mistakes. And, in fact I remember Sidney Waugh, my great friend, describing art school as a place where you went to make mistakes and have them discovered and eliminated. The idea of inspiring a student I think developed later.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you think it was the times, also—

WALKER HANCOCK: I think it was the generation, I think it was the way of looking at things, there was after all a time, as you know, a generation or two before Grafly’s perhaps, where the teacher would almost accomplish everything he had to do by his presence. They were so in awe of him that he could say almost nothing and they would get what they needed from it. If the master came into the room and came up to you and said, “Cherchez les plans,” something of that kind, you would ask yourself what he meant, and you would find out, and learn to do it. There was always this, and it goes back I suppose to Sir Joshua Reynolds’ answer to the lady who wanted her son to be a great painter, you remember that, and he said, “Madame if you want your son to be a great painter put every possible obstacle in his way.” And it was that attitude that—you see, the student had to be tough, he had to have the stamina the kind of grilling criticism that a good teacher would give him, and then he might go on—but that left its marks. Suppose you did have the stamina to go on you also had in the back of your mind, “Am I doing this as well as I might be,” so I think—

ROBERT BROWN: You were in great self-doubt.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: Now, did this have dire effects on some people?

WALKER HANCOCK: I don’t know, I don’t know if the effects were dire in my case, but I felt the difficulty.

ROBERT BROWN: Take a case like John Flanagan who—didn’t he go to pieces—or perhaps for other reasons. Were there any other—or conversely were there some artists, or sculptors particularly who were boastful, and extremely self-confident?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, actually the most self-confident artists I ever came in contact with were some of the poorest students I ever had. They didn’t need any encouragement. Nothing ever came of them either, but regarding them as artists, which by definition I suppose they were at the time.

ROBERT BROWN: This is a very interesting point you have made is an interesting conclusion to—

WALKER HANCOCK: I think people are variously affected. I think one attitude toward criticism is apt to be first of all apprehensive, you are afraid that you are going to have to change something that you think is all right and I’ll never forget I was discussing with John Gregory this thing about exchanging criticisms, which I have done with such marvelous and encouraging results with other sculptors. Manship and I were back and forth in each other’s studios constantly, as he put it, “saving each other time, but pointing out things.” But, John Gregory talked about this, he said there is only one kind of person I can ever stand having in my studio, and I said, “What kind of person is that?” And he said, “It’s the kind of person I can count on, when he comes in the studio saying, ‘God isn’t that beautiful.’” (laughs) Well, there you are, he needed that kind of a boost, and he would do better for it. And I think all of us do better for having a boost of that sort, some from perhaps, not necessarily a great critic.

ROBERT BROWN: But, you were by this time, even in the Rome years, and when you came back, beginning to get some boosts weren’t you? You were, by then you’ve mentioned Manship, were you getting to know him pretty well?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh yes, I knew him very well, yes, yes. And I had of course a great many other sculptors, say more specifically encouraging things about my work, and Grafly never would, although he showed it, he showed it in many ways, he wouldn’t say it, but, for instance when he was dying after that terrible motor accident.

ROBERT BROWN: When was this?

WALKER HANCOCK: 1929.

ROBERT BROWN: You were back by then?

WALKER HANCOCK: I had just arrived. I was in New York when it happened. When I got to Philadelphia, after having spoken to him on the telephone from New York, and he was perfectly all right, found him in the hospital, slowing dying from having been hit while he was standing on the curb. A runaway, hit and run driver, stolen car, he—before he died asked the director of the Academy to make me his successor. He never would have said any such thing to me, you see this went on behind—with him it was a kind of reticence, he was a very taciturn man—which meant that everything he said you paid attention to. He [had] that great advantage as a teacher.

ROBERT BROWN: Who were some of the other senior sculptors that you got to meet and know to some degree in the ‘20s? You mentioned going out to—to meeting Daniel Chester French, and visiting him, how did you come to meet him?

WALKER HANCOCK: I met him because he was on the committee that awarded the American Academy in Rome Prize. I met him, I had to call on him, I had to go call on James Earle Fraser, and Herbert Adams was another one. That’s how I happened to meet those men. And French was most cordial to me, and asked me to visit them, which I did for several days before I went abroad.

ROBERT BROWN: What was that experience like?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, it was a wonderful experience, he let me sit in his studio while he was working, and I enjoyed that, and I enjoyed the walks with him after the working day, and while he was working it was very amusing. He said nothing of any consequence having to do with the technique, having to do with what really matters in sculpture, his theory about sculpture, but had a great many little tricks like getting your foot out in time to catch a falling tool before it hit the floor. And, keeping the shellac bottle covered with a piece of cardboard with the brush stuck through it, and he used, I thought this was amusing, cheese cloth on this thumb while he modeled to keep the plastering from shining, little things like that, and then here again a criticism comes in an unexpected way. He asked me to look at the photographs that he was working from, he was doing a bust of Westinghouse at the time, and he said, “Do you see anything in these photographs that I have missed?” Well, I did see a certain wrinkle or two which I pointed out, and he said, “Oh, yes they are there, but they wouldn’t make good sculpture.” And, I don’t think that it had ever occurred to me even as late as that, that a thing that didn’t make good sculpture should be left out of a likeness. I thought that if you were going to produce a likeness, well, that was—

ROBERT BROWN: It should be pretty literal.

WALKER HANCOCK: He was so generous with his time, and stayed with me in off hours, walked and had a great deal of joy obviously in showing me the place, saying how surprised he was after all these years to find himself a country squire, he had never thought that would happen, and—

ROBERT BROWN: This was the grand place in the Berkshires, Chesterwood?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. And he said, “This is contrary to the biblical idea of how to build a house, because this house is built on sand, and it has stood very well,” (laughs) and he said too isn’t it a pity that you have to be walking in this lovely place, with an old man like me, instead of a beautiful young woman. He was very apologetic about that. But, we had happy times, at meals his daughter Mrs. Crescent was there at the time with her husband, and all together it was a perfectly lovely little visit. And my last of the kind before I went over to Rome.

ROBERT BROWN: You also knew Cecile Beaux?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, and I think that I hadn’t met her before she broke her hip. At the time when I first knew her she was painting, but she was painting much less, and it was a great trial to her, and so she began to be more and more interested in the work of other artists, particularly the young artists. And, she loved to come to the studio here in Lanesville, and I loved to go there to the Green Alley in East Gloucester. And our talk was largely about music, and that sort of thing, and she gave me quite a collection of records, and we would play these together, I have them still here.

ROBERT BROWN: What was her taste chiefly?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well of course Bach was at the very top, and I think the others, there were Mozart, and the rest, but I think that Bach was her great hero, and he was mine at the time, still is. And, so—looking over her correspondence too, I see a great deal of reference to concerts that we mustn’t miss. Concerts in New York as well as here, because it so happened that in New York, my studio was very near hers, and I lived on Grammercy Park, which was just a block away from her studio, she was 19th Street. So, it became a very close friendship, and she appeared often when work was going [blank in transcript] and when she left I always felt that it was going in the right direction, and that things weren’t so hopeless after all. She was a great inspirer, she had that gift of—her own enthusiasm was so intense that it was impossible for her to leave a person down, she would always give a lift by her—even though she was physically suffering at the time, and sad about not being productive, she was, and of course her stories were perfectly marvelous experiences, and I have here letters showing that she followed my trips abroad very carefully, being interested in what I was seeing just at that moment, and so on.

ROBERT BROWN: Did she, was she teaching then as well?

WALKER HANCOCK: At that time she wasn’t teaching, she had taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, just before I got there.

ROBERT BROWN: Through her did you meet other artists, people you hadn’t known?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I met people where who were her friends, that I would have missed otherwise, but her criticisms were quite remarkable. They weren’t criticisms of a sculptor, she saw things always in terms of how the light fell on what you were doing, and how to make it fall the right way. And, she was—

ROBERT BROWN: It sounds not unlike what you said was St. Gauden’s approach to sculpture, concern about light and shadow.

WALKER HANCOCK: I think, I hadn’t really connected it, but as you suggest it may have been in a way related, perhaps having something to do with the generation, with the way things were looked at, with the generation before us.

ROBERT BROWN: Were these other painters that you knew up here in Lanesville and New York? You lived in New York through the 30s didn’t you?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes, there were a number of painters, of course I knew, here I knew Leon Kroll very well, Barry Faulkner, and—

ROBERT BROWN: You would have known him in New York wouldn’t you have?

WALKER HANCOCK: I could have known him in New York, but actually I knew Barry Faulkner best because of his annual visits to Lanesville. He came every year to see Paul Manship, and in fact Paul Manship wouldn’t have been here at all if it wasn’t for that pool that you see outside there.

ROBERT BROWN: A quarry pool.

WALKER HANCOCK: He came to call one day, we were old friends by that time that he did come, and he sat down there and looked out and said, “I have to have a quarry pool, where can I get one?” And I didn’t know where and the war was coming on, and things looked not very hopeful for him, but he managed to buy one down in Lanesville, and despite the prohibition against building, was able to get a house torn down, and rebuilt and in fact he brought over a great barn from Rockport, and made that his studio. Eric Gugler was his architect, and so we became neighbors as well as friends, and it was very useful to us because we were back and forth constantly, to each other’s studio.

ROBERT BROWN: And you frequently gave each other critiques. What did you think of his work, he is an example of what Grafly would say was a stylist, isn’t he?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I think what matters now about Manship’s work isn’t superficially his style, or any other movement that he was interested in, it is the fact that I honestly believe that he was the most talented designer that ever worked in this country. Even now, after all these years, looking back, all of his early works straight through to the end, it seemed that he had an infallible sense of design, I think perhaps it was all summed up in one sentence that [blank in transcript] spoke of him one day, we were talking about Manship’s work. And [blank] said, “Yes, he knows what to do.” And he did know what to do, on that medal behind you I had a very difficult problem squeezing those two figures into a triangle in a circle, and with all the foreshortening that I did everything, I seemed to have managed it, but there was one corner that just wouldn’t work, I couldn’t fill it with anything that seemed to act correctly with the lines of the figures. And one day he came in and I said, “Paul, there isn’t anything that will go in this corner, I have tried everything,” and he picked up a pencil and he said, “Have you tried this?” And he drew that and the design was finished. It was just as easy as that, and he was just as quick as that. No problem at all.

ROBERT BROWN: An innate ability, essentially to compose.

WALKER HANCOCK: And that was his forte, I think all the business of style and subject and period, anything else that has interested people in his work, is secondary to that. An amazing native sense of composition.

ROBERT BROWN: What did he like to talk about beside—apart from critiquing each other’s work?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, he liked to talk about eating, and about the trips that he had made, and he didn’t like to talk about art, and he never read art criticisms, and he made a great point of the fact that that was all a great waste of time. And, it was [blank in transcript], the joys of life, that he talked about.

ROBERT BROWN: Did he enjoy life a great deal?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes. He enjoyed life a great deal. It was on the other hand a very serious, a number of very serious subjects that he would talk about, he was concerned with art education, the Academy in Rome, he was enormously interested in that; represented his happiest days, to him, and to most of us. He could be very serious about those things, but largely it was good humor, and the joy of life pretty much. And especially travel to Italy.

ROBERT BROWN: What was his personality like?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, he was a very, very, congenial person. He could be quite abrupt if he felt somebody was perhaps on the point of flattering him, or leading him into something he didn’t want to talk about. I remember one day, this was repeated to him, but it was so characteristic of him, he sat next to a lady at dinner, a lady unknown to him before that evening, and she was I think a little embarrassed to find the right subject to start talking about. She said, “Oh, Mr. Manship your Prometheus at the Rockefeller Center is … “ “Oh,” he said, “can’t you find something interesting to speak of?” (laughs) That was the kind of thing he always would do.

ROBERT BROWN: He felt it was a talked-out subject or something. He would just switch it off. Was he very hard working, very productive?

WALKER HANCOCK: He had a perfectly phenomenal power of concentration. When I first saw him in Paris he was working on a huge plaster of “Europa and the Bull,” and in a big studio down in the Latin Quarter.

ROBERT BROWN: This was on one of your trips?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, one of my trips, actually at that time I think I was a fellow at the Academy in Rome, and I had gone north to Paris in the summertime. And there he was hard at work with his rasps breaking down one side of the thing, while numbers of children were crawling all over the rest of it. He only had what four or five children, but there were all there, all crawling over this thing, all shouting at each other and making the biggest possible rumpus, and he apparently was unaware of this. (laughs) It was such a funny picture. But, he did have that power, he was noted for it, power of concentration, when he once was absorbed by—

ROBERT BROWN: Well at least today, he secured some of the nicest commissions in this country.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, he came along just at the time for that, it was a time before they had begun to use the stripped architecture, and he—every building that was worthy of the name building, had to be decorated, and if it was a public building, it was a foregone conclusion that it would be decorated with sculpture, and there was an enormous demand for it. And, because of his training at the Academy, his self-training, you may say, because a good deal of it was a result of his own travels, and his own observation. He was able to do the right things for the place, and I think in the end those of us who had that feeling about the pleasure of collaborating with architects of doing something for architectural settings, a pleasure which is very greatly diminished these days, but still a very, very great one. I think that the idea of doing the fitting thing is the foundation of one satisfaction, that you feel that you have solved the problem, by doing, but that place, or that building, or that symbolic opportunity requires, then you have done a good job, and I think that is the thing that you work for, certainly in his case. It was not—of course he was not unique in that, the whole generation of sculptors who worked for architects, felt the same way.

ROBERT BROWN: They didn’t place great store by the autonomy of a piece of sculpture.

WALKER HANCOCK: No, no. This may be, this has suddenly occurred to me, we were talking about Daniel Chester French, this may be a very fine point, that marks Manship’s generation from French’s generation. Because I remember in our conversations at Lenox something that French said about a piece that he had done, for a chapel. It was a war memorial of a young man holding up a torch and it was to be in the chapel of one of the schools here in New England, St. Mark’s or St. Paul’s, one of them I’ve forgotten which. And, I said I admired the figure, and he said, “Yes, and I think it will dominate the building although the architects don’t know it.” And you see that would not have been the attitude of the next generation. We would have tried I think, to make it find its place in the chapel, to live up to its requirements, but not to be the center of interest.

ROBERT BROWN: That is well put, that capsulizes [sic] pretty well. Were there other sculptors with whom you were pretty close, in the 20s and 30s of your own generation?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, my own generation, we were, for instance Sidney Waugh and I were very great friends, [blank in transcript], who is still working bravely.

ROBERT BROWN: Another sculptor, although I guess he was somewhat older, who you worked with at one time or another was Adolph Weinman.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, and I have always been so grateful for that experience. He was the sculptor in charge of the decoration of the Post Office Department building in Washington, and he chose two sculptors to work with him, and I was one of them, and he made a little sketch, which I have in the basement, it is only about that big, showing his idea for the composition for the pediment of the Pennsylvania Avenue side. And, so I made from that the scale model, in my studio in New York, and had the great pleasure and benefit of his coming in and looking at it, criticizing it, and looking at it, commenting. His criticisms were valuable because they were entirely those of a man experienced in how to make sculpture carry on a building. This was something that I didn’t know very much about at the time, and yet—

ROBERT BROWN: This was the early 30s.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes. And yet, he was always so appreciative that you felt quite set up when he left, you felt this is really working. He had a great sense of humor, but the thing that I admired about it was that he was clearly the disciplined Germanic sculptor of the old school. I could just imagine them all having been like Weinman in one way or another. In looks too, with his pointed beard, he looked the part very much, and beards weren’t as common in those days as they are now, and they meant something. And, so that—well I will tell you a little story that will show you how meticulous he was about these things as the developed. We were working from the same model. The name was Carl, Carl Sary, and he was an excellent model, very, very strong man, and he went to Weinman in the afternoon after having worked for me in the morning, and one day Mr. Weinman called up and said, “Hancock, Sary is a very fine model, but he had one fault and you will have to be very careful or you will be misled by it, his pectorals are too low, now just be sure about your proportions.” That’s the way he talked. Imagine sculpture these days, being regarded in those terms. It is such a different world from the way that we think now. So, I went back to my work and to Sary and his pectorals didn’t look too low to me but I put them where I thought they should be, and one day we shifted, and Sary went to him in the afternoon, no, no went to him in the morning, and came to me in the afternoon. Immediately there was a call from Mr. Weinman, “Hancock, Sary’s pectorals are all right in the morning, must be because he is tired in the afternoon.” And this of course is true, that’s what happens to a person, but the fact that he followed him as closely as that, and was in a way so completely influenced by this live model, I think in terms of today is very interesting to look back.

ROBERT BROWN: Also via the preconception of what should be the correct formula—

WALKER HANCOCK: Indeed it did, there was a classic canon there, that he wanted to see respected.

ROBERT BROWN: Even if the live model couldn’t.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You collaborated with him on this one project.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, just that one. I of course, I then afterwards knew him very well, and saw a great deal of him, and liked him immensely, and he had a lovely sense of humor too. But, it was that kind of thing, that very happy relationship that you could only have with a person that you were collaborating with on the same job.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, can you give an example of his sense of humor.
[blank interval on tape]

ROBERT BROWN: Then was it in the 30s that you began—you got to know the author Booth Tarkington, did you get to meet him up here or in New York?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I met him first in Philadelphia, because he was a great friend of very dear friends of mine, and we used to come to Kennebunkport in the summertime, but I saw him mostly in Philadelphia and Indianapolis. I went out there to visit him more than once. And, the head that I did from him, did of him, I did in Philadelphia at the house of my friends, it took me four and one-half days, and I didn’t work on it afterwards.

ROBERT BROWN: And that’s pretty quick working isn’t it?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well it was for me, Grafly could do a head oh, in less time than that, but I don’t think I ever beat four and one-half days for a finished portrait.

ROBERT BROWN: What led to your friendship, yours and Tarkington?

WALKER HANCOCK: I think it was a mutual friendship, he was enormously interested to talk about sculpture, he was of course a great enthusiast on the subject of painting, and sculpture too and he had his theories about it, and he was glad to have some young man to discuss these things with. And, when he posed he was just as entertaining as his stories, matter of fact he was very much like his stories, in the way in which he would recount his experiences. When the thing—while it was being done we were talking, with these friends who were with me about the projection of this and how this receded and how this was varied from the other side, after a while he said, “This is the first time in my life that I have been regarded as a mere object,” and then when he saw the head being cast covered with the blue coating of plaster, which is the first coat that goes on, he said, “Now, for the first time I looked like something from the nursery,” it was just like that, that kind of thing. But, he talked a great deal, and very seriously too, about the relation of painting and sculpture and writing, and he gave me some pointers about composing in sculpture, that I wish I had had a little earlier, because as I mentioned before I think that a part of our training that was perhaps detrimental was this constant self-criticism as you worked, “Am I doing the right thing, is this going to work,” that kind of questioning. And he said, “When you write don’t criticize yourself, just write, get it out, if you can’t think of the right work leave a dash, and when it is all down, then you can go back and look it all over and see where you can improve it, and fit in the words that you missed,” and so on. That of course, applied to composition in painting and sculpture is invaluable. And it is the way to do it. Not to mistrust any idea that comes to your head, but to get it out, and have a record of it and then you can go back and if it doesn’t work then you’ve lost nothing, and if it does work, you’re launched. He was a very conservative person in his critical judgment. He was very suspicious of all modern painting and sculpture, but more suspicious of the critics, and he had in fact a collection of clippings from the newspaper critics, that demonstrated to him two things; first of all, that they didn’t know their own medium, which was writing; and second, that they deliberately avoided saying what they meant, in order to sound erudite, and perhaps gain a few extra pennies from the amount of news—

ROBERT BROWN: Additional lines.

WALKER HANCOCK: The additional lines it would take, and I wish I knew what had become of that collection, he showed it to me, his real one, it was a scrapbook.

ROBERT BROWN: Was he quite obsessed with critics? They were quite important to him in his career weren’t they, even though he couldn’t respect them.

WALKER HANCOCK: He didn’t speak to me ever of literary critics, these were art critics, that he was talking about, and all his collection had to do with art criticism.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, did he have quite a large acquaintance among artists, or were you one of his closest artist friends?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, he knew quite a number of artists, yes. Paul Manship he knew later very well, and he was painted of course, I forgot about that, now—I think he knew quite a number of painters and sculptors, talked about them a great deal. His personal acquaintance with the Silverman brothers who sold him his own collection of first of all eighteenth century British portraits, and later some old Italian masters, was the basis of his book, The [blank in transcript, probably meant to be Rumbin] Galleries. And he really knew their tricks and he learned them from the dealers, first-hand, who were very good friends and were perfectly free to tell him how they lured people into buying things that they had for sale. The most roundabout method.

ROBERT BROWN: But, he was a man who could laugh at his own mistakes or his own being used.

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. He said, “When I finish this,” he looked at it as if it had been [blank in transcript] of somebody else. And he said, “I think you would know that he was a writer, I think you would know that he was a comedian, and I think you would know that he was fond of observing human nature, and that he had simply decided that because it was human nature the best thing to do would be just to laugh about it.” (laughs) And, he said it in just the way that he had been writing about his own eighteenth century portraits, analyzing the character of those people, it was very much in that vein.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, that was quite a compliment to you wasn’t it?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I was amused by it.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, by this time you were getting, as we say today, feedback of a very nice sort, weren’t you? From friends like that.

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes, it was very encouraging. By that time I think I had gotten over this constant questioning, maybe this is the wrong thing. Actually in modeling a head you don’t have it because the head is right there, the man is right there, and you completely forget yourself, you have only the form to reproduce and the character of the man as it comes out in his changing expressions, and his conversation, so it is the least self-conscious thing that you could possibly do I think, modeling a quick portrait of another person.

ROBERT BROWN: Whereas something that is thematic or to be expressing an idea—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, if it is you own idea and your own composition, then there is room for all kinds of questions.
[end of first interview with Walter Hancock]

TAPE RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH WALKER HANCOCK, August 8, 1977
At Gloucester, Massachusetts, by Robert Brown

ROBERT BROWN: We could begin today’s session by perhaps talking about some of the colleagues and at least other sculptors that you have known. I think you met at least Lorado Taft when you were quite a young person. Could you explain that, describe it?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I think Lorado Taft was the first professional sculptor that I ever met. We had summers near Chicago, and the great thing was to take a trip into the Art Institute, and some friend gave me a letter of introduction to Lorado Taft. And, he was so kind, he took me to his studio and showed me the Fountain of Time that he was working on and he also introduced me to the enlarging machine. And, that was the first of course that I had ever seen. And I really remember very little of him, except for his extreme kindness to a young boy whose work he didn’t know, but who showed interest in sculpture.

ROBERT BROWN: This was before you went to the Pennsylvania Academy?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, yes. Long before. I was a young kid.

ROBERT BROWN: As you look back, do you admire his work as you look back at it now?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I’m not sure that the piece I admire most isn’t the very thing that I saw him working on, The Fountain of Time. That great imagination. I don’t know what ever became of it, I don’t know that it was ever executed, but it was to me a great wonder to see this vast thing in this studio.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned when we first talked about going out to the Berkshires, to Chesterwood to stay with Daniel Chester French. Is there anything else or other times that you met him, anything else you can tell us about him?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, he was so full of very wise little remarks that it is very hard to sit down and try to think of them all together, they come to you from time to time. One thing I do remember his saying, which I haven’t been very good about obeying, was an admonition [to] never criticize your own work to anybody. “People will quote you, but forget to quote the source.” I loved that. And then there was a time when I was visiting them, he had just gone through this great struggle with lighting the Lincoln Memorial. And it had been accomplished very successfully, and he gave me these two now very famous photographs taken one in the reflected light before the overhead light was turned on correctly, and the other with the present proper lighting. And I have been able to use these to good effect, in arguing for light, for the right light, very often. But, I remember his saying, shaking his head, “Sculpture is at the mercy of the light.” And it is perfectly true. And while lighting out of doors can be very—that relentless business of the artificial light turned on your piece from the wrong direction. It is a very disheartening thing.

ROBERT BROWN: Had you not been as sensitive to that, till you met him?

WALKER HANCOCK: I think that every student is sensitive to it, but I think you’ve got to be a professional and must have been exposed to the anguish of seeing your finished work badly lighted to fully realize what a serious thing it is.

ROBERT BROWN: Did your teacher at Pennsylvania Academy in architectural sculpture stress how sculpture must relate to its surroundings?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, but I think that, I think I never heard him mention light. In fact I wonder some time whether architects do think as much about lighting as they should. I can think of some good examples where they haven’t. Very good architects, too. (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: That you tried to deal with?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes. Think of the difficulty presented to the sculptor for instance by the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, where you have the light coming from below, and from all around, not to mention the moving lights of the traffic at night. It is an impossible situation, for a portrait statue.

ROBERT BROWN: Is that one—or something like that you ever had to deal with?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, as a matter of fact, I had to deal with that particular statue because dear old Evans, Rudolph Evans, was finishing that at the end of his active life, he was suffering at the time.

ROBERT BROWN: This was in the 1930s?

WALKER HANCOCK: Just before the war; actually the war had started. And they weren’t able to cast it in bronze at once because of the war. But, he sent for me to go down to New York, and work by the day to simply give him the physical strength to pull it through. He was a delightful man, another very, very gentle person. I think, isn’t it interesting that whole group of—that whole generation of sculptors were very gentle, kindly people. So different from some that (laughs) we can think of that have come along since. When you think of Herbert Adams who was like him in a way, French of course, and then a little later Fraser and his wife, the same kind of people exactly. Eager to do anything to help younger sculptors.

ROBERT BROWN: When did you meet the Frasers? In the 20s or—did you work closely with them?

WALKER HANCOCK: I didn’t work closely with them. I knew them quite well. I think that I must have met both of them shortly after—oh, as a matter of fact I first met James Earl Fraser while I was competing for the Rome prize. We had to go and call on the members of the jury, who awarded the prize, make ourselves known and talk with them. And, that took me to his studio among others, I suppose Adams was another one, French another. I think that was the way I met all those men.

ROBERT BROWN: They were all very giving to a younger artist.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes. To jump for a moment, almost a generation, apropos of that same business of going to call on members of the jury. There is a friendship that resulted from such a call between John Gregory and Sidney Waugh, that started because Gregory was likely to be less giving than the others had been. He was a—Gregory was English of course, perhaps Irish, and had great wit, very little patience with people at times, and Sidney had to go and ring his doorbell, and ask if he might come to see him to talk about the Rome prize. He had made an appointment properly, and Gregory expected him, but when he came to the door, he said, “Now, you’ve come to talk about the Pris de Rome haven’t you.” And Sidney said, “Yes.” And Gregory said, “Are you going to come into my studio and talk about sculpture? Because I don’t want to talk about sculpture.” And so Sidney said, “Well, what would you like to talk about Mr. Gregory?” And he said, “Well, let me see, I’m interested in ….”
[tape ends and Brown inserts new tape]

WALKER HANCOCK: So Sidney said, “Well what would you like to talk about?” And John Gregory said, “Well, I’m interested in eighteenth century poetry, I collect first editions of eighteenth century romantic poetry.” And Sidney said, “Well, I have a first edition of Endymion that I bought in Como for three lire.” “Oh,” John said, “Come right in.” (laughs) And he went in, and they spent the rest of the afternoon writing poetry, writing sonnets, and Sidney got the Rome prize. (laughs) It was the kind of friendship that resulted from another kind of personality.

ROBERT BROWN: Was Gregory a rather eccentric man? Did you get to know him?

WALKER HANCOCK: Not really eccentric. He was unexpected, he always had a little unexpected twist to his humor, and he had a great sense of humor. He very frankly said that John Flaxman was his inspiration, and that when he did those, I think, splendid reliefs on the Folger Library, he had derived his sense of drama and composition from the Flaxman drawings, but of course not the treatment. I think it was Flaxman’s engravings, and not his sculpture that inspired him. But, I remember him as a very humorous and wise man, he knew a great deal, a great deal about things other than sculpture.

ROBERT BROWN: What about Sidney Waugh, did you get to know him?

WALKER HANCOCK: I got to know Sidney Waugh very well, because he came to me in Rome, with a letter of introduction from Daniel Chester French, and we became very good friends, rather on the same terms that he had become the friend of John Gregory. He wouldn’t ever show me anything that he was doing. He was studying in Rome in an anatomy class taught by [a blank occurs here in original transcript] an expatriate refugee, a Russian sculptor. And, as warm as our friendship was, he would never let me see a thing that he had done. The first I knew of his work was actually that he had won the Rome prize, and was going to go over as a fellow. But, he as you know did a great—he was an extremely clever designer, and did a great deal of work for the—for glass, for glass engravings, and Corning Glass. And, I’m not sure that his greatest talent didn’t lie in that. We had this pleasant kind of association. He was working with the figures on the opposite side of the triangle in Washington, while I was doing the pediment for the Post Office Department, and one of the figures that he was carrying out was the figure of the Guardian Ship which is on the entrance of the Archives building. One day he called me up and said, “Walker, I can’t model feet, come down and model feet for me.” (laughs) So, I went down and here is this superb figure, beautifully done with great monumental hands, and he could perfectly well have done the feet, but I modeled the feet. (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: Did he lack a little confidence in certain areas?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well he had the feeling that his hands weren’t as good as his feet. (laughs)
Robert Brown; Well, particularly then was Waugh more or less your age, was he?

WALKER HANCOCK: He was a little younger, just a little bit younger.

ROBERT BROWN: Were there others of your type, or your age that you were pretty close with? In the 30s?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, Charles Rudy was a little younger than I am, a little younger. Bruce Moore studied with me in Grafly’s class, he was a little younger, and we never worked together although I was associated with him on a few projects. I got to know them very well, and I liked them both very much.

ROBERT BROWN: Others that you mentioned … You talked about Adolph Weinman last time, what about Albin Polasek?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, Albin Polasek was a student of Grafly’s long before my day, and he in fact had been the prize student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in his time, and had become practically a legend by the time I got there, and I had all this in mind when I first met him, and in fact, when I met him in Chicago all the stories that I had heard about him became suddenly true, because I could see that they really were in character. For instance, he was a cripple, I suppose he had had polio as a child, he limped very badly, but was enormously powerful, and an extremely modest and considerate person. He would never swear; they said that the worst thing that anybody ever heard him say, when he was absolutely enraged by something that one of the other students had done, was “You fellow.” (laughs) That was as far as his profanity ever went. But, another thing that I am sure is true that they used to tell, was that he came in late one day while Grafly was criticizing the class, and not wishing to interrupt the criticism or disturb anybody, he picked up his modeling stand with the heavy clay figure on it, which must have weighed some three hundred pounds, and held it up in the air and walked across the room with it, and set it down, so that it wouldn’t make the noise of scraping wheels. (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: Did you get to know him when you were on your own later?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I did. I talked with him in Chicago, and I verified some of these stories. Perhaps one of these would be interesting to you because it has a bearing on the way that he worked, eventually. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and as a boy had become so accustomed to carving wood, which was of course the tradition of that country, that by the time he came to Philadelphia to study, clay was a strange and rather difficult material to him. And we had to bring in compositions to be criticized once a month, and these compositions of course were developed by experiment, a great many changes as you could imagine, and it was all we could do to put them together in clay. But, he asked permission to bring in his wood, because it was easier for him to do them in wood than in clay, and I’m sure that’s true. I remember walking under the L in Chicago with him, and when the noise had got to the point where he could be heard again, we stopped, and he said, “You know, when the bridge of St. John of Nepomulk in Prague was built, the citizens almost had the work stopped because of their complaints of the noise of the hammer on a chisel, they didn’t like it. What would they have done here?” (laughs) Well, he was a charming, charming man. Very strong work.

ROBERT BROWN: The others that you could talk about now, that you have mentioned before.

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I knew some of them much better than I did for instance Lipschitz, but I have a much stronger impression of Lipschitz than I have of some of the people that I actually had more to do with simply because our encounters were rather intense always. He was, as you know, a very strong personality, had enormous charm, he could make people feel that he was perfectly angelic, and he really could be so, at times. And then he could be very overbearing, and he would dominate a jury to such an extent that if he were on a jury there was really no use of anyone else being there.

ROBERT BROWN: Can you give us some examples of his—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I can give you a very good—his action on a jury—I can give you a very specific one. We were called to judge, or to find a sculptor to execute a piece for the United Nations. And on the jury were, let me see, Zorach, David Smith, Manship originally, but he retired, and there was another. At any rate, the idea was to choose fifty sculptors, of whom we would request photographs and then with these photographs choose a number, say perhaps seven or ten, to submit models, which would be paid for. And, then one of these models would be chosen to be executed for the United Nations. And, the choice of the fifty went fairly easily, but when it came down to picking the few from that number of entries, invariably any suggestion that any of us would make Lipschitz would counter by saying, “No, no, we know what he would do, I would rather have this person whose work we don’t know. He might surprise us. He might do something.” This was repeated, to the point where I think the only really known sculptor who was invited was Naguchi, I think. I didn’t know the names of any of the others, and that seemed to be the point. Well, the result was what one would expect, we went to see the models that were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, and there they were. Perfectly ludicrous, and Lipschitz was the first to speak, and he said, “See what we have done. Our crime, see what we have done.” Well, I think an award was made, but it was clear that none of them would be carried out. That was the kind of thing—

ROBERT BROWN: What he got you into was picking people who weren’t reliable, or hadn’t—

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, well we were looking for people whose work showed that they had the experience to do this very large piece that was proposed.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you speak out very much in this?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, we did, but oddly enough, the people—we were all fairly (laughs) vocal and yet somehow it came to nothing. It was just curious, a very strong personality, curiously dominant in the case of a jury.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, some more on David Smith, how was he?

WALKER HANCOCK: I don’t remember his saying very much.

ROBERT BROWN: Did Zorach speak out very much?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, but quietly. Zorach was not a vociferous person at all, he had a kind of pleasant headiness about him, in a good sense, you know. It was a curious experience …. And, then another example of the kind of thing that you could run into with Lipschitz. I used to have various sculptors come to my class in the Pennsylvania Academy, and criticize the students, and then talk with them afterwards, particularly after a competition. And he was very kind, and very glad to come and gave them very generous criticism, very much to the point, quite traditional criticism, just what any other good instructor would have given, which was what they needed to be reassured that they weren’t missing something very far out, by not having people like that around.

ROBERT BROWN: And then he gave them traditional criticism, which surprised them I suppose.

WALKER HANCOCK: One very sweet little girl went up to him afterwards, and said that she was so glad to meet him, because she had studied with Mestrovich at Syracuse and Mestrovich had spoken very so often of Lipschitz. And Lipschitz bridled and said, “What did he say, did he like my work?” And she said, “Oh, yes, oh yes he did.” “Well, I’m very glad because I don’t like him, I don’t like his work. His work is bombastic, and no one has the right to be bombastic.” And this rather amazed me. He had a way of being so generous with artists whose work was traditional, tame, if it was good, if it was well done. But, being tremendously impatient with people who did certain kinds of sculpture that weren’t his. For instance, the time I was seeing something of him, he was absolutely down on everything that was abstract. He pointed at a piece of abstract sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum once, and said, “Look, nobody has the right to do abstractions.” And of course he had done them himself, at a time. Which again amused me because there again—and this was true with most of the sculptors who I’ve served with on juries in that way—all sculptors are out of patience with work that isn’t dated as of today in their opinion. I remember Bill Zorach once at the Academy of Fine Arts, we were about to give a medal to a piece which was rather abstract, very much more abstract than anything Zorach ever attempted. And he said, “Well, you could do that sort of thing fifteen years ago, but you can’t do that now.” But they were after all doing such work, and more extremely, in the few years later, it was just every man seemed to have his idea of the proper dating for a thing. That entered so much into his estimate of the work, in awarding prizes.

ROBERT BROWN: So Zorach thought that this would have been avant-garde fifteen years before. You might have given a medal then, but not now. Whereas your attitude is a bit broader do you think? You try to look at it on its own merit?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I try. I haven’t the ability, I’m sorry to say, to look at myself critically enough, and see what I, what ridiculous things I may have said and done on juries. But, I’ve tried to put aside that question of what belongs in what year, as much as possible. Because I really do enjoy so many different kinds of sculpture, and it doesn’t really make a great deal of difference to me what year the thing was done in.

ROBERT BROWN: Including abstract sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh, indeed. Yes, yes. Not all of it either, by any means, I have my own choices, but they aren’t based on dates.

ROBERT BROWN: Were there any sculptor friends, who were abstract sculptors?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes. I have had very good friends who became abstract sculptors. I found that the best of them were all grounded as we were, in the traditional thing. I remember once Archipenko saying to me really very seriously about learning to draw, and learning to model, and he said, “If you can’t draw what you see, how can you hope to draw what you feel?” He said it with such emphasis, you know.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you meet him fairly early on, Archipenko, when did you—

WALKER HANCOCK: I knew him during my teaching days. I had a great deal to do with other sculptors at that time, and [we] were collecting work to go into the annual exhibitions. And, we visited all the sculptors that we possibly could, and we—it was the way for instance that I first heard of Sandy Calder, I think I told you this before—but we went through his father’s studio, Sterling Calder, to get some of his work. He was not interested in showing us what he was doing, he wanted to tell us about his son, who was doing these wonderful things in wire, and he was so proud of them.

ROBERT BROWN: There was really no great [blank in transcript] then. In a way, here is a father who is a very successful, traditional sculptor, proud of his son who is moving into abstraction, really, at least with untraditional materials.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes. Well, I think Sterling Calder was a man of great imagination and with a keen interest in everything going on in life, and this was one of the great things that was going on—happening in his family.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you get to meet—get to know either of the Calders very well?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I felt that I knew Sterling Calder fairly well, I don’t think—I may just have met Sandy Calder. He by the way was one of the fifty invited to send photographs of his work, the only one who didn’t send photographs. He sent instead a letter, which I thought was delightful. It said, “Gentlemen, if by this time you don’t know what my work looks like, it’s just too damn bad.” (laughs) And if he had sent a piece, photographs, he wouldn’t have been selected obviously.

ROBERT BROWN: Is Zorach somebody you knew over a number of years?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, I saw him on and off over a number of years.

ROBERT BROWN: What was he like? You characterized him at the U.N. jury, but what was he—in general, any other aspects of him that—

WALKER HANCOCK: He is hard to describe, he was always, he—I think affected the peasant. He enjoyed saying slightly vulgar things, with the hope that he might shock somebody. The man wasn’t really like that.

ROBERT BROWN: Sort of barnyard humor.

WALKER HANCOCK: But, he loved that kind of humor, yes. And he would bring it out in unexpected places. But, he was a person with great understanding of sculpture. Of all of sculpture. I used to love to hear him talk about the work in these exhibitions, as he went around looking for somebody to give a prize to. And, he began after all as a watercolorist. His sculpture grew out of his experiments with boulders in Maine. And, he kept some of that character of the boulder even when it was modeled. Even to the end when he did fairly free figures. Which I think weren’t his best. I think his forte was in sculpture, that still somehow related to the rock, to the—but he wrote a superb book on stone carving. And a book which sculptors like Herbert Adams, more old-fashioned people respected as perhaps the best that had been done. And it came from really his own experiments and experience, self-taught.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you ever go into this, stone carving? Many people did in the thirties.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, that was a time when I really couldn’t go in—I’ve carved marble but I have never carved direct [blank in transcript], I’ve taken a rock and tried—I just know a little bit what those problems would be, but not as the result of any real discipline in the thing. I’m sorry to say, because I would have loved to do it. I enjoy carving more than I do modeling.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, your initial course with Grafly was mainly the modeling as well.

WALKER HANCOCK: It was clay, all together.

ROBERT BROWN: You also got to know, I don’t know just when, Carl Millis. Where did you meet him?

WALKER HANCOCK: Millis I met in New York after he had come to [blank]. And he used to come to the sculpture society meetings there. I didn’t know him personally very well, although I feel that I knew him. We were friends, and it was always in a very happy jovial way. He believed in the happiness of life, and the pleasures, the beauty of things around him. He was—I think that he was a great spirit, I think that his contribution was immense in this country. He came along at a very good time too. We were so concerned with the help of the galleries and museums, with the doctrinaire approach to art, especially sculpture. And, to have this blithe spirit come in from, wherever it happened to be, Sweden, it might have been from anywhere, and do these beautiful lively things not committed to any doctrine or any theory, but just for charm and beauty of—

ROBERT BROWN: Many of you American sculptors of the 30s were getting very, very serious with political overtones.

WALKER HANCOCK: Oh yes. Political overtones, not necessarily, but I think that people had begun to preach about sculpture so much and read so much, I mean everybody from [blank] down as—telling what sculpture was, and very rightly so much of it was. We needed to be brought back to a respect for the medium itself. We needed it very much, but at the same time it involved a very serious point of view, and the light-hearted attitude that the Germans, even, were so easily capable of and their out-of-doors sculpture did so much to enrich and rejoice life.

ROBERT BROWN: Who do you mean, Lanebrook or Caldwell?

WALKER HANCOCK: No, not Lanebrook, not that kind of sculpture. But people like, well, let me see, people such as the minor sculptors, a great many of them unknown, who decorated the cities with fountains with half humorous subjects, and things that would make people smile as they went by.

ROBERT BROWN: In your career you’ve almost entirely, or at least your most important work has been on commission, as opposed to working on your own rather speculatively, for sale in a gallery, or for private people who would buy what you had already made.

WALKER HANCOCK: Right.

ROBERT BROWN: Could you comment a bit on what this has meant, in terms of your life and also in terms of perhaps what sort of sculpture you have done, when you have been working for clients, on commission?

WALKER HANCOCK: I think it has made all the difference. It is perhaps not what I would have chosen as one—as a situation that one fell into, rather easily, coming back from Rome in 1929. While sculpture was still being used in connection with architecture, the commissions were there waiting for us thanks largely to the patronage of such architects as Dedannow, Aldrich, Cross, men like that. And, we were confronted with problems. And, it began to be to me a very fascinating thing to be given a problem, a situation, requirements of setting, subject matter, scale, and so on. And, to solve it as a problem. To try to reach a fitting solution. And I think the word fitting occurred to me again and again, is this the right thing for this place, and I believe that is a very different attitude from that of people who work more freely. Whether I continued in this by force of habit or by limitation of natural talent I don’t know. Perhaps the latter has a lot to do with it. Because I don’t know what I would do now if I were given free flight to do a great work of fantasy. At any rate it has always been fascinating to me, to try to find the right solution to the problem, to try to bring one’s clients into agreement to accept the right thing, which is always very hard to do, or often very hard to do. And, then sometimes the problem of getting the thing executed properly is another phase of the problem that is interesting. As far as educating the clients is concerned Mr. French used to tell me that was a very important part of what the sculptor had to learn to do. And he said, “I have always been able to do it. I have been patient, and in the end I have been allowed to do what I thought was right.” So, I tried to follow that.

ROBERT BROWN: You found that generally true.

WALKER HANCOCK: That is generally true. Sometimes it takes a bit of doing. There was one situation which for a time seemed almost hopeless, and yet it was a very, very simple problem. The family of the chairman of the board, the late chairman of the board, of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company came to get a statue of Mr. Litchfield and they said, “First of all Father had polio when he was young, we want him to stand so that it shows that he had polio. He also was a very tall man with a very large head.” Well, I agreed that the polio could be taken care of somehow, but I said, “There is one choice that you will have to make: do you want him to be tall, or do you want him to have a big head? Because you can’t have both.”

ROBERT BROWN: They didn’t understand that.

WALKER HANCOCK: They didn’t understand that. I said, “Invariably this is a large piece of sculpture unrelated to the man’s actual size, unrelated to human scale. If you give him a big head he will look like a small man.” They really didn’t understand it, they came back and forth from Akron, looked at the model, and when they looked at the model they seemed very happy, then when I sent them photographs of the same model and they saw it at home, they were unhappy. They thought the head looked too large or too small, I forgot just exactly what we went through but it had to come eventually to an issue and I saw that the only way to do it was to make three heads fit this nine foot statue. It wasn’t too difficult, because I made the head as large as they wanted it at first. Then I made a mold, a piece mold over that, made a clay squeeze, let that shrink, made another clay squeeze, let that shrink, and fired it. So, I had a head in three sizes. And, I put hooks in the top of each, and we got the family here. The family was always in disagreement with each other about details too. But I realized I was going to have to get them together once and for all. So, they came in and the large head was on it, and they said, but you know, it doesn’t look as tall as father did, and I said no it doesn’t. We can make it look taller by putting on a somewhat smaller head, so I hoisted that head off and dropped another head in place. And, they said well, that looks better, but it still isn’t as tall as father. And, so I lifted that off and put the smallest head in place and then they agreed that it looked like a tall man, but, I said, “Now the head is much too small isn’t it?” “Well,” they said, “I guess we’ll just have to leave it that way.” (laughs) It does take patience in a way, when you know the easy answer at the outset, an axiomatic thing, and have to go through all that to prove it to a person who—

ROBERT BROWN: And this was axiomatic in terms of figural sculpture?

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, yes.

ROBERT BROWN: When was that, about when was that commission? In the 40s—

WALKER HANCOCK: I think it was later than that. Oh, it was after the war.

ROBERT BROWN: But, you found, generally speaking, that you were able to accommodate your pursuit of what you thought was best in the end, with what they could accept, with what the clients could accept.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, it promised to be most difficult in the case of the Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial.

ROBERT BROWN: That was made in 1948.

WALKER HANCOCK: Yes, 1948. Because there the president of the railroad had seen a monument that he liked, and wanted something almost exactly like it for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

ROBERT BROWN: What sort of thing did he want?

WALKER HANCOCK: He had seen a statue of a charming lady angel lifting up a dead soldier. And he said, “We would like exactly this, but we can improve on it I think, by making the soldier’s shirt a little more torn, and adding some grenades to his belt. That would make it more realistic.” The question then and there was will I be able to undertake this honestly, knowing that I am not going to do just what this gentleman is determined to have me do.

ROBERT BROWN: You right away had an aversion to—

WALKER HANCOCK: Right away I knew that I couldn’t do that.

ROBERT BROWN: You didn’t like sentimental?

WALKER HANCOCK: There was the question of whether I could do a soldier being lifted up by an angel, and keep it form being too sentimental, and sweet. But, I decided the thing to do was to try it, and so I had a model made of the end of the great room of the 30th Street Station, and in it tried two sketch models in the round. One of them carrying out as well I could the president’s suggestion. The other taking the angel and lifting the solider as a motif for something almost resembling a column, another architectural element in the room.

ROBERT BROWN: Which has columns?

WALKER HANCOCK: Which has columns, exactly. This would be seen against columns, and by the way, they gave me the choice of the setting, which I was very happy for. So, having produced these two sketches, I went to the vice-president for operations—in the railroads like the army, there is a chain of command and you don’t go back to the president, you go back to the particular vice-president who has to do with the project at hand. And, this was the vice-president of operations, and I explained to him that Mr. Clement the president had wanted one thing, I had tried another. I didn’t tell him which was which, showed him the sketches, and I said, “Which do you prefer?” And he looked at me quite a while, and said, “Well, I don’t know anything about sculpture, but I can tell you how these make me feel. This one,” pointing to the first, “makes me think of a man who has had a fainting fit and this nice young girl is helping him up, and this one”—this is what surprised me—he said, “This one make me think of a soul being conducted to Heaven.” Those were his exact words, and I could hardly believe my ears. (laughs) And I said, “This is exactly the way I feel about it, but Mr. Clement I’m sure will prefer the first. What do you think should be done?” And he said, “Well, just leave it with me,” and eight months later I was getting the order to go on with the second scheme.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you ever learn how—

WALKER HANCOCK: I never learned what went on behind the scenes, what marvelous diplomacy must have been put into effect.

ROBERT BROWN: Working further then with the vice-president was easy.

WALKER HANCOCK: Very easy, and from that moment on there wasn’t a word either of criticism or of arbitration. They paid their bills as the various stages were completed. I couldn’t get any word from them, and after having worked in this vacuum for two years, I said to the vice-president, “This has been a very strange experience for me to have no comment from the clients at all.” He said, “Oh no, the railroad works like the old army, a man is given an assignment, and if he carries it out he doesn’t hear anything. If he doesn’t carry it out he does.” (laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: This was not typical, was it? Most of the time you do hear.

WALKER HANCOCK: Most of the time you are, I won’t say “swords’ points,” but some kind of conflict with your clients. And, they usually end in the greatest friendships, the harder the time you have, the greater the friendship seems to result.

ROBERT BROWN: Would you want to talk about any somewhat earlier commissions?

WALKER HANCOCK: Well, I can tell you, at some length, if you don’t mind, about one of my early experiences, my largest early experience, which was the St. Louis Soldiers’ Memorial. The architect came to me with a design for a building, done in the style of the day, which was a kind of Art Deco, but a very ponderous architectural mass. Very good, I think for its kind. And they said, “Now we want winged horses on both sides of these entrances. What do winged horses mean?” And I said, “Well, the only winged horse that I know of was Pegasus, and that meant poetic inspiration.” And they said, “Well, it can’t mean that on this building. What can we make a winged horse mean?” And I thought, “Well, if you put figures beside the winged horses you might suggest that they have a certain meaning.” So, that idea was agreed upon, and I made the models and they were approved by the architect, the sketch models, then the scale model, and we had finished three, there were to have been four altogether, a male and a female figure on each side of the building. I had reached the last one, which in my sketch was female figure shown bearing a floral offering of some kind, a wreath. And, they said don’t bother submitting the scale model, we’re in a hurry, just go ahead, it will be approved, everything is all right, and we’ll get it out as fast as we can. So I did this figure of the woman, in which I changed what had been in the sketch to a figure of a child. This I had in my studio in New York, at the time I was living in my studio on 20th Street.

And, early in the morning, well two o’clock to be exact, I was awakened by a voice that said, “This is the New York Times, we want to know about the fight you’re in in St. Louis.” And I was a bit sleepy, and I said, “I’m not in any fight in St. Louis,” and they said, “Oh, yes you are, the fight about the baby.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about a fight about a baby.” And they said, “Would you like me to read you the dispatch?” And I said, “If you let me hear the dispatch I can clear it up.” Well, this was the dispatch: “Director of Public Works, amazed to find the woman has a baby. Will cost one thousand dollars extra to carve, and will be rejected.” And I said, “Well this is the first that I have heard of it, a very distinct thank you for letting me know.” Then in a few minutes another newspaper called up, and said, “What about the baby?” And by that time I knew where I was and I said that I had nothing to say until I had corresponded with the architects, and so when the third newspaper had called, this was still before six o’clock, I realized that the thing for me to do was to get out of town, because I was going to be forced to say something that might be difficult to deal with later, so I came up here to Gloucester, and then telephoned the architects from here. And Mr. Crowell, the architect with whom I dealt, said, “Well, Hancock, I don’t know what we can do for you. Brown, the Director of Public Works, is up in arms, we can’t deal with him, and if you want that baby you better come out here and deal with him yourself.”

So, I went out there, and went into Mr. Brown’s office. It was a great big office in City Hall, and he saw me at the door, and he stood up at his desk and before I had a chance to say anything he held onto his desk and said, “I don’t want that baby!” (laughs) And I said, “Well, Mr. Brown I certainly don’t want you to take a baby that you don’t want, but before I know what to do next, I will have to know why you don’t want the baby, and what you suggest, what is our next step. I must know what is in your mind.” Well he said, “You’re trying to get another one thousand dollars out of us and they’re using that baby, and you can take it out.” And I said, “Well, as a matter of fact it would cost a good deal more than a thousand dollars to change it, would like me to pay the extra carving?” “No, no, no. You can’t do that, that is entirely irregular, the city has a contract with these people for doing a certain thing, you can’t get into anything like that.” So, he wouldn’t hear that, so my next step was to call the carver, and this man was a very difficult one to deal with, because he had been the lowest bidder, being a government financed project. He was a tombstone maker, and had no idea what the carving involved and he had already made a very bad mistake carving one of the wings, and I had redesigned the wings in that group so that it would fit into the remaining stone. And, so I had really a very ignorant man to deal with and said, “Well, Mr. Muchari, why are you charging a thousand dollars extra for the baby? You know perfectly well that that floral decoration that the sketch showed, that you fi