Interview with Jim Melchert
Conducted by Mady Jones
In Oakland, California
April 4 and 5, 1991

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Jim Melchert on April 4 and 5, 1991. The interview took place in Oakland, California, and was conducted by Mady Jones for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

Tape 1, side A [30-minute tape sides]

MADDY JONES: Interview with Jim Melchert by Mady Jones for the Archives of American Art.
[Interruption in taping]

JIM MELCHERT: I suppose in a way we should start with how I got here. . . . [obscured by microphone noise]

MADDY JONES: Well, a little bit about your background of where you were born and. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: . . . when I was a kid, yeah, and _____ [all of this]. . . .

MADDY JONES: . . . .and how did you know you wanted to be an artist?

JIM MELCHERT: I suppose I’m what’s called a first-generation artist, in that I’m not aware that there were any artists in either my mother’s or my father’s families. There were musicians, [a lot of] teachers, but no artists. Although when I was a kid I loved to draw, and I just drew and drew and one thing my dad did for me that was very nice was to always keep paper for me that was either blank on one side or something that he wasn’t going to use. And he’d set this aside, and I could just use all the paper I ever needed. It was terrific.

MADDY JONES: And what did your dad do?

JIM MELCHERT: My dad was a minister, a Protestant minister, and I grew up in a small German-speaking community in Ohio, where my dad was the pastor of a large church. He had been born in Wisconsin. His family were farmers, and my dad was the first one in his family to get a formal college education and, of course, if you came from a poor farming family, the only way in which the family was willing to sacrifice to put you through college was if you were going to go into the ministry. It was like the family religious faith was important to them.
My mother’s family were Swiss originally, and her father was a minister. Her mother’s father was a minister. A long line of ministers in her family. And her two older brothers who were in training for the ministry were in college with my dad. And that’s how my mother met him, as he was a friend of theirs. And in any event, my dad was the first one to get a formal education in his family, and it was always clear to us children—my two brothers, older brothers and myself—that we too would be educated for a profession.
And in a way it was a fulfillment of dreams that that family must have had with them when they first came from Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. And my dad’s parents came from Prussia. And I think to a certain extent a wonderful thing about this country has been that people, families, have been able to realize their dreams at long last, and in many cases education was a large part of that.
I was the third son and therefore I had more freedom to choose a direction for myself than my brothers had. And my oldest brother was to be a doctor, only when he got out of the Navy and finished college he did have the GI Bill, but there was such competition to get into medical school in those days that unless you had some kind of assistance, through family contacts or whatever, very hard to get in. And my brother certainly didn’t lack the grades, but I don’t think he came from a college that had a substantial enough reputation to help him there. And so he ended up becoming a clinical psychologist with a doctorate, but it wasn’t what my dad had in mind. But in any event, by the time I was in college, there was no pressure on me as to what I might do. I thought I might become a musician at one point.

MADDY JONES: And what was your instrument or your interest [there]?

JIM MELCHERT: Piano primarily. But, actually, during my freshman year, when I took a wonderful course—what was it called?—harmony and composition, I realized that that wasn’t really what I wanted. Because I just loved drawing. I did a lot more in college. It was strictly an extra-curricular activity. And I even took some painting courses, none of which were for credit, as well as figure sculpture courses. And I should say that the reason I chose Princeton was that it represented a kind of. . . . What shall I say? It was a very independent choice because my family had no history or contact with an institution that was essentially Scottish. Because there was just no WASP world in my parents’ histories. And that was attractive to me because I didn’t want to take the route my brothers had. And somehow or other the world seemed so large and wonderful that I couldn’t put off going to investigate it.
An article came out in Life magazine sometime in the middle forties about the undergraduate life at Princeton, and it was so thrilling to me. Because it was all about things I knew nothing about, and therefore that was for me to check out. And people would always ask you, as you were going from high school, “Where are you planning to go to college?” And I would just automatically respond, “Princeton,” and with not the ghost of an idea how a person might actually get there.
My parents moved from this little town in Ohio to the city of Mansfield, which is a fairly large industrial city in northern Ohio, just before my senior year in high school. And again we were asked what our plans were for college, and I let it be known that I wanted to go to Princeton. Goodness, there were two young alumni in the town who had decided that they wanted to help the university find good candidates and so they got in touch with me. The school somehow knew about it, and told them about me. They were determined, since I was their first. . . . [laughs]

MADDY JONES: Protégé.

JIM MELCHERT: . . . protégé, yes, that they had to see me get admitted. And so that’s how it actually worked out. . . .

MADDY JONES: And what did you major in at Princeton?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, I discovered that there were art history courses. I started actually with architectural history courses—that I just loved, and I did very well in them. I mean the first good grades that I got were in art history. I was very badly prepared in the public schools in this little town, particularly, and then in Mansfield. You couldn’t catch up in one year. And consequently I didn’t know much about how to write a good essay. And my vocabulary was certainly very limited. And I lacked the discipline that it took to get good grades my first year, so I sort of floated on a “C” average the first year. But once I started taking architectural and art history, I just. . . . Oh, I was so ready. And that’s what made me decide that if I majored in it, I could have a really good time. And I did, and I did very well in that major.

MADDY JONES: Art history or architecture?

JIM MELCHERT: Art history. The architecture courses were part of their art history program. It was called art [in, and] archaeology. And I just loved the major.

MADDY JONES: Were there any periods that captured you the most, or was it just. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: I thought for a while that I might want to go to graduate school and become an Egyptologist, for example. But at the same time I had a feeling that I didn’t want to become a scholar. [a dog joins the conversation—Trans.] And yet I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I did a lot of painting already by that time, as well as figure sculpture. Then I heard about some positions in the Middle East, and a friend of mine and I, in our junior year—spring of our junior year—attended some meetings where young, about to be graduate—young, young students—were being recruited to teach English at some of the schools in the Middle East: the American University in Cairo, Roberts College in Istanbul, American University in Beirut, such places. They were two-year programs, and it sounded wonderful. Really it sounded like the very kind of thing that I’d like to do for a few years before I had to reach a decision about a career. And at the same time I heard about three-year programs that our church had in Japan and a few other places. Well, a three-year program would postpone things longer than a two-year one. [said with a broad smile]

MADDY JONES: [Really].

JIM MELCHERT: And somehow or other I had a harder time imagining what I would encounter in Japan than the Middle East, and so I opted for Japan. It was far away from everything that I knew. And you know at that age the world’s your oyster. I was full of confidence and felt this was just wonderful.

MADDY JONES: And were you studying Japanese at all at that point?

JIM MELCHERT: No. I had no background. But, see, part of. . . . What they wanted in that program were young people, primarily, who would go and speak English for three years with all these students. They were junior high students through a kind of high school—I shouldn’t say a kind of high school—through high school through liberal arts college, where if we knew no Japanese, we would be forced to speak English all the time. “It would be good for our students,” they thought. Well, at any rate, I went over then in the fall of ‘52, just after I graduated from college and soon found that it’s essential to have Japanese when you live there.

MADDY JONES: And where were you living in Japan?

JIM MELCHERT: North of Japan, a city called Sendai, which is two hundred-some miles north of Tokyo.

MADDY JONES: And what is Sendai known for?

JIM MELCHERT: It was just an industrial city, and it had been badly bombed. It had been fire-bombed during the war, at the very end of the war, and it was an unnecessary bombing because the war was at an end. And it seemed to be one of those decisions that would let the Japanese know that they were really defeated, and it was one of those things where fires are started in a circle around the city that just burned inwards. It was a pretty nasty thing, and it destroyed what had been called a “garden city.” And fortunately it didn’t wipe out all of it. It was essentially the center of this city. War is just a nasty thing no matter who the victor is. It’s, I mean, it’s nasty. And. . . . Going up to Sendai would be a little bit like going to Bismarck, North Dakota, or something. [laughing] I mean, you know you don’t choose to go there—unless you have a job there.

MADDY JONES: Really. A destination.

JIM MELCHERT: A destination. Precisely. But I just loved it. And I taught junior high classes at a boys’ school, high school classes, boys’ school. And then I taught poetry, as well as English, in a liberal arts college. And of course we taught five days a week, and we also had classes at a student center that we volunteered for.

MADDY JONES: And was your Japanese getting fairly good at this point?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, my Japanese didn’t do much at all until I met Mary Ann [Melchert—Ed.].

MADDY JONES: Let’s backtrack a little bit here. Where did, how did you meet Mary Ann?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, the first summer that I was there would have been the summer of ‘53, and I knew that in the, oh, month-and-a-half, two-month vacation that we had that this was likely to be my only chance to see more of the country than. . . . A better chance to see it than I would have for another year. So I heard about work camps being organized in southern Japan, and I signed up for one in Beppu on the southernmost island of Kyushu, one of the major islands. It was way in the west and south of Japan, and the American Friends Service Committee had been very active in Japan from the very end of the war, and in fact I think it was Esther Rhodes was the name of the Quaker woman who taught English conversation to the crown prince, Akihito. And the Quakers did a lot of work that I felt was very beneficial, very constructive, as they did in Europe with their work camps. Well, the notion of work camps spread and other church groups started them. So that it wasn’t a Friends Service Committee camp that I went to; it was some. . . . Oh, it seems to me that each [appearance, parents, church]. . . . During the war, the Japanese churches took over all of the missionary schools and programs, and after the war held on to them, and it was actually a very good thing. They accepted gifts—contribution of funds—and accepted faculty to teach English, but otherwise the mission boards no longer had any control or any say in the way in which these many, many schools—colleges as well—went about their business. It was a very healthy arrangement actually, and it was this large Japanese Christian Protestant church that organized such work camps in Beppu. That’s what I went to. And Mary Ann was also, that was also her first summer. She had come over also in the previous fall, and she was in language school in Tokyo. There must have been about eighteen of us in the camp. I suppose all together maybe four or five Americans, quite a few Japanese university students, a Filipino, and I think that was probably it. And we all got along wonderfully, great times together. And [our—Ed.] main project was building a retaining wall at an orphanage, because the purpose of a work camp is to actually use volunteer labor to improve conditions at a place that couldn’t afford to hire regular workmen. And none of us were skilled, but it wasn’t work that required much experience.
Well, anyway, Mary Ann had grown up in India, where her parents were missionaries. And my dad’s. . . . Well, my parent’s best man at the wedding was a college classmate of my dad’s who had gone to India as a missionary by the name of Emil Menzel—whose sons came back to the states for college and were classmates of my [brother’s, brothers’] at the same college where my dad had attended. And anyway the Menzels fitted in a large way in my childhood. We longed to live as exciting a life as the boys in India had in our imaginations. And here Mary Ann knew the Menzels very well, and from the beginning we just had one thing after another in common.
And Mary Ann had a song book in which there was a Thomas Morley round for two voices—it wasn’t a round; it was a little song for two voices—that she liked to sing, but she never found anybody to do the other part. And I could sightread well, so I provided the second voice, and we spent a lot of our first month together just going off and singing, and later climbed Mount Fuji together that summer.
I learned a little Japanese from her because in the camp, even though everyone there could speak English, it became much more of a situation where a lot of the talk at the table would be in English—or I mean, excuse me, in Japanese—and you had to know how to ask someone to pass the shoyu (soy sauce). And that was where I started speaking Japanese, and I never got really good at it, but I could carry on a conversation, if it didn’t get into anything deep, by the time I left.

MADDY JONES: And when you were in Japan—I mean, obviously not at the work camp, but in any of these other places—did you come in contact with Japanese potters or any of. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Not potters, but I did [meet] one who was an undergraduate at the university who was studying to be an engineer, who came to the center—a student center that the mission board had set up where we had discussion groups, English classes, things of that sort—where Mary Ann and I later, after we were married, actually started a kind of a work-camp program at social institutions around the city of Sendai. But I met this young engineering student who turned out to love to paint, and he would go out to the country on Saturdays, the countryside, and paint. And I started going along with him, and Saturdays became painting day [for a bit]. Just loved it. And this boy was such a good painter, a very good artist. And we became good friends, and through him I got to know his family well and some of their friends.
I think it’s ironic that this young man who was so gifted as an artist, who had far more talent than I, should become an engineer, when in fact had he lived in a different culture, he would have had the option, I think, of doing something other than what his father did. Because he was the oldest [son]. Anyway. . . .

MADDY JONES: And did his style of painting affect what you were doing?

JIM MELCHERT: We did landscapes mostly. No, I can’t say that I was influenced so much by his style of painting as much as his enthusiasm for it. Somehow you need to be with people who give you permission to do what you do well. And I really loved to draw and paint. [dogs barking] And his example said that these are good things to be doing. And I didn’t know artists really yet. I met a few teachers, of course, in college, but I think artists need the company of other artists. There is a way of thinking, a way of, well, just attitudes that you share and values you share that need being reinforced. Well, I got that reinforcement from him. His name was Sugawara.

MADDY JONES: Say that one more time.

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, Sugawara, S-u-g-a-w-a-r-a. I have a painting of his in the bedroom that I see every morning when I wake up, and I still to this day have to wonder where he is and how things have been for him, to hope he’s had a good life. Anyway. . . .

MADDY JONES: Did you and Mary Ann get married over there?

JIM MELCHERT: Yes, we did. After we climbed Mount Fuji, at the end of the summer, we stayed in touch—she was in Tokyo, still in language school—and we corresponded. We saw each other on weekends now and then. I’d go to Tokyo and she’d come up to Sendai. And we decided that we should get married, which was a very good decision. And so we were married the summer of ‘54. And Mary Ann moved up to Sendai with me. And our first child was born the summer of ‘55, and our second child was born the summer of ‘56, and then we returned, actually, in the fall of ‘56. And at that juncture, I was applying to the University of Chicago to get into the psychology department, I believe.

MADDY JONES: And how had you decided on that?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and my brothers had both become psychologists. Somehow I kept thinking that what I should do is what they do. Which was nonsense. But I just didn’t allow myself to think about a career in art because I didn’t know what that was really—and what that meant. There was a man named Carl Rogers who had a system of talking with a person that allowed the person to say things that shed light on his or her own situation. And I liked that form of counseling very much. I liked teaching a lot, so that counseling would have, I think, been sort of a natural step. So it wasn’t really wrong-headed of me to think that I might study with Carl Rogers.
Except that we got home about Thanksgiving time, and it was in fact closer to Christmas when my oldest brother asked me if he could see the catalog from the graduate school of the University of Chicago, and he did a wonderful thing for me. He was looking at the art courses and he said, “Oh, my goodness! Just look at these art classes! Boy, painting, and ceramics, and all these things.” And I was standing next to him. . . .

MADDY JONES: Was he trying to guide you, do you think?

JIM MELCHERT: He was. He knew very well what he was doing. And he said, “Wouldn’t it be great to take these courses? Wouldn’t you like to take these courses?” And I said, “Of course I’d like to take those courses.” But I said, “What do you do if you get a degree? You know, what do you do?” And he said, “Well, don’t you think you’d find that out by the time you finished?” [laughing] I said, “Well, I hadn’t thought of that.” But it sort of meant that I dared to do that. I suddenly had his approval.
And so, at the very last minute, since I was to move into student housing January first with Mary Ann and the children, and classes started within a week, I quickly petitioned to change my department to art, and it was granted. And I started the MFA [Master of Fine Arts—Ed.] program as a painter. So anyway it was a two-year program, a very new program, and we were in the Loredo-Taft Studio, which is really quite a wonderful building, just off the campus. And half of the course load involved art history, but since I had already done an undergraduate major in it the department waived the art history courses. I did audit one on the Chartres Cathedral that I just loved. But other than that all my work was in the studio courses.
Now we’re getting to [Peter—Ed.] Voulkos. It was actually not a good program yet for MFA students. They hadn’t, they hadn’t worked it out well. They didn’t have a good faculty, when I think about it.

MADDY JONES: Who were any faculty there that. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: The head of the program was a man named [William—Ed.] Talen. I assume it was T-a-l-e-n, but I could be mistaken—T-a-l-l-o-n—Bill Talen, who was very fond of Bernard Leach. He was a potter, but he was like a gentleman potter, which is to say I think he had family money and it was never necessary for him to make a living doing pottery, and consequently he was more like someone who potted on weekends. And I must say he was quite skilled at it, but he had that kind of academic distance from it. And I remember I’d do independent reading, and he would give me books having to do with the differences between northern and southern Sung Dynasty celadons, when I didn’t even know what a celadon looked like. I was reading about the kilns in which they were firing, that kind of thing. Well, I didn’t have money for a two-year program, so the fact I was there and I could get my degree in one year really was a lifesaver because. . . .

Tape 1, side B

JIM MELCHERT: [I had taken out student loans when I was in college and was paying them back at—JM] seventy-five dollars a month, all during my Japan years. That’s why my savings, by the time we entered Chicago, amounted to only something like three thousand dollars, which was enough to just get us by. But, oh my goodness, the strategies we had to devise to scare up enough—we had two children at that point—just to make ends meet. But it was really something. I did win a couple prizes, students prizes. . . .

MADDY JONES: In?

JIM MELCHERT: . . . in shows. For paintings. The prizes couldn’t have amounted to more than forty-five dollars or sixty dollars, but for us, wow! [laughs] Getting the prize money meant more than getting the prize! [laughs hard]

MADDY JONES: I can relate.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah. Anyway, it was discovered that I couldn’t finish in three quarters because I lacked something like three units, and the only way I could get them was if I would quickly sign up for courses on Saturdays at the Chicago Art Institute. So every Saturday for I think it was two quarters I took ceramics classes there, and Leah Balsham was my teacher. Leah was telling me one day about having worked at the Bray Foundation the previous summer, and how wonderful it was for her to be in a place where there was a quantity of clay—as much clay as you could possibly want. The doors were open throughout all twenty-four hours a day, so that you could set up your own schedule. Nobody bothered you. And you could fire all your work there. It was just wonderful for her. And there was a community of artists living and working there, who she found very cordial, good company. It sounded really wonderful. Well, one show that was scheduled at the Art Institute that spring was a crafts show juried by Jack Larson, Pete Voulkos, and someone else—I think probably a metalsmith. And the jurors were each given a room for work of their own. So Leah Balsham suggested one day that we all go up and see this exhibition. The last room that I hit was the Voulkos room. I didn’t know anything about him except that he was from California. I walked in that room—this is the spring of ‘57—walked in that room, and I saw these what seemed to me to be overfired, white structures that were so offensive, so absolutely revolting, that. . . . I think they looked parched. It was dreadful, and I had to get out of that room as fast as I could. I couldn’t even see the whole show. And it really bothered me. Intensely. One of those things you wish you’d never seen. And well, I tried to forget about it, and sometimes succeeded. At the end of the third quarter, which was the summer term, I was. . . . I completed all the work, I was getting my degree, but I still had no job. And I’d been applying for anything—you know, substitute positions in the most remote colleges. A job turned up in western Illinois at a small Lutheran college where the art instructor was not returning because she’d gone to Greece for the summer and decided to stay and phoned at the last minute and said, “Sorry.”

MADDY JONES: Was this Carthage College?

JIM MELCHERT: It was Carthage College. A funny little school. I think they had something like four hundred students. It was near the Mississippi. On a map it is one hundred miles due south of Iowa City, which was really, and I suppose still is, a major center for the arts in the Midwest. Well, I interviewed for the job and got it, and we managed to get to Carthage in a car that Mary Ann’s dad had given us—an old Oldsmobile I think it was. And we had something like fifteen cents. [laughs]

MADDY JONES: Really.

JIM MELCHERT: But the school gave me a little advance, so that we could go and get a refrigerator, which we needed, and stocked it full of things including a lot of ice cream, I remember. [laughs]

MADDY JONES: What kind of ice cream?

JIM MELCHERT: Bizarre flavors.

MADDY JONES: Oh. Really.

JIM MELCHERT: It was thrilling to suddenly have some income. But anyway, I was the only art instructor, and I had all these courses to teach, and among them was ceramics. Well, I had to work nights keeping ahead of my classes, and ceramics was one area where I needed more experience than I had so. . . . I was doing a lot of painting, a lot of painting, but there was still time for clay work as well. And in a town like that there isn’t anything to do except work, and you feel for people who don’t have some kind of a studio-type arrangement where they can go and work. It would be great for scholars if there were a library, but there was no library—to speak of. But for an artist it was fine. I got an enormous amount of work done. But surprisingly I wasn’t enjoying painting as much as I was enjoying what I was getting out of the clay. I just relished my time with the clay.

MADDY JONES: And what kind of things were you making then?

JIM MELCHERT: Small vessels, really.

MADDY JONES: Thrown?

JIM MELCHERT: I was mostly at that juncture. . . . I think I was. . . . I must have been doing some throwing. I couldn’t throw very well. Leah Balsham didn’t believe in throwing. Everything was hand built. But I had had some lessons in throwing in my ceramics class from [Talen, Tallon].
By the way, I failed to mention that also at the University of Chicago graduate program I did have Roland Ginzel as a painting instructor. No, I mean, not painting there; he was teaching printmaking. And I liked Roland a lot, and he looked out for me and occasionally invited me up to his place. He and his wife, Ellen Lanyon, were living in the northern part of Chicago, and they had me up several times, and were very nice to me, introduced me to Richard Hunt and other artists. That was my first contact with real artists by the way, thanks to them. But I also studied painting with a Professor Giesbert, who was a real academician. I learned some useful things from him, but he was a rather rigid, albeit elegant, individual. Anyway getting back to. . . .

MADDY JONES: Trying to keep ahead of your ceramics class.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. I wrote to Leah Balsham at the Chicago Art Institute, and I said, “I think I want to spend the summer working at that place you were telling me about, because I’m having a very good time with clay and it’s responding to me, in a way that the painting wasn’t.” Well, she wrote back and told me about the Bray Foundation and said, “You know, if you wanted some instruction, instead of going to Helena, why don’t you go to Missoula?” because Peter Voulkos was going to be teaching a summer session there. There’s that man again. And I had that gut feeling that hadn’t really diminished once I heard his name.
Well, I decided, “All right, let’s get this over with. I’ll take his course in Missoula and find out what this is about, because either he has something that I need to know about, or I will have proven that there’s nothing there—proven to myself that I can forget about [doing, all] this.” So I applied and was accepted to summer school, and so Mary Ann and the children and I all drove out to Missoula for the summer.
And I took the courses and it was a turning point in my life. I was in the pot shop twelve hours a day. Rudy Autio was the instructor at the university, and he had set up this wonderful building for clay work. And there was all the clay imaginable. I’d just never seen anything like it. It was the most generous setup, the most permissive setup. A circus was performing next door in the stadium, a kind of sports arena that they had, and some of the acrobats came over and talked with us. They were interested in what artists did and so on. I was meeting people in circles that I knew nothing about, and it was just somehow the most fulfilling kind of summer in terms of just getting a sense of humanity—and gaining a sense of Pete’s humanity and my own.

MADDY JONES: Well, you know everybody talks about what a godfather Pete was to anyone who was interested in this, and what he made available to people.

JIM MELCHERT: Uh huh.

MADDY JONES: And did you have this. . . . How were you and Pete?

JIM MELCHERT: He was somebody who looked out for you, and he was. . . . He’s a very good teacher. He gave demonstrations regularly—although I must say, something that helped. . . . There was a potter named Gib Strawn, who had studied with Marguerite Wildenhein, who had also signed up for the course. And Gib was about Pete’s age. And Gib’s work was much more along the lines of utilitarian ware, and I don’t think Pete thought much of Gib’s work because it was so academic. But that’s what you got. . . .

MADDY JONES: And Marguerite actually felt that Pete had betrayed the movement.

JIM MELCHERT: Interesting. I didn’t know that.

MADDY JONES: Well that’s, that’s what Ron Nagel tells me, and I, you know. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: I can believe it.

MADDY JONES: And I’m sure that’s it.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: She really. . . . Then the words “betrayed the movement” are her words.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. Well. . . .

MADDY JONES: Maybe he hadn’t betrayed by that point.

JIM MELCHERT: That’s possible. It’s possible. But at any rate, Gib admired Pete very much, and Gib would stand next to me during demonstration, and he would point out things. “Now watch his right hand.” And Pete’s talking about something else, but sure enough suddenly you see that thumb move out in a certain way. And Gib would say, “All right, you get your thumb right at that point, and this is what it does.” And he would explain. Or “Notice what he’s doing with the rim right now. You see how he’s done it? Now I’ll point it out to you again next time.” And he would actually articulate all these things that [illuminated, eluded] where Pete was concentrating his attention. Otherwise, you’re just sort of watching and it’s sort of a continuous flow.

MADDY JONES: And everyone always says about Pete too that really it was his presence that carried them away. I mean, the way he wore his hair and smoked a cigar and. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yes.

MADDY JONES: You know, that he was an artist and there was no doubt about that. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: . . . and many people have said that that was the big effect that he had on them. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Well, he was so charming with. . . . You know, he was like a great entertainer. He gave a public demonstration that summer that I will always remember, because he made a pitcher, among other things. And the way in which he had all of us in the palm of his hand. There was a point when Pete was so serious about his guitar playing that he was considering becoming a professional guitarist.

MADDY JONES: Of flamenco, right?

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right. And dropping ceramics. Thank goodness he didn’t.

MADDY JONES: Really.

JIM MELCHERT: But in any event he did have that ability to engage his audience. But it was Gib who helped me see a lot of the things in Pete’s demonstrations that I learned from, and. . . .

MADDY JONES: And were you talking to, I mean, were you asking Gib what he thought about these parched pieces you had seen that were so shocking to you?

JIM MELCHERT: No, I never had a discussion with him about that. Gib’s. . . . Our contact was either about technical matters, which he knew thoroughly, or family things—like we found we were all fans of Adele Davis. And he had a lot of Adele Davis stories. I heard Gib died a few years ago of cancer.

MADDY JONES: As did Adele.

JIM MELCHERT: And. . . . [laughs]

MADDY JONES: You know she died young. [said with tongue in cheek?]

JIM MELCHERT: She died young, yeah? [laughs]

MADDY JONES: She died in her early seventies, I believe.

JIM MELCHERT: Is that right?

MADDY JONES: Uh huh.

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, dear. Well, it’s very funny that somebody who lived such a pure life wasn’t spared any longer than the rest of us. But at any rate, Pete would haul out his slides occasionally, and somebody he admired a lot was Toshiko Takaezu.

MADDY JONES: And what year is this?

JIM MELCHERT: This would have been the summer of ‘58. And then I went back the summer of ‘59 as well, when he taught yet again. And there was a whole world out there that he made you aware of. Just as though there was a whole world beyond what he knew he knew. In the kind of places he liked going to after hours. So that we’d finish work around midnight, and then he would take maybe three of us with him to someplace where he’d get a steak and we’d all have maybe hamburgers and. . . . Or we might go to a bar where there was good country western music.

MADDY JONES: And Scotch.

JIM MELCHERT: And Scotch. And, though there was this world of people that I came in touch with that was really quite wonderful, singing and music was a big part of that. Well, Mary Ann was very supportive through all of this, because you’d think that being stuck in student housing with two kids—and the second summer three at that point—would have just been a form of prison. But she actually enjoyed herself enormously. It was a chance for her to do a lot of reading. The kids had a yard and other kids to play with, and it went well. And we were meeting people who were different from people we’d ever met before. The Autios were wonderful to us.

MADDY JONES: Now, Rudy Autio was certainly an influence, but on a technical kind of thing. How would you say he. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Rudy was very different from Pete. Rudy worshiped Pete, and that was something that handicapped him terribly, I think. It wasn’t until years and years later that Rudy, I think came to realize that he had a very special gift that was different from Pete’s. And, in fact, someone I credit that with had a gallery called Exhibit A in Chicago. She was from Evanston. Alice somebody [Westfall, Westfahl? probably Westfall—JM]. She saw some of Rudy’s pieces, talked him into doing a show there. And this must have been in the, oh, middle seventies. And at that point Rudy was in very bad shape, drinking heavily, harboring serious, serious doubts about himself, in trouble with his. . . . And his marriage was really on the rocks. Things were really bad.

MADDY JONES: And what kind of work was he doing then? Was it figurative at all?

JIM MELCHERT: His work had been figurative from the beginning but Alice Westfall. . . . Would that be her name?

MADDY JONES: Maybe.

JIM MELCHERT: . . . gave him a show and sold everything. And it was suddenly like a message to Rudy, and I think that [the, this] strange woman—I’m sure that’s her name, Alice—she gave him something that changed his life. And now, you know, Rudy is a changed man. I mean, he’s not the same. I mean, none of us are the same as we were twenty years ago, my goodness.

MADDY JONES: Yeah, right.

JIM MELCHERT: But she brought him back to life.

MADDY JONES: And was he, what. . . . You said it was figurative. What was he working in then?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, okay. What Rudy would do was. . . . He was doing sculptures.

MADDY JONES: Stoneware?

JIM MELCHERT: Stoneware, yes. He was doing a lot of murals too, big ceramic commissions. And he did a bank someplace like Helena, where you had a scene of the pioneers, as it were, from the old days. And he wasn’t very proud of this work, but it provided him with an opportunity to do his work and supplement his, I’m sure, meager salary. He did a bear for the university campus. I’ll show you later a candelabra that he gave us during the first summer. It was one of a line of candelabras that he would sort of throw together over a couple evenings to make a little money at the state fair, kind of thing. But he did horses. I mean, [they were] in the most wonderful way, like plaques of galloping horses that were just charming. I had really wanted to study with Rudy at one point, and wasn’t sure but what studying with Pete might be too hard a thing to handle in a way.

MADDY JONES: Why?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, because, I mean, Pete was so dynamic, and it, so large, and things were very much his way. Whereas Rudy represented a much gentler route, as it were. But regardless of who I was going to study with, I knew that I couldn’t stay on at Carthage, and so, after the second year, went back to Missoula for the first summer session, which Pete was teaching, and then followed him out to Berkeley. And he had just gotten the position here because he’d been fired at Otis.

MADDY JONES: By Millard Sheets.

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right, by Millard Sheets. And so instead of going to Los Angeles, we arrived in Berkeley.

MADDY JONES: And how were you going to support yourself?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, again, we hardly had any savings to speak of. There was enough to, we figured would get us through the first term. And somehow, like Pete assured that there would be some kind of student help. It was a bit complicated because I hadn’t heard from the university. I had enough time to apply to Cal to start graduate school in the Decorative Arts Department, where Pete was teaching. But we had to leave before I ever got an answer from them. So when we arrived in Berkeley, I went to the department only to find that the university wouldn’t accept me because I already had an MFA, and they thought that it would be duplicating a major, which you couldn’t do, duplicating a degree. But the Decorative Arts Department made a case for their program being very different from what I’d had, which was quite true, and succeeded in getting me admitted. Then I worked as Pete’s assistant in the pot shop, and it was not an hourly wage.

MADDY JONES: And were you throwing at that point? Was that what you. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Yes, because, I mean, throwing was the thing that we did a lot of in Missoula during those two summers. We did a lot of throwing and I. . . . Pete had his own technique, which he insisted that you learn, which is to master the eighteen-inch-high cylinder first using a grip that he knew would allow you to work on a large scale—and [I must say it made all the] difference. It was different from the way most potters hold their hands. But. . . . For pulling up a wall. Yes, we did a lot of throwing. And what Pete had shown us was that it’s possible to build a large clay sculpture without an armature, simply by using forms that would support themselves, thrown forms.
And the work that he did, always. . . . He would work a lot at night. But you’d come in in the morning and there were these wonderful, wonderful pieces. It was the most inspiring kind of contact that I had had with an artist, ever, in that first summer. And then coming here, I also, for the second year, was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. And also at that point I could throw lamp bases. I mean, Pete showed me how you could make some money by throwing lamp bases, selling them at Gumps. There’s a man at Gumps. . . .

MADDY JONES: Well, [Bob—JM] Arneson was selling at Gumps at the same time.

JIM MELCHERT: I’m sure he was. There were a number of us doing that, and there was a man there, I wish I’d remember his name, because he was so nice to me, and he would buy anything I’d take him. And you’d get thirty-five dollars for a lamp base. And, boy, thirty-five bucks went a long ways for us.

MADDY JONES: Now, Stephen de Stabler was at Berkeley with you then. Was he there your first year?

JIM MELCHERT: We knew each other at Princeton.

MADDY JONES: Oh, really?

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, he was a couple years behind me. He was an undergraduate.

MADDY JONES: So tell me about your interaction with him.

JIM MELCHERT: Well. . . .

MADDY JONES: Because whenever you read anything it’s always Melchert and deStabler.

JIM MELCHERT: Really. . . .

MADDY JONES: Well, they were “[Beep, beep, beep], they were Pete’s graduate students at the same time.” So when you read these things, you wonder what the real interaction was.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. Actually, I don’t think Pete had that much influence on Steve. John Mason to a much greater extent. I [didn’t] know Steve very well when we were undergraduates, but I’ll tell you two things about him during those years that impressed me. He was very taken with the stained-glass windows in the chapel, and proceeded to make a small window. He studied some way or other, learned how to do stained glass, and did a small window. And it wasn’t just a matter of making a window, but he got very involved in the iconography, spent a fair amount of time with Albert Friend. He was a professor, an art historian in the department, the most revered, Medievalist. And Steve had the kind of mind where, at one point he did a paper for an art history course having to do with some mosaic, I think it was, but some object in the university art museum where he treated the whole thing as a mystery and came out with some deductions that must have been quite impressive to the art historians. He’s just very brilliant and had this kind of curiosity that propelled him. And he was a very pleasant, cheerful boy. Smiled a lot, chuckled a lot. And it seemed to me he lived in the same dorm as a freshman that I’d lived in as a freshman. Anyway, we ran into each other here. I don’t know whether it was the first year or the second year. I’ll have to think about that. Steve was in the art department though, so that his professor was really. . . .

MADDY JONES: Oh, and you were in decorative arts.

JIM MELCHERT: And I was in decorative arts.

MADDY JONES: Um hmm!

JIM MELCHERT: And, okay, here’s one of those things. There was a man named [Richard—JM] O’Hanlon, who was one of the sculptors there. Jacques Schnier, whom Steve admired enormously and I think felt very close to. Jacques Schnier liked him a lot, and temperamentally they had a lot in common, and also, I would say, in terms of the kinds of minds that Jacques Schnier and Steve had a lot in common. And I think they enjoyed their friendship enormously despite the fact Jacques Schnier was quite a bit, quite a bit older than the regular faculty. But the art faculty always found it very amusing to point to the decorative arts courses, as though it were a joke. And Pete’s turning up there, of course, changed that a bit because there wasn’t anyone [among them who had a higher professional reputation than he—JM].

Tape 2, side A

JIM MELCHERT: Among the sculpture students who were there, there were a number who were very eager to have contact with Pete: Jerry Johnson, Steve, Eric [Johnson—JM], who eventually disappeared. Oh, then Eric Gronberg also, who won the big Paris prize the one year. At any rate, the pot shop, of course, was a place where all the sculpture students were welcome, and a number of them took advantage of it. Harold Paris got very interested in it, and I don’t remember when Harold came. I think the second year that I was there. But my first year Hans Hollein, the architect from Vienna was there finishing up a degree—master’s I suppose—in architecture. He was on a Harkness Foundation grant. And Hans spent a lot of time in the pot shop, and he and I enjoyed a very nice friendship. And I must say, because of Hans, I became aware of a lot of European art magazines that were just so wonderful to look at. Due, and L’Oeill, and all those. Aujourd’hui. In all of this, my world was constantly opening up, opening up, opening up. The move to California was just a revelation for us, and Mary Ann loved it. We eventually ended up in a little house in Berkeley that was a wonderful old place that became like a center focus of activity. We’re very happy here.
I don’t think Pete would like to hear this. He might dismiss it immediately if he did. But I think that two things really hurt him around that time. And this would be about, let’s see, ‘59 and ‘60. One was, he had applied for a Fulbright—no, a Guggenheim—and I think he really was ready for it. Really, I mean it would have been a great thing. He didn’t get it. And someone—I don’t know who it was; I should check this out—somebody got one that year who Pete referred to as like somebody who makes salt and pepper shakers. I think that was a setback that he minded terribly, because he had established—and earned—a solid reputation on the west coast, but in New York it didn’t exist. He had a strong reputation already in Japan, and he was known in Europe, but not New York.

MADDY JONES: And yet this. . . . Did he have this place on Sixth Avenue in New York by then?

JIM MELCHERT: Not yet.

MADDY JONES: Okay.

JIM MELCHERT: He was starting to go out in summers to New York. And in fact Greenwich House Pottery invited him out. I mean, he’d. . . . He was known, I think, in New York. He’d been to Black Mountain in summer, and knew Jack Tworkov, knew [John—JM] Cage, knew a lot of very interesting people. And Greenwich House Pottery at the time, Marge Israel was working there, and there was a real attraction, I think, between Pete and Marge. He used to come back from there with the most beautiful things that he’d done during the summer. But I think he wanted a foothold in New York.

MADDY JONES: Um hmm. Was he making money then?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yeah. He was selling very well. I think he sold everything in those days. But he also, he always went through money right away. He lived extravagantly. Anyway, the other thing that I think was a real setback for him was that he was given a show by Peter Selz at the Museum of Modern Art in a room that was sort of members’ gallery, where someone would be selected as an introduction. And Pete had these wonderful sculptures. I mean, nobody was making clay sculpture like that. Tall, potent images. What was the show in the main gallery just at that time, but the Twenty Americans—Dorothy Miller’s show, in which she was showcasing for the first time Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Bob Rauschenberg. You know, that whole thing. And, interestingly enough, three Bay Area artists, you remember: Wally Hedrick, Jay de Feo, and David Simpson. Otherwise all New Yorkers—and wonderful artists. But I don’t think there was any response at all to Pete’s work at the time. I don’t know that there were reviews of it, whatever, but it got no attention. And there’s all this talk about the other show. The timing was extremely unfortunate. And the bias against clay was still very strong in New York, whereas it hadn’t entirely disappeared here on the west coast, but things were much better for an artist interested in clay here than back in New York. And I think Pete desperately wanted attention in New York. Since you’re not going to get it with clay, I think that was one of the attractions of bronze. So, that’s my. . . .

MADDY JONES: So when you were a graduate student, he had started the Garbanzo Works?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yes.

MADDY JONES: And you were talking about how you would come in in the morning, and there’d be all these clay pieces thrown. I mean, when was he doing the bronze? I mean he worked around the clock.

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they started with. . . . See, Don Haskins was involved with this, and then when. . . . This had to be the second year that I was a graduate student. And we were casting aluminum to begin with.

MADDY JONES: And you were doing a little of this, too?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yes, all of us were. The sculpture students were taking casting with. . . . Julius Schmidt came that second year as well, and casting was his big thing. And Harold had done a fair amount of casting, so at any rate we had these experienced people, and Pete knew that this was a good time to check it out. So he and Haskins rented that space in front of _____, Berkeley, the Garbanzo Works. And we did all the wax work in the old pot shop, which is where the museum stands now, the University Art Museum. And mostly casted aluminum, as I said, sheets. You know, cast sheets and then make things out of them.

MADDY JONES: Um hmm.

JIM MELCHERT: But in the beginning Pete’s things were small and he did this one series that I just loved called Dead Birds, where it had a little platform, and then this shape that was like a dead bird. The title helped. [laughs]

MADDY JONES: Really.

JIM MELCHERT: At any rate, I think it was Dorothy Miller again, juried a show here, one of the San Francisco annuals, and all of us entered [because it was an open competition—JM]. And I think all of us got in. But when. . . . The way the show was set up, I remember Pete’s Dead Bird was there, about this big [10 inches high—JM]. And it was on some kind of base next to the door, just after you entered the room. The way it was displayed, it looked like a satchel someone had left.

MADDY JONES: Really.

JIM MELCHERT: Well, the fact is [you’re] not going to get any attention with small things. I think in these competitive situations, it had to be large. And, of course, Pete was right, as you say, you could work large with bronze. And he was also able to bring to bronze—bronze work—what he’d learned from pottery making, which is to make parts and then assemble them. And it always interested me that this was a Greek technique, that the ancient Greeks used in assembling, those [ky-lex-es] and so on. You made parts and then you assembled them. And I’m sure that it’s strictly a coincidence, Pete’s being Greek. But there’s a way in which you could get a very articulated profile that way, and also a way in which you can surprise yourself by juxtaposing the shapes that you would never have put together had you been modeling.

MADDY JONES: Talking about that juxtaposition, what were you. . . . You were working. . . . In 1962, you made the Leg Pot I. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: . . . which had to do with gravity and juxtaposing parts that you wouldn’t actually think belonged together.

MADDY JONES: Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about that.

JIM MELCHERT: Well, the juxtaposing was something I had certainly learned from Pete. Probably at the beginning, it was a matter of his saying, “Look, why don’t you set that on top of this.” And I’d try it. “Wow!” I’m sure it was that sort of thing. But also with the Leg Pot, it was a time when I had decided that I had to get out from under Pete’s influence. And one characteristic of Pete’s work was the strong vertical bilateral symmetry. And, okay, work in another way. And supposing things don’t go up, supposing things go out. So that was a lot of what the Leg Pot was about.

MADDY JONES: [Only] the Leg Pot was stoneware.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: It also had some lead in it.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah.

MADDY JONES: So now we’re talking about assembling other. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. I had become very interested in a lot of what I was seeing for the first time in the work of people like George Herms, Bruce Connor. That was work I had never seen before, and it fascinated me because it was a matter of taking things that had separate histories and getting them to interact. Before I did the Leg Pot, I did some plates where I. . . . Very large plates. I’d love to see them again. One I glued a muffin tin to. We used a lot of epoxy in those days, and. . . .

MADDY JONES: And the muffin tin, was that 1963, about?

JIM MELCHERT: 1962. It came before the Leg Pot, I think.

MADDY JONES: Oh, it did. Okay.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah. But as Ron will I’m sure tell you, there was also a feeling that there’s no reason to restrict yourself to materials that belong to the ceramics tradition—that we were sculptors.

MADDY JONES: But where did that come from? Where did that idea come to you? How did you arrive at that?

JIM MELCHERT: [pauses, thinking]

MADDY JONES: Because it was certainly a departure.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, it was a departure. By that time, I think that I certainly was aware of the fact that there were the orthodox clay people, and that there were lots of other ways in which you could create an image that other sculptors were using, and in a way we occupied a territory between the two of them.
Now Pete has always maintained his contact with the craft world. He’s been very loyal to them, and I think much abused by them—by some of them. But Kenny Price was not particularly interested in them, and John Mason wasn’t particularly interested in them, even though some craft people, Rose Slivka, wanted very much to stay abreast of things that Pete and his students were doing. There was a preciousness to the craft world that is a little claustrophobic.

MADDY JONES: And you felt that right away?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yes. Also, I remember one time working in the pot shop at Cal, throwing at the wheel, when some people came in who obviously were potters who were very skeptical of what Pete was doing, and they stood watching me and making these snide remarks that all had to do with my using too much water. And it was sort of like, “Ha ha ha, look at this,” that sort of thing. “Doesn’t even know how to throw with a minimum of water.” And I was throwing something this big [24 inches—JM]. I don’t think any of them could throw them that high. It was a matter of their having crossed over into enemy territory, and I was there available to be picked on. And, at any rate, there was a certain hostility that you became aware of that existed.

MADDY JONES: And did you find the hostility from the other side, too? Of other people looking. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Well, there were people like O’Hanlon, who I mentioned, who snickered at the notion of trying to make anything of significance out of clay. Although. . . . [pauses] I would say more. . . . I sensed a wonderful kind of receptivity from Manuel Neri and a few of his friends at the San Francisco Art Institute—including Joan Brown who was still a student—graduate student, I think—that they saw clay as being really a wonderful medium of working, but it was just one of a variety of ways that would work.
And, oh, again, as I say, [that constantly] the world was unfolding for me, and there was more yet to be found, and so on. There was more to sample and to try out on your own work. And one thing I guess I will admit to is that to some extent you got certain ideas of what you might try from knowing what would just curdle some of the orthodox craft people.

MADDY JONES: Like sticking in a piece of lead or a muffin tin?

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right. Or I remember at one point painting instead of glazing wares.

MADDY JONES: And what were you painting with?

JIM MELCHERT: Just enamels. Yeah. Modesto Lanzone has a piece in his restaurant that’s a still life that I did, I’m going to guess ‘63 maybe, and I painted it. And I did paint on a number of pieces for a while in the middle sixties, rather than glaze them. Why not, you know? And it was the sort of thing that made regular ceramics people shudder. But it was still the fact that they’d give a shudder, anytime that somebody says, “You may not do that,” you know get curious, “Why not? What if I did?” And this is an old thing. The so-called Dissonant Quartet of Mozart’s was a matter of checking out some possibilities, some potential, in sound that wasn’t yet quite acceptable. And so all you need to do is find out what you must not do to get a clue to where there might be something that could yield some surprises.

MADDY JONES: So at this point you were still working in stoneware, but earthenware was just beginning. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Well, earthenware. . . . Okay, there were a couple things. My first contact with earthenware was still in Missoula—I think it was the second summer—when some potters came to visit Pete one day at the shop, and they were complaining about how you couldn’t get into craft shows anymore with earthenware. That. . . . See, everybody had been doing earthenware, and then people like Pete and Susan Peterson and Carlton Ball were beginning to investigate stoneware. I think Tony Prieto was doing stoneware. Well, suddenly it was all the rage, and these potters visiting Pete at the Missoula show were complaining that since they worked in earthenware they couldn’t get into shows. Well, it may have been because of the work, but in any event they thought it was the bias now against perfectly useful material. And I remembered that. . . . Here is something that is scorned, and that’s another signal, “Hey, go and check this out.” But the person who really is responsible, I think, for the attention given to earthenware was Kenny Price, because he was working with those colors and all.

MADDY JONES: And did Kenny Price come to Berkeley at all or. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, not at all.

MADDY JONES: You went down to L.A.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah. Kenny, [Billy Al—Ed.] Bengston, and those guys had this attitude that they were the best, and if you wanted to see Kenny you had to see him there. But as happened one time, we went down to see him once, and I called from here, and he said, “Well, give me a call and I’ll see.” And we were at John Mason’s, and I called him again, and said, “We’re here, and we’d like to drop by.” “No, it wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do.” And so we didn’t get to see him. But I’d been to Kenny’s with Fred Marer and Henry Takemoto, and I remember Kenny showing us some of his cups. They were so beautiful. Simple little things. And they were five bucks, and I remember not being able to afford five bucks to buy one. Well, I should have done it anyway. But, at any rate. . . . He had these colors that were like Merthiolate—you know, lavenders and things that represented [a] very different aesthetic scheme from what was available.

MADDY JONES: Had he been to Alfred [University—JM] by then?

JIM MELCHERT: I don’t think so. I think it was just before he went to Alfred. But, you see, Kenny had to get away from Pete, out from under Pete’s influence, and. . . . I never thought he was under it, frankly. But I think of all of the students that Pete had, Kenny still represents up there, like an aesthetic sensibility that is most exquisite, really the rarest. And frankly, I don’t find Kenny an interesting artist. You know, when I look back over his work, over the years, I don’t find it to be all that interesting. But. . . .

MADDY JONES: And yet. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: But he. . . . I mean there’s something there. I’m not denying his gift. Pete really admired Kenny’s work. So Ron [Nagle—JM] and I decided that at the Art Institute. . . .

MADDY JONES: Before we get to the Art Institute with Ron, let’s just backtrack a little bit. You met Ron at Berkeley.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, Ron was. . . . He and Rick Gomez used to come over. Ron was at [San Francisco—JM] State, and he was a like a jewelry major who also did some ceramics. And he always had funny things to say. He used to poke fun at the Potters’ Guild and those people, and he was very funny, always, and just delightful to have around.

MADDY JONES: Well, you know, Ron was at Berkeley on what Pete used to call his auditor’s program. Ron didn’t have the grades to get into Berkeley, so Pete would just let the people who he thought had talent come in.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. [Mike Frimkess—JM] was here for a year working that way. And I got to continue using the shop after I graduated. I was working at the Art Institute, but it was much more convenient for me just to come up to Cal when I wasn’t teaching and keep working in the pot shop.

MADDY JONES: And what was your relationship with Frimkess?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, well, I. . . .

MADDY JONES: You smoked pot together.

JIM MELCHERT: More than that. Like pot was something that Ted Bielefeld introduced, because he was a jazz musician.

MADDY JONES: Who did?

JIM MELCHERT: Ted Bielefeld. Who was a wonderful character, who also figures into this auditing business—just as Ann Adair, Ann Stockton started out as an auditor. Oh, there was a great gang of us. Fred Wollschlager began working in the pot shop as an auditor. A lot of good people.
What Frimkess. . . . See, Frimkess was also crazy about jazz, and he brought a kind of imagery. It was very different, it wasn’t abstract. It was always pictorial. And he would do things like make boxes and shapes that [you didn’t associate with—JM] clay. Clay normally wouldn’t be the first material you’d choose for some of the forms he wanted to make. But he was a wonderful artist and just somebody I loved talking with. Unfortunately, also someone who, for reasons of his own, found it necessary to terminate friendships in ways that weren’t nice and would leave you with a bitter, resentful feeling. And so before Frim left to go to. . . . Frim—we used to call him Frim sometimes, mostly Mike. Before he went back to L.A., he severed ties with us. But he was a difficult, complicated, wonderful, oh, wonderfully gifted [young man]. But Ron had this fascination with things in miniature and popular culture. Jazz didn’t interest him as much as pop tunes, and particularly early rock, [and all of that].

MADDY JONES: And Beatles. He said he was playing Sergeant Pepper’s [Lonely Hearts Club Band—Ed.] even before the real recording was out. He’d gotten a sneak preview of it. He said he used to blast that over at the Art Institute a lot.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. Now that doesn’t surprise me at all. But popular culture was a big thing with Ron, and rhythm and blues. All those things. And he had a friend—Mike Daly, I think his name was—who had a fabulous collection of old 45s from high school days. All of this was new to me. One thing about being in Japan for four years was that you missed out on this many years of American culture. And to this day, I know about Elvis Presley but I didn’t hear Elvis Presley when everybody else did. And I know that there were big fins on the backs of automobiles that were two-toned and all of that, but I never saw them, that kind of thing. That happened while I was gone. And with each person that I got to know in those days, there was another world to explore, that absolutely dazzled me. With Montana and Fred Wollschlager, who came down from Missoula, and his friends, there was good country-western music. Fred was a terrific country western singer and guitarist. He’s still in San Francisco, a good potter, too. And I just loved it all.

MADDY JONES: Who else did you encounter over at Berkeley?

JIM MELCHERT: In the pot shop?

MADDY JONES: Um hmm. And was anyone kind of a mentor or a major criticizer, any kind of. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Well, a friend of Ron’s named Ed Burell was up from L.A. for a while. Ed didn’t work in the pot shop, but he was an artist, quite gifted. Assemblage was what I identified with him. He wasn’t [particularly—JM] productive so there were very few pieces. He used to make things that were purselike. . . .

Tape 2, side B

JIM MELCHERT: . . . made of leather with metal hardware parts. He made sandals for a living. Ed had studied at Chouinard, I think. He was a good friend of a lot of the artists whom we admired in L.A. but particularly. . . . Who’s the one who. . . . Ruth Braunstein handled his estate? Did wonderful drawings.

MADDY JONES: Oh, John Altoon.

JIM MELCHERT: John Altoon. He was a good friend of John Altoon’s. But he knew Kenny [Price—JM] and he knew Larry Bell well. But anyway Ed Burell was very critical of what we were doing in ceramics, and I’m afraid that I was no match for Ed when it came to critical discourse, so that I began to develop serious doubts about my work and what I was doing—and at a time [when I should have been more confident of my direction. He had us believing—JM] that we were giving in to too many conventions.

MADDY JONES: What kind of conventions?

JIM MELCHERT: Round plates. Also he essentially questioned the kind of massive scale that we were working in, that I was working in. Very critical of the kind of surfaces we were getting. I look back on it now, and I realize that [I should have been more critical of his opinions—JM]. One of the things that he and Ron had in common was that kind of a jeweler’s sensibility, that attention to detail, and the love of miniature, and so on. And, of course, the kind of surfaces that we were getting with stoneware were anathema to him, really disagreeable. And the kind of scale we were working on was unnecessary. And I’m just sorry that I wasn’t better prepared to think through all of that. So I floundered for a few years. It was at that time, however, that we had started using lowfire glazes on stoneware.

MADDY JONES: And where did that come from? I mean was that from going down and seeing Kenny?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, first Pete used to refire stoneware pieces with touches of earthenware glazes.

MADDY JONES: For surface.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah. [No, for color.—JM] And so, from the very beginning, it was always an option. Even for my graduate show in the spring of ‘61 at the Richmond Art Center, I had stoneware pieces that were helmets that used lowfire glazes. There’s a wonderful red—that cadmium selenium red—that Pete had come across and that I used a lot. So color was already a part of the work, but there was a subtlety to Kenny’s palate that we didn’t have. His vessels were really vehicles to display the glaze.

MADDY JONES: And with Ron.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, Kenny was the perfect person for Ron to know, to be paying attention to. In some ways, I think Ron’s work might have developed in more imaginative ways had Kenny not been such a dominant figure for him. His influence on Ron was very marked. In any event in the fall of, I guess it was ‘61, maybe even the summer of ‘61. But by fall I was made chair of the program at the Art Institute, and Ernie Kim was asked to leave. [phone rings]

MADDY JONES: Do you want to get that?
[Interruption in taping]

JIM MELCHERT: [So] the first year that I taught at the Art Institute we continued using stoneware, firing at stoneware temperatures, and I was able to get Ted Bielefeld a job teaching Saturdays and maybe night school, and I was able to bring Ron in for some of the daytime courses. And so I think he and I alternated days, or something like that. But anyway, that first year was a time when a lot happened. Now I may not have the sequence quite right, but I’ll you tell you this story.

MADDY JONES: Okay.

JIM MELCHERT: One thing Pete felt strongly about was that you should never be snobbish about where you’re going to show your work. If you’re invited somewhere, you send them something. Well, there was some new gallery opening in Walnut Creek that wanted Ron and Ann and me to have a show of ceramics. And I was doing large thrown white shapes at the time, and stoneware and some porcelain. The entire series was not bad, but I had a few clunkers in that show. It was a very funny kind of gallery, because they wanted to put white dolomite stones on the floor, things like that. That funny sort of thing. Well, we had this show and Manuel came to the opening, and he had had quite a bit to drink, and he picked up one of my bowls and threw it on the ground and smashed it. [laughing]

MADDY JONES: [laughs]

JIM MELCHERT: He was so disgusted. And there was a message in that, and always afterwards he was apologetic. But he shouldn’t have been because he couldn’t have told me, “Look, you shouldn’t be doing this”. . . .

MADDY JONES: . . . any better.

JIM MELCHERT: I had to think more about what I was doing.

MADDY JONES: And what was your immediate reaction when he smashed the bowl?

JIM MELCHERT: Both slightly hurt but aware that he was telling me something that I needed to hear. And I think I was being pretentious with that work. There was a kind of Japanese aesthetic that I was borrowing for effect, and it wasn’t genuine. And it was good that I had heard that. Well, the other show at the Art Institute was really quite wonderful. I think it was the first time that Steve de Staebler showed any large ceramic work. He did a very big [massive—JM] floor piece. [Earlier—JM] Steve and I had gone down to Los Angeles together to see a John Mason show. Steve was very taken with John’s work.

MADDY JONES: Where had you gone down to see that?

JIM MELCHERT: At the Pasadena Museum. It was a show in which John had built sculptures by using a two-by-two in the center on which he could attach things. He’d have ropes that were tied to the ceiling that could support these meandering thick ribbons of clay and then as they would set up, you could pull the inside two-by-two out and the piece could stand by itself through the firing. Steve was really taken by it [John’s use of clay—JM]. And I think for the record that that’s an interesting influence to make note of, because I don’t think Pete inspired Steve as much as John did. And Steve has been very independent so that he’s pursued his own course.

MADDY JONES: So in the work of Six Artists in Clay at the Art Institute, it was you, Steven de Staebler, Ann Stockton. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right. Manuel.

MADDY JONES: Manuel.

JIM MELCHERT: Rick Gomez.

MADDY JONES: And one other.

JIM MELCHERT: One other. I wonder who could that be. Well Fred Martin was running the gallery at the time. . . .

MADDY JONES: Ron Nagel?

JIM MELCHERT: Ron. Of course, Ron. Ron and Fred Martin arranged the show. I remember John Coplans was in the audience when we had a panel discussion while the show was up. We were all very excited about that because it meant that we were getting some serious attention. And it was a good show, and I think each of us had work in it that represented us well.

MADDY JONES: What was your piece in that?

JIM MELCHERT: I had two what I called doors; they were wall pieces—large wall pieces. The San Francisco Museum has one of them: Door F, which consists of slats of clay diagonally placed on [a frame—JM]. There were two sections to it. The diagonals run left to right in the upper one, and right to left on the lower one, with a kind of a periscope at the top. But it was the piece that I put in a show of Eleven Americans at the Biennale in Paris. At any rate, I had that Door F, and I had another door piece that was not as successful, and the Leg Pot. And Steve had this very large kind of blanketed set of shapes divided by the cuts, and so on. By that time, he already had gotten himself a very good, capacious studio on this side of the Bay. Ron had the tombstones in there, one for Lamont Cranston [who was “The Shadow” on the radio—JM]. See, the popular culture reference, again.

MADDY JONES: And Manuel was working in clay?

JIM MELCHERT: Manuel did loops that he’d made in the pot shop at the Art Institute. He came down and worked there for a while, and did those loops [set on a clay slab—JM]. And they were really wonderful. And he used low-fire glaze on them. Very painterly, like that painterly thing that Pete had liked so much. He used to put engobe on top of his glazes, that some people saw as being such a violation, which nevertheless related to painting as opposed to glazing. Abstract expressionist painting had captured his imagination. He talked about it a lot, and particularly Franz Kline. Well, in any event, what to say about that show. . . . I don’t know what some people like Al Light thought about it, but. . . .

MADDY JONES: Well, apparently he was very upset. He took Manuel aside and said, “What are you doing hanging out with. . . .” I mean, he really. . . . He was the head of sculpture then?

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: And so did you feel that, being head of ceramics. . . ? I mean, was there. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: The only thing that I sensed that was hard for us was that we couldn’t have graduate students. And that was largely because the powers that be at the time—who were Elmer Bischoff and. . . . Oh, the man at Stanford, the painter.

MADDY JONES: Lobdell?

JIM MELCHERT: Lobdell. Frank Lobdell and Al thought you couldn’t do graduate-level work in ceramics. I mean, it’s just a. . . . I discussed it once with Elmer, the first time I met him. It was at a party and I asked him about it. And he said that it had to do with process, that there was so much. . . . It’s not a direct medium, and like you had to fire it, and all those things, and that as far as he was concerned it was like photography or printmaking. But nevertheless there was so much going on in the ceramics area. I think. . . .

MADDY JONES: Had Fred Martin hired you?

JIM MELCHERT: No. It was Gurdon Woods who hired me.

MADDY JONES: Ah hah.

JIM MELCHERT: He was the director. Fred wasn’t. . . . Fred was in charge of the gallery at the time. No, Gurdon Woods was director of the school.

MADDY JONES: And how. . . . He must have been supportive of you.

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, yes. Gurdon was very supportive. He saw my show at Richmond, my graduate show. And that’s what decided him on asking me if I would take the job.

MADDY JONES: And had they had a department before that? Before you?

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, Ernie Kim. . . .

MADDY JONES: Oh, Ernie Kim, right.

JIM MELCHERT: . . . ran it, yeah. But I think he wanted a more aggressive program, and that something. . . .

MADDY JONES: And Ernie Kim was a real traditionalist, real potter.

JIM MELCHERT: He was basically a potter. Ernie was a very nice man, but he was basically in pottery, and it was not. . . . The range of work that interested him was narrow, compared with what Gurdon wanted. But. . . .

MADDY JONES: So how did you turn the shop over to earthenware, whiteware?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, we just decided that, I suppose the second day, why not do it, because we were having trouble with the kilns. The ceiling was always catching fire, the roof of the kiln shed was always catching fire, and so on, and the school never had any money, and you just couldn’t replace kilns if they went. I mean, they were looking pretty bad. So we decided let’s go to low-temperature firing. And to be firing stoneware and earthenware made no sense, because you’re always confusing your glaze and everything, so we just said, “Let’s do it.” And I remember at the time writing to Bob. . . . Oh, goodness. A potter at Alfred [University—JM] who I like very much. Turner, Bob Turner. Asking him if he knew a good source of information for us on earthenware, clay bodies on glazes, anything that would be useful in reestablishing our curriculum around earthenware. Well, we didn’t get much help from Alfred, but we just had to work it out ourselves. And it went quite well.
Let me just say something more though about Al because. . . . There isn’t much more to say except that, see, I don’t remember any expressions of hostility from him at the time of that show. Where it turned up was later when Ron and I started having slide shows where we’d just take slides of anything that interested us out of magazines, mostly, and books. And maybe once a week we’d just show a batch of forty slides, and anybody who wanted to could come in. Well, we had all these sculptors coming in. The place, the room filled with people for our slide shows. And there wasn’t any commentary, necessarily. Somebody’d ask, “What is this?” And we’d say, “I think it’s a. . . .” You know. [chuckles]

MADDY JONES: Yeah, exactly.

JIM MELCHERT: And Al was losing his students because they wanted to see what was going on. And the last year that I was at the Art Institute. . . .

MADDY JONES: Which was what year?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, that must have been ‘64, something like that, ‘64, 65. There were these guys coming in, had come down from Montana who wanted to work. One of them, Jim Reineking has done very well as a sculptor on his own, living in Europe now, but it was New York for quite a while at. . . . And [he] has become very successful in Europe. But this guy came down, we had Nick Stephens come over from England. . . . The pot shop became the place where was happening, as it were. I mean, lots of stuff. Gurdon complained at one point that we weren’t showing the student work enough because there was. . . . He just loved what he saw, but we weren’t making much noise about it. Well, you couldn’t make much noise, because if they weren’t going to let you have graduate students, you were just going to wall yourself off and set up your own kingdom, as it were, and really go to town—which we did. It was just great fun.
Before I get too far ahead though, one of the things that I also did early on was I was interested in the fact that so much of the work at the Art Institute involved the figure. And that was something that potters didn’t do. And so I, at one point, for a period, maybe a month, I had a model come in to my ceramics class and just sit there. And if anybody wanted to work from the model with clay they could. Not to make sculpture, but just looking, getting a sense of forms, and so on. And the Leg Pot came after having a model in the pottery for. . . .

MADDY JONES: Oh, well, now, talk about that a little bit.

JIM MELCHERT: Well, it’s just that it was a leg.

MADDY JONES: Uh huh.

JIM MELCHERT: There was a faint reference to a figure, and it was something that you just didn’t see in pottery. And to have this coming out of a box, it was like. . . . It was one way in which I could assert a kind of independence from all that I’d been seeing in [paint _____]. And I don’t have a lot more to say about it, except that I did a number of pieces.

MADDY JONES: Ron also said that in the back of the pot shop you had a lot of guys working in roplex.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. Again, materials that either were combined with clay or they were just [drawn] on. I wouldn’t say there were a lot but some people. . . . We were like a sanctuary to a certain extent, for. . . .

MADDY JONES: Like Pete’s was a sanctuary at Berkeley.

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right. Anybody who was not, I mean, was sort of a renegade from another department could come down and “do it” there as it were. But. . . .

MADDY JONES: And how did Gurdon Woods feel about that? Was that fine?

JIM MELCHERT: Gurdon respected what was going on. It was fine with him. He just didn’t think that all this should go on without its being seen more widely. But we were afraid that if more people found out about it, Al would do his best. . . . And Frank Lobdell wasn’t at all sympathetic with what we were doing. They were pretty doctrinaire individuals. And on the other hand, we were crazy about Pop Art and with the kind of freedom that Pop Art brought with it.

MADDY JONES: Okay now, where were you seeing Pop Art?

JIM MELCHERT: Mostly in magazines. And also surrealism interested me a lot. Surrealism and Dali, Magritte. Those were books. Or from movies. We saw a lot of movies in which they were strong surrealist imagery.

MADDY JONES: Ingmar Bergman.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes! And we saw all this stuff and it began to figure into our own work. Well, the last thing that the paint department at the Art Institute was interested in was surrealism because it wasn’t painterly. And certainly I. . . . The sculptors, a lot of them. . . . Well, I must say Jeremy Anderson was interested in what we were doing, Manuel was interested in what we were doing. . . .

MADDY JONES: Was anyone. . . . Who was showing your work outside the Art Institute at that point?

JIM MELCHERT: Wanda Hansen. She wanted to make Art Unlimited into something more than it was, kind of one step above a gift shop, in a way. And she and her cousin ran it. And so she started showing people like Wayne Thiebaud.

MADDY JONES: Is this when she had her van and she was driving around?

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, I don’t remember the van, but she was driving. . . . She’d come to studios. And she’d just sit and talk and get a sense. And I must say that. . . .

MADDY JONES: She actually would pile this van full of paintings and just go hawk them to people, practically _____ students. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: That doesn’t surprise me.

MADDY JONES: I know, really.

JIM MELCHERT: But she had stuff that. . . . I remember Henrietta Burke did paintings that were very easy for people to like. And I’m sure it was Henrietta Burke’s paintings that kept the gallery alive.

MADDY JONES: She also said that Modesto Lanzone would come into her gallery in the beginning and look around, and if he didn’t see anything that he liked he would leave her fifty dollars anyway and say to just credit it toward something that he would eventually buy. He was really a supporter.

JIM MELCHERT: Isn’t that terrific?

MADDY JONES: Isn’t that?

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. I didn’t know that. Well, she needed it, because. . . . See, the only other gallery that I remember at the time that was showing good work—but I must say more consistently—was Jim Newman’s space, The Dilexi.

MADDY JONES: This is at the time that you were doing your ghostware pieces?

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah. My first show with Wanda was Ghostware, the Ghostware series. And in a way, I regard that as my first really successful body of work that represented a departure from Pete. The Leg Pot, the wall pieces, they parted company but somehow they weren’t a body of work the way that the Ghostware series was.

MADDY JONES: And the Ghostware were earthenware, and they had the lustre glazes. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Yes, low temperature glazes and overglaze—a lot of overglaze drawing particularly.

MADDY JONES: And other objects attached.

JIM MELCHERT: Attached? No, I don’t remember that.

MADDY JONES: All right.

JIM MELCHERT: No, I think that they. . . . It was all clay, all ceramic materials. The idea for it came from an Ingmar Bergman movie, The Silence, in which these sisters are talking, and one of them says that a person needs to walk carefully among the ghosts in your past, something like that. And I had seen a face, a wonderful head of clay that Nate Olivera did as a caricature of Pete to put up on a kiln as a kiln god. And we have it somewhere upstairs in a broken state. But Nate was a good friend of Pete’s and would come by the pot shop once in a while, and in fact made this kiln god of Pete to put there, and it eventually fell off and the nose broke and the cigar broke off, and I liked the thing so much, I just put it in the kiln and fired it. And that is really what inspired the ghost face for me, because there was this sense of this ghost that was a witness to things, and there was almost a kind of smirking. But what I liked a lot about the series was that it allowed me to make references to other things. There was a reference to the Lindbergh kidnapping, for instance.

MADDY JONES: What was it? What was the reference.

JIM MELCHERT: In a way it had to do with rivalry between two people. In his messages that Hauptman sent to the Lindberghs, he would draw these two circles, each of which had a square in the center, and they were beginning to interlock, like this. [gestures] But these strange intersecting circles that almost implied an eclipse. And also on that piece is an image of an airplane racing over a motor racer at some track, and a telephone—a reference to telephone dial in there—that. . . . The telephone dial figured into a good deal of my work for a while, which I saw as kind of access.

MADDY JONES: Access?

Tape 3, side A

JIM MELCHERT: . . . that was _____full, access, instant access that as though a wall separated you from someone else, you could still get to them. And there, there’s a menacing aspect of that. You know, it all fitted in with this notion of competition and eclipsing and so on, that the Lindbergh story suggested to me. I’d read the book about Hauptman, and so that’s where that reference came from. But. . . .

MADDY JONES: And had Hauptman. . . . And you felt a rivalry? Was that part of the reason. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Oh, I don’t think in terms of any specific person, but there, as a factor in living, this is something you’d better be aware of, you’d better be able to handle. But all the ghosts, in a way, those pieces dealt to some extent with some kind of insecurity. There’s one jar. . . . And there were jars, too, which Pete asked me why I, kind of kidding around, that, you know, once a potter, always a potter. But they really were jars in the sense that there was an inside, as it were, that if you made this motion, I mean, you’ve made it with your own hand. You’ve made an effort, like you would change the condition of something, as it were.
Well, one of the jars had fingerprints on it and also reference to a ruler, of measurement, identification. I really enjoyed being able to include allusions. One of the pieces too that I did also involved decals with horses and a typewriter, and it’s the one jar that looks different from the others, _____ somewhat unique, in that I didn’t use the images as symbols in any way. And I attribute that to discovering about that time a little of [Bill—Ed.] Wiley’s work. And I owe him for a kind of casual goofiness, playfulness, that certainly didn’t describe my work up to that point. But anyway, that series was a wonderful one for me.

MADDY JONES: And what was Pete’s reaction to that?

JIM MELCHERT: He liked it, liked it very much. So maybe that’s a good place to stop.

MADDY JONES: Okay.

APRIL 5, 1991
Tape 3, side A (cont.)
[There is considerable microphone noise throughout the first part of this portion of the tape—Trans.]

JIM MELCHERT: And I thought about some things that I think should be known about the context in which artists worked in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies. And I’m sure that a lot of this holds true for now. But there was something very wonderful about the sixties in the Bay area, both with the music scene that was so great, and also the. . . . I think that’s a kind mini social revolution going on. The atmosphere was very progressive, and there was a lot of testing going on. To a certain extent I think that a lot of what the flower children business was all about, and other activities of the sixties, had to do with testing limits. I know a lot of people who were doing this in terms of their lives, and people tried using drugs for the first time to check out who you were and how far you might be able to go with yourself, to discover something you didn’t know. And take great risks, far greater than I think we realized at the time. But this was also true with artmaking, that we were very interested in expanding the edges of disciplines, at the edges of ideas. And that was certainly the time that you had terms like. . . . Well, it was all redefined, I’ll put it that way. We were thinking differently about photography, we were thinking differently about what sculpture was, and the edges between painting and sculpture, for example. So I made a list of some things that I thought should be taken into account. There is something about the Bay Area—and I think it’s unique in this whole country—that we tend to take for granted, and yet it has a lot to do with how artists have functioned here and how artists have survived. There are a lot of schools here that have been from time to time at the center of some kind of heightened activity in the arts. And I just made a list, for [example] of the two art—rather three art schools actually—the San Francisco Art Institute, CCAC [California College of Arts and Crafts—JM], and that art college in downtown San Francisco.

MADDY JONES: The Academy of Arts.

JIM MELCHERT: The Academy, which actually provided jobs for a few of us—like Joan Brown at one point. And these jobs had made it possible for artists to continue living here, working here, despite the absence of a market in those days. Yeah?

JIM MELCHERT: Anyway, there hasn’t been a market in the Bay Area until fairly recent years, the way there was in Los Angeles and especially New York—to a far greater extent. And I think there are a number of reasons for that, but in any event there. . . . But the point is that for artists to be able to live here in the fifties and sixties, it was necessary to have some means of income other than sales, because you couldn’t count on those. And the schools provided jobs for a lot of artists over the years, and were also the centers where young artists working towards college degrees were able to train with very good people and good facilities.
So anyway, I’ve mentioned the three art schools. The major university in the area was of course the University of California at Berkeley, but there’s also Stanford, with certainly a very respectable department—although somewhat removed. I never think of Stanford as being part of the Bay area in a funny way. It’s more like an extension of Harvard or someplace. But San Francisco State, San Jose State. . . . As far away as San Jose State was there were people like John Battenburg who were up here showing work, coming to parties. Fred Spratt. Oh, a number of them. So they were visible, and they also probably had the best facilities of any of the schools—I mean, of the state schools, if I remember correctly. U.C. Davis, which I want to talk about a bit. Mills College. And then a wonderful, sort of overnight one miracle, was Lone Mountain College, which nobody had heard about until. . . . I think maybe for only two years it existed as the most exciting sort of art center in the Bay Area. I don’t know what happened exactly. It’d be interesting to find out, and I’m sure that somebody like Alan Scarrit, who taught there at the time, could tell you about it. Judy Linares, I think taught there. But money was made available, as well as space, for art studies of some sort, and one of the sisters was responsible—this was a Catholic school—for bringing in some very spirited young artists to develop a program, a curriculum, and they did it with great imagination, and it became an exciting place to visit.

MADDY JONES: What year was that, about?

JIM MELCHERT: I wonder. It would have been in the probably late, very late sixties or early seventies. I suspect early seventies. But the period that I most want to talk about this morning is probably the period from middle sixties to the middle seventies because I’ve never experienced anything quite like it and I don’t think the Bay Area has ever been quite as brilliant during the years I’ve known it as it appeared to be during that decade.
Now [the] two schools I most want to talk about are Berkeley and U.C. Davis. And first [I want, I’m going] to talk about U.C. Davis, because it was a. . . . When the university decided to have a real art department there, I believe it was Tio Giambruni who was brought in to organize it. He was a sculptor. He worked, cast metal, and worked on a very large monumental scale. And it was up to Tio—possibly other people—to recruit faculty for this new art department, and he came to me at the Art Institute, in which I was teaching at the time, so it had to be still early sixties, and asked me if I would like to head up the ceramics department. And to my amazement. . . . I mean, here was a real job that paid a lot more than the Institute did, but I told him I wasn’t interested. And I think I did it for two reasons. One is I didn’t realize both what a great new thing this was, and secondly it meant redirecting my attention out of the Bay Area, out of San Francisco, to the Sacramento area, and I didn’t want to that. I didn’t want to move, even though I could have managed it without moving. Nevertheless, that wasn’t where my life was and so Tio very wisely approached Bob Arnesson, and Bob made history there.

MADDY JONES: Exactly.

JIM MELCHERT: But I think the wisest choice that Tio made—I mean, the most, to me, most inspired choice was Bill Wiley. And if there is one artist who I think was at the center, both in terms of his. . . . Wiley as a catalyst and Wiley as an artist who had a significant aesthetic position—a philosophy let’s say—significant philosophy as an artist. His influence was profound, and there was Wiley still with that extraordinary energy of his, the love that he had for teaching—and he was very close to his students. He was just perfect at that time at Davis, and of course he had some wonderful students.
And I think of two waves of students during those years who made a big difference. The first was Bruce Nauman, and Bill Wiley’s lack of interest in high art as it were. High art/low art being akin to high church/low church. Anyway, Bill’s dislike for high art and all the things that were happening that we identified largely with New York at the time figured into his teaching a lot. Central to his teaching was the notion that you’re first of all a human being trying to live your life, and that you’re surrounded by mysteries, and there are wonderful things that are just part of your daily experience. And for all of his interest in artists like Magritte for instance or the surrealists, I think it had to do with the joy that he took in the, of the sense of wonder that he had in the, in his own experience—the enigmas in his own experience. And I don’t know what Bruce would say about what he gained from Wiley. The way in which Wiley shared with Bruce a real interest in [Cliff—JM] Westerman. And they had some correspondence with him, and I know that in many ways Westerman was a more likely correspondent for Wiley than for Bruce Nauman. But, in any event, I was absolutely fascinated with Bill Wiley and his work during the let’s say early middle sixties. Yeah, I would say middle sixties. And the circle around him was also one. . . . I mean, the circle of friends that he had was also one that I paid a lot of attention to. Bob Hudson, for example, wonderful artist. Bill Allen, another wonderful artist. They’d all come from this same little place in Richland, Washington, or some place like that.

MADDY JONES: With the same art teacher, Jim McGrath.

JIM MELCHERT: Same art teacher. There was something that those people had, those artists had, that I learned a lot from. I paid close attention to them, I tried hanging out with them, and I really loved them. In any event, I just wanted to put this on the record, that it clarified a lot for me in the sense that I wanted to work with. . . . I mean, I wanted to include experiences, reflections of my own, things that I knew about, in my work, and there was no way in which a person can do that adhering to Voulkos’s aesthetic. And therefore, with that series we talked about at the end of yesterday’s conversation, the ghostware, that series, as I said, represented a kind of stand of my own that I’d taken where I was no longer under Pete’s influence, and where I had established a direction for myself, that it was my own territory. And I think that the exposure to the artists I just mentioned—Bill Allen, who I just love, and Wiley, Hudson, wonderful artists, wonderful human beings. The exposure to them helped make that possible, that series possible for me.
Okay, now I also wanted to talk about Berkeley because as of 1965 I joined the faculty—not in the decorative arts department where I’d been; it in fact was in the process of being phased out—but rather in the art department. Jacques Schnier was very interested in the work I was doing in clay, and, surprisingly, I look back on it now and I wonder how on earth the painters in that department, who really controlled the whole, I mean, all the activity there, how, I mean, what they saw in me that made them think that I would be a compatible faculty member, but in any event. . . .

MADDY JONES: Who were the painters there then?

JIM MELCHERT: Who were the painters there? Well, the best-known one I would say at the time was Erle Loran. John Haley, Felix Ruvolo, Glenn Wessels, Karl Kasten. The sculptors were Sid Gordin, Jacques Schnier, as I said, Richard O’Hanlon, and also I met [Willard—JM] Zogbaum, who. . . . Actually Zogbaum died before I joined the faculty. He was around at the time I was a graduate student, and I barely knew him—just as David Park was still around when I was a graduate student—but I think he died within a half a year of our arriving in Berkeley, so I didn’t know him other [than] to have seen him in the hallways.
But in any event, what made a huge difference at Berkeley was the decision the university made to build a museum, and they had to have a director, and they brought in Peter Selz. And, you know, in recent years Peter has lost the kind of, the image that we had of him. I think there are people who would characterize him as a buffoon, but he was a man with great energy, many, many contacts in the art world. He had a vision, and he did things with style and with a lot of dignity. And—you talk about gossip—I would attribute a lot of his demise to his womanizing. I think that that kind of activity ultimately undermines an individual, and if you have that kind of passion I think you’d better be very careful to harness it so that you use it productively instead of letting it destroy you.
But the other thing I think with Peter was that dreadful mistake he made of accepting money to testify at the Rothko hearings. Testifying, ultimately, against Kate, the daughter, and doing it for money. And I think that injured him horribly. But then later came his being fired at Berkeley. However, despite all that, Peter Selz, when he came to Berkeley, worked marvels. I can’t get over what a change he wrought in that school. He had spectacular shows. I mean, can you imagine an exhibition of Magritte in the Bay Area? And it wasn’t just a minor show. It was a major Magritte exhibition. The Lindner show that he had. The Kinetic Art Show that he had. All at that funny little brick powerhouse building on the center of the campus. But not only did he bring these wonderful shows to us, but it was because of him that the most extraordinary artists began appearing at Berkeley to teach.
Just think, Mark Rothko was here for six weeks—ten weeks maybe, I don’t know; six certainly, ten possibly—one summer. People are always talking about how great it was when Clyfford Still [was] at the Art Institute, or Mark Rothko taught there. Their influence was nothing compared with what happened when artists appeared through Peter Selz’s program, appeared on Berkeley campus.

MADDY JONES: Do you remember any of the others besides Rothko?

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. The one I probably enjoyed most of all was Ron Kitaj. But was also David Hockney. There was Robert Morris. There was Eduardo Paolozzi. There was. . . . Not Daniel Spoeri. Who was the. . . . It was a kinetic sculptor. Paul Bury was here. There was a Greek kinetic sculptor who was here, whose name I’m not going to get. But these were really quite wonderful people, and they were people who had international reputations as opposed to the kind of artists the department were bringing in, who had national reputations. I mean Herman Cherry is someone you take seriously. But the people that Peter was able to bring in for us to get to know, and rub elbows with, and drink with, and talk with were this far higher stature. I mean, far greater stature.
Well, having, having all this going on in the middle sixties—middle to late sixties—was just fabulous. And it wasn’t just the artists, it was also the staff people that Peter brought in: Brenda Richardson, who did a lot for younger artists because she paid attention to us. And with Brenda came Carol Lindsey who was first just around, but who then started that gallery, the Reese-Palley Gallery, which became another miracle in its own way—and I’ll talk about that a little later. But, in any event, there’s was Tom Freudenheim, who was here, who in his way was also bringing in very interesting shows. Brenda did very imaginative things. And in San Francisco we had that wonderful Sue Foley, regardless of what Ron thinks. [laughs] But Sue Foley was thinking in very different terms from the usual curators we had around here.

MADDY JONES: She was very responsive to conceptual art.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes, she was. She was. She was also interested in what young other artists were doing. She made a lot of studio calls all the time, and she was a good listener. But [maybe, then] you can’t imagine how dull San Francisco Museum was in the early sixties. There was a director named [George—JM] Colleur, who sold the Pollock. There was an early Pollock here and I think there was a very early Rothko. He deacquisitioned the very works that would make people come to San Francisco on a pilgrimage to see. Dreary, sort of, I mean, tiny imaginations, tiny visions. Well, I’m sure Mary Keesling can give you the history of all of that, because the museum started with that wonderful old Grace Morley, and I think went down hill quite a bit, until things started coming up with Gerry Nordland, I think, and then Henry Hopkins was quite good in his way. Not wanting to grow beyond a certain point, but. . . .

MADDY JONES: Not one for blockbusters.

JIM MELCHERT: Not one for blockbusters. That’s true. But, in any event, with the Berkeley Museum, there was this fresh wind sweeping in thanks to Peter Selz, and I will forever be grateful to him for that. You see what. . . .

Tape 3, side B

JIM MELCHERT: . . . all these artists coming in at that time from places in Europe or the East Coast, was that our own horizons were expanding. We began to think in terms of New York as part of our world. As you made friends with these artists, you found that when you went to their cities you had somebody who was glad to see you and welcome you. And when Ron Kitaj moved. . . . Oh, he came back to the States and taught at UCLA for a while, and David Hockney came back and eventually settled in Los Angeles, and you could call them when you were down there, and you had friends there, and it made L.A. seem somehow less distant.
But, okay, so I’ve mentioned two of the schools here now whose activities figured so much in making the middle to late sixties—early seventies—so wonderful. Now at UC Davis I mentioned Bruce Nauman as being part of the first wave. What Bruce and I found we had in common was that we both liked to read, and I enjoyed conversation with him enormously. He was living in the Wileys’ house in Mill Valley, and it was easy to go up and we’d talk all morning and have lunch, and I enjoyed him and Judy a lot. And there was a lot of talking going on, just a lot of positive discourse during those years.

MADDY JONES: And what were you reading?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, I had gotten on to Robbe-Grillet. I’d gotten on to Raymond Roussel, for instance, and I’d gotten on to, even finally, Raymond Chandler. One book that Bruce and I had both read that we liked so much—it was from the Something Else Press. Something Else Press began to figure increasingly more centrally in a lot of my reading, but later I met Emmett Williams, for example, who was chief editor under Dick Higgins, who ran the Press. [And] Emmett Williams, who was a concrete poet and. . . . [Look], there were constantly these new ways of doing things.
Of course _____ was exposed to it _____ _____. The book that Bruce and I had both enjoyed so much was The Topography of Chance, by Daniel Spoerri, and eventually Spoerri turned up in the Bay Area and. . . .

MADDY JONES: Actually around 1975. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Was that when it was?

MADDY JONES: Yes, exactly. Later I’ll tell you a story about that, but. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Well, yeah, of the cake or the pie?

MADDY JONES: When he pushed the pie into D. A. Hoyt’s face.

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right.

MADDY JONES: It was supposed to be in our store. We were supposed to have the event in our store, at a party.

JIM MELCHERT: [laughs]

MADDY JONES: Because we had a gourmet store.

JIM MELCHERT: Uh huh.

MADDY JONES: And. . . . I can’t think of her name right now, but she was married to Claude Ganz. I can’t think of her first name.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah.

MADDY JONES: And she had a gallery and Daniel Spoerri had come over here for that. But the only reason we didn’t have the party in our store is I was having a baby any minute, which is how I remember what year it was.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes, yes. [laughs]

MADDY JONES: So they did it somewhere else.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: And, yes, in the middle of the dinner he just took a real dislike to D. A. Hoyt. And you know she’s such a dignified. . . . Do you know her?

JIM MELCHERT: Yes.

MADDY JONES: She was on the board at the Art Institute for a long time, just a really elegant, kind woman, and he, yes, he pushed a cake in her face. It was just very cruel, and he really did it for the experience. And I mean she really to this day is so humiliated by what happened to her that night. I think they have it on videotape. It was just a horror.

JIM MELCHERT: Yes. Well, his version of it is that Claudee [________—Ed.]—was that the woman he was with at the time?—wanted to pick things up, because it had all been far too serious and somber and so she did something to Daniel and he turned around thinking that it was D.A. and slugged her.

MADDY JONES: I know.

JIM MELCHERT: I mean, the woman hadn’t done anything.

MADDY JONES: No.

JIM MELCHERT: But at any rate, the fact is that Daniel Spoerri was in San Francisco, and _____ _____, somehow or other, but whatever it was we were reading in the early seventies, that person could very well turn up, and it was possible to meet that person and have something to talk about instantly because you knew something about that world in advance. And I think of all that going on during those years that made it wonderful to be in this part of the world.
And also Ron Kitaj made an interesting observation to the effect that he saw the San Francisco Bay Area as a watering place, that what migratory birds looked for en route to some other destination, that wonderful people will pass through and they’ll stop in this kind of oasis, and you have a chance to spend time with them, and get to know them, which is altogether different from places like New York, because that’s the workplace. And in New York nobody drops in on anyone. I mean, you just can’t interfere with people’s schedules that way, whereas here people would pass through, and in passing they always had time for you. So that Mary Ann and I started inviting artists to come to dinner when we knew they’d be in town, and they’d invite a few other artist friends and we’d get to know them. And in the process we got to know a lot of wonderful artists and some not so wonderful. Someone who brought in very distinguished artists, mostly from the east, was Kathan Brown at Crown Point Press, which was in Oakland in those days. And Kathan was just struggling at that time to stay afloat and was always glad for an invitation. There was, this evening, like she wouldn’t have to take the artist out, that they’d be able to come over here and we’d have other people. There were always fun times and. . . .

MADDY JONES: Do you remember some of those people who came out?

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, Dan Flavin, Dorothea Rockburne, I met them through her. I met Sol Lewitt through Kathan. Met Mel Bochner. No, Mel I met actually through a project of probably Brenda’s [Richardson—JM], but I’m not sure. But these people have since become our friends. Not Dan Flavin, but certainly the others. Now in addition to all this going on. . . .
I’m going to get back to this notion of circles, because there are many groups of artists who had common interests, and they were doing quite wonderful at different things. For example, in the early seventies you had the neighborhood muralists beginning to find walls they could paint. Luis Cervantes had had a little gallery in the sixties, and Luis was trying to find a way in which he could provide something that would enliven the art community and so on, and he had a little storefront gallery for a while in the early and middle sixties. And then his wife, Susan [________—Ed.], became quite active with some of the other muralists, and they began putting up murals, that I think restored dignity to a lot of people living in those neighborhoods, who were proud to identify with their Mexican ancestry. And I wasn’t in at all on the early years of the Galleria de la Rasa, but that became such a wonderful institution. But there was other activity. There was Carlos Villa, who was befriending the Samoan artists and turning his living space over to many of them for some of their drawing classes and things that they were doing. Carlos was paying attention to what we now call artists of color.

MADDY JONES: Other Sources was the show that they called it.

JIM MELCHERT: Remember that? Uh huh. And all of that was going on. I wasn’t much a part of it, you know. It took me a while before I sort of understood and appreciated what was going on, but it was going on.
And another circle I want to talk about that was quite amazing was probably centered around Tom Marioni and to some extent Bonnie Sherk. It would be hard to overestimate what the two of them did in the Bay Area. I think it took Tom longer to find ways of doing what he was capable of doing, but Bonnie, who was so bright and so spirited, had all kinds of ideas. You know she started the Farm, but only after she had done some other quite extraordinary feats.

MADDY JONES: Do you remember some of the earlier feats?

JIM MELCHERT: Well, two things that she did that led to the Farm. One was, I think in a way, is in connection with some program that perhaps Tom Marioni was responsible for, but she got permission to go into one of the cages at the zoo—I believe where the big cats are. They were in some empty space, and when they were fed she’d be fed, and she would just spend time in there. And people would come and they’d see the lions eating and the tigers eating and Bonnie Sherk eating! [laughs]

MADDY JONES: God, that’s amazing that she got permission to do that.

JIM MELCHERT: Well, you know there are a number of quite extraordinary people. Lynn Hirschman started something called the Floating Museum, probably around ‘75, ‘76, where. . . . She was looking for sites where it was possible to invite an artist to do something with the site, with the place. And this is exactly what Alanna Heiss was doing in New York at that time. But there were things in the air that. . . .
Lucy Lippard was probably the person who recorded it best. There was Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, you may remember, from year X to year X [1966 to 1972—JM]. That was a wonderful and I think very helpful book at the time, and Bob Kinmont was in that book with a picture, a photograph, I remember. But in any event there was something in the air, and it wasn’t as though Lynn Hirschman heard about Alanna’s activities at the Coney Island Sculpture Factory, places where she would just make arrangements for an artist to come in and do something, Gordon Matta-Clark, or whoever it might have been. It was just something that I’m sure occurred to Lynn that was possible. And Bonnie Sherk was simply one who was thinking differently. And so was Mel Henderson, who was doing some amazing sort of public art events during those same years. But another thing Bonnie did was to do an installation at Santa Clara. That’s one of the schools I forgot about, but it wasn’t as though the Art Department at Santa Clara, University of Santa Clara, was so hot. I think that the artists who taught there felt rather oppressed. Paul Koss was one of them, another quite amazing person, he and [his wife—JM] Marlene [Koss—JM].
But in any event Lydia Modivitale ran the gallery there, and she was doing wonderful things. You know, she started the first video archive in America?

MADDY JONES: Really? Who was that again?

JIM MELCHERT: Lydia Modivitale—a name that she chose herself. She apparently loved Modigliani, and she is of Italian descent, and I think. . . . Maybe her name was Vitale, I don’t know, but she changed it to Modivitale. An individual with a lot of charm, great presence, and she had a vision. And she was in charge of the gallery, and she gave a number of us shows, Bonnie Sherk being one. And Bonnie lived with animals for something like a week, and I’m sure smelled up the gallery and all, but that was part of living with animals. And that had a lot to do with Bonnie’s deciding to bring animals into the city for children. And she started the Farm out there in the Mission District. And she actually, against all odds, got the city to donate land. She was trying to get the same kind of space for her gardens that I think some major landscape firms were trying to get hold of—or developers—but Bonnie was tenacious and very smart.

MADDY JONES: And she would stand on street corners down in the financial district with animals to. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: [laughs]

MADDY JONES: . . . _____ people, to make them participate.

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, how amazing. Well, Bonnie is one of the wonders of this world. I’ve sort of lost touch with her, I’m sorry to say, and I’m not quite sure why and I think it has to do with her being engaged in some projects right now that don’t involve us particularly, and ones that I can’t be of much help to her with.

MADDY JONES: Was she ever a student of yours, or are you just friends?

JIM MELCHERT: No. Just friends. She was quite close to Mel Henderson, who used to live over in the Mission, and Mel was on the faculty at San Francisco State, a sculptor. I knew Mel because Sue Reynolds, with whom he lived, was an assistant curator, along with Brenda Richardson at the University Art Museum, and so we saw Mel a lot. An interesting sculptor, but I think his most dynamic work was really the public events that he staged, one of which was the Yellow Cab Day, when between certain hours you were to get a Yellow Cab and drive to an intersection in the Mission—and wear yellow just, as it were, painting the neighborhood yellow. He also did some of the first art works, public art events, that had real political overtones, one having to do with Attica [the prison incident—Ed.], I remember. Well, in any event, people were doing things quite spontaneously and quite independently.

MADDY JONES: You started to talk about Tom Marioni, and we got kind of. . . .

JIM MELCHERT: Yeah, let’s get back to Tom, because he first came here as, I believe, a sculptor, and I think he showed with Wanda [Hanson—JM], when it was still Art Unlimited. I just vaguely remember a piece of his that looked like it had come from a design shop, actually, a very beautifully crafted metal sculpture. But I sort of dimly recollect that. But anyway Tom had a lot of ideas and was the perfect one to become the center for conceptual activities in the Bay Area, and he too began to look for places where he could do things, do exhibitions, make opportunities available to other artists, as part of his own artwork. And it wasn’t so much in thinking of his exhibitions as artworks, so much as there’s a lifestyle, an attitude, that included making opportunities available for other people that simply enriched our circumstances, everybody’s circumstances. For a while he was the curator at the Richmond Art Center. And the Richmond Art Center, I must say, was another one of these miraculous places that provided opportunities. You know, it had the first, probably the only major Jasper Johns show in the Bay Area?

MADDY JONES: Really?

JIM MELCHERT: When Rudy Turk was there. Huge exhibition—and in Richmond!

MADDY JONES: And probably no one from Richmond ever goes there; it’s everybody else.

JIM MELCHERT: That’s right. And I remember there was this wonderful woman who started the Art Center and really fought hard for it many, many years, because the city wanted to convert that space into a basketball court, into a gymnasium, and she hung on. I remember meeting her once and I was able to tell her how much I appreciated that. I forget the name [________—Ed.]. But Rudy Turk took it over at one point and began. . . . He converted the lobby—no, the entrance, that kind of atri