Jacob Kainen interview, 1982 Aug. 10-Sept. 22

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Jacob Kainen interview, 1982 Aug. 10-Sept. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Jacob Kainen
Conducted by Avis Berman
At the artist's studio in Washington, DC
August 10 and September 22, 1982

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Jacob Kainen on August 10 and September 22, 1982. The interview took place at the artist's studio in Washington, DC, and was conducted by Avis Berman for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview was conducted as part of the Archives of American Art's Mark Rothko and His Times oral history project, with funding provided by the Mark Rothko Foundation.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

AVIS BERMAN: [In progress]-oral history interview of Jacob Kainen with Avis Berman on August 10, 1982, in his studio on 10th Street in Washington, D.C. Well, let's begin with Waterbury and ask how your parents ended up there.

JACOB KAINEN: Well, my father was born in Russia. So was my mother. And my father escaped Russia in 1905, at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, because it was obvious that Rasputin was not very competent and that he was sending training rifles to the soldiers at the front. They didn't have weapons to fight with. And he escaped at the age of 23, 22, 23, and got to England. They had forged passports and so forth. Then he came to the United States shortly thereafter, I guess about 1906.

He had to learn English. His brother-in-law had a farm on the outskirts of Waterbury, Connecticut. So my father could always get a job because he was a very skilled mechanic, that is, toolmaker. He had worked since he was 10 in an industrial town in Russia, a town that was called Hughesovka [Yuzovka], after an English industrialist named [John] Hughes. Later the name of the town was changed to Stalino, and what it is now I have no idea. But he had a great gift for invention and a great deal of initiative, so that he would invent safety devices for the machines and he had many inventions himself. In other words, he could make anything with metal. He knew all about it. In Waterbury he worked for Chase Rollin Mills, Schofield Manufacturing Company. So my brothers and I were born in Waterbury, Connecticut.

MS. BERMAN: What was your mother's maiden name, and where did she come from?

MR. KAINEN: She came from Odessa. Her maiden name was Levine. But she had an interesting background. That is, she loved music and she had volumes in Russian and Yiddish, stories of [Guy] de Maupassant and some other folks. She would go down to the Metropolitan Opera by herself and listen to the great singers. She had no formal education.

Early on she would go to the Metropolitan Museum and pick out a painting for me to copy to send to relatives who were about to get married or to have children. That started me off. I copied about 15 paintings there.

MS. BERMAN: Do you remember any of them?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, sure. She had classical taste. She liked Claude Lorraine. I copied a Ford. She liked [John] Constable. I copied Rembrandt on my own. But [Camille] Corot, [Nicolas] Poussin. She liked George Inness. I copied Autumn Oaks. That was in the Lenox collection at the New York Public Library. That was before your time. They had a whole room with some very good paintings.

MS. BERMAN: So there was-first of all, what was your mother's first name by the way?

MR. KAINEN: Fannie.

MS. BERMAN: So there was a great deal of culture in your house, and you were encouraged. So they realized that you were talented very early on.

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: And did they want you to become an artist?

MR. KAINEN: Well, they thought I'd become a commercial artist. But by that time I had been to the Art Students League. When I was 16, I studied with Michael Ives. He used to draw without looking at the paper. That was before-I guess it was at the time of the Surrealists. I didn't realize the connection. But we would draw. He said the reason for doing that is to learn to trust your hand at drawing. You don't want to watch your hand like a hawk. You draw better if you look at nature or whatever you're looking at and let your hand go. But he also said not to take the pencil off the paper. Let it run around and move around in forms. I was 16 and that was, I think, the best training I ever had.

MS. BERMAN: That sounds very valuable.

MR. KAINEN: I used to practice.

MS. BERMAN: How did your family get to New York?

MR. KAINEN: Well, my father's brother opened a garage and prevailed on my father to help him. My father, being a good-hearted person, left his fine job [he was told he could get a job anytime he wanted to come back] and came to New York to help him with the garage. But there wasn't enough for him after a short while, and he got a job improving on the latest inventions for some outfit. He had about 22 inventions recorded, many not in his own name, I mean, aside from those.

MS. BERMAN: What was your father's first name by the way?

MR. KAINEN: Joseph.

MS. BERMAN: There was a story in one of the articles about you that your first paint box belonged to William Merritt Chase. How did that come about?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I knew a number of painters in high school as friends. And they knew some old painters who lived around 10th Street. They visited Chase's old studio that he abandoned and saw this little paint box there that they had no use for. I said, "Gee, I'd like to have that." So they let me have it. It was a guy named Charlie-I forget his name, a friend of James Halifax.

MS. BERMAN: That's the famous 10th Street building, 51 West 10th Street. Did you ever go down and visit, and meet any of the painters who were down there?

MR. KAINEN: 51 West 10th? What painters are you talking about?

MS. BERMAN: Well, that was the-

MR. KAINEN: Do you mean Chase's school?

MS. BERMAN: Yes. And also it was a big studio. La Farge had his studio there, and [Childe] Hassam was there for a while, but the painters of that generation were in that big building. And other people would rent it too.

MR. KAINEN: I didn't know that.

MS. BERMAN: I guess it's a real historical building for American artists. I mean, it wasn't just Chase, but a good many other painters were down there.

Did you decide that you wanted to be an artist yourself, or was it your mother's encouragement?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, no. I have a drawing I did when I was 10. I copied a drawing in Cosmopolitan magazine. Was it Cosmopolitan? Yes. But I also used to read Howard Pyle's stories of the round table, King Arthur and so forth. Howard Pyle was an art nouveau artist. That is, it was a carryover of art nouveau, and he had a great sense of pattern-black and white, lines, he'd have texture with dots, some little dashes. I was very young and reading about Lancelot and all the Knights of the Round Table. And Pyle wrote the books himself, transcribed them. He had a [Sir Thomas] Malory-like style, like clay through his armor.

MS. BERMAN: Yes.

MR. KAINEN: It gave a certain flavor. He handled it very well. I always was interested in art. I was filling up sketch books when I was pretty young. Of course, I haunted the Metropolitan. I remember the time I saw the plaster casts. They had a room of plaster casts. I saw the Discobolus [Myron] and all the famous Greek and Roman statues, Michelangelo and others. And I saw seams on the side and dust. I was very much disappointed. I thought these were the classical great statues of antiquity. That's how naive I was.

MS. BERMAN: You were really disillusioned?

MR. KAINEN: Yes, I was disillusioned, but I found out shortly thereafter that they were just casts.

Oh yes, my parents used to subscribe to the Jewish Daily Forward. On Sundays there was a rotogravure section and a painting was always reproduced, lots of Rembrandts. But they had other artists, you know, art history. I began clipping out these painting reproductions and pasting them into scrapbooks. Very cheap paper and I used rubber cement, but I finally had a pretty good collection. I learned a lot about art that way.

Then, when I was 17, I worked for Brentano's during the summer, and Brentano's published their volumes on artists. A friend of mine was in the shipping department so he gave me books on Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens, D?rer. I learned a great deal. The titles were in English, French, and German. It's a good way to pick up a smattering-

MRS. KAINEN: [Inaudible.]

MS. BERMAN: When you went to the [Art Students] League, what was it like? You were very young.

MR. KAINEN: I was 16.

MS. BERMAN: Who were some of the other students that were there?

MR. KAINEN: I went to a night class.

MRS. KAINEN: That was later.

MR. KAINEN: No. At the League, I went to a night class, even when I was 16. I remember some of the people physically but I don't remember their names.

MS. BERMAN: It interests me that you were actually painting very young, too. Most kids are just coloring and drawing.

MR. KAINEN: I painted on a piece of cardboard. I copied paintings in the Forbes. I remember copying a painting of Lady Diana Manners as an adolescent. It was painted by John Lavery or one of those guys.

MS. BERMAN: Were you doing any original paintings, any original compositions, or just copies?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I did originals. I put little-this is about a 10 by 12 box and panels. You could have canvas board panels covered with canvas. I used 12 by 16 later. But I'd go out and paint. I went out with my high school buddy, Jules Halfant. There are still a couple. I guess my brother has some of them. He has one.

MS. BERMAN: And you were at the Educational Alliance too?

MR. KAINEN: Yes, I went evenings just around that time, 16, 17.

MS. BERMAN: Was the teaching different than at the League?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. I studied with Abbo Ostrowsky, who was an etcher, basically. But he was very literal, and he obtruded his teaching too much. He was giving orders, instructions. So I didn't like it very much. He was downtown somewhere.

MS. BERMAN: Also it seems by the time you were 16 or 17, besides being precocious, you were very proficient, since it seemed you had a lot of practice. You were painting and drawing a lot.

MR. KAINEN: I was painting and drawing and looking at old masters. I've had occasions to-that background's come up. I remember at the University of Maryland there was a primitive painting. It was based on Titian's painting [Noli me tangere, 1511-1512].

And George Levitine, who's head of the department, didn't recognize it. He said, "That's a very funny composition for a primitive. It shows that: they have some imagination." I said, "George, that's right out of Titian." He was very embarrassed.

But when you look at these paintings, and I looked at them for years, there are artists who have a sense of what puts a painting together.

MS. BERMAN: Well, it seems that you started then to build a base of the museum in your head and you could reshuffle or reorder the paintings.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, that's right.

MS. BERMAN: And pull them out when you needed them in a way. Then you went to Pratt. What was the instruction like there? What did you learn as an artist from being at Pratt?

MR. KAINEN:

I'll tell you, very little. The main painter, painting teacher, was Paul Moschowitz, M-O-S-C-H-O-W-I-T-Z. He was a Pole and he did religious paintings and he made portraits for a living. He had a studio on 41st Street, just off Fifth Avenue. I visited his place a couple of times. And he started giving us a palette. Among his colors was Harrison red. I wouldn't use a color like that. It was a hard, synthetic color. Then he said, "Emerald green." I said, "Mr. Moschowitz, that's a poisonous color. That contains arsenic. A pupil of [Adolphe William] Bouguereau died from getting emerald green into a cut." He said, "Oh, is that so? Well, nevertheless, you can't replace it. That's a very easy green."

He would also come in on Monday. You see, we painted every day. In the portrait class, he'd paint three times a week-Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And he'd come in and pose a model, or sometimes the monitor would pose a model. He would always come in Friday afternoon and sit down at each person's easel or stand up and start painting on it. I didn't have too much respect. He came to work on mine. I said, "Don't touch it, Mr. Moschowitz. You'll spoil it."

MS. BERMAN: Is that what led to your dismissal from Pratt?

MR. KAINEN: No. Actually he said I was the only serious student there. By that time also, I was beginning to have a few C?zanneish touches and things like that. I can show you some of the paintings. I have a couple left. But the instruction was pretty bad, but we could paint.

MRS. KAINEN: You were setting up your own classes.

MR. KAINEN: Finally I began setting up my own classes.

MS. BERMAN: You did at Pratt?

MR. KAINEN: At Pratt. I didn't want to take the commercial art classes. I set up a class in still life just for myself. I was a little too much a bone in the throat, so they got some excuse to kick me out.

There was a new director. The old director used to give lectures on art history and he'd show [Henri] Matisse and [Georges] Rouault and talk about how insane these artists were. Well, the new director came in. He wasn't nearly as good. The old director at least had a background, Dr. Walter Scott Perry. The new one, James Boudreau, was an administrator and he wanted to iron out all the problems. So one afternoon a friend of mine in the painting class prevailed on me to begin a chess game. I said, "I don't play chess." He said, "I'll show you how." We only had about ten minutes more. So I sat down and put out the chess board. At that moment Boudreau came in with visitors from Cleveland. He was livid, of course. He called us in to give us a calling down. He suspended the other fellow but he kicked me out. This is a month before graduation.

I had it all prepared. I said, "Well, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley was kicked out of Cambridge [editor's note: Shelley was actually expelled from Oxford University College, in Oxford, England]. [Max] Weber was kicked out of Pratt Institute before me." I had somebody else, I guess. "I'm proud to be in their company."

MS. BERMAN: Evidently you were quite ready with the wisecracks when it served you.

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: You knew so much more than the other students too.

MR. KAINEN: Well, sure. I remember in one class with Moschowitz, there was a model posing and it was the exact pose of Titian's Man with the Glove. There was a fellow in that position. I said, "Would you mind moving? I'd like this position." He said, "I won't move." I said, "Look, I need his position." So finally I shoved him out and took his position. He complained to Moschowitz. He said, "He just threw me out of the way and put his easel there. I want that place." Moschowitz said, "Look, you can't do things like that. Take another place." I said, "This is exactly the position of Titian's Man with a Glove, exactly the pose." He said to the other fellow, "Fairfax, take another position."

MS. BERMAN: In retrospect, what do you think of your preparation as an artist in the typical system of the time? Do you feel that you were adequately prepared to go out into the world as a painter, although you would be a young painter?

MR. KAINEN: Oh yes. We had good training. After all, we used to draw from a model. For homework, we had to take the drawing-it was done on a sheet about 12 by 9, maybe a little bigger; I might have one of the drawings. We had Dunlap's anatomy. We had to take the model and draw the model in the same position but just the bone structure. Then we had to draw the model in the same position, just the muscular structure. The osteology and the myology. So I knew at least the muscular physiology, the anatomy of the body, the pronations and synchronizations. I don't know how good it would be. You can forget it. But still I don't regret having done it.

MS. BERMAN: Well, I think you need to know it in order to forget it in the right way.

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: Did you have any sort of grounding in, say, some of the strong American artists? I mean, did they talk to you about people like, say, [Thomas] Eakins or [Winslow] Homer, or some of the-or even El Greco or people like that at all? I mean, were you learning about-

MR. KAINEN: Do you mean in art school?

MS. BERMAN: Yes.

MR. KAINEN: Oh, no. They brought it up to the late 19th century. He mentioned some of the moderns but just to criticize them. We did go to see the Brooklyn-Pratt Institute is of course in Brooklyn-to the Carnegie International which went to Brooklyn a couple of times. And there I saw my first Kokoschkas and some other artists, and quite astounding. I hated Kokoschka the first time I saw him-okay, it was a crazy kind of painting, but at least it was something. We could visit the Brooklyn Museum show. It had a lot of [John Singer] Sargent watercolors and so forth.

MS. BERMAN: What ideas were influencing you in the early '30s in your painting and in what you wanted to accomplish as a painter?

MR. KAINEN: Well, my friend Jules Halfant was particularly crazy about Franz Hals and Velazquez. And I was, too. You know, a young man likes vigorous brush work, a little bravado in the painting. I'm trying to think-in the early '30s. Well, I used to copy old masters, that is, in black and white, Degas and others. Just reduce the design to black, white, and gray to study composition. It took a long time before it sank in.

Actually in the summer of 1929, I found out that there was going to be a show in Boston of [Georges] Seurat, [Vincent] van Gogh, C?zanne, and Gauguin. So I borrowed some money from a working girl-$8 round trip overnight from New York to Boston, Sunday night. I had a quarter in my pocket. I thought I'd see the show, somehow survive the day, and come back. Well, I got there Monday morning, walked up Huntington Avenue to the museum-closed Mondays. So I had to kill a day.

I don't want to go into the whole story, but anyway I finally saw the show the next day, came back. Then I found that in the fall the Museum of Modern Art was opening with that very same show.

MS. BERMAN: I was just going to ask you, but it turned out to be.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, but I don't know how much it sank in. I liked it. I liked the work, but it took some time for it to sink in.

MS. BERMAN: You mentioned that your friend liked Velazquez and Hals. Were you aware of the Ashcan School and their influence?

MR. KAINEN: Yes, I think so.

MS. BERMAN: Had you ever had [John] Sloan as a teacher or any interaction with him?

MR. KAINEN: No. I saw him once. He gave a little talk. The American Artists Congress was against it,

MS. BERMAN: When do you think you first began to understand what really goes into a work of art, what goes into painting?

MR. KAINEN: I think probably in the late '30s really, although I did some things in the early '30s on instinct. The National Museum of American Art [now called Smithsonian American Art Museum] has 18 of my paintings and the Phillips has nine. But I think that-I knew Joseph Solman, and Solman was a member of The Ten and he helped a lot, you know, to flatten out.

Now there's one thing I should mention, that is J. B. Neumann's gallery. He was there from 1932 on, maybe before. But by 1934, I used to be visiting it, and I'd see the [Paul] Klees and the Beckmanns. He had lots of [Max] Beckmann all the time. He also had some [Ernst Ludwig] Kirchner, Heckstein. I think The Ten used to see Neumann. Neumann was the most agreeable of all the dealers. After all, he showed Rothko in about 1935 or 6 with Solman. You could always talk with him and he had such a vast background.

The Germans, I think, were closer to the Expressionists, closer to us than Matisse. We admired Matisse but Matisse didn't have the feeling of the streets in him and the Germans did. So we used lime to flatten it out. I think it's an unacknowledged influence.

MS. BERMAN: So you feel that I guess the tension and maybe the grittiness of the Expressionists is probably what drew you to Expressionism?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. I think the streets. Well, Gorky-Graham, sure.

MS. BERMAN: I'm going to ask about that tomorrow. It's a little bit too much to get into today. I'm also only going to ask you briefly about the graphic arts, because I think that's really very well covered in the O'Conner book [Francis V. O'Connor. Art for the millions: Essays from the 1930s by artists and administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project. New York, NY: New York Graphic Society, 1973.]. But I wanted to ask you how you became involved in the graphic arts project [Graphic Arts Division of the Works Progress Administration].

MR. KAINEN: Well, I was unemployed like everyone else. I knew all the artists. I knew Stuart Davis very well. In 1938 he gave me a lithograph as a wedding present, and I used to visit his studio. So I said to him, "I can qualify for either the painting project or the graphic project." I hadn't done any graphic work to speak of, but I asked him what he would suggest. He said, "Don't be a fool. Don't go on the painting project, because all your paintings will disappear forever in some veteran's hospital in Utah. Go on the graphic project. You can do your graphic work at night. Paint during the day. You can't paint very well at night. Paint during the day. All your work will disappear. But if you go on the graphic project, you can do the graphic work at night, paint during the day and keep your paintings." That was good advice, because I have a lot of paintings of the '30s which very few artists do have. Most of them are lost. The WPA [Works Progress Administration]-think of how few. Rothko, Gottlieb, and the rest of them, they disappeared. You know what happened to them?

MS. BERMAN: A lot of them were just thrown away. They used the canvas to wrap pipes in.

MR. KAINEN: That's right. You know about that.

MS. BERMAN: Right. About [Jackson] Pollock certainly. What was your interaction with Stuart Davis like, and what did you talk about?

MR. KAINEN: You know, I was sort of left wing, and Davis was interested in left wing causes. It was a different kind of left wing in those days. You know, you were thinking of Russia as the hope of the earth, society without exploitation, et cetera. And Davis always had been a socialist. The American Artists' Congress [founded 1936] was formed against war and fascism, so that I saw quite a bit of him. He said to me, "Kainen. Painting is space division." I never forgot.

But I think my interest in left wing causes probably prevented me from being more daring in the work, because no matter how I patterned and so forth, I had still a proletarian angle.

MS. BERMAN: Actually, I think that some of that may have persisted, because it was very interesting, this New York group that you had. There seems to be a conflict in the way of resolving in the statement of aesthetic-what did you say here-resolving, you know, keeping the image of the streets and doing it and yet of course wanting the work to be judged on its artistic merit too as well as its statement. I felt that there was a difficulty in resolving what to do. And I don't know if all the artists felt that. Who wrote this statement on the art?

MR. KAINEN: I did. I was the only one with experience.

MS. BERMAN: I want to talk about your experience as a writer but let's talk about the New York group for a minute or two since I mentioned it. When and why was the group formed?

MR. KAINEN: I think it was basically Joseph Vogel and [Herbert] Kruckman. There's some others around there. But the idea was to have something social but at the same time not illustrative in the usual sense, even modern. I can't remember who picked the people [Inaudible]. Hoagland went to Spain and he fought in the Lincoln Brigade. He was lucky he got out alive.

MS. BERMAN: Was this the first exhibit in May, 1938?

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: Who were the leaders of the group, if there was such a thing?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I was, because I was showing with ACA [American Contemporary Artists Galleries, New York, NY, est. 1932] anyway. I had shown in group shows there before. I knew Herman Baron [founder of the ACA Galleries]. And Herman Baron was quite left wing. He was editor of a trade journal of some kind, I don't know which. There wasn't any specific connection with the John Reed Club, but I was more precocious in that direction than most of the others.

MS. BERMAN: Did you attend a lot of meetings at the John Reed Club?

MR. KAINEN: I did in the early days-1934 and so forth.

MS. BERMAN: What was it like? What went on there?

MR. KAINEN: There were writers and artists. And there was a head of the writers' section and head of the artists' section. There would be little exhibitions and discussions. Nothing much went on. It was mainly a matter of bolstering the opinions we already held.

MS. BERMAN: Convincing the convinced?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. But of course, at that time, Partisan Review started as a left-wing organ. Before [Philip] Rahv and [William] Phillips took it over on their own, it had been a John Reed Club publication.

MS. BERMAN: Did Rothko go to the John Reed Club? No? Did you ever meet the great-like did you meet [Diego] Rivera and [Frida] Kahlo and some of the other people?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I heard Rivera give a lecture at the John Reed Club, and it was a scandal. Louis Lozowick translated. Rivera was speaking in French and Lozowick was translating, Lozowick in German, Russian. And shortly after he began, he was heckled by people from I guess the Daily Worker. "Why do you speak in French, the language of the oppressors? Why do you work for Dwight Morrow? You're suckling at the breast of imperialism." And Rivera said, "What do you want me to do, suckle at my mother's breast? I have to make a living." It ended in a wild uproar. It was standing room only. People were standing all over because Rivera was such an important figure. And members of the John Reed Club said, "I resign. This is a disgrace to him. You have to let him talk."

MS. BERMAN: What was the subject of the lecture?

MR. KAINEN: I don't know. Probably proletarian art. That was the forgotten subject in American art history.

MS. BERMAN: To go back to the New York group, was there a kind of conscious program of exhibition and publicity?

MR. KAINEN: No. We used to meet once in a while at the ACA Gallery just to plan the exhibitions. But it was thoroughly unplanned. We didn't know whether or not the people were going to exhibit. That's why when Kenneth Fearing did that introduction to the second show-he had a very nice phrase: "The six separate and distinct personalities of this exhibit." So we took out six because we didn't know. But the separate and distinct personalities isn't the same as the six separate.

MS. BERMAN: Absolutely. How many shows did the group have together?

MR. KAINEN: We just had two as a group.

MS. BERMAN: Did you feel that there was a need to form a group in order to have either visibility or you wanted to have a name?

MR. KAINEN: Well, we wanted to make proletarian art more modern, show that it doesn't have to be workers with their fists raised and all that. We wanted it to be quite flexible. [Joseph] Vogel had a surrealist point of view. I wonder what happened to those early paintings of his. Herman Rose just did street scenes.

MS. BERMAN: It seems to me that you were trying to fit in, say, between the Ten and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Is that correct?

MR. KAINEN: Well, between the Ten-but we didn't know about the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. The Ten, but more consciously connected with social problems. That is not really a social problem, but we were in depths of the Depression, and also the problem was, what is American? We didn't want too much foreign influence. That's why any Cubist devices immediately made the work not native.

MS. BERMAN: Whereas expressionist devices did?

MR. KAINEN: No, because it fitted the-I know it sounds odd, but it was a natural current for Americans.

MS. BERMAN: Why did the group break up?

MR. KAINEN: 1940-the dangers of war and things like that. I really can't remember why. I don't think we had any real officers. That was one of the problems. It wasn't as well organized as the Ten and some of those had been.

MS. BERMAN: Do you think the group served its purpose, or do you think it just didn't-

MR. KAINEN: Well, I think a lot of people saw those exhibitions and there were reviews. I remember what's her name from the World Telegram?

MS. BERMAN: Genauer, Emily Genauer.

MR. KAINEN: Yes. She said, "There's a cleavage between the stated purpose and what they actually do. There is no real social comment."

MS. BERMAN: Were you planning on having other members? Was it going to be-

MR. KAINEN: No, no. It was just a small group.

MS. BERMAN: Because as you know about the Ten, the Ten who would be nine or eight and they'd always get fill-ins.

MR. KAINEN: Well, they were better organized. Somebody was running it, and they'd have John Graham one year, Lee Gatch another year.

MS. BERMAN: Here you said-I was wondering when you wrote this if you were referring to the Ten or another group. You said, "In this enterprise we feel that we do not encroach upon the legitimate domain of any constituted group. On the contrary, we feel that we are removing barriers from a road which already exists and which many artists are prepared to traverse." With that were you basically announcing, "Listen, Ten, we're not in your territory?" Was that the purpose?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. Basically that. To me there was another group that thought it was a viable direction. It really wasn't, but that's-

MS. BERMAN: Do you think among critics and artists there was an interest in the Ten? Do you feel it was an influential group among peers?

MR. KAINEN: Well, yes, I think so, because it was an expressionist direction. Expressionism was natural in that period. It was being modern. It was actually giving a direction.

MS. BERMAN: In the reviews you found the Ten quite exciting, whereas everyone else gave them rather lousy reviews.

MR. KAINEN: The thing is no one paid much attention to those reviewers because they weren't terribly much use to them. The Times critic, who was it then? Either Howard Devree or Edwin Alden Jewell, either one. Their favorites were Eugene Speicher, the accepted big names in their period. Don't forget, the Ten was just an odd group that showed at the Gallery Secession [West 12th Street, New York, NY].

MS. BERMAN: It started with a man named Pat Codyre.

MR. KAINEN: Pat Codyre.

MS. BERMAN: Who was he?

MR. KAINEN: Joe Solman can tell you better. He was an Irishman. He liked art. We had a little-we started him. We had a show. But then Robert-what his name?

MS. BERMAN: Godsoe.

MR. KAINEN: Godsoe, right. I knew Godsoe well. He had a group gallery called the [Gallery] Secession. That was about '35 or '36. Solman was about a year older than I am, and he got started earlier since he lived in New York, downtown, whereas I lived in the Bronx. So at that period I wasn't terribly connected downtown, and Solman knew more. He was talking with these developed artists. Of course, I was talking with [Arshile] Gorky and Graham- [End Side 1.]

In 1934 I had a studio on the corner of University Place and 14th Street, in a meeting house. It was a real studio. It had a skylight about 18 feet up in the air, cubical, a tiny skylight. And the light came through very gray, dim, mournful. You could see everything in a gray haze. The light was constant.

MS. BERMAN: Did moving down there have an effect on your painting?

MR. KAINEN: Oh yes, because I had been painting at home before that. Downtown, you know, I could line up paintings, do slightly bigger ones. But very few artists were doing big paintings. We used to show-John Wanamaker [of Wanamaker's department store] had a gallery. There was a man named Nathan Eijur E-I-J-U-R who later became particularly fond of Gorky and collected him. But he put on shows and there were shows elsewhere, the Hudson Walker Gallery, I used to show there, a canvas or two, once in a while. But the only way to get the canvas there was to take it in the subway. Nobody used taxis, never. So that canvases were generally small enough to be taken easily on a subway.

MS. BERMAN: Well, even the well-off artists, I should say, were painting fairly small compared to today's standards.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, easel paintings.

MS. BERMAN: Right. What other galleries were you going to besides J. B. Neumann and more stimulating places that you went to?

MR. KAINEN: Julian Levy, there were many good shows there. [Alfred] Stieglitz had a gallery. I don't know where it was then. He was a very standoffish person with his black cape. He'd glower at artists when they came in. Then there was [Karl] Nierendorf. Nierendorf had German and French artists, a very good dealer. But I was in there once with Jules Halfant. Jules was whistling some Beethoven, and Nierendorf gave him a terrible calling down for it.

There were other German galleries. There was Brummer, Joseph Brummer. It must have been in 1933 or so, he had a big [Jacques] Lipchitz show. Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor. That was very impressive. I could appreciate that but in my own work I was fighting shy of those influences. There was another German gallery, Lilienfeld. I don't know when that started. Now Kurt Valentin came in in 1937, the Buchholz Gallery and his first show was a Kirchner exhibition. He didn't sell anything.

German dealers were giving things to the museums. And they were also giving one-third off to museums to buy, if they wanted to buy prints or anything. So that they really were promoting German artists. Not only that, the German dealers had more background than the American dealers.

MS. BERMAN: They had kultur[German for culture].

MR. KAINEN: They had kultur. [J.B.] Neumann did the first catalogue raisonn? of the prints of Rudolph Bresdin in the '30s. He also had a publication called the Art Lover, which he put out from time to time. He published and he knew art, old art, new art.

MS. BERMAN: Didn't he have antiquities, too?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. He had quite a number of Flemish surrealists of the 17th century, people around Brueghel, the 16th century. Yes, we were amazed. Neumann doesn't get the credit he deserves. It's always Stieglitz. Stieglitz didn't influence us much.

MS. BERMAN: Well, Stieglitz could be a very destructive personality at times, too.

MR. KAINEN: He was good in photography, but so was Julian Levy. He really had some great shows.

MS. BERMAN: Did you see [Eugene] Atget there?

MR. KAINEN: No, I saw Clarence John Laughlin; I guess it was 1936. I was very much impressed. He had small oblique photographs. They were very good. He always was a good photographer.

MRS. KAINEN: So was Gus Mayer.

MR. KAINEN: Yes. There was Gustavus Mayer, who had a print gallery. And you'd see old master etchers there if you wanted to go up, one flight up.

MS. BERMAN: When did you first meet Mark Rothko, or Marcus Rothkowitz, then?

MR. KAINEN: I'd say around '36. I saw him in New York from time to time. He didn't go to the cafeterias often. I was in the cafeterias almost every night before I was married and moved out to the Bronx. But once in a while he was there. And of course, I'd see him on the projects from time to time.

I remember seeing him at a World's Fair when paintings from Italy were shown. It was Titian's Portrait of Paul III, Botticelli's Birth of Venus. I remember standing in front of the Birth of Venus with Rothko and saying how wonderful it was. And Rothko said, "Yes, it's nice." I was very disturbed by his reaction. He wasn't terribly impressed. But we knew each other as artists knew each other around then in that period.

MS. BERMAN: Do you know how you-excuse me.

MR. KAINEN: Of course, I met him later.

MS. BERMAN: Do you know how you were introduced?

MR. KAINEN: No, I can't remember. But you know the story of Max Weber and Rothko.

MS. BERMAN: And the cigarette?

MR. KAINEN: And the cigarette ash, yes.

MS. BERMAN: Were you there?

MR. KAINEN: I was there.

MS. BERMAN: Oh really?

MR. KAINEN: I mentioned it and Joe Solman mentioned it.

MS. BERMAN: Yes. I interviewed Joe Solman last year, so he did tell me about that. And Rothko took this all benignly?

MR. KAINEN: Benignly, yes.

MS. BERMAN: Did you ever talk about Weber with Rothko?

MR. KAINEN: No.

MS. BERMAN: I was wondering if Rothko felt that Weber had influenced his work at all.

MR. KAINEN: Well, he certainly influenced his early work in his figures. But I don't think he mentioned Weber very much.

MS. BERMAN: When you knew Rothko in the middle and late '30s, were you impressed with his talent as a painter?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I saw very little of it. I saw it at the Ten shows. And yes, I did a review in Art Front in which I praised Gottlieb and Rothko for getting to the core of their feelings. That I could see.

MS. BERMAN: Well, it seemed to me that most of the best notices went to Solman or at times [Jack] Kufeld or at times [Louis] Schanker.

MR. KAINEN: Schanker? I'm surprised.

MS. BERMAN: It seemed that there was a sense that Rothko was floundering. Did Rothko feel this?

MR. KAINEN: This matter of floundering. It is assumed that artists take one point of view and follow it in a sort of continuous way making minor changes. That's true of certain artists. I don't know if you saw the [Raphael] Soyer show ["Raphael Soyer: Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking," Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Aug.5 - Oct. 3, 1982].

MS. BERMAN: I'm going to see it this week.

MR. KAINEN: All right. Soyer was always saying, although in his early days he did work in a sort of primitive style, but he emphasized color more and more as he grew older. He had one kind of outlook. On the other hand, he's not a very speculative artist. His great talent is his marvelous feeling for paint and color, yes. But if you take someone, say, like Picasso, I wouldn't say he was floundering if he tried one thing or another, because this is the 20th century and artists are complex.

In fact, some of the more important artists-I won't say more important, but artists of a wide range like Rembrandt, Goya, Velazquez, were classical at one period, or highly finished, and became quite loose at another period. In fact, at the same time Goya would be doing these classically drawn portraits and then do wildly painted canvases. I mean, every artist has a certain classical side and romantic side or expressionist side. Why shouldn't he give weight to those sides. He isn't going to worry about what critics say.

I think Rothko tried certain things, and I think he was all of a piece. When he did figures, they were rather loosely painted, expressionistically painted. He just became a little more serene later on, or he began thinking more in terms of forms. He told me, and he told other people also, that he had been influenced by Michelangelo's Medici Chapel. We visited the Medici Chapel a couple months ago. He said not the sculpture, the rooms before you get to the sculpture. The rooms have rectangular walls, rather low ceilings, a very elongated curve. The rectangles are bordered by another color of marble. I don't know whether it's marble or whether it's painted that color. But every form has a sort of frame and they're rectangular, different sizes. It's suited to a chapel.

MRS. KAINEN: Somber.

MR. KAINEN: The somber vault. He wasn't trying to show off his talent as an architect, like [I.M.] Pei, for example. He was thinking of the function of the building which was a memorial to the Medici. Rothko said that influenced him more than anything else he had seen.

MS. BERMAN: That's fascinating because the de Menil's [John and Dominique] of course are the modern Medicis in a way for artists, too. So he made this connection. When would he have said this to you?

MR. KAINEN: He said this after Kennedy was elected and there was a luncheon for people in the arts field. I sat at a table with him. Actually, it was after that. I sat at a table with-

MRS. KAINEN: It was President Johnson, wasn't it?

MR. KAINEN: Was it Johnson? Yes, the Great Society. I guess that was it. Rothko came and for a change he was pretty well dressed, for him. He was the world's worst dresser. I sat at a table with Giancarlo Menotti and the dancer, [Maria] Tallchief, Robert Creeley, and some other people. But afterwards, I got together with Rothko and he invited me to come to his studio which, like a fool, I did. He mentioned this. What else did he mention?

He was very relaxed. I had seen him before. He came to Washington, I guess it was in the mid-'50s. I can't remember exactly when. He went to visit Pietro Lazzari. Pietro Lazzari also was with Pat Codyre. He was a friend of Rothko's. He said whenever Rothko had to leave, couldn't pay his rent, Lazzari would come and help him move. Lazzari was a good strong Italian.

MRS. KAINEN: In the middle of the night.

MR. KAINEN: Yes. Well, he came to see Lazzari. Lazzari phoned me. I went over with my first wife [Bertha Friedman]. Lazzari had-Rothko had either just had been fired from Brooklyn College, or he was about to be fired, because he wasn't following the curriculum. Rothko was very profane at that time. He could also be very courtly. And he said that he was being fired, but some of his paintings are beginning to sell, and people are beginning to like his work. I think this was before Phillips had bought the Rothkos.

Of course, I saw him later in 1968. Do you want to talk about that now?

MS. BERMAN: We can in a minute. But one of the myths, and perhaps the truths, of that New York School was the terror of success, and how much of it ruined them. Was Rothko ambivalent about that? Was he-

MR. KAINEN: Oh, he was very ambivalent about it.

MS. BERMAN: What was his reaction when he said people were liking his work and it was beginning to sell?

MR. KAINEN: His reaction was that-this has to go to 1968 then.

MS. BERMAN: Okay. But in other words, did he talk about this in '53, or was he just happy and excited that his work was going so well?

MR. KAINEN: He was excited, yes, that he was getting some recognition. But later on he got very disillusioned.

MS. BERMAN: Well, let's talk about 1968. It seems a natural thing to do right now.

MR. KAINEN: I saw him in Provincetown. He had just had a massive heart attack. He was recovering from it. I was in an inn just opposite his house, but he had a studio elsewhere. He said-I saw him with my son, who can vouch for a lot of these things. He said he hated the art industry. "If you can convince me I love art, I'll give you a painting." So immediately I was put on the spot. If I started to convince him that he loved painting, it might have been out of cupidity.

He said, "You're working for a museum, aren't you?" I said, "Only part-time, two days a week." He said, "That doesn't matter. You're part of the art industry." He hates the art industry. He said he wasn't with any gallery. All he had to do was sell one or two paintings a year and that was enough for him.

MRS. KAINEN: Did he ask Ben what plans he had?

MR. KAINEN: He asked my son what he was doing. He was about 18, 19. He said, "Oh, I'm an artist." And Rothko turned and shot me a look and said, "You ought to be ashamed." He was wearing a tie that had been knotted in the same place for years, a funny shape, spotted. He was drinking very heavily, although he was recovering from a heart attack, and chain-smoked. But he was very cordial. He had a group of people to his house including Warren [M.] Robbins, who's head of the Museum of African Art [National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC]. He used to have my son once or twice drive him to his studio. He wouldn't let me see what he was doing. I was part of the art industry. He was mad.

MRS. KAINEN: But Ben had said something to him about the Phillips?

MR. KAINEN: Sometimes his driver didn't show up so my son would drive him there. And I saw him once and he had a speck of blue acrylic on his forehead. It was very faint but I knew it was acrylic. I said, "Oh, you're using acrylic." He said, "I'm using everything." He said he wasn't permitted to paint anything over 40 inches high. That's why he's working on paper. He said he had it marroflaged to canvas. There was this fellow in Brooklyn-what was the name? Goldbrayer? He said, "I recommend him." He paints it on paper and it's fastened to canvas.

That's why I was amazed when I saw that he was painting these large paintings. Did he paint them himself? He wasn't permitted to.

MS. BERMAN: In other words you're saying, as far as you understood, he was working on the works on paper, because physically the effort would have been too great to go up?

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MRS. KAINEN: The doctor ordered him.

MR. KAINEN: The doctor ordered him not to.

MS. BERMAN: Oh, how interesting. But you didn't get to see what these works on paper looked like at all?

MR. KAINEN: No. I asked my son. He said they look like his other paintings; they're just smaller. I think he'd begin in acrylic and finish in oil, because it doesn't have the feel of acrylic. I suppose sometimes he'd let it be. But they all had softened edges, and I understand that some of the late paintings were done by assistants.

MS. BERMAN: Where did you hear that from?

MR. KAINEN: Well, certainly the paintings shown at the National Gallery which were taped on the edges.

MRS. KAINEN: Someone told us that recently. E. A. Carmean.

MS. BERMAN: That's certainly an authoritative voice.

MRS. KAINEN: He said that about the [inaudible]-

MS. BERMAN: At the what gallery?

MRS. KAINEN: In the [inaudible]-

MR. KAINEN: Did he say it about those or the-

MRS. KAINEN: Those, those are the ones he was talking about. He said Rothko didn't do them.

MS. BERMAN: I guess my question would be, just as an artist, what would be the satisfaction of having someone else do your paintings?

MR. KAINEN: Well, a lot of artists do that. When Gottlieb couldn't move, he directed others and it looked pretty good. Look at Matisse.

MRS. KAINEN: You said he was very unhappy about it though.

MR. KAINEN: He was very unhappy about it. I saw him at that show, told him how well the paintings looked. He just shot me a look of disapproval. I immediately saw that he didn't paint it.

MS. BERMAN: Now when you say he, do you mean Gottlieb?

MR. KAINEN:

Gottlieb, yes.

MS. BERMAN: At his retrospective?

MR. KAINEN: Yes, when he was in the wheelchair.

MRS. KAINEN: No, it was the big show at Marlborough, yes.

MR. KAINEN: Marlborough, yes; not retrospective.

MRS. KAINEN: After he had had a stroke.

MR. KAINEN: Well, Matisse when he couldn't do anything. He'd cut them out and tell the people where to put them. Sam Francis, among others; he forgot his blue, white, and red. Everything keyed to white. Renoir would tell the sculptor how to sculpt. You see it all the time.

MS. BERMAN: I guess so. I guess because Rothko seemed to just hate to paint after a while too. Did you get the feeling?

MR. KAINEN: I don't know if you know the story of Maurice Sievan. We were in Provincetown after Rothko had killed himself. Sievan said that only about a week before that, he met Rothko in the street and Rothko wanted him to come up to look at his recent work. Sievan always said what he thought, not diplomatic. He said, "He showed me these paintings. They're all black." So I said to him, "They don't look like Rothkos." "Do you think I could have had any influence on him killing himself?" We all said, "Oh, no. He was painting like that for some time. And he was in bad shape. You wouldn't have done that."

Sievan said he used to discuss Nietzsche with him. The book Ecce Homo where [Friedrich] Nietzsche talks about how great he is; a nutty book. That was after he went off his rocker. Rothko was a reader. A lot of artists are. They may not seem to read, but I'll bet even Picasso read. I'm always surprised. Soyer said that Hopper was very silent, never talked, but he once sent him a note. It was a quote from [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe. He said he was a reader.

MS. BERMAN: That quote from Goethe, I think that Gail Levin said in a book that he used to carry that around in his wallet. But that's the one. I mean it seemed to be his favorite.

MR. KAINEN: I don't know if this is it. It says, "Gray, my dear Faust, are all our theories, and green the golden tree of life." I don't know whether that's it or not.

MS. BERMAN: I'll have to look it up. Do you know what else Rothko used to read?

MR. KAINEN: No. [Philip] Guston used to read.

MS. BERMAN: You can tell that Guston was a reader. He's not literary, but it comes out in his art.

MR. KAINEN: Good artists have a speculative intelligence. When they read, they're always trying to apply it to their own work, trying to deepen it, get some clues they could use.

MS. BERMAN: The incident with Sievan and seeing the paintings; was there anything else to that about, maybe, did Rothko make any commentary about these paintings?

MR. KAINEN: No. Sievan didn't mention that. He just wanted his opinion. Do you remember the time we called Rothko?

MRS. KAINEN: Certainly I do.

MS. BERMAN: What was this?

MR. KAINEN: Well, Rothko had no dealer then. We were in a New York hotel. Ruth said, "Why don't you call him? Maybe we could get some work on paper or something." So I called Rothko, got him on the phone. He was very subdued. I said, "We'd like to come down and get something. We like your work." He said, "I'm sorry. I signed up with Marlborough just recently." He said he can't do it, he isn't permitted to. And I knew why. His wife was an alcoholic. He's on his last legs. What's going to happen to his estate? He had small children.

MRS. KAINEN: He had been drinking heavily and we weren't sure-he said he would call you the next day. Do you remember? He said, well, he'd think about it and he'd call, the next day. Of course he didn't, and Jacob didn't call him. Later after we got home, Jacob said, well, he might not have remembered the next day.

MR. KAINEN: Oh, I don't think that.

MRS. KAINEN: That's what you said.

MR. KAINEN: I think he probably wanted to put me off. He didn't want to say no exactly. But he had signed with Marlborough. After all, Gottlieb was with Marlborough.

MS. BERMAN: Well, they all were at the time. Really, he had gotten-

MR. KAINEN: It was after he had told me that he hated the art industry and wouldn't have any dealers, and he has to tell me this.

MS. BERMAN: I'll retreat right now to Rothko in his days in the Ten and the reviews. Did he ever talk to you about your work as a writer and a reviewer at all?

MR. KAINEN: No.

MS. BERMAN: Did you ever visit his studio in the early days, in the '30s?

MR. KAINEN: No. He was out in Brooklyn, wasn't he?

MS. BERMAN: Well, he was all over.

MR. KAINEN: He used to visit [Milton] Avery.

MS. BERMAN: Did you used to go to Avery's apartment, too?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I went twice. I went with Joe Solman. I knew Joe very well.

MS. BERMAN: How did you get to meet and become friends?

MR. KAINEN: Through Jules Halfant. Jules was a good painter, but he became an art director.

MRS. KAINEN: Didn't he live near you?

MR. KAINEN: Who?

MRS. KAINEN: Jules.

MR. KAINEN: He lived in Brooklyn.

MRS. KAINEN: How did you know him?

MR. KAINEN: I knew him from high school.

MS. BERMAN: I'm asking you this because you were writing so much then. Did you know that Rothko was writing a book in the '30s?

MR. KAINEN: No, I didn't.

MS. BERMAN: Was there ever any discussion about that? Also that-

MR. KAINEN: Is that so?

MS. BERMAN: Yes, which was some book on art theory, but it's lost and no one's ever seen it. I think it was almost, maybe possibly a dissertation topic, but no one remembers.

MR. KAINEN: Do you mean from Yale?

MS. BERMAN: How about driftwood sculptures he was making? Did you know anything about them at all?

MR. KAINEN: No. He probably got the idea from Gottlieb. Gottlieb painted driftwood sculptures.

MS. BERMAN: I don't know, possibly.

MR. KAINEN: Do you mean Rothko actually made things from driftwood?

MS. BERMAN: Yes. That's what Bonnie Clearwater, the curator, said. Driftwood sculpture and grotesque carvings on pieces of wood.

He was also evidently using the term "troglodytes." Did you know anything about that?

MR. KAINEN: Troglodytes. Was that about the general public or his critics?

MS. BERMAN: No. It seemed to have something to do with his book that he was writing. I think some of these statements may have been transformed into the things he said in the Tiger's Eye but I'm not sure.

MR. KAINEN: Was that before he became interested in myth?

MS. BERMAN: I don't know. When did Rothko's paintings begin to change from the Expressionist paintings to the myth paintings in your recollection?

MR. KAINEN: I think in the early '40s.

MS. BERMAN: Would you recall-and this is a very difficult question-what any of the specific paintings looked like that Rothko showed in the Ten?

MR. KAINEN: The Crucifixion.

MS. BERMAN: Can you tell me what that looked like?

MR. KAINEN: It was very expressionist. I once had a reproduction of it. It was reproduced in a magazine with a painting by Joe Solman on the other side. And I can't remember where that is. Yep, he did some crucifixions.

MS. BERMAN: When you say some, there was more than one?

MR. KAINEN: He did more than one.

MS. BERMAN: What colors were used?

MR. KAINEN: They were somber but quite vigorously painted, not like Weber. It didn't have that-it wasn't Averyish, more Weberish.

MS. BERMAN: Do you think you could describe it literally?

MR. KAINEN: Well, there was a figure on the cross, light against a dark background. But it was very pasty paint he put on, very expressive.

MRS. KAINEN: What kind of drawing?

MR. KAINEN: It was an expressive drawing. The figures were put on. It was closest, I think, to-take a small [Oskar] Kokoschka without the Slavic, without the-it was a little more-would Solman know where a painting of his, Streetcar, was reproduced quite early in the '30s? On the other side is-it was written about-I don't know where it was from.

MS. BERMAN: Well, that's a clue, because I have a list of paintings that they don't know what they looked at. And that's one of them. Was the crucifixion right in the foreground or was it in the middle distance?

MR. KAINEN: Right in the foreground. It was a real crucifixion.

MS. BERMAN: Well, in the first show of the Ten that was at the Montross Gallery [New York], there was a picture of a woman sewing and there was also Subway, A Seated Nude, and something called City Fantasy. I was wondering if you remember what any of those looked like?

MR. KAINEN: No, I don't. What year was that?

MS. BERMAN: That was December, 1935.

MR. KAINEN: I must have missed that show. But I saw-they had a show at-

MS. BERMAN: The Municipal Art Gallery had The Crucifixion, and there was something called The Sea.

MR. KAINEN: I'll tell you who you should see. Do you know Marchal Landgren? He ran Municipal Art Gallery.

MS. BERMAN: He lives here, right?

MRS. KAINEN: Right here. I wonder what shape he's in.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, he's getting on.

MS. BERMAN: There was also something called Portrait, but we don't know who it was a portrait of. How did he use paint at the time when you saw him?

MR. KAINEN: Well, the paint was put on more vigorously than when he started to become influenced by Avery. Then he spread the paint. It's a difference really, a tradition of modern painting. The paste paint comes from Manet. The spread style comes from Degas. Degas liked to spread the paint, and it influenced a lot of the people in New York. Solman, for example, liked to spread the paint.

MS. BERMAN: This is a generalization, but it seems to me when the younger artists of the period began, they started with the thick, just enjoying putting it on and feeling it, having the canvas weigh several pounds. And then as they went on-

MR. KAINEN: It's true.

MS. BERMAN: There was another show at the Municipal Art Gallery. One was called Portrait. One was called Interior. One was called Music. And the other was Composition. Would you remember anything from that second show?

MR. KAINEN: No, even though I was in the show. I had a painting which I destroyed, but I have a photograph of it-some man in a rooming house buttoning his shirt with a hole in the wall with the lattice showing. But very formal, that is-now lost forever.

MS. BERMAN: Then there was the Mercury Gallery, the Whitney dissenter show. He showed two pictures, one called Movie Palace and one called Conversation. Would you remember either of these?

MR. KAINEN: I remember his subway paintings. You know that too.

MS. BERMAN: Yes. Why didn't you join the Ten by the way since you had friends and the outlook was sympathetic?

MR. KAINEN: I was not in the community. That is, I really lived in the Bronx.

MS. BERMAN: When were you married?

MR. KAINEN: In 1938.

MS. BERMAN: So that effectively isolated you and took you out of the social life.

MR. KAINEN: That's right.

MS. BERMAN: Who were Rothko's favorite artists at the time that you knew him?

MR. KAINEN: Well, Avery. He liked [Albert Pinkham] Ryder, [Mardsen] Hartley. They're more in the American grain.

[Audio break.]

MS. BERMAN: You just talked about the Medici Chapel and Rothko's feeling about it. You were going to say about the mood.

MR. KAINEN: You come into the Medici Chapel and immediately you get the Elegiac mood. The ceiling is not very high as its long inverted scoop, and these rectangular walls with the rectangles, emphasized by a band of another deeper color than the center rectangle. You come in and you have to go through this to get the main chapel where Night and Day and the other pieces are. And the Lorenzo sitting there. But it's typical of Rothko to be impressed by the architecture, by the nonfigurative. But Michelangelo did that deliberately. Obviously he didn't make some fancy interior.

MS. BERMAN: It's also interesting that Rothko went back, if you know what I mean, to European art, because it seemed that he wanted to disown it and there was a period where they were despising it.

Did he ever talk to you about [Joseph Mallord William] Turner at all?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. Turner came on-yes. Turner has a much greater influence than most people think, because he wasn't French. But long before the Impressionists-after all, Turner had practically abandoned nature. He couldn't see anything except invented colors. The colors aren't the colors of nature either. It's a kind of ecstatic quality.

MS. BERMAN: Were you ever in any of Rothko's studios?

MR. KAINEN: No.

MS. BERMAN: Of course, you mentioned before when he didn't want to talk to you about what he was doing, you saw the tell-tale dot of acrylic. But did he ever talk about art materials or anything like that?

MR. KAINEN: No. He was very secretive about it. He used to prepare his canvas with an absorbent surface. Clem Greenberg says he primed it with tempera. Tempera would mean-it couldn't have been tempera, because a canvas with tempera would crack. So it had to be a half chalk probably. That is where you mix chalk and white lead or zinc white with glue, water and oil. You can mix oil with water if you use gelatin. Gelatin will emulsify the oil and the water. And when you put it on, I do that myself, you put that on and you have an absorbent surface depending on how much oil you put on. But there is enough oil to make it really flexible. If you put checkered white on a canvas and paint on that, especially when he rolls it up and so many of his canvases were rolled up, it would crack all over. So although Greenberg said this to a large audience, it's not true.

He used to prepare it. Sometimes he'd use egg and water in place of the gelatin. In other words, you need something to emulsify. Egg is an emulsifier. It has grease, it has oil, and it has water. And it will bring them together.

MS. BERMAN: How do you know he did this?

MR. KAINEN: There's a person who-first of all, I used to hear it. But in this book on the Rothko case, this woman talks about the guy who helped him. He said Rothko would mix the egg himself moving it from one part of the broken egg to the other to remove the white. You can also use both of it. He used to prepare a whole series of canvases. That means emulsion.

MS. BERMAN: I ask you these things for the sake of the conservator so he knows how to treat the paintings.

Did he ever talk to you-as you know, he was very tyrannical about how he wanted his paintings exhibited. Did you ever talk about that?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. He used to come down to the Phillips and tell them to reduce the lighting more and more. He thought that the tones set-I don't know, I assume he thought the tones were set by the atmosphere. If you make it too bright, it's punchy. It's all right for a certain kind of painting. His painting he wanted low lit especially in a room. I mean he is still thinking of the Medici Chapel. What is that room? They say the Medici Library but it's not the library. There's nothing in the room.

MRS. KAINEN: It's just a vast room there. Somebody from the Phillips told us every time he was at the gallery they'd turn down the lights. You could always tell when he'd been there by the light.

MS. BERMAN: Did he ever talk about color at all with you, color intensity or anything like that?

MR. KAINEN: No. I'm trying to think now.

MS. BERMAN: When he also mentioned the Medici Chapel, did he talk about the idea of murals and the evolution of his thinking really into series of paintings?

MR. KAINEN: No, he didn't. He talked about the effect of the walls. That was the big thing. He was probably the first artist who really noticed it to that degree.

MS. BERMAN: On the works on paper which you didn't see, did your son Dan say any thing to you about the works and what Rothko talked about or what the works meant to him at all?

MR. KAINEN: He just said that they looked like his usual works. They were softened on the edges and he left a little border of paper.

MS. BERMAN: Well, were they white or were they grays and browns?

[End Tape One.]

MS. BERMAN: [In progress]-with Jacob Kainen on August 11, 1982, at his house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Yesterday you told me a couple of stories after we had turned off the tape. I was wondering if you could repeat them. The first was Rothko when he was desperate for money and went to the museums.

MR. KAINEN: He told me when I was in Provincetown, in the presence of my son Daniel, that at one time, just before he made it, just before he started to-his work started to become attractive to museums and collectors, but he was still known as one of the leading artists, he said that he had offered two paintings to three museums-the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, what's the third?

MRS. KAINEN: The Guggenheim.

MR. KAINEN: The Guggenheim, yes. He offered them for $300 each and they wouldn't buy them. They weren't interested. But a year or so later, his work became very attractive to collectors. And the museums came back; I think it was especially the Whitney-

MRS. KAINEN: No, it was the Modern.

MR. KAINEN: The Modern, I guess it was the Modern, and offered to buy the paintings or at least one of them. He said he wouldn't sell them. He wouldn't sell the paintings or anything to them. I don't know if I should use his exact language.

MS. BERMAN: Well, I wish you would.

MR. KAINEN: Yeah. And the representative of the Modern came to him. He said, "I wouldn't sell you shit."

MS. BERMAN: I'm actually surprised about the Museum of Modern Art because both Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr were very enthusiastic about the paintings since the late 1940s. And Dorothy Miller did give them the shows I think in the '50s. Do you think it was before that?

MR. KAINEN: I don't know. I think it was around 1950, because he was already pretty well-known. Well, he said the museum paid $30,000, eventually, to get one of those paintings.

MS. BERMAN: Why don't you tell me about the Rothko watercolor that you own?

MR. KAINEN: Well, the watercolor was done, obviously, in the mid-'40s. It's very hard, of course, to describe the watercolor. It's basically a gouache opaque watercolor with washes, of course, crayon, and it's watermarked, J. Whatman 1945. The paper is watermarked.

MS. BERMAN: Does it have a title?

MR. KAINEN: I don't think it has a title.

MRS. KAINEN: The National Gallery wanted to reproduce it in a volume they were publishing of works by Bill Sykes. He wrote about this at the time it was done apparently.

MR. KAINEN: Then I suppose he would give the title?

MRS. KAINEN: I'll look and see. I think we have the title.

MS. BERMAN: What led you to buying it? What appealed in particular?

MR. KAINEN: Well, it had a very spiritual quality; it's a very deeply felt work, also beautifully done.

MS. BERMAN: You also told me that Rothko was inquiring of you about a price Newman was getting.

MR. KAINEN: Yes. When I was in Provincetown, it was 1968, Rothko knew that I worked part-time for the National Collection of Fine Arts. One day he said to me, "Is it true that the National Collection of Fine Arts has bought a Newman for $100,000?" So I told him it couldn't possibly be true. The National Collection didn't have that kind of money. And if it did, it wouldn't pay it for a Newman.

MS. BERMAN: And what did Rothko say to that?

MR. KAINEN: Well, Rothko didn't say anything specifically about Newman; but from his attitude I could see that he was very much irked by the idea that Newman would be getting more than he would, or that Newman even would be considered on the same level as artists who had worked for a long time, who had training and had gone through the mill.

MS. BERMAN: Did you also tell me that Rothko was considering giving a painting to the museum?

MR. KAINEN: Well, he invited me to visit him, visit his studio. He didn't specifically say that he was going to, but he was talking about the museum.

MRS. KAINEN: But you were trying to get things for the museum at that time.

MR. KAINEN: Yes. He knew that I was trying to build up the collection, even though I was in the Graphic Arts Division.

MS. BERMAN: Do you think he was less hostile toward the Washington museums than the New York museums?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, definitely. He loved the Phillips Museum, the Phillips Collection, and the National Gallery of Art. He liked Duncan Phillips. Phillips wasn't the usual museum director.

MS. BERMAN: No. Do you recall anything that he ever said about Phillips?

MR. KAINEN: No, I don't.

MS. BERMAN: I guess the Phillips displayed the paintings the way he wanted them to and also bought a group of them.

MR. KAINEN: Well, they gave him a room. Also, they had a lot of other artists of his generation and the earlier generation. And he liked Phillips. I know that because he used to visit it even before they bought his works.

MS. BERMAN: Did you want to say something, Mrs. Kainen?

MRS. KAINEN: I think he ought to say why he didn't get the painting for the museum.

MR. KAINEN: I don't think so.

MS. BERMAN: Okay. Now I'd like to go back to the '30s. And I was wondering if you observed any relationships or friendships that Rothko had with other artists. We'll start with your friend, Joseph Solman.

MR. KAINEN: At that time Solman was one of the most advanced of the artists. He always, Solman always was fond of Paul Klee. And in the '30s he was an extreme Expressionist, and he always was quite articulate. Solman was close to Avery, as Rothko was. I don't know how close they were personally, they had different temperaments. Rothko was much moodier. Rothko never involved himself in any of the organizations that I remember. I can't even remember him in the Artists Union. He steered clear of all entanglements. He was more single minded than most of the artists I met. So while Solman wasn't terribly active, he was active in the Artists Union and on the board of Art Front. Rothko was just not involved with any of the things that were going on so that you'd see him once in a while in the cafeterias.

Cafeterias were a great place for the artists. Any night you could go down to Stewart's on 14th or 23rd or 8th, Stewart's or Waldorf or whatever it was, I can't remember exactly, see a group of artists around these white topped marble tables and always talking about art-the importance of color, what composition was. We talked about older artists or contemporary European masters. We never talked about ourselves or contemporaries. It was amazing.

It's hard to place Rothko. Rothko was just with his group artistically.

MS. BERMAN: What about Rothko and [Willem] de Kooning?

MR. KAINEN: Well, de Kooning wasn't very active. He wasn't around much. I had a studio on 22nd Street-this was 1938, '37, or '38-that I shared with Martin Fuller. He was a commercial artist, and he did a lot of work at night. So we'd string a clothesline across the room with sheets and I would sleep on one side while he worked. But de Kooning also had a studio on West 22nd Street. We'd meet in the cafeterias at night. Artists hadn't seen de Kooning's work. This was, say, 1938. We knew from the way de Kooning talked that he must be pretty good.

So one of the artists, I forget who, said, "I'd like to see your work sometime." De Kooning said, "My work is terrible. You don't want to bother seeing it." But Max Schnitzler said, "Don't believe him. I've seen it. He's terrific." Max Schnitzler was very gifted. I don't know what happened to him. He was also a member of the New York group. So we took Schnitzler's word. He had a good eye. It was absolutely, had great integrity. But de Kooning wasn't showing. And at that time the story was that de Kooning will never make it. None of us thought of making it. We thought he was kind of hopeless because he could never finish a painting. He'd work on it and change and go over it. This is what we heard, but we didn't see his work. He wasn't exhibiting.

The first time we saw his work was at his first one-man show.

MS. BERMAN: Was it 1948?

MR. KAINEN: 1948 at the Egan Gallery. So he must have shown perhaps one or two things. But [John] Graham knew it. See, Graham knew everything.

MS. BERMAN: What did Graham say about [Willem] de Kooning's work?

MR. KAINEN:

"One of the important young American artists." And he mentioned Avery, David Smith, Max Weber. That's about it.

MRS. KAINEN: Did he mention Pollock?

MR. KAINEN: He wrote this in 1936, don't forget, or earlier because it was published in 1937 in Paris. You know, he showed me the manuscript of it. I didn't know-well, Harry Rand mentioned some of the things briefly. He used to take me to Gorky's studio, say, 1935 and '36. I had posed for Gorky in 1934. Gorky had great respect for Graham. Graham dressed like a gentleman, very erect, and absolutely no small talk. He didn't discuss things; he pronounced. I mean, he was such a stimulating man, and his insights were incredible, how he'd pull things out of the air. So Gorky admired him, and he admired Gorky, but surprisingly not as a painter. You know, in his book he didn't mention Gorky as one of the important young American painters. But he mentioned him as a man of great taste, because at that time he thought Gorky was too much of a follower, I assume.

Now there's one thing, I don't know if this is in Harry's article. He came in with a volume of reproductions of sculpture from the middle ages, early Italian sculpture and early European sculpture. And he flipped the book open from page to page and said, "What do you think of this," like a teacher. Gorky and I would respond, but after a few pages Gorky went away because he didn't want to play; but I kept on. Finally he said, "What do you think of this one?" I said, "I don't like that sculpture but the background is terrific, that wall." He said, "That's right, that's right." For some reason, he had a high regard for my art mind because one day he said, "What's the finest Gothic cathedral in Europe?" I said, "Burgos?" I had never been to Europe, but I had taken a course, in fact, I was taking a course, in the evening. You know, I worked at WPA during the day and went to NYU in the evening, taking the history of architecture. The teacher hadn't said too much about any of this, but I was just looking through Banister Fletcher [A History of Architecture. Oxford: The Royal Institute of British Architects and the University of London, 1896]. He said, "Unbelievable. How did you do it? Sure," he said. Well, things like that. And we'd discuss things.

And then one day, I guess it was sometime in '36, it had to have been early in '36, because it took some time before his book was published, he came to my studio with the manuscript. He said, "Tell me what you think." But when I read it, I said, "This is impossible. You'll never find a publisher." Such violent judgments. I was used to a more reasonable tone.

MRS. KAINEN: Balance.

MR. KAINEN: Balance. And he talked about S. [Salvador] Dali and things like, you know, these odd things. But obviously he was cutting to the bone. But all this business about involving psychology and music, everything together. He came back a couple days later and I said, "It is quite terrific, but the title-System and Dialectics of Art [John Graham, 1937]-it's not grammatical. 'System of Art'-I can understand dialectics. Question and answer." He said, "Well, that's the way I see it," and he didn't budge. He had to have System and Dialectics of Art. But that was my only comment on it.

MS. BERMAN: Were you too awed to say very much more.

MR. KAINEN: It was so much of a piece. I wanted to say that condensation is splendid, but you don't explain your terms. It was a little arbitrary to say the least. But I said, "He has all this background and he's doing it his way. If someone else did it, it would be rewriting. It would lack that kind of boiled down quality. And that very arbitrariness made it more provocative. But I thought it couldn't be published.

MS. BERMAN: What did you think of Graham as a painter?

MR. KAINEN: At that time I thought he was rather imitative. I thought he was a very strong painter. In fact, I did a review once, I can't remember where, of the show of the Ten. Graham was in it then. Graham's Fish, the one that's in the Phillips, I said, "It's a very strong painting without particular originality." Now I look at it and I see in a way he was doing what Gorky was. He was influenced by Picasso but he was doing something totally different.

We didn't see too much of his drawing. He didn't exhibit much. At that time he had just married. He had married Constance Wellman and I was in their apartment once. He took me there. Of course, I knew Constance later in Washington after she and Graham split. Then she married a Turkish doctor, Abushadi [ph], who died after a few years, and Constance came to Washington as an employee of Voice of America [new organization]. She spoke a beautiful English. A very forceful woman. I could see why eventually she and Graham parted.

At that time she was very fresh-faced, rosy cheeks and Titian hair. In her apartment-I had never seen French doors like that. It was very nice. I think it was Greenwich Street or something like that. But he had a piece of African sculpture there, wooden sculpture. Anyway, Graham was very subdued there. He made a living as an antique dealer and he also collected for Frank Crowninshield. He had carte blanche to buy all the primitive sculpture. He probably was the greatest authority on Negro sculpture at that time. First of all, his sensibilities, and he could really go over and study something very thoroughly. He probably had traveled all over. So he had a certain income. He wasn't making a lot of money, but it cut into his painting time. Later on he became very bitter.

MS. BERMAN: In what way in particular? I know he turned against a lot of artists.

MR. KAINEN: Well, he thought that Picasso had done him a lot of harm, and he became very anti-Picasso. I met him a year or two before he died at the New York Central Supply Store. I was coming in and he was leaving. He had a beautiful overcoat, crisp cut, and a black fedora. I hadn't seen him in years. The first thing he said was, "Kainen, you know how crazy I used to be about Picasso?" I said, "Oh, yes, the greatest painter, et cetera, in the past, present, and future." He said, "Well, now I think compared with the spirituality of Raphael and the razor clarity of his line, Picasso looks a little cheap." It's funny but that is the aristocratic of this expressionist sloppiness he didn't like.

MS. BERMAN: Do you happen to know why he ever changed his name to John Graham from Ivan Dombrowski? John is Ivan.

MR. KAINEN: Graham, I don't know.

MS. BERMAN: I just thought it odd to take such a Scottish name.

MR. KAINEN: Well, you know, he was supposedly fluent in 12 languages. But Graham? Well, he knew Avery and used to be at the studio all the time. Some people think that Avery got a lot from him. But he spotted Avery very early.

Then he put on that show of Pollock, [Lee] Krasner together with some Europeans in the l940s, something like that.

MS. BERMAN: Did Rothko spend much time with Graham to your recollection?

MR. KAINEN: I don't know, but everybody knew Graham. Everybody had something to mention about Graham. Yet he was never in the cafeterias, never at the union meetings of course. But somehow, I don't understand it. Now Werner Drewes, I know he knows a lot about Graham. He was a neighbor. Werner Drewes is over 80 now. The thing is to talk to some of the old-timers who were in New York. You might find something.

Then there was Peter Busa. Where is he now, Milwaukee or someplace?

MRS. KAINEN: He has a summer place on Long Island though and he comes back every summer.

MR. KAINEN: He was there and he knew everybody. He has a good memory.

MS. BERMAN: What about Rothko and Gorky? Were they particularly friendly?

MR. KAINEN: I don't think so. Gorky just had rapport with a few people. If he didn't have rapport with you, he was generally hostile. It's surprising. But I don't think he would have liked Rothko's early work. On the other hand, he would have respected him as a person. But Rothko never went to the abstract artists meetings. Gorky went once, but he wasn't a member of any particular group except the Ten.

MS. BERMAN: How about Rothko and Stuart Davis?

MR. KAINEN: Well, everybody knew everyone else. And Stuart Davis was one of the best known painters in New York, even though he wasn't selling anything, or very little. I never saw them together.

MS. BERMAN: Was Rothko interested in printmaking at all?

MR. KAINEN: Well, he was at Hayter's. [Stanley William] Hayter says that he did something in the Atelier 17. This is when it was in the New School, 1940-41-42, around there. [William] Baziotes was in there, quite a number of people worked with Hayter, because the Surrealists came there. [Yves] Tanguy and [Max] Ernst, [Andr?] Masson. He was big time, after all. Pollock was there. Hayter still doesn't get the credit he deserves.

MRS. KAINEN: Hayter might remember something about this. I was the one who found out Rothko had been over.

MS. BERMAN: What sort of prints was he making there?

MRS. KAINEN: Hayter had no proofs.

MR. KAINEN: They had no proofs. Everyone was on his own. But Hayter would tell them to ruin the plate. Start without sketches, take proofs, re-etch, dry point, do everything. The idea was to make the artist lose his fear of the plate and also to make it an intuitive process. So that, I think, had a lot to do with the development of the automatic point of view. [Robert] Motherwell was there too, you know. Of course he was. He can't deny it.

MS. BERMAN: You experimented with automatic writing, didn't you?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. Well, actually a number of people used to try the exquisite corpse idea, where you'd write something and fold the paper and someone else would write. But not automatic writing as such. Automatic drawing, yes.

MS. BERMAN: Rothko's painting during the '30s-did he himself see it and recognize it as being expressionist, deriving from Expressionism?

MR. KAINEN: I think so. I think that-after all, I did a piece for Art Front called Our Expressionists. I think Dore Ashton mentions it in his book, The New York School [The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New York: Viking Press, 1973]. And there I talk about how it's pretty evident that there's a revival of Expressionism in this country. It had been here before in a more limited way in artists like [John] Marin, [Arthur] Dove, [Max] Weber, [Mardsen] Hartley, [Abraham] Walkowitz, and some others. I said, "The American point of view leans more toward a descriptive realism than emotional turbulence. But at times like this when it seems clear war is coming, an expressionist outlook has developed."

So the idea of Expressionism was in the air. Sheldon Cheney wrote a book [Expressionism in Art. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1934] on Expressionism in 1935-36. He took everything under Expressionism, including El Greco. But he knew the Germans. You know, he used to go to J. B. Neumann. After all, he showed there. And I mention Avery as an Expressionist, talk about "our Expressionists," yet, there's a whole new wave, because it's a reflex of what's happening in society. So Rothko knew very well what he was doing.

MS. BERMAN: Do you remember him ever talking about either Beckmann or Klee?

MR. KAINEN: No. I just used to see him at the project. We'd exchange a few words. He just wasn't with the groups. The meetings of the Ten, I don't know how often they took place, was where people could note what he said. As I mentioned, meeting him at the World's Fair about the Botticelli and at various other places. There are individual times I remember, but there are others when we passed, would exchange a few words, never a real discussion.

MS. BERMAN: You mentioned your writing. I'd like to talk with you a little bit about your writing. Maybe you don't like to be known as a writer. It seems to me you're a natural writer. And I'd like to know when you started and how it came to you, just when you realized that you could write.

MR. KAINEN: Well, I used to do a lot of reading. Probably I did more reading between the ages of 16 and, say, 23 than I ever did afterwards. This included English poetry. So if you read a lot-I also used to write poetry. I had things published in the Poetry Quarterly and a few magazines, you know, these fly-by-night, small magazines when I was 20, 21. Then I did forewords. I did a foreword for Walter Quirt's show at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1956. I did it before I left. I used to write for the New Masses, I reviewed [James] Soby's book in New Masses, after it came out in 1935. I reviewed it favorably. So I was trying to do two things-push a modern point of view and be left-wing.

MS. BERMAN: Well, your reading, you were reading art books and the classics and what else were you reading? Were you reading texts on psychology?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. I read Karen Horney's Instinct and Intelligence. It was one of the great books of the '30s. I tried to read [Alfred North] Whitehead's-what was it? Well, I read [Arthur Stanley] Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929], and so forth. I couldn't get too much of it, especially with the math. Whitehead's book was very important, because in one part he said that Wordsworth's description of a mountain was just as valid as a physicist's. A physicist will see it as a collection of molecules.

MS. BERMAN: Were most artists as intellectual as you were?

MR. KAINEN: To a certain degree. I think an artist would have a natural feeling for structure, for the flavor of words, their relationships, the form of a sentence. So most artists I know, in spite of people like Clive Bell who was always knocking artists, his Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting [London: Chatto & Windus, 1927] is one of my great influences, short essays on [Honor?] Daumier and [Jean-Auguste-Dominique] Ingres and [Eug?ne] Delacroix, and other artists. But Roger [Eliot] Fry, Transformations [Transformations: critical and speculative essays on art. London: Chatto & Windus, 1926]-he used to read the Germans in translation, Herman Barr and Expressionism. Well, the New York Public Library was great.

I don't think the other artists I knew did quite as much reading, because I was more interested in literature. But I had to make a choice.

MS. BERMAN: So in other words, when you say you had to make a choice, was there at some point a conscious decision on your part not to become a writer, although you did, but a full-time profession?

MR. KAINEN: Well, writing of sorts. Well, I guess at about the age of 19 or 20, I decided to do what Ingres had done, use writing as anger.

MS. BERMAN: You said that you were trying to push the modern point of view and be left-wing; when did you become left-wing? Was it in the household, or something that you came to gradually, or what?

MR. KAINEN: Well, in the Depression, in 1929, I used to see entire blocks evicted, people with their bedding out in the street, not just one house, no place to go, their mattresses out there. So I took part in the unemployed councils. We used to take the furniture back upstairs and the police gave only half-hearted resistance. So I think that got me started. The government seemed to do nothing about it. [Herbert] Hoover's only solution was to let veterans who were unemployed sell apples. They had little stands. They were more like boxes, crates on end, and they would sell apples for a nickel or so. So that was the only conscious move he made. All his money went to organizations like the banks, the railroads. His vice president [Charles Curtis] was Charles G. Dawes [sic], one of the big bankers. You know, it was so blatant. There were no jobs.

I got out of Pratt Institute in 1930. I was kicked out a month before graduation. But I saw an ad for a job for the Italio Gravure Company. "Bring samples." So I brought two small paintings and a couple of drawings, figure drawings or street scenes. This had to be about 1932. And the man who ran Italio Gravure Company was a very intelligent man, Daniel Decovan. Well, there were commercial artists with lots of samples. He looked at my sample and said, "You're hired. I don't want a commercial artist because the idea is to make drawings that can be reproduced by photogravure so that they look like etchings. They can be used for high-class greeting cards, black and white."

MS. BERMAN: That was unusual for the time. I mean usually everything was so corny.

MR. KAINEN: I saw the basins put in for the acids, made a couple of drawings. I don't know what happened to them. Reproduced. But after about six months, he went out of business. He thought there might be some revival. Everybody was going out of business. So there just were no jobs. The government wasn't making any effort. So that helped people to want to change things.

MS. BERMAN: How did you get involved in writing for Art Front?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I had already done some writing. After I was on the editorial board. The first editor was Clarence Weinstock who later changed his name to Charles Humboldt. He was a writer.

[Audio break.]

MS BERMAN: -Art Front. You were saying the only trouble with Weinstock was that-

MR. KAINEN: He wanted to have a sensational piece once in a while. And a review came in from the West Coast about some book, and I think the review was by Kenneth Rexroth. It was a very insulting review where he talked about the writer's diaphanous mind. I said, "That doesn't mean anything, it's just abuse. I don't see any real criticism in it." And Weinstock was annoyed. He said, "We want to have this provocative publication. Rexroth thinks that's the way it should be." Anyway, I was on the board only a couple issues.

MS. BERMAN: Why did you leave?

MR. KAINEN: Well, Weinstock was a little too dictatorial. After all, he had a board. The other people didn't seem to mind. Stuart Davis was on it. Harold Rosenberg. He came a little later, he was there. I remember him.

MS. BERMAN: What was Rosenberg like in those days?

MR. KAINEN: He was very masculine. He was leaner. And he wasn't writing so much. He was an assistant on the mural project. He had some art-

MRS. KAINEN: Wasn't he mostly a poet then?

MR. KAINEN: Yes, he was writing poetry, but not much of it was published. He wasn't connected with any of the organizations that I knew of.

MS. BERMAN: What about Ben Shahn?

MR. KAINEN: Shahn was a brilliant man but very devious, brilliant in the sense of-well, he was brilliant. But he also was not as left wing as people thought. He was left wing in his drawings, but I don't think he was connected with any organization. He was very articulate and very sensible. But his dealings with women, that's another matter. But his second wife, Bernarda Bryson was around.

MS. BERMAN: Did you ever talk about your work with him or did he ever say anything about it?

MR. KAINEN: No. I really began exhibiting in about '37. You know, I had shown a couple of things in the Hudson Walker Gallery [Provincetown, MA] early, in '36, part of a general show. Then I was with the ACA from '37 on. I showed in a group show in '37, and '38 was the first New York group show. My problem was that I lived basically in the Bronx. I'd come down to work and sometimes I'd stay late, but my home was in the Bronx, so that I wasn't-and a lot of my paintings were in the Bronx. After I got married, my studio was in the apartment, mostly in the kitchen. So this was a problem.

MS. BERMAN: I see. You seem to have been quite friendly with David Smith. Is that correct?

MR. KAINEN: That's right.

MS. BERMAN: Could you tell me about how you met him and your association?

MR. KAINEN: Well, we both used to be on the project, of course. He was on the sculpture project. He would come to the cafeteria fairly often, and everyone would discuss things there. He could be quite profane too, that is, "salty," you'd say. At one time we were discussing Tiryns [Greece], the sculpture in Tiryns-he said it was-he was in Crete. You know I forget what it was now. I wrote it down. I can't remember what. It appears we were both right-different aspects of the same place.

MS. BERMAN: Did you appreciate his sculpture?

MR. KAINEN: Oh yes, all the time. But many artists appreciated his sculpture, painters especially.

MS. BERMAN: Why was that?

MR. KAINEN: Smith, of course, had been a painter. Not only that, he left a body of something like 650 paintings, more than most painters do, while he was doing his sculpture, in upstate New York [covered in] polyethylene. Someone who wanted to do work on his sculpture, I guess Miranda McClintic [David Smith, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden collection, Smithsonian Institution. Photographs by John Tennant. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979], said they wouldn't take the polyethylene off. So she had to photograph them through the polyethylene.

He also was associated with Graham. I saw him once or twice on the street with Graham. Graham thought very highly of him. Oh yes, he included David Smith among the young painters. But he would send me cards after I was in Washington. In fact, when he came to Washington, he visited Kenneth Noland. He got Noland to phone me and I came down to Noland's place.

Smith then-I don't think he was married to Jean [Freas, married 1953-1961] yet, but he brought her with him. It must have been in '52 or 1951. Noland was just beginning but he had been to Black Mountain. I can't say too much about Smith except that he was a man of great force. He had weight as an individual. I know he used to write. He wrote poetry, not very good. He hadn't read any. But he had lots of potential.

MS. BERMAN: I wanted to ask you just a couple of questions about Gorky. As I said, I'm not going to ask you lot because I think it's been covered. But you said that when you walked into his studio, you saw the portrait of the artist and his mother, the Hirshhorn or the Whitney version?

MR. KAINEN: It was the Whitney. But that's in the National Gallery. Hirshhorn doesn't have any.

MS. BERMAN: Yes, the National Gallery. I'm sorry.

MR. KAINEN: No, the Whitney.

MS. BERMAN: Did he talk about these paintings and the portraits and his family and anything?

MR. KAINEN: No. He talked about-he had reproductions, mainly postcards. He was always talking about shape making and about [Paolo] Uccello, who he admired greatly, because of the shape of the horses and the background was black. But he also talked about-yes, he did talk about his instrument. He had this guitar-like thing. He said-it's true, he talked about a lot of other things. He said that last Sunday he spent the whole Sunday looking for skin to cover part of the instrument. He had to have the skin of the heart of a calf.

MRS. KAINEN: The skin of a heart?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. He went all over New York trying to find it, but he finally got it. And every once in a while he'd strum it and sing in that high wailing voice. That very fact alone showed his attachment to his past because he didn't sing in English. He did this a couple of times. But he didn't talk specifically about.

MS. BERMAN: It's such a great, moving painting. When you saw it, were you surprised?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, yes, the clarity of it. Well, it was Ingres, but different in that the pigment is different. The pigment is more dense. But at that time, he told me that he scraped the canvas like they did in the [inaudible].

Just before painting when the pigment was just about dry, he'd scrape it with a razor blade, because he wanted to get very smooth, smooth gloss, on that smooth surface but he still wanted a painterly quality. Whereas Ingres, of course, painted it all in black and white first. That's why you see so many painting. They hadn't gone over it. That, of course, was a tradition before Manet. Most paintings were under painted in monochrome. You read letters of Thomas Gainsborough. "Diary, today I put in the dead color on the portrait." You know, his gray-green. Every artist had a different color he was working with.

You look at the El Grecos and you see this brown-violet, deep brown-violet background, against which he painted with a white, emulsion white, that would dry faster than oil, but still would take oil. This was a Titian method. And when he wanted a grayish color, he would drag it over, dry brush, letting the dark color come through so that the drawing was separated from the color. That's why they could do portraits so beautifully.

They painted in monochrome letting the under painting come through in the Titian manner. But there are other ways of doing it. Then they would put these washes of color on it, semi-glazes. The drawing is there. If you had to paint it and draw it at the same time, it not only becomes hard but in time the paint sinks in. That's why you look at a Manet black you see, who is it, Edmund Keene as Hamlet? Whoever the guy was. The black has turned dead. If you look at [Diego] Velasquez black or at [Peter Paul] Rubens black, it's completely differentiated from the darks to the pale grays because of the methods of under painting. But that didn't suit the modern way which as Hassam said probably came from the English watercolorists, the light brown. I don't know how we got onto this.

MS. BERMAN: That's perfectly all right. We were just talking about Gorky. Was it a surprise to see this painting? I mean were you mostly aware of Gorky emulating Picasso and C?zanne or the other way around?

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: Did it seem to mark a break in his work?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. I hadn't thought of it in that way but it had this serenity that he hadn't had before. And also the classical style. But I think that might have summed up his early style because after that-well, he was also doing Picasso, his variations on Picasso. But like most artists of complex natures, he liked one ancestor and another. You don't have just one path, one kind of point of view. You like to be classical and you like to paint loosely. But basically he was working formally no matter what he did.

MS. BERMAN: Did he ever give you a reason or did you have a feeling why when he went through the portraits, I guess which lasted until around 1938, why he decided to stop painting them?

MR. KAINEN: Do you mean the portraits?

MS. BERMAN: Yes. Not a portrait most of the time but really recreating his family in a way.

MR. KAINEN: It would be difficult to gauge his reasons. But I think by then the work was becoming more abstract-his and others. They're more abstract conceptions. He began to leave the figure but he kept painting on older canvases, refining them, making them more classical, as he did with my portrait.

MS. BERMAN: During the sessions in which you posed, did he talk much while he painted?

MR. KAINEN: Not only didn't he talk, but he didn't tell me when to rest. You know, I was leaning on a hand. After a half hour, it got very tiring. So I'd put my hand down and he'd look like of impatient. But after all, I had worked from a model. At Pratt a model posed for 20 minutes and rested for five minutes. I didn't rest for five minutes, but I got the stiffness out and went back to it. He didn't say anything. He really concentrated. However, he did it sitting down. Of course, the ceiling was low there. He had a slanted skylight. Of course, he could have stood up.

MS. BERMAN: Did you see any other paintings there in his studio?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, yes.

MS. BERMAN: How did he keep them? Were they out to be shown?

MR. KAINEN: No. They were in a separate little room. I think there was a curtain, say a drape in front, maybe part of the room. They were leaning against the wall, quite a number of them. In the piece Harry Rand did, I mention how he brought out each painting and said, "Who does this remind you of?"

MS. BERMAN: Uh-huh. It's a funny question to ask I guess.

MR. KAINEN: Well, he wanted-his sources. He wasn't ashamed of his sources, which is more than you can say for a lot of other artists who deny everything.

MRS. KAINEN: I think he was testing your intelligence.

MR. KAINEN: Well, no. Graham might have done that as a teaching thing. But Gorky, he wanted to know if I got what he was working at. But there's one other thing about that. I think when he painted me, he used a model stick, an old-fashioned stick with a ball at the end that had padding around it usually covered with chamois and tied there so you could rest your hand. He didn't do that all the time but he used a model stick. And the palette on his hand, a big palette.

MS. BERMAN: Just like Rembrandt at the Frick [Collection, New York, NY].

MR. KAINEN: Well, the first artist I knew who didn't use a palette was Stuart Davis who had a table with a white top covered with glass. His paint was on that. So he painted with a color against white whereas most artists paint with a brownish color. And I suppose that might be one reason why brown was such a prevailing color. Except, also, they thought of color in a different sense in general.

MS. BERMAN: To go over some of the other people you knew, were you friendly with Byron Browne?

MR. KAINEN: Yes. Byron Browne and Rosalind.

MS. BERMAN: Were you interested in what the abstract artists were doing at the time? What was your feeling about that?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I liked the abstract artists but I had this sort of social hang-up. I reviewed their show. Anyway, I liked them. I liked George McNeil. I liked the people who were more painterly. But I knew a lot of them. It just wasn't the way I was working but I could understand why they were doing it.

It's surprising-in those days artists were very tolerant of other points of view, except for straight, descriptive realism. That was more for people who just did pretty pictures.

MS. BERMAN: Why do you think that people became so much more intolerant which, I guess, I would date from the early '50s?

MR. KAINEN: Competition. For the first time there was an art market. I mean, people were interested in acquiring their work, and then the jealousy started to set up. In the '30s and '40s if an artist sold anything, great. No one was known outside the local confines except people like Stuart Davis, people who were with the Downtown Gallery, Ben Shahn. But they mingled with everyone. There was no star system there.

MS. BERMAN: Do you also think that possibly because there were fewer museums and the work of living artists weren't bought very much, that it was also even getting into a museum was pretty much out of the question for them, too?

MR. KAINEN: Oh, it was out of the question, yes.

MS. BERMAN: So there wasn't the competition to not only get into a museum, but later to have rooms in museums, too.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, that's right. There was the Whitney Museum, the Whitney Annual. But no one really respected it. They'd have one or two so-called moderns and the rest, Ivan Albright. He was among the better ones. The weight would be so heavily on Leon Kroll and Eugene Speicher that it was something to get into it. Artists were required, who were invited, to bring their paintings to be looked at by a jury. A lot of artists didn't want to do that. Take your paintings down and wait.

MS. BERMAN: I forgot to ask you, by the way, what you felt were the most important ways your association with Gorky and Graham influenced your own art.

MR. KAINEN: Well, they taught me the importance of composing a painting, the importance of the feeling of pigment, the importance of one edge of an area against another. It was the kind of thing you could get only from artists advanced in their art. There's nothing of the school about it. I mean it was the feeling of the art of painting. And they were so intense about it, and knew so much about it, that it affected me. Also, the idea of using your imagination-even if you paint from nature-change it. So that association with strong, gifted personalities can't help but have an effect if you have any sensitivity.

Davis was different. I admired Davis, but he didn't have the kind of visionary quality that Graham and Gorky had. They were more poetic in their work, more imaginative. Graham would talk about the enigma of these qualities, these intangible qualities. Stuart Davis was just putting down one color next to another. He had a jazzier, livelier, sort of "accept the world," kind of, point of view for an American, let's say. While I liked Stuart Davis, I leaned more toward the Russian mentality.

MS. BERMAN: You mean the spiritual?

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: You said they talked about how you had to invent things. But it seems from the paintings I saw yesterday, you were inventing before that weren't you? I mean that was never a stumbling block for you.

MR. KAINEN: No. The only stumbling block was my commitment to a social point of view which created problems. Otherwise I probably would have been much more abstract much earlier.

MS. BERMAN: Did Gorky and Graham try to dislodge that?

MR. KAINEN: Gorky did. Graham pretended that he was socially conscious. You know, "Oh yes, the working man," and that stuff. But he didn't paint that way. Gorky, he came up to my studio and I had some paintings there. I had a lot of them in the Bronx. But I had done a painting, I have a photograph of it, of a model wearing a brassiere with a cup of coffee, pot of coffee, on an electric heater on a table, simplified in form, rather plastic, to use that old-fashioned word. And Gorky said, "Too much modeling. You don't want it round like a sausage," even though it wasn't. "Keep the shape flat." I hadn't kept it flat. He said, "Just a little on the edges, all you need is to turn it. That way you have shapes. The way you're doing it, you're not having any shapes." That was very important. After that, he asked me to pose for him.

MS. BERMAN: What finally disabused you of this eye of keeping the primacy of this socialist or left-wing point of view in the picture?

MR. KAINEN: It's a kind of humanist outlook, let's say. I was doing that in the '70s, abstract paintings with a figurative implication, because I didn't want just handsome abstraction. There had to be some kind of view.

MS. BERMAN: I didn't mean that you didn't have these things, but you said that this caused problems and "I would have become abstract earlier." So what I'm trying to isolate here is what you felt, how it came about that you jettisoned something that you feel was an obstacle in your work.

MR. KAINEN: Probably after I came to Washington. That was probably it. The street scenes changed, became much more abstract. From that I went to rooftops that were kind of tormented shapes. You haven't seen those.

MS. BERMAN: Well, I saw a couple of the prints that might almost be called that.

MR. KAINEN: The painting had color and was fresher. And from that I went into abstraction which was even a carryover from some of the rooftops.

Have you been to the National Museum to see what they have of mine there?

MS. BERMAN: I haven't. I'm going to go tomorrow probably.

MR. KAINEN: Well-

MS. BERMAN: Yesterday you told me about how Edith Halpert [founder of the Downtown Gallery, New York, NY] had confided [Edouard] Vuillard's advice to her. I'd like you to tell me-

MR. KAINEN: Yes. As I remember, she told me that when she was in Paris as a pretty young woman-I think she said, I forget, it was 1920, probably, I imagine, a little bit later-she met Vuillard. She was a very pretty girl then, and she was interested in being a dealer. Vuillard said, well, or words to this effect, "You have to play it smart. Ask artists who are good who they think is the best young artist, who has a good body of work. Or he doesn't have to be so young but someone who is not properly recognized. Then you go visit him and you buy out his entire studio, buy up everything. Then you start having other dealers show his work. You can show his work and have quite a number of other dealers build him up. You keep the best work. After they've built him up, you'll have the best work, and you can get the highest prices for them."

And Edith Halpert said, "Oh, that's a very unethical thing to do." Vuillard said, "Don't worry about ethics. It's art dealing."

I don't have it quite right, but it's something that had the same kind of point of view. That is to have other dealers show the work, but you have the best work.

MS. BERMAN: Somehow she would have had to parcel out the lesser work to the other dealers.

MR. KAINEN: Yes, that was it.

MS. BERMAN: Or sell it to them.

MRS. KAINEN: Let them do the work. That's really it.

MS. BERMAN: Or let them think they're participating in it but not getting the best-

MR. KAINEN: Yes, that's it. He probably said that he made a deal with other dealers, but he kept back the best work. But the artist had to have a lot of work, so it probably couldn't have been too young an artist.

MS. BERMAN: A neglected artist. But definitely going to the other artists for advice.

MR. KAINEN: That's right. Well, he always did that, Vuillard. He mentions it in his biographies.

MS. BERMAN: I guess we are getting pretty much to the point of your decision to move to Washington. When you decided to accept the job, when you were going, were you aware of the far-reaching consequences of the decision?

MR. KAINEN: When I took the examination, it was in 1939. There just were no jobs. I was still on WPA. I was married. But I wouldn't have taken the test, except that a friend of mine told my wife that he had seen this notice for an opening in the Division of Graphic Arts in Washington. My wife said, "Well, we need a job." The project was still going, showed no signs of folding. I don't know if the war had begun in Europe yet, but it was pretty imminent. So I took a trip to Washington in the old Chevrolet. And I saw that the Division of Graphic Arts had not only fine prints but had other aspects of the graphic arts-photomechanical processes, stereotyping, linotype, and all that sort of business.

So I went back to New York and studied up on photomechanical. I didn't have much problem with the history of graphic arts, but I studied that too. And the exam was given in 1939, and I got second in the country. Now people who had written books on graphic arts took the test, but they didn't know anything about photomechanical prints.

Well, nothing happened much. I knew that some people who had been on the project, Ted Witonski, for example, had this job. I knew I was second, so I came to Washington and saw the curator, Ruel P. Tolman, who was also acting director of the National Collection of Fine Arts. I said, "Who got first?" Well, I didn't ask him then.

I came there, and he saw me, and talked to me, and saw that I wasn't some strange character. A few months later, I received an offer from the Smithsonian for this job. Well, when I came, I accepted, came in May, 1942. I asked Mr. Tolman who had got first on this exam. He said, "Oh, I had to fire him. He didn't know anything, incompetent." I said, "How did he get first?" He said, "Well, he typed out the test." He was a boyfriend of a librarian and the librarian had him take the test. Whether Tolman knew about it or not, I don't know. But he certainly shouldn't have accepted it. He knew all the questions.

MS. BERMAN: Well, he was cheating.

MR. KAINEN:

He was cheating, yes. And then there were a couple questions that were ambiguous anyway, like when did printing from moveable type first begin? So I said-what can you say? The first Bible was 1455, but printing from moveable type began earlier, right? What can you say? So I said about 1450. No, the answer was 1455 because when-a couple things like that. But they had some methods that people in the United States didn't know about, like the Baxter method of picture printing in the mid 19th century, whereby artists printed from about-they went to about as many 20 woodblocks and one steel aquatinted plate over it. It made the most uncannily realistic glossy pictures you could imagine. Well, Baxter was very successful, and he leased his method to others. But the work is not great, and we don't know about it here. But I had seen it here. I mean, that was among the reasons I got such a good mark on that. So that's how I started in the Division of Graphic Arts. Of course, I knew all the technical methods, since I had been on the project and worked on them.

MRS. KAINEN: Tell them about your marriage.

MR. KAINEN: Also, my wife was pregnant.

MRS. KAINEN: That's still not what I meant.

MR. KAINEN: Well, that would come with my schedule.

MS. BERMAN: Well, I'd like to just pursue the impact of coming down here. Excuse me-

MRS. KAINEN: Just the bargain with his wife.

MR. KAINEN: Well, yes.

MRS. KAINEN: I think you should put it on the record.

MR. KAINEN: Before we were married, I said, "I'll marry you on one condition-that you work for five years, and allow me to establish myself as an artist, just five years." She agreed, but as soon as we got married, she began having health problems. She couldn't work. She was physically weak and so forth. So I joined the WPA and worked on WPA. She never did anything. Of course, now she's working.

MS. BERMAN: Does she live around the Washington area still?

MR. KAINEN: Yes.

MS. BERMAN: She was also a young woman then, if you were 28.

MR. KAINEN: Well, 22.

MS. BERMAN: She must have gotten pregnant very soon after you were married. But soon after you were married, you agreed to work nonetheless.

MR. KAINEN: Well, the thing is, I suppose it's the old Jewish background. I should have been more ruthless. I mean Shahn, Rothko, and others would let nothing stand in their way. But I felt sort of committed to a family, more her family than mine. But I kept working.

MS. BERMAN: That was in the beginning of your marriage too. You'd assume that maybe you could work things out or you'd make a go of it. You don't give up on it immediately.

MR. KAINEN: That's right.

MS. BERMAN: What was it like moving down here after being in New York? What was the adjustment period like?

MR. KAINEN: Well, when I came there were two Washington papers, actually three, but two of them had art reviews-the Washington Star and the [Washington] Post.

[Audio break.]

MS. BERMAN: -talking with Avis Berman on August 12, 1982, in his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Let's begin with your discussion of the cultural climate in Washington when you arrived.

MR. KAINEN: In the art field, there were critics on two newspapers-the Star and the Post. A little later on the Herald Tribune, the Washington Herald Tribune-not Herald Tribune-yes, it was the Herald Tribune, which is a Hearst newspaper, had an art critic also. But when I came here in May, 1942, I looked at the Sunday newspapers-that's when the reviews appeared, every Sunday without fail, even though there were very few commercial galleries. There were two aside from framing shops. But there was a review by Leila Mechlin of a show at the National Gallery of Art. She was criticizing C?zanne severely.

Mechlin said that everyone knows that a painting should be like a window on the world. And with C?zanne, you just don't see anything. Things don't go back, they're not rounded. So she can't understand why people think so highly of him. I read this and I wondered what I was getting into, 1942 and this kind of criticism.

But shortly thereafter an artists group was formed called the Artists Guild of Washington. There was an old Washington group called the Society of Washington Artists which took everyone. But the Artists Guild of Washington was supposedly more modern, and there were some interesting artists here. Of course, Pietro Lazzari had shown with Pat Codyre in the Gallery Secession, and he was a friend of Rothko's. But there were some people at American University, William [Howard] Calfee and Robert F. Gates, who were studying with [Karl] Knaths.

The big influence in this town was the Phillips Gallery on artists. Phillips even had classes. Karl Knaths taught these classes and Phillips supported Knaths. The problem was that Knaths would set up the still lifes. They all did still lifes. He picked the colors; he picked the shapes, so that all the students looked like Knaths. But in the Phillips Gallery, you could see contemporary art, you could see modern art, you could see the connection between the older art and the new art, because the gallery was devoted to modern art and its sources.

Now, shortly thereafter-I don't know when it was, '43 perhaps-Caresse Crosby opened a gallery here. Do you know Caresse Crosby?

MS. BERMAN: Absolutely, Caresse and Harry [Harry Grew Crosby].

MR. KAINEN: Yes, she's the widow of Harry. Black Sun Press in Paris. She was a free spirit. She put out a publication called Portfolio. On the board were people like Seldon Rodman, who took care of poetry; Henry Miller, prose; Romare Bearden, the art; Samuel Rosenberg, who I mentioned earlier as a literary detective, also took care of photography and various other things. And they had other people of note. The magazine came out quarterly. It came out, I think, for two years. Caresse Crosby also had openings. It wasn't exactly a salon.

Well, she also put on exhibitions. She put on an early show of [Giorgio] de Chirico. That was quite a show. I don't know how it was handled in the reviews. She had older artists, that is Surrealists especially. I remember one opening. Thornton Wilder was there, David Daiches, a Scottish literary critic, Charles Olsen, Samuel Rosenberg. Wilder and Daiches were the people I had heard of. I'm sure there were other people I didn't know about.

So she had this gallery going and the literary activity. Then in 1943, I guess, David Porter opened a gallery. Caresse Crosby had been on 19th Street, and then moved to G Place [The Crosby Gallery of Modern Art, 1944-1947]. It was a one block street above G Street between 9th and 10th. Yes, I guess so. And Caresse Crosby was upstairs-was she upstairs or downstairs? I don't know. David Porter had one floor and she had another floor. David Porter worked for the government at that time, as an economist. Later on, he became a painter himself. He had some success.

I had my first Washington show with the David Porter Gallery [on G Place, Washington, DC]. This was January, 1943.

MS. BERMAN: What did you show?

MR. KAINEN: I showed a couple of things from New York and a number from Washington. I still have the catalogue. But I did show one painting called Man of Sorrows. The show was reviewed by Florence Berryman who was a successor to Leila Mechlin. She was rather ambiguous about the paintings until she came to the Man of Sorrows. And she said, "Well, Christ painted in green and purple is not the Christian's idea of Christ." I forget what the colors were. Anyway, this is an amusing story.

David Finlay came in. He liked one of the paintings and reserved it. Then he came back and said sorry, he has to cancel that. His wife won't let him get it.

So there was activity, but it was more or less below the surface, the general surface of Washington culture.

MS. BERMAN: What was Caresse Crosby doing in Washington?

MR. KAINEN: Well, I read her book called The Passionate Years [New York: Dial Press, 1953]. She talks about Paris, and she talks about Italy, and about this mountain she had in Greece with her foundation. She doesn't say a word about Washington.

MS. BERMAN: Did you get to know her?

MR. KAINEN: Oh yes, I knew her.

MS. BERMAN: What was she like, I mean seeing her first-hand, aside from the legend?

MR. KAINEN: Well, she was a very attractive woman. I suppose she was in her late 50s then. She had dyed titian hair, a very nice voice, you know, a warm voice, and she was graceful and a free spirit. She also showed Pietro Lazzari.

MRS. KAINEN: You might as well say it.

MR. KAINEN: Who was her boyfriend here.

MS. BERMAN: How long did the gallery go on for? Did she have to close it for lack of enthusiasm on the public's part or did she want to leave?

MR. KAINEN: She was here-I remember three locations for her gallery. But I suppose nothing much was happening here. There was no clientele for art. At the same time, on G Street, there was another little gallery run by a man named Dante Radicci [ph]. He formed a group called In Transit [Gallery, 2004 M Street NW, Washington, DC]. It was supposed to be for the real moderns in Washington. Lazzari was a member. I was a member. Laura Douglas was a member. She had been a pupil of [Andr?] Lhote in Paris and had a few Cubist passages. And a woman named Jane Love, who was kind of a frantic abstract