Oral history interview with John Paul Miller, 2004 Aug. 22-23

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with John Paul Miller, 2004 Aug. 22-23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with John Paul Miller
Conducted by Jan Yager
At the Artist's home in Brecksville, Ohio
August 22-23, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with John Paul Miller on August 22 and 23, 2004. The interview took place in Brecksville, Ohio and was conducted by Jan Yager for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

John Paul Miller and Jan Yager have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a verbatim transcript of spoken, rather than written prose.

Interview

MS. JAN YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing John Paul Miller in the artist’s home and studio in Brecksville, Ohio, on August 22, 2004 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disk number one, session number one.

John Paul, could you tell me when and where you were born?

MR. JOHN PAUL MILLER: I was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, in 1918, April 23rd.

MS. YAGER: Can you tell me the name of your father and where he was --

MR. MILLER: His name was Abram Brown Miller. And he went by the name of Brown all the time, which is a strange first name, but everybody called him Brown.

MS. YAGER: In what year do you think he was born? Do you remember?

MR. MILLER: I don’t know. I think he was around 34 when I was born. So --

MS. YAGER: And where was he born?

MR. MILLER: I think he was born on a farm near Curryville in Blair County, Pennsylvania. And my mother?

MS. YAGER: And your mother, yes.

MR. MILLER: She was Mary Hershberger and she was from Everett, Pennsylvania which is near Bedford, Pennsylvania. And she died in 1919, just a little over year after I was born in the flu epidemic of that time. So I have no memory of her at all.

We had moved to Cleveland. My father had gotten a job teaching here and so she died here in Cleveland at that time. But she had been an artist. She had done watercolor paintings but she was the head librarian at the College of Juniata in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. And she had gone to library school in Philadelphia and installed the first card catalogue at the university. And she was one of six sisters in the Herschberger family and three brothers. So it was a big family.

MS. YAGER: Tell me what your father was interested in?

MR. MILLER: Well, he taught mathematics. He first started teaching in a one-room school house – everything, you know, in Blair County and he went to Juniata College. I think he was doing something at the college when he got the job here teaching in Cleveland. He came to Cleveland to teach at the Training School of Western Reserve University for teachers.

So he was teaching junior high, but he had training students from the university who were observing his classes and learning to teach in his classes. Actually three other people from the college came at the same time he did. They didn’t teach in the same school that he taught in but they all were living here in Cleveland at the same time -- college buddies of his.

MS. YAGER: So you were raised in Cleveland?

MR. MILLER: No. When my mother died, one of my aunts, one of her sisters, came and took care of me and then my father kept on teaching. But I went back to live with both pairs of grandparents who lived in -- one lived in Everett and one lived about 24 miles away in Curryville, Pennsylvania which was just sort of a railroad stop and I would live with one set part-time and the other grandparents the other part of the time. Amazingly, I -- whether it was the shock of the changes and so on, but I can remember a lot of things that happened in those early years still. I can remember lying in a cot beside my grandparents’ bed at both houses and having to -- if I wanted attention or something, having to reach up and get their attention, then up on the bed.

I can remember being -- I had a cousin Betty who was born just a month after I was born and she lived with her father and mother in Everett and her mother died the year after my mother died. I don’t know whether it was a whole year. But anyway, I can remember at the funeral that was held in the house and the casket was in the living room.

And my father had me upstairs because there were enough people there that the people were listening to this sermon all through the house and I can remember he gave me his watch on a gold chain that I played with up there. And then I can remember he carried me in his arms and I can remember going down that stairway. Of course, it was an unusual thing, but there was the casket in the living room. And so I can remember that.

MS. YAGER: You were a year old?

MR. MILLER: Well, no. By that time, I was about two years.

MS. YAGER: Goodness.

MR. MILLER: And then Betty came to live with the grandparents in Everett and we were just a month apart. So, some of the daughters were still in school and so they could help take care of us and my grandmother was a great, great person and so was my grandfather, for that matter. But -- so we grew up just sort of like brother and sister until when I was five. Well, my father would come back and visit every once in a while which was traumatic for me because I didn’t want him to go back to Cleveland without me. But when I was five, he remarried.

He remarried a math teacher where he was teaching in Fairmont, whose name was Florence. And then they brought me to Cleveland. But I continued every summer well until I was in my teens going back to my grandparents in Pennsylvania and spending maybe the summer vacations back there mainly with them and eventually with some of my aunts who had married and were living back there.

I had strong ties with the mountains of Central Pennsylvania. I used to go out with my grandfather on the farm. I’d go out with him when they were bringing in the hay and ride the hay wagon through the fields and saw the rattlesnakes. They’d pick up the wheat sheaths, and often there’d be a rattlesnake in that. They’d throw it up on the wagon and then the rattlesnake would go out and they’d have to kill it with a pitchfork and so on.

And we’d lie under the wagon when a rainstorm would come on. I have vivid, vivid memories of all that early -- and I don’t know if this is important -- things like the circus coming to town with my cousin Betty and I and cousin John who was older than we were. We’d go up and meet the circus train when it came in and watch them unload the animals. And then I’d go up -- and I had an Aunt Belle, and she lived right on the main street over a store and had a little porch. We could go up on her porch and watch the circus parade when it went through town. A lot of that early period was, I think, very important to me.

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing John Paul Miller. This is track 2. Let’s see. I want you to describe a little bit about your childhood neighborhood. You did some with the country experiences. How about in Cleveland?

MR. MILLER: In Cleveland, I lived in a neighborhood that -- well it had mixed -- there were no blacks in the neighborhood. It’s all black now. But there were no blacks there. It was fairly near the school where my parents taught and I went to Hough School. We had one black boy, Clayton Townsend, who was a wonderful guy in my class. It was a good school.

My mother, my stepmother knew some of the teachers in the school as Sorority sisters. She had gone to school at what was then Flora Stone Mather, a women’s college which is now part of Western Reserve. But she’d also gone to Europe for two years -- I think just two years -- with her sister who was a singer. And they went to Vienna and lived in Vienna for two years. And she had heard [Gustav] Mahler conduct and the operas and orchestra and [Theodor] Leschetizky, who I think was living in the same apartment that they were living in. So she had a very strong interest in cultural things.

I remember -- the kids in the neighborhood, I mean, I was out with them. But I can remember one thing that surprised me now when I think back on it, that there was a house that was vacated, but a lot of the stuff was left in it. And I remember I was the youngest kid, I was left outside a window and the rest of the kids went in the house and stripped all the things, all of it that they thought worth taking out and handed them to me out the window. I don’t know how much of this my parents knew. But anyway we moved from that apartment to another one that was within walking distance of the school. But it overlooked Rockefeller Park.

There was a whole system of parks that runs along a stream in Cleveland right up to the museum [The Cleveland Museum of Art] and on up into the Heights to the Shaker Lakes. It goes all the way up. So we overlooked this wooded area and a lake down there. A wonderful place to play. And there was an abandoned brewery, a huge building that was sort of a wonderful place that we kids weren’t supposed to go over there. But we would get into it and a vast interior you could holler in and so on.

And there was skating on the lake in the winter and sledding because the park went down into where this stream was and there was a valley. And they closed off the road that went through the park in the winter so that you could sled down the hill and go out across the road. You didn’t have to worry about stopping before you got to the road.

There were gas lamps all along the road at that time, and there was a lamplighter that came at night and lighted the lamps. And this isn’t all that critical, but anyway.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember a favorite game?

MR. MILLER: A what?

MS. YAGER: A favorite game, or a favorite toy?

MR. MILLER: I remember I played marbles, you know, in the school yard. But I was never much of an athlete at any point in my life, so I don’t remember -- I had a toy train, eventually, which was a big thrill to have that.

MS. YAGER: So you went to high school, what was the high school you went to?

MR. MILLER: I went to Shaker High. See, we -- I went through Hough School, through the first half of the sixth grade -- well, the last half of the sixth grade we moved -- this was 1929, we moved at the worst time. My family bought a house in Shaker Heights and the crash came. But I went into the elementary school, in Fernway School for the last -- my second year or second half of the sixth grade. And that was traumatic for me because you had to -- it was a progressive school, and they had an art teacher who sort of ran all the art departments.

And she had decided that everybody should print manuscript writing. And you couldn’t -- I had struggled to learn Spencerian, you know, with all the exercises and so on, learning Spencerian writing. And here I had -- anything that I wrote had to be done manuscript, and I had to learn this and it was an awful struggle. You know, if I wrote I had to change my writing, and my manuscript wasn’t very good, but my long hand writing just went completely.

I’ve used printing ever since, except for my name. But it was a wonderful school system and I greatly enjoyed it. And one thing I think probably is important, when I first came to Cleveland at the age of five my mother enrolled me in Saturday morning classes at the museum. And at that time there wasn’t an art class for Saturday morning students, it was a singing class. And so I was a little blonde toddler, but I took singing lessons every Saturday morning.

But that got me started at the museum. And my mother -- one of my mother’s sorority sisters was head of the education department at the museum, Mrs. Louise Dunn. And she would take me to the lunch room at noon and cut my meat and so on, and so I had -- and then I roamed the museum until every Saturday afternoon at two o’clock there was a program in the auditorium, and it was usually aimed at children.

And I don’t remember too many of them at all, but I got to know the museum because I wandered the museum with other kids. This went on for years. But we saw the changing shows and we picked out our favorite items, objects in the museum, and so I got to know it very well.

Then after that first year, then I got into an art class on Saturday mornings. These were for members’ children, and the classes were wonderful. And I remember one of the very early ones was all on Egypt.

And usually the classes had a story time and then you drew pictures from the story or something like that. The Egyptian was a story called “Sokar and the Crocodile,” but they taught us hieroglyphics. And I wrote a letter to my grandfather in Pennsylvania in hieroglyphics, I remember how proud I was that I could do something like that. And --

MS. YAGER: How did he read it?

MR. MILLER: I don’t know how. Maybe I had to translate -- translation, I don’t know. But anyway, those classes were fine. We had several on Greek mythology. And eventually towards the end of my classes there I took one that was a general course with Bill [William M.] McVey, who was a young sculptor at that time. And he had us doing my first -- well, my first and only dry point etching that I did with him, and we did some other sculpture problems and things like that.

But that was great. I mean, that whole relationship with the museum through those early years.

MS. YAGER: I noticed in some of the early catalogs from the museum that the art classes for children were free of charge and that they had videos or films that they would show on insects and nature and things. Do you remember them?

MR. MILLER: I don’t remember -- that could have come later.

MS. YAGER: This was later, yes.

MR. MILLER: Because in the early days there were two classes of children. There were the members’ children classes and there were the just general children’s classes that anybody could bring their child in and they would be assigned. And you were assigned according to your age. There were different age groups for many of the classes. But it really was a great introduction to the museum.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember, you said, you know, picking out favorite objects, do you remember particular pieces?

MR. MILLER: Well, I was entranced by the collection of enameled boxes that the museum had.

MS. YAGER: Were these the Guelph Treasures?

MR. MILLER: No, that came -- that was exciting, but that came later [1930]. No, these were before that. These were French snuff boxes and things like that that were gold, and sometimes there’d be a medallion with a face on it or something of that sort. But they were sort of little jeweled boxes.

And then there was a -- the museum owned this fantastic table fountain that was metal. Of course, it -- well, I don’t think it’s ever been hooked up to any water. But it’s a very elaborate thing, about 20 inches high with all of these sort of like gargoyle things that came out of it that the water would come from. It was something that influenced me very much too.

MS. YAGER: Did you ever do any drawings of pieces in the museum as a child?

MR. MILLER: Oh yes. I did drawings -- nothing that I ever kept, but we did have days when we would go around to a specific gallery and draw things. But I don’t remember too much about that. I remember more about the stories and learning a lot about Greek mythology and drawing illustrations of Greek mythology.

MS. YAGER: So this may have started the classical interest?

MR. MILLER: Yeah. And the other thing that probably is important too is that my parents, when I was six, they took me to my first opera if I promised to be quiet. And the Met [Metropolitan Opera Co., New York] came to the old public auditorium, and I can remember it was “Carmen,” and I was entranced by the settings but, you know, I enjoyed the music. But then my parents were very fond of symphony music, so they took me to the symphony concerts. At that time they were all in the Masonic auditorium. It’s where [Nikolai] Sokoloff and the Cleveland Orchestra played.

And again, you know, I really enjoyed -- I got to the point where I really enjoyed symphony music. Actually, in my grandparent’s Miller’s home in Curryville, Pennsylvania, when I would live with them, my aunt there was a piano teacher. A small town, but she had pupils, and they had a victrola. And they had Amelita Galli-Curci records and a lot of [Enrico] Caruso records and symphony records, things of that sort. And they allowed me to play -- it was one of these big, you know, high standing, old victrolas, but they allowed me to play the records if I was careful.

So even before I moved to Cleveland I had been -- sort of become interested in classical music, which is sort of strange. But I did love classical music at that point.

MS. YAGER: You said you still work with it on?

MR. MILLER: I’ve always worked with classical music playing. I go into the studio and the first thing I’d do is put on some records or turn on our local classical music station. Then I’d go to work.

MS. YAGER: What do you think -- do you remember an educational experience that just stuck with you, from some of those early training?

MR. MILLER: Well, this is something else that’s important and we haven’t mentioned it yet, but at that training school there was a wonderful art teacher. Her name was Mrs. Mills. And she was a fantastic person to be teaching in a junior high school, from what she could get out of junior high students. And she did projects with the students with marionettes.

She did “Petruska” [ballet by Igor Stravinsky] with the students using the -- you know this was in the 1920s, using a recording of the music and a staging, and it was done at the museum. It was done first at Fairmont, at the school, but then it was done at the museum for one of the Saturday afternoon performances. It just was incredible what she got out of those students. It was a big puppet stage with -- well, marionette stage, I should say.

She did Javanese shadow puppet shows with the children. She did full-figure shadow plays with very inventive, with lighting effects. And she took me under her wing, and because I was interested in the marionettes she gave me a couple of marionettes. And I put on at Hough School -- my father turned over a table so the legs were up and we put curtains around it, and I made some scenery and I composed this play. And it was put on for the whole school in the big hallway at Hough Elementary School.

I don’t know now how if I ever had the courage to -- and the other crazy thing they did, I went to some art appreciation class very, very early at the museum. And they were asking -- they would put a slide on the screen and they asked kids to say what was going on in this scene. And from some of my answers, I impressed these people to the point where they gave me a box of slides -- this seems absolutely crazy now -- that I took home and went through and went through. And then I showed these slides to the elementary school, again to an assembly, and commented on the slides. And I don’t -- I can’t imagine how I was very articulate, but --

MS. YAGER: What age were you?

MR. MILLER: Well, I would be, what, seven, eight, something like this.

MS. YAGER: And do you remember some of the images that you showed?

MR. MILLER: I only remember one, and I said, “This is a sea battle, that’s all I can say about it.” I do remember when they picked me out, there was a painting called The Song of the Lark, with a woman that’s standing, and I don’t remember who did it or anything. Is it Millet or -- I don’t know [Jules Breton, 1884]. But anyway, they were asking us what we thought this painting was about, and I said, “I think she hears something like a bird.”

And so they thought – [Laughs.]

MS. YAGER: Get him. [Laughs.]

MR. MILLER: But Mrs. Mills was wonderful. She was a big, big influence on keeping me doing things.

MS. YAGER: That’s fabulous. Let’s see. I have after you were training at the art museum, then you started doing a transition into the Cleveland School of Art [now the Cleveland Institute of Art]?

MR. MILLER: Yeah, well -- yeah.

[Audio break.]

MR. MILLER: I think when I started high school or junior high, I started Saturday morning classes at what was Cleveland School of Art at that time. And at that time they had their regular faculty was all Saturday morning teachers too. And the first class I had was with Otto Ege, who was a really, really brilliant man. He was the head of the education department for teacher training in art with Western Reserve University, but he taught the beginnings, first Saturday morning classes.

And he did -- well, he had us for one thing I can remember, draw the person next to you with a pencil, without looking at what you’re drawing. Just do their profile. And I was amazed. I mean, here I had done it, and I couldn’t believe that this was possible, to get this likeness without watching what you’re doing. And he had us do all sorts of things with memory, looking at something just briefly and then re-drawing it.

MS. YAGER: Wow.

MR. MILLER: Yeah, he was a very brilliant man. He was a calligrapher. He taught calligraphy, and, well, letter design, which I had with him when I finally started going to school. And he collected manuscripts. He had this fabulous collection. I’ve got -- he gave me – Fred one and me one of these old manuscripts, beautifully illuminated manuscripts. He had I guess one of the best collections in the United States of manuscripts.

A really great person. And then I think the next year I went to a drawing course with -- figure drawing with Paul Travis, who was a wonderful painter. Paul had gone to Africa in the early 1920s by himself and painted and sketched through Africa, and later on I’ll have more to say about Paul because he came back into my life very definitely later on. But that was just drawing from clothed figures every Saturday morning.

And then there was another class with a lady, and I can’t get her name to come now, which also was a figure drawing class. But the Bates class --

MS. YAGER: This is Kenneth F. Bates?

MR. MILLER: Kenny. He’d just started teaching at the arts school, and he was building his modern house because I can remember he was always telling us how his house was coming along. And we did two enamel trays. And we did batik. I don’t remember what else we did. It was sort of a design, craft design class.

MS. YAGER: Was that your first contact with enamel?

MR. MILLER: The first I knew anything at all of enamel.

MS. YAGER: Did you -- you mentioned his house. Did he bring you to the house? Did you see the house?

MR. MILLER: Eventually I went there a lot. It’s a rehabbed building. The first sort of really modern house built in Cleveland. You’d go down the lake, and his wife had quite a bit of money, she was a wonderful person. It was a totally modern house with a wonderful little studio. Nothing like the size of ours, it was a bit small, but -- and he was a great, great person.

So I had him for Saturday morning too. And then in high school I had very good art teachers, or art teacher. And --

MS. YAGER: This was at Shaker Heights?

MR. MILLER: Shaker Heights, yeah. And I did my first oil paintings in that class and enjoyed it.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember the subject of it?

MR. MILLER: No, actually I remember, after I did the oil paintings in school I don’t remember what they were, we worked on canvas board. But I got two canvas boards in that summer when I was visiting at -- staying with one of my relatives in Pennsylvania, I did still lifes with bottles and things like that. And then I came home and I did a portrait of our dog. And I don’t know whatever happened to them, but anyway, they were the oil paintings.

And we did water color, but I don’t remember too much about the water colors that we were doing then. And at that time -- well, in junior high I got involved with the stage. They called me out of class one day. They were casting a show, A. A. Milne’s “Make Believe.” And they thought -- somebody said I would be the person to play a certain character in that. So I was called down to the auditorium and auditioned for this.

And Shaker had hired a man, a director, who was to be the director of all the school dramatic programs: elementary, junior high, high school. And this was his first big -- he came from Colorado Springs, where he’d been in -- well, he’d been the director of the Broadmoor Theater in Colorado Springs. And the director of the Shaker school systems had formerly been in the Colorado Springs school systems and known this man, and that’s why he came.

And his name was Sergeant, Mr. Sergeant, a wonderful director. Well, I was in the play, and it was a big production. I was thrilled to be in it. And then Mr. Sergeant formed this group, we were called the Shaker Guild. And you could be in the junior high or the senior high, and we put on independent productions that were not -- they were paid for by the school board but they weren’t part of the regular school curriculum. And we would rehearse at night and Saturdays and Sundays and that sort of thing.

And the school board paid for production costs, of building scenery and that sort of thing. And it was extended over into the summer. There was a lake by the Shaker school, a little -- well, you’d call it more like a pond. But it had a grassy slope that went down to it like an amphitheater. And they built a stage, just a platform -- I don’t know, maybe 15 by 15 -- that came out over the lake from a grassy area behind that. And so in the summer we put on productions down there.

I remember I was doing sets by that time, and I did a great big backdrop for “Ten Nights in a Barroom,” which we had down there. And we did “Abraham and Isaac” with -- I did a stained glass window that was 20 feet high by about 12 feet wide, and it was done with scrim and that sort of thing and painted with lights coming from behind. But at night it -- when it was lit, it reflected in the lake and it was quite a spectacular thing. I was having a wonderful time.

Another thing we did for one production, I don’t remember what it was any more, but we stirred magenta paint -- there was a stream that came into this pond. We stirred magenta paint into the pond so that it all became magenta colored, and we had fake water lilies that we made that had a candle in them. And we floated these at this point in this production out into the lake, so that it was pink or magenta underneath of these -- it was spectacular.

MS. YAGER: Sounds like your first plique-a-jour.

MR. MILLER: But anyway, I was very entranced with stage. We did “Nathan Hale.” They built a unit set that you could use in many different ways. There were columns, rectangular columns about 18 inches square and maybe 12 feet high, and some of them double that size and so on. You could paint and move them around to produce the sets.

And while I was still in high school, we took a production of some kind down to Higbee Company was a big store in Cleveland on public square. And they had a theater on the 10th floor, and we took one of our productions down there. And then I don’t remember exactly how the ramifications of it came, but anyway, Mr. Sergeant got hired to go down there, and there was a Saturday morning children’s theater. There was also a Saturday morning dancing class, and a former Ziegfield Follies girl ran the dancing class down there.

But I got hired to come down and do the sets for these productions down there. And also there was a book reviewer named Dorothy Fuldheim, who had a monthly book review, and she liked to have a set to come down -- she liked to go down steps or make a grand entrance before she did this, so every month I had to do a set for her. And the school, at that time there was a graduating class in January and one at the end of the year, in elementary and high school.

And I had started out -- because of my birthday I had started out early, because I had taken the test and so I started school in January rather than in September. So I was in this intermediate group. So the school, the last two years, gave me mornings off and arranged my schedule so that I could work mornings at Higbee’s and extend my schedules so I would graduate at the right time, in the June class.

So I worked at Higbee’s and did sets, and had a lot of fun in doing this until I -- well, I think I still did some work down there, must’ve been after school, even after I started art school. I think I still worked for them for a while. But --

MS. YAGER: Now, I read that when you were looking for college that you looked at a couple of places before you settled on --

MR. MILLER: Really --

MS. YAGER: -- or one other place?

MR. MILLER: I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I graduated. I thought I wanted -- well, I really thought I wanted to be a set designer. My folks were so relieved, and I never knew this until years later, because they thought I was going to go on the stage because I had done so many parts in all of these plays. And actually --

MS. YAGER: They would not have approved of that?

MR. MILLER: Well, my father’s cousin, who he grew up with, was Hedda Hopper. And this was a rift in my father’s family, you know, it was very, very religious. And Hedda stayed -- loved the farm in the summer, so she stayed with my fathers’ family in summer on the farm. She didn’t like the city.

And when she ran off -- when this theater company came through Altoona [Pennsylvania] and she ran off to become an actress, it just shocked this very, very religious family. And I’m sure that was part of the reason my father thought I was just going to go to the devil if I became an actor. So that, I think, was the reason that they were glad that I was thinking about stage designing. Well they took me up to Yale because the Yale School of Drama [New Haven, Connecticut] was really the only place at that time that you could go to study theater and stage design.

And I had an interview, and whoever was the director of the school said, “You’re never” -- well, of course this was the Depression time, this was 1936. And he said, “You’re never going to make a living at stage design,” and totally discouraged my parents. And there wasn’t very much money in the family at that time, and so we came back and I said, “Well, I’ll go to the Cleveland Institute of Art. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll go and get an art training.” So that’s how I got started there.

MS. YAGER: That was in?

MR. MILLER: In ’36.

MS. YAGER: 1936.

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: So that enabled you to stay living at home, which would have been some savings?

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: What kind of -- the Depression, what kind of effect did that have on your family?

MR. MILLER: Well, it had quite an effect, because at the height of the Depression there were times when the school board didn’t have money to pay their teachers, and they wouldn’t know whether they were going to get paid that month or not. And we thought -- or my parents thought maybe they would have to give up the house and move into an apartment again some place, and they looked at others but we never made the break.

And the school board passed a rule that there couldn’t be two members of the same family receiving a check from the board. So my mother had to stop teaching in the Cleveland public schools, and she was very -- she was Christian Scientist, very anti Catholic. I mean, rabidly anti-Catholic. I think it’s typical of Christian Scientists, from what I know. But anyway, where did she teach? She got a job teaching in the Catholic seminary -- teachers’ seminary here in Cleveland -- mathematics and how to teach mathematics.

And then -- she was only there for about a year or so, and then she got a job teaching in the Shaker schools, so she went up and she was teaching in Shaker Junior High after -- when I was in senior high.

MS. YAGER: And they never had any other children?

MR. MILLER: No, no.

MS. YAGER: In the Cleveland School of Art, can you talk about some of the classes that you took?

MR. MILLER: Well, you had basic -- first two years were basic courses, you couldn’t major or minor in anything at that time, everything was basic. And we had drawing, water color and perspective, design, which was Kenny Bates. Several life drawing classes, one where we were doing sometimes just parts of the body, and another one which was quick sketch.

And we had – one very influential course for me, which was -- oh, what was it called? Historic Ornament. We had a very great teacher. And I don’t know how we ever did it, because it was a half day course. We would go in in the morning; she would give us a short lecture with slides on the particular period we were involved with. We’d go back to class and she had a whole lot of plates, colored plates, examples of --

MS. YAGER: Sort of photo images?

MR. MILLER: Photo images of stained glass or sculpture, or enameling, or an art object, or just patterns from that period, and so on. And we had to pick out three and make a plate and render -- not totally, but in color and using different techniques in transparent and opaque water color and so on, place three of these artistically on a page by, you know, 12 o’clock in the morning. But it was a wonderful -- they don’t teach it any more, and it was a fabulous course, I learned so much in that course.

MS. YAGER: Drawing is a way of internalizing those things.

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: Rather than teaching history of art by text.

MR. MILLER: Yeah. But we had that too, and I would go to sleep and then Fred would have to punch me and wake me up. And we had another course called color and composition, which was illustrations. We’d get some sort of an assignment and we’d have to make an illustration of this idea. I don’t -- I can’t remember very good because then all of these things would be put up in the front of the room, and we had a teacher who would go through them all and criticize them in terms of color and composition. A very, very good course.

And, of course, Fred -- we were arranged alphabetically, so Fred sat next to me.

MS. YAGER: This is Frederick A. Miller, your long time --

MR. MILLER: Yeah. And that’s how we got to know each other. And Fred asked if he could go to lunch with me because we -- there was no lunch room in the school or anything like that. You either brought your own lunch -- but there was an hour period that was close enough that we could walk over to 105th and Euclid, and there was a Chinese restaurant over there that had, oh, at that time, for about 40 cents you could get a whole chop suey and so on meal.

And he asked me whether he -- because he knew I walked over there to go to lunch, and he said, “Could I walk to lunch with you some day?” And I said, “Sure, but I’m a fast walker.” So we got to know each other.

And then Fred was doing silver at that time, he was making fantastic, intricate watch cases. He would get the workings of a watch and then make a silver case for it and a band for it. He’d learned how to solder and saw because a friend of his, Jack McCausland, had -- no, wait a minute, it wasn’t Jack McCausland. No, the name isn’t coming right now [Garth Andrew].

Anyway, had gone when he was -- Fred lived in Akron [Ohio], the outskirts of Akron. And this friend of his had gone -- with a fairly wealthy family -- had gone to a summer camp where they had taught making simple jewelry. And he came back and taught Fred soldering and sawing, and Fred started making these pieces of jewelry.

MS. YAGER: Now, I noticed that Fred was about five years older than you [b. 1914]?

MR. MILLER: Yeah, yeah.

MS. YAGER: What -- you came into college right from high school, what had he been doing?

MR. MILLER: Fred had been working as a photographer’s assistant in Akron. Mabel somebody or other. And she was a very good photographer and Fred got a fairly good camera and he began doing his own photography. And he even did separation color prints, which -- and his family was not wealthy -- his father was a barber and his mother raised chickens in the basement.

MS. YAGER: In the basement?

MR. MILLER: Yes, the house used to smell very much, I’ll tell you. But she would raise little chicks and then sell them, hatch them and sell them. But he had a good camera, I don’t know, a three-and-a-quarter, four-and-a-quarter, something like that negative size. And he did some very good portraits and things, because that’s what he’d been doing with Mabel.

But he also -- I don’t know how in the world he ever did this -- but he did big photographic screens. I only think he did a couple of them, but with huge paper. And he projected them somehow or other in their house on these big -- and he developed and fixed the sections of print in the bathtub in order to get a large enough area that he could -- and he did one of tropical fish, that was a beauty. I never saw the actual one but I saw photographs of it, and as a result of that, somebody knew about these things and they showed his photographs at an interior decorating studio down on Euclid Avenue here. And the man, he finally, he eventually became director of the Metropolitan Museum, the man that ran that studio way back.

Anyway, because of this show, a very, very wealthy family in Cleveland saw the show, bought the screen with the tropical fish, it was a folding screen, and offered to let Fred or to have Fred go to -- they’d pay his tuition and his living expenses for four years in arts school. Their name was Hord.

MS. YAGER: How fabulous.

MR. MILLER: And so that’s how he got started in art school.

MS. YAGER: Wow.

MR. MILLER: And he was really a genius. I mean, the things at that age that he could do.

MS. YAGER: You mentioned tropical fish, and I remember reading that you had raised tropical fish and guinea pigs and something else?

MR. MILLER: Rabbits. No, I loved animals. We had, I think, eight rabbits at one time and 14 guinea pigs in the garage in Shaker Heights, because they multiply. And eventually they were given -- during the WPA [Works Progress Administration] days, you know, you hired somebody to come and work at your house, to sort of help with the situation where there’s so many people unemployed and so on. And eventually I think all my rabbits and guinea pigs went to that man, because he had a big family and he thought his kids would enjoy them.

MS. YAGER: Is this to eat or to play with?

MR. MILLER: Oh, to play with. And the tropical fish, oh, my father was interested in wild things a lot. And I remember we went to visit some of my stepmother’s relatives up in Plattsburg, New York. And my father caught some minnows or little like little miniature sunfish in the lake, and he put them in a bottle, like quart jars, and we brought them all the way back to Cleveland and put them in a little aquarium.

And getting the water changed and so on meant we were driving all this distance and constantly getting this changed so the fish would live and so on. But then he bought the first guppies, you know, guppies came in way, way, way back. And he bought the first guppies that came into Cleveland, and we had a tank with some guppies in it. And this was about, well -- he had a crystal set. You know, our first radio was a -- do you know what a crystal set is?

MS. YAGER: No.

MR. MILLER: Well, I can’t go into the technicalities, but all that mattered was there was a kind of metal that you -- you had a metal feeler that touches this and it picks up radio waves. You put on earphones like you’ve got on now, and you have a -- there’s a little dial with a wrapped wire around two cylinders, and you turn that, and you get lots of static, but at some point we could pick up KEKA in Pittsburgh with, you know, there’s no batteries or anything like that, you’re just picking up radio waves out of the air. [Audio break; tape change.] My father was always fascinated by things of that sort. This is getting way off the subject.

MS. YAGER: Yes. Let’s see. I’m looking at some of the teachers that you had when you were at the Cleveland School of Art. A couple that weren’t mentioned, Viktor Schreckengost.

MR. MILLER: Yes. The second year, I had him for just an extension of basic design from Kenny’s first year design and he impressed me so much with his lectures and his teaching. So --

MS. YAGER: What were his lectures like?

MR. MILLER: Well, it’s just he would go over the work that we’d done. I remember we did an all-over pattern. I’d done them in high school, you know, and all the way through. But we had an all over pattern problem and we had a book jacket problem and -- I really don’t remember all of them -- but just his -- I sensed that this man -- at this point I thought there must be some secret to design that I would eventually learn.

Otto Ege, I had him, too, as a calligraphy and lettering teacher, but he taught this theory of dynamic symmetry, the Magic Square and I sort of --

MS. YAGER: Is that like the Golden Mean?

MR. MILLER: The Golden Mean, yeah. And I thought that that probably had something to do with what design was all about and so at the end of the second year, in the second year, I had more life drawing. I had a full day of sculpture, which was very important. We worked from the model with an armature and for a whole year, every week, we worked with a new figure. I learned so much more about drawing the figure in that class --

MS. YAGER: By sculpting it?

MR. MILLER: Sculpting it, yeah. And we also had, of course, anatomy and interior design, where we did design. I remember we designed the interior of a restaurant. We had an interior design course and -- I don’t remember too much. But anyway, at the end of the second year, I had to decide what I was going to major in.

By that time, Fred had taught me how to solder and saw. He was living in a rooming house with two old ladies and we worked on a card table in the living room at that place with an alcohol lamp and a mouth blowtorch. And that’s where we worked. But I was making rings by that time that my mother was able to sell to friends.

MS. YAGER: What material were these?

MR. MILLER: They were silver. I bought a lot of zircons. There was a man in New York that Fred knew about, Mr. Meyer, who you could write to and ask for a collection of stones. And he’d send you a box of stones and you would go through it and pick out what you wanted to buy and send the rest of them back. And they were cheap. That came from him.

MS. YAGER: The ring you’re wearing?

MR. MILLER: Yeah. I was making lots of rings because I set up at home in the basement a little studio. There was a workbench already there. I just worked at that and I had an alcohol lamp and mouth blowtorch.

MS. YAGER: Now, were you using sheets or wire silver?

MR. MILLER: I started out using a lot of wire but then I went to sheet and I worked mainly with sheet.

MS. YAGER: And these were pieces that you were selling. And was this helpful for your income?

MR. MILLER: Yeah, a little. Five or six dollars for a ring, you know, but it was still helpful.

MS. YAGER: And your mother was the --

MR. MILLER: Well, Mother was the main contact because the rings were pretty interesting. They were different than anything that anybody had seen before. So I got quite a lot of orders for rings.

Some place along the line, and I’m not sure when, I bought myself a little kiln and I started doing some ashtrays too. And I did a few because Kenny Bates was doing brooches with enamel designs on them. It was usually rectangular or circular with a bezel and that was it. So I did some of those too with that one.

Eventually somebody here in Cleveland came up with the idea of building your own kiln, using the regular bricks, ceramic bricks.

MS. YAGER: Fire bricks.

MR. MILLER: Fire brick. And I think there were four of them that you arranged and then you arranged two to give it the height. And then you put them across the opening. I think I could get a 9-inch circle into this.

MS. YAGER: Was there a heating element?

MR. MILLER: We brought the heating elements that you use for coffee makers at that time and you had one on the top and one on either side and then you made the door. On that, I had to get a piece of transite. You put this whole thing on a sheet of transite too and then you -- the door I made was a piece of transite that went in front of it and put a handle on that. But that was, I think, probably my junior or senior year or something like that.

MS. YAGER: This was all outside of school or -- no, you had been --

MR. MILLER: This was outside of -- I mean, I did this at home in my --

MS. YAGER: But you had been taking some enameling classes?

MR. MILLER: No. The only enameling classes I ever took was that first class with Kenny. I did the two trays with Kenny in art school.

MS. YAGER: And everything else was outside after that? Were they teaching jewelry at that time at the school?

MR. MILLER: Oh, yes. And there was a very good woman that taught it, Ms. Watkins. She has pieces in the -- I think, Chicago Art Institute has a piece. I think there is a piece in the Boston Museum [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston] too. But I wasn’t really interested in the sort of things they were doing and painting was really -- I was mainly interested in painting.

And I won some awards at the end of the year, “Best Watercolor Painting,” and that sort of thing. So my drawing and my painting were really coming along. And so when I had a choose a major, I hadn’t any idea of what I was going to do as a major. And then I finally decided that Schreckengost had just, I think, just the year before had the first industrial design class of any school in the United States. He had it there. And so there was an industrial design department and I thought I’m going to learn the secret. I had no interest in becoming an industrial designer. But I signed up for industrial design as my major and I think my minor was ceramics. I’m almost positive my minor was ceramics. And --

MS. YAGER: Who was teaching ceramics?

MR. MILLER: I can’t get the name to come to mind.

MS. YAGER: I have Carl --

MR. MILLER: Mrs. Dyer, Mrs. Dyer. And she was famous for her red color which, years later, she finally revealed the secret to me. I used to drive Mrs. Dyer who was a little old -- well, she wasn’t old but she was a very good teacher. But I used to drive her because she didn’t drive to school. I’d go down and pick her up and bring her to school. So I majored in industrial design and, of course, I had drawing courses and I had the ceramics, which I just -- two days a week. I know I had industrial design for two days a week.

MS. YAGER: A couple of the names were Kae Dorn Cass.

MR. MILLER: She was the watercolor teacher in my freshman year who was, until she passed away, a lifelong friend. Just great person, wonderful personality, both for Fred and me, and for all the -- and she was popular with the whole faculty, a wonderful person, a very, very good watercolor painter.

MS. YAGER: And Walter Sinz.

MR. MILLER: Walter Sinz was this ceramic -- I mean, was the sculpture teacher and we remained friends until he passed away.

MS. YAGER: And Carl Gaertner.

MR. MILLER: Gaertner. He was a very fine painter, had a gallery in New York, won some of the big prizes in various shows around the United States. It was gouache more than watercolor. And eventually, when he died, actually they put me into teaching this course for three-quarters of a year or something like that. I never should have been in there because -- but anyway, he was great too. We had wonderful teachers. I mean, that school had just a fabulous group of teachers.

MS. YAGER: The school was started, I read, in -- was it 1899 [1882], something --

MR. MILLER: Something like that, yes. And it first started out as a girls’ school and --

MS. YAGER: Specifically for art?

MR. MILLER: Yeah. And then became a general school. It started out downtown some place. I think, among the things that you have there, there is a booklet called “The First 100 Years.” That’s all about it, yeah.

MS. YAGER: Yes, yes. Now, I’d like to move on to your Army experiences. That was 1941 to 1945, I have.

MR. MILLER: Yeah. Well, the last year at the Art School, in my senior year, one of the teachers left. He was teaching nature research and techniques and he was a bad boy or something and was fired overnight. And the next morning, they came in and told me I was going to teach his classes and that I would go on and graduate but I was going to teach his freshman classes for the rest of the year. And they told me what I was going to teach. This is Otto Ege, and I guess it was because my parents were teachers. I never quite could figure this out, why they thought -- because at that point, Fred had, you know, he was majoring in education, art education at Western Reserve and the Art School and he was minoring in industrial design.

Anyway, they told me I was going to teach today and I was going to teach painting, rendering butterfly wings. So for the rest of that year, I taught. They were half day classes; I guess three half-days a week.

MS. YAGER: Was this a class that you had taken yourself at one point?

MR. MILLER: Yes. Well in my freshman year, you know, under the same teacher who got fired. He was a real good friend. And then --

MS. YAGER: So you painted butterfly wings? And what would some the other nature research?

MR. MILLER: Well, the school had a collection of shells and we did rendering shells.

MS. YAGER: In nature laboratories?

MR. MILLER: There were different techniques of watercolor, opaque watercolor, colored pencil. I really don’t remember what other things there were. But I can tell you the following year -- then that was sort of a critical summer for me because in the group that I was with, drama group at Shaker, there is a man named -- a young man named James Card who was very interested in movies. And he actually produced this movie.

I was in it and a couple of our other people in the group were in it. It was about a water nymph and a witch and so on and it took place out in Twinsburg here, out in forest and waterfalls and that sort of thing. And it was silent. It was done on cheap black and white film and I did all the titles for this film because it had to have -- all the old silent films all had titles. So I did all the drawings and printing for all the titles.

Then another man in Cleveland, whose sister was in Fred’s and my class at Art School, Phoebe Flory, her brother, John Flory, had been working in Hollywood producing the coming attraction films in Hollywood. He was very interested and he had produced a movie out there on his own called “Mr. Motorboat’s Last Stand” [1933]. I never saw it. I don’t know anything. But books on the history of independent film credit John as being the father of the independent film because, apparently, this was the first produced independent film. But anyway, John got the job of making a film here in Cleveland. This would be 1939 probably, that would be called “Song of the City” and it would bring in all the ethnic groups that -- Cleveland has so many -- and their heritage.

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing John Paul Miller in the artist’s home and studio in Brecksville, Ohio, on August 22, 2004 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disk number two, session number one.

John, when the tape was ending, you were talking about John Flory’s --

MR. MILLER: He got this job -- I think that’s on the other tape -- making a film about the ethnic communities in Cleveland and also the Cleveland Orchestra was going to do the sound track for it as well, you know. And I got called because he needed another editor to work on the film. I had never done any editing but -- so I spent a couple of months editing bits of the film. It was my first experience with that and I didn’t do anything again with film until after the war.

When I got out of the Army, John wanted me to come to New York and work for him. By that time, he had an office in New York and was doing films. So I left the Army and went directly to New York and worked in his office there, editing film for a couple of months. And I hated New York so much that, when the Art School wanted me to come back to teach, I said I’m going to go back to teach. They wanted me to teach art history. And I said I will not teach art history. So they gave me a job teaching a variety of subjects.

But then, on this same thing, the next summer John called me again from New York, and he said he had a job to produce some movie on the Presbyterian mission work in Alaska. He knew I’d always wanted to go to Alaska and he needed a director. He said we can fake it to make them think that you are a director and we’ll send you up as a director, and a photographer who was from the Presbyterian Church, and his assistant and me, we would spend the whole summer going from mission to mission and photographing and going from industry to industry in Alaska.

It was fabulous. We flew to Alaska and off the top of my head began directing people for sequences at various missions and churches and then went around and we did the fishing industry, the canning industry, the gold mining industry, the lumbering industry. And we went to Point Barrow for 16 days and photographed the Eskimos up there. We went out in the Arctic Ocean on an umiak and hunted with an Eskimo, hunted ducks. It was just a fantastic summer for me.

MS. YAGER: During lunch, you were saying that, as a child, you remembered going to lectures on the Antarctic and explorers. So this fit right in.

MR. MILLER: Right. I’d always – I never thought I’d get to the Arctic or the Antarctic. But I had heard [Roald] Amundsen and [Richard] Byrd and various other polar explorers lecture in the ‘20s in Cleveland. And they just planted this image of how beautiful the Arctic and Antarctic were in my mind. I always wanted to go there. So that chance to go to Alaska was just fantastic.

MS. YAGER: Do you remember seeing any of the Eskimo handcrafts?

MR. MILLER: Oh, yes. And I wish I had money because at that time, all their basketry, you know, their baskets could hold water, beautiful baskets that were woven so tight. These were Indian. And Eskimos had wonderful carvings too. But I couldn’t afford anything.

I did bring back a little bit of mastodon ivory bracelet and mastodon ivory. And I think this was an old thing to hold a point for. Harpoons were made out of mastodon ivory. But I did go to the museum to Fairbanks and in Juneau and saw a lot of wonderful stuff there.

MS. YAGER: Now tell me about your experience in the Army.

MR. MILLER: Well, I went in in -- the school got me deferred. I had a very low draft number and they got me deferred so that I could teach the fall of ’40 and spring of ’41. And then I went in in July. I went to Fort Knox.

MS. YAGER: This is in Kentucky?

MR. MILLER: Kentucky and went into the -- the platoon was a tank driving platoon and this all seemed very, very foreign to me. But anyway, I got driving tanks, firing all the weapons and all that business and bivouacking and -- Fort Knox was so strange at that time because a lot of it had been a firing range and they had to build where the firing range had been to build all these new barracks. And they surrounded some places -- little patches of wood where we’d go out to pitch tents, to practice this and I’d see somebody next to me using an unexploded shell to hammer in tent pegs.

You know, there were several people, not in my outfit, killed in Fort Knox at that time from doing just that. And when we would drive tanks, you would see an unexploded fairly big shell and you’d have to drive around it so that you didn’t hit it with the tank. I wasn’t a good tank driver at all. But anyway, that’s what --

And then they decided that every chapel on the post should have a religious picture behind the altar and so they looked through the records and they picked all the artists they could and got us assembled one morning. I was taken away from my platoon and driven to this building and each of us was to paint a religious painting. And this was our job. I was to paint a Nativity.

Well, at the same time -- this was right towards the end of my training, I was called into the office of the commander of our whole area to be interviewed to become a lance-corporal. And he looked at my records and he said, “You’re an artist? I said, “Yes, that’s what I was trained as.” He said, “Did you even paint murals?” And I said, “No, I never painted murals.” And he said, “Well you’re going to paint murals.”

He had this dream of taking -- every area had a rec hall, recreation hall and ours didn’t have any murals on it and a lot of them already had murals on. He wanted a history of the armored force and he said, “I’ll give you a three-day pass. You can go to Cleveland Public Library, get all the information you can about the history of armor and come back and start painting murals.”

So I took my three-day pass and I came back and I made sketches and started on -- they were to be four-by-six-foot panels on the walls. And I think there were six of them, plus a full size rendering of a tank at the back of the stage. I did ask one of my teachers while I was in Cleveland what -- I was just going to work on, -- these were not wooden walls, they were -- whatever --

MS. YAGER: Plaster?

MR. MILLER: No. It wasn’t plaster. It was composition board. And he said that I should work with casein paints. They had just come in and he said that will probably would be a good medium to work with. So I made my drawings and I started.

I made a scaffolding to get me up there so I could climb up and be on the level with these things. And I started painting. I don’t know -- I had three or four of them done when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and I thought I would be shipped out right away. But they said, “No, you’re going to finish these murals.”

Already, I had gotten a little box of tools that I’d taken down to my barracks, silver jewelry tools, and I was making simple rings for soldiers to give to their girlfriends -- selling these simple silver rings. And actually, when Pearl Harbor -- I was listening to the New York Philharmonic and sitting on the floor and working on my foot locker on jewelry --

[Phone rings.]

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing John Paul Miller. This is track number two. You were talking about --

MR. MILLER: Working on the silver. I thought at that point, you know, that I was going to be taken off the murals. Well, they said I had to keep going on the murals until they were finished. Then I finally finished the murals. They got quite a bit of publicity and they decided that I was -- well, something they could use, sort of, for their own devices there.

So they put me in charge of the rec hall when the murals were done. This was terrible. I didn’t like that at all. Then all the people that had been called in to do the religious paintings, by this time a lot of them were done. They got all of them together again and assembled them into what became the Training Literature Department of the Armed Force.

And what had happened, the British had captured German training manuals on tank tactics and given them to the Americans. They came to Fort Knox, these manuals, and they decided to republish these in English using -- it was practically all pictures and maps – with German tanks, showing tactics. And it was always the right and the wrong way to do it: two pictures and two maps. And so they put these artists to work changing them to American tanks, new pictures, but American tanks. And after a little bit of finagling around, I finally got assigned to that training literature department and I was there then for the rest of the war.

MS. YAGER: I read that there were about 35 artists in the unit.

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: And two comments that you had mentioned earlier – one, you had said, that I just thought was kind of interesting, you had said that when you were in Kentucky, that people in the armed services were given free admission to symphonies –

MR. MILLER: Concerts. I heard Rudolph Serkin give a concert and [Vladimir] Horowitz and the ballet theater would come to Louisville every year, and the Cincinnati Symphony came down and gave concerts there. And that was wonderful and the local – the main department store had a soldier’s art show, usually once a year, and I sold a lot of my watercolors down there through that. So it was very good.

MS. YAGER: I noticed that you had entered the Cleveland May Show as a sergeant. So do you remember what piece you might have entered and how you had –

MR. MILLER: Well I entered I think – well, I considered myself a watercolor painter so I entered watercolors from the time I was in art school, right on through the Army I would send things down and some of them sold out of the May Show. There were – one was a view of Knoxville, Tennessee at night. I did a lot of night scenes. I liked painting – I have a wonderful memory, visual memory, and I could paint from memory, and so that – I kept that up all through the army, painting, watercolors, and sending them to May Shows. I won a couple prizes even – landscape watercolor during the May Shows. And I sent some jewelry too, but not – I can’t even remember what pieces I sent anymore.

MS. YAGER: So after the war then you returned to the Cleveland School of Art?

MR. MILLER: Well, after – I did after I spent a little time in New York. Then I came back and started teaching and still doing some jewelry. I was living with my parents and still doing some jewelry and enameling in the studio. I still thought of this as my hobby and the painting, that was fine art to me. And actually I – you know, every once in a while somebody would ask me to do something that was gold – I was doing things with silver. I was using gold so thin and I hated it. I didn’t like the looks of it. So I was using 14 karat at that time. Well, before the – before I went in the army, the school library used to get the magazine Das Kunst [Das Kunstmagazin], a German magazine. It was all in German but it had wonderful illustrations. I saw work in there, and I think now that it must have been by Elizabeth Treskow but here I was confounded by, they were black and white photographs, but how you could do something as minute and elegant as that without seeing any signs of soldering. So I – and when the magazine had been on the shelves a while, they had put it in a box and if you wanted it you could pick it up. So I tore those pages, ripped it up and tore those pages out. And I took it with me to the army because they were so fascinating to me.

MS. YAGER: Now this was – you later found out that this was Professor Elizabeth Treskow, in Cologne, Germany?

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: And she had been doing goldsmithing with real fine granulation.

MR. MILLER: Yeah, for years. Since the 1920s.

MS. YAGER: So you hadn’t attempted any granulation yet but it was on your mind?

MR. MILLER: No, I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t even realize that the museum had some beautiful examples of granulation that I had never really paid that much attention to. And it was only after I finally knew what it was, and it was only very gradually, I don’t remember all the details, that I found out – for some reason or other, I don’t remember – I went to Detroit when – what was her name? The girl from New York, the jeweler from Copenhagen?

MS. YAGER: Adda –

MR. MILLER: Adda Husted-Andersen. She was there for some reason or other. There was an exhibit of some of her pieces. Now whether she was lecturing – anyway I got to meet her. I asked her if she knew anything about granulation. And she said she really didn’t, but she thought it was probably done with powdered solder. So I was interested enough to make some experiments of powdered solder. But I was doing some larger pieces of jewelry at that time. Fred by that time was – had been called, released from the army and became a designer for Potter and Mellen [Potter and Mellen, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio]. Mr. [Horace E.] Potter was still alive – who was the – started the organization, and Fred had been sent up to Stone Associates to learn about their methods of silversmithing and raising because he had never done any of that. He had done a lot of spinning when – in art school when he was in industrial design, they got a spinning lathe, and he did some silver spinning at that time. One of the few people that made use of the lathe, but he did, and made some julep cups and things like that. But he had never done – knew anything about raising so, but he came back and started – he raised a salt, no, a creamer and sugar with ivory handles. They went into the May Show and I think he got a prize.

And we worked in the Potter and Mellen studio at night. I was still doing, just normal run of the mill jewelry, rings, a few larger pieces. And then some – well, Charles Bartlett Jeffrey, who was a protégé of Kenneth Bates, who did enameling, asked me if I could make a silver cross that would feature one of his enamels in the center of the small cross. So I did that, and of course it went into the May Show and it won first prize, but I didn’t get any credit for having made the silver, it was just Charles Bartlett Jeffery. And I thought at that time, well maybe I should start making something larger that would be more impressive for the May Show. And I had seen Alexander Calder’s silver and I – who else had I seen? There were a couple other people –

MS. YAGER: [Harry] Bertoia?

MR. MILLER: Yeah, Bertoia pieces. I was very impressed with the Bertoia pieces, and they were in gold. I saw them first at an exhibition in the Colorado Springs museum [Fine Arts Center of Colorado Springs]. I happened to be out there and saw them.

MS. YAGER: What were they like?

MR. MILLER: Well they were mainly brooches as I remember it, but all made with forged gold pieces assembled.

MS. YAGER: Wire? Forged square wire?

MR. MILLER: Forged square wire, yeah.

MS. YAGER: And where did you see Alexander Calder’s work?

MR. MILLER: In photographs from – I don’t know that I ever saw any of the actual pieces. I might have at the Museum of Modern Art. I think there were some there at that time. I may be – because at the brief period that I worked in New York I did get to the museum but I did see them. So I started making necklaces with forged – well, I did some with forged round wire and I did some with forged square wire, and they got in the May Show and won a prize of some kind. And then I –

MS. YAGER: I want to – let’s talk about the May Show a little bit because that’s a very interesting Cleveland phenomenon. It was started in – was it 1919?

MR. MILLER: Probably. Well, that’s about when the museum building got started.

MS. YAGER: Okay. And ran until ’93. So over 75 years. And a couple distinctive things that I read about it were that painting, sculpture, craft, they were all considered all in the same category –

MR. MILLER: Right. Which was unusual.

MS. YAGER: And they were – it was intended to champion craftsmanship and support for local artists that were Ohio born, or Ohio trained?

MR. MILLER: Well, it had to be local at that time. It had to be within Cayahoga County which is the local county. And it was a big event every year. They brought judges from various museums around the country, and there were usually a couple people who were curators of painting and a couple of people who were involved with the crafts in some way or another: a curator of crafts from Richmond Museum [Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond], I know the craft person from there, or the director from there, St. Louis Museum [St. Louis Art Museum], Metropolitan Museum, and they were really good jurors. And there was this vast amount of stuff that would come in for these – we were allowed to enter ten pieces and you could enter ten watercolors and ten pieces of jewelry and so that there was a huge input of work into the museum that had to be dealt with. But they did it. And it grew for opening night thousands of people – roads were blocked all around the area and the galleries were so full you could hardly move through them. You could hardly see anything.

MS. YAGER: What years do you remember that roads were blocked and –

MR MILLER: Well I think 1937, ‘38, in that period when I first started going to the openings, yeah. And that went on for quite a while. Eventually they limited the number of entries you could make because it was just too much of a job for the museum to handle all of this material.

MS. YAGER: Now some of the jurors that I have seen mentioned were Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and the director, Dr. William Mathewson Milliken –

MR. MILLER: Yes.

MS. YAGER: He seemed to be a huge driving force in the –

MR. MILLER: And see, he had been trained in decorative arts and the museum in their acquisitions was driven towards decorative arts much more than painting. I mean we didn’t have much of a collection – we had some good modern paintings, but not many. There wasn’t a lot of purchase in that direction but, well, the Guelph Treasure came in at that point [1930] and I don’t remember what year for the Guelph Treasure was, but I think it was when I was in school. But it was a tremendously important event for the school – I mean for the museum. And then they also had a gold show. Now I don’t remember the date for that, but that was a great impression for me because it had wonderful Pre-Columbian gold, African gold, just gold from all over the world. And it was one gallery, but it just knocked you off your feet to go in there and see the craftsmanship and the beauty of the work.

MS. YAGER: He also seemed to have a real interest in – it said he hammered away at the interdependence of artists, museums, and patrons and tried very hard to connect the artist and the patron, and encouraged people to support creativity and try to make – really put Cleveland on the map in artistic terms.

MR. MILLER: Well he – with me, I’m sure when I finally was able to do pieces in granulation and in gold, I’d only been doing pieces in silver, but when I started doing gold I’m sure he encouraged members of the board to buy my early pieces so that I could keep on having enough money, that I could keep on working in gold. And actually I think he judged the Wichita [the “Wichita National,” Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas], an early Wichita that I entered with silver – I think there were three silver necklaces that were all forged units. And I got a first prize, I think from them, and I think he was one of the judges.

MS. YAGER: And that – did the awards have prizes? Cash prizes or ribbons?

MR. MILLER: In the museum? No. It was just the honor.

MS. YAGER: But being pointed out like that would be –

MR. MILLER: It would be first, and second, and special –

MS. YAGER: – major validation.

MR. MILLER: – special mention, and honorable mention, and this sort of thing.

MS. YAGER: What was it that made you turn to gold?

MR. MILLER: Well, I was doing painting, and I found that I was having a harder and harder time painting at night because I was doing so many other things at school. Though I taught only three days, I was doing their catalogs, and their announcements for shows, and the photography of student work and the installation of those shows.

MS. YAGER: And the exhibit design, yeah.

MR. MILLER: And I was having a hard time painting, just wasn’t going right, at night. And one day the director, Laurence Schmeckebier, called me into his office and said, “Cleveland has enough good watercolor painters, we need a good jeweler. Why don’t you concentrate on your jewelry?” And I think this sort of slided – that tilted me in the direction.

MS. YAGER: Did you know each other well? I mean how would he have –

MR. MILLER: No he had just become director a couple years before that. He came from Wisconsin and had written a book about [the town of] Red Wing and somehow or other the chairman of the board of the art school had a sister in Wisconsin that had heard him lecture and thought that he would make a good director of the art school. So that’s how he got here. And he was a very boisterous director, and I didn’t agree with him on a lot of things, but eventually – we stayed friends all through the years, but we had a lot of disagreements. But anyway –

MS. YAGER: But that’s such an interesting – that he would call you in and tell you, you know, “Give up your watercolor,” and you listened to that advice.

MR. MILLER: Well at the time I didn’t say, “Well I’m going to change.” But little by little I did change. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I realized that I had to switch to gold to do the granulation, that I wasn’t going to do it in silver, and at that period too – see Fred went to Rhode Island School of Design for the second Handy & Harman silversmithing conference under Baron [Erik] Fleming. And the year after the Baron got back, came back the second year, well of course Fred learned the whole stretching process, which got him doing free forms and all of that sort of thing because of the Baron. The next year Fred and another friend and I went to New York because the Baron was arriving in New York for the second conference, and there was to be a party for him, so we went to the docking of the Gripsolm and met him, and then there was a party after that. And the Baron said that he was going to go across the country. He wanted to try to organize some shows of his work at various museums: Omaha, Colorado Springs I know he wanted to go to, and Los Angeles.

And right after I got out of the army I started going west for the summer camping. I went first with friends from art school, Joe O’Sickey and Paul Travis, the painter, and spent the whole summer traveling around and camping and seeing the country, because I’d never seen the mountains, and I’d always wanted to see the west. So the second summer I went to Alaska for the summer and did the movie. And then the third summer I went west with another student and spent the whole summer backpacking and camping. And then this next year was when – anyway, saw the Baron, we went to the party, the Baron said he wanted to go across the country. He was going to fly to these various museums. So I said, “You know, I’m going to leave in a couple weeks to go to the west.” I owned a Jeep station wagon at the time, but I could fix it up in the back to carry all of our camping equipment, and I said, “If you want to see the country from the ground, and see what America is really like, you’d be welcome to come along.” And I think the Baron must have been in his early sixties at this point, and about a week later he called and he said, “I’m going to take you up on the idea.” So he came to Cleveland. Fred threw a big party for him with various art people here in Cleveland. And we got in the car with another student of mine and headed west.

We went all over, stopping at – we went to Longs Peak and camped at Longs Peak camp ground. The Baron and I were sleeping in this little pup tent and he had a flask with him and he would drink because it would help him sleep at night. We were sleeping on air mattresses and sleeping bags, and he woke up in the morning with a bad back. And he said he slept on the flask. Well we went next and stopped at Colorado Springs, and I think that may have been when I saw the Bertoia things but I’m not sure. But anyway, we went to the director’s home and the next morning – we were staying at a motel – the next morning he got up and he could hardly walk. And he had other friends from Sweden living in Colorado Springs, we got in touch with them. They got him to a hospital; it was a Catholic hospital in Colorado Springs, and they put him in traction right away and said that he had to be in traction for a week. Well, I had never been to Aspen and the Goethe Festival was being held in Aspen, which was close enough to Colorado Springs across the mountains that I could get to it. So I went with my student and we went over and camped above Aspen.

And the Goethe Festival – Papke had the idea for this. They built a tent and they had the St. Louis Symphony there in residence with all of these wonderful artists: [Gregor] Piatigorsky and [Arthur] Rubinstein and various singers that were putting on musical events every day and then famous people talking about Goethe at lectures in the evening. Thornton Wilder lectured, and I had read all of Thornton Wilder’s plays and books. It was a real thrill to be there for that. And then the highlight was the doctor from Africa, theological doctor from Africa – the name isn’t coming – very famous [Albert Schweitzer]. He spoke on Goethe in German. He was the real reason for the whole thing. And I had heard about him in all my life because in church groups he was thought of as this fantastic intellect, and he was a wonderful organist too – why won’t the name come? But anyway, there he – I saw him standing on the street corner and of course went finally to hear his lecture.

Then we went back, picked up the Baron, and he was well enough by now that we went on from there to Grand Canyon, no, we went first to Santa Fe. He wanted to see Santa Fe. We went to Santa Fe and went to Grand Canyon and my friend – we stayed in tents, but we got a little cabin for the Baron to stay there, and he said, “The world’s greatest silversmith living in a box!” [Laughs.] We went on from Grand Canyon to Las Vegas to cross the desert to Los Angeles. You do it at night because it was so hot then, there was no air conditioning, and well, the car would have heated up so much trying to cross that. So we spent the afternoon – no, we spent a night there – we first went to a casino. Las Vegas at that time only had a couple main hotels, it had more casinos and we went to one of the hotels and Burl Ives was the entertainer. And that was a big thrill for me too because I knew all of Burl Ives’s recordings. And then we went to the Golden Nugget and gambled, and of course my family would have – I was never a gambler in my life, and he said, “You’ve got to learn to play roulette. I have a system.” So he taught me this system, and we played for several hours and I was doing alright. And I felt so wicked because these girls would come up with a cocktail for me, and I wasn’t a drinker at that time either. But we had a wonderful time. And he had this special system. I wish – I can’t remember it now, but anyway, we placed our chips on various combinations of numbers and it worked out all right.

Well, finally when it got late enough we took off and we went across the desert and left him in Los Angeles. But in the process I had been trying to find out what he knew about granulation. Well he didn’t know much about granulation. He said he thought you just glued the granules to the gold surface and heated it up and at a certain point you could see that it was working, they attached to the surface. Well, I got back and I tried that and it didn’t work. The secret wasn’t – he didn’t know. But Margret Craver knew that I was searching, and she kept sending me little bits of information that she thought – she came across something about the American Academy in Rome had an archeologist that wrote a paper on granulation from the point of view of an archeologist. And he had decided that granulation in ancient days used gold that was anything but really pure, and had a lot of copper and other minerals in it. And that he thought they simple brought the copper to the surface so that it would go blackened – the copper oxide on the surface – by heating it, then glued it with any kind of animal glue onto the piece, then put in into a kiln that was – [tape break] – operated with bellows, with a cover and a hole that you could look thru. And the ancient craftsman could see when the gold or the copper on the surface united with the gold at a much lower temperature, because it was in a reducing atmosphere. Because of the charcoal it would be a totally reducing atmosphere. And they could see by the shimmer when it was time to stop the bellows and the piece was ready.

And I found the article in the Cleveland Public Library in their archival section. It’s amazing, you know, that this thing from the American Academy in Rome. But Cleveland Public Library is a fabulous library. I read this and for the first time I heard about reduction atmosphere as being necessary to have this granulation take place. And at that time, Fred had bought a gas fluxer at Potter and Mellen to keep fire scale down on the silver pieces he was making. And the gas fluxer, in essence, produced a reducing atmosphere around the piece where it was being heated.

And I decided, well, that’s reducing atmosphere. I’ll try that with granulation. And, of course, I was working with 14 karat gold at that time and I was having practically no luck at all. And I tried adding flux to the glue, thinking that maybe this would help. But 14 karat, it would work sometimes with it then I would lose a whole piece.

So I decided to go to 18 karat gold and then I began having the success with the granulation. And I worked with gold that I would buy here in Cleveland from the I. Miller Company that sold gold and silver and took in scrap and so on and so forth. But he was getting Handy & Harman 18 karat number 8 yellow gold. And I would buy it from him. But sometimes he would substitute his own 18 karat melt, and I wouldn’t know it, and I’d have this piece I’d be working on and I would overheat it and days and days of work were gone. But the strange thing is that probably -- well, I have tried other people’s 18 karat gold, Hoover & Strong and other refiners. None of them would work the way Handy & Harman 18 karat yellow number 8 worked for me.

MS. YAGER: Was there something in the alloy or the preparation of the metal?

MR. MILLER: Well, at one time when I was doing granulation Cyril Smith, who was a metallurgist and had written many books and he worked on the atomic bomb in Chicago, and he was traveling through and stopped in Cleveland to see me, because he was fascinated with old techniques. And so I talked to him. And eventually he came to the conclusion that there must have been some way in the process of refining the gold and the pouring of it -- he thought maybe pouring it under a reducing atmosphere or something -- that made their 18 karat -- because I got the formula for their 18 karat from Handy & Harman and I gave it to Hoover & Strong and said, “Make me some gold like this.” And they made it and it didn’t work. I mean, it would partially work, but it didn’t have the strength and the certainty that the Handy & Harman gold had.

So if I hadn’t started using Handy & Harman 18 karat, I probably would have been going on for years, or I would have eventually realized I had to shift to 22 karat, which was what was being used all over Europe. Treskow used 22 karat. And they used the method where they combined some sort of copper salt with the glue to provide the copper at the joint rather than the method that I was using. But my early pieces, I wanted strength in rectangular forged wire, because I was doing insects and legs and things. They were made with 14 karat -- or with 18 karat -- actually, many of the early pieces were 14 karat, because I didn’t want them to be easily bent. So I stuck with the 18 karat, and it worked.

MS. YAGER: Is that the karat you use now?

MR. MILLER: It’s still the karat that I use now.

MS. YAGER: And is the Handy & Harman available?

MR. MILLER: In just the last maybe 10 years, they stopped making their gold available to craftsmen. Before that I could buy, you know, $1,000 worth or a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of ingot. And then they suddenly changed their policy and it was only for commercial users of gold who would buy big lots that they would sell it to. But they sold their formula to a company in Massachusetts. That name isn’t coming right now. But anyway.

MS. YAGER: Leach?

MR. MILLER: Hmm?

MS. YAGER: Leach & Garner?

MR. MILLER: Yeah. Stern-Leach.

MS. YAGER: Oh, Stern-Leach.

MR. MILLER: Yes. And so I ordered some. And it seems to work, well, though not quite as well as the original Handy & Harman formula.

MS. YAGER: Alchemy is alive and well.

MR. MILLER: [Laughs.] But it was such a relief to finally find that I could still get it some way or other. But of course I knew that I had experimented with adding the copper salt to the glue and gluing it on pure that way, which is just like that [snaps fingers]. But I’d never really worked with 22, though I knew by that time that all the German jewelers who had developed it were working.

And funny thing, I went to judge one of the Wichita shows and there was a German jeweler there working by the name of Braun. And he had studied in Germany with -- name won’t come now -- one of the early German jewelers in the ‘20s, or maybe 1919, had developed a way of doing granulation. But he would never let Braun in on his secret. And I think Braun had inveigled them to bring me to Wichita as a judge, hoping I could enlighten him.

But, anyway, I’ve taught few students that worked -- a lot of the students that I had couldn’t afford gold, so I developed this way of plating silver granules with copper by just using acid and iron and getting a deposit on the granules that way. And so a lot of my students worked that way. But then some of them accused me that when they went to gold, they couldn’t make it work. Well, they didn’t have Handy & Harman 18 karat to work -- they weren’t working with that and they weren’t having any luck.

But I did then I went to the University of Indiana [Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana]. Alma Eikerman was teaching there, and Fred and I went down and gave some lectures. And I demonstrated the process of working with silver and using copper on the granules with the acid method of developing the copper on the surface of the silver to that group. And I think there were people there from the University of Wisconsin at that conference, and they went back and then started using the copper, because I began reading in publications there about this method of working with the copper.

MS. YAGER: What year was that Indiana conference? Do you recall?

MR. MILLER: I don’t know. It was quite a few years before Alma died so, you know, she was still teaching at that time. I’m trying to think who some of her students were at that time. I think we went twice down there. I can’t come up with dates.

MS. YAGER: I read that by 1952-53 that you had gotten granulation to behave and that you were able to fuse even long seams. So you were able to create actual forms using that process. Is that --

MR. MILLER: Yeah. Actually what happened, I wanted to do a snail -- first I wanted to do a slug, and I wanted the feeler, you know, the long feelers.

MS. YAGER: The antenna.

MR. MILLER: Antenna. And I decided I would try making the antenna solid and then forming the body and then making two holes through the body and forcing some of the metal up out of the body and then making the antennae out of solid material, tapered and forcing it out up through these holes until it was firmly in the hole. And then I thought, well, I heated up little chips of 18 karat and turned them black with oxidation and glued them around the joint, and heated it up and they fused to both pieces. And also some of that fusion material went in down into the joint and I could then file and get an invisible seam at that joint. And then I went on and put the granules on the form of a body, running up the tentacles.

And, of course, I did it in several firings. I had discovered by that time that with granulation, what you’ve done the first time will stay in place and won’t deform and you can go back and add on. And so as I went to the ends of the tentacles, I could work just in that area, and because they were more in danger of melting than the rest of it. And so that was the first time. And then from then on I -- well, if I wanted to do a ring, I found I could do the joint in the ring, fusing it that way, adding it on both sides of the joint, or if I wanted to do a cone or form a cone and granulate it, and so on. So little by little I did more of that sort of thing.

MS. YAGER: I’m looking at the piece [Pendant/Brooch, 1975] that’s pictured on “Jewels and Gems,” the Renwick’s exhibition [Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.] in 2003. You know, this is sort of a sea creature. Now, would each of these granulated sort of cone forms --

MR. MILLER: They’re solid.

MS. YAGER: Oh, these are solid?

MR. MILLER: Those are solid, yeah. And I just did them by actually using my I brought a square roller in Germany that’s graduated --

MS. YAGER: A wire roller?

MR. MILLER: Wire roller so that I could -- and I start out with just a square piece and then gradually work through the system of rollers until I get it thinner. And then I do the filing to get it to be the shape that I want it. But that’s the way that the piece is done.

MS. YAGER: This centerpiece, how is that created? Those are pleated.

MR. MILLER: Those are all individual strips that I cut on the metal cutter out of a sheet. And some of them are angled and some of them are -- you know, so that they’re triangular or thinner or thicker. And then they’re filed individually to get a form to these individual pieces. And this was simply a good way to join these to some sort of another form, because I could then assemble this whole group.

And then after it was assembled, I would wax it and then take a metal form, thin strip that would do the curvature of this body form, whatever you want to call it, and using investment, hold this whole thing together and then lay these pieces on to fit the intersections down here with these forms and glue this all together. Of course these are all black at that point. And then because I’d waxed it, I could remove this from the rest of it.

MS. YAGER: I don’t understand the wax. What’s the purpose of the wax?

MR. MILLER: The wax is so that the glue -- see, this is all being glued together. The wax is so that the glue won’t hold this part to this part. Of course this thing isn’t on here at all.

MS. YAGER: The enamel section.

MR. MILLER: No, and then there is the unit under here that is gold that is helping -- and those are glued to it, so I can take that old glued together section off and put some investment under it to help support it, and then put it under the torch. And then it’s all fused like granulation. All those units are fused together at one time.

MS. YAGER: And then this whole gold piece, is this -- is there a cold connection between the enamel and the other --

MR. MILLER: No. Very early on I -- there’s a piece of gold behind this that’s formed to it. And I think actually this one was formed so that it didn’t just have a sharp edge here but the gold came down from it. And then -- of course it has an opening in it. And a bar, or part of it goes across the rectangular section. It goes across that, kind of has a hole in it.

And when I make the enamel piece after the decoration is fused onto the well, actually I do it in pure gold to start with. Then fuse like little square chips of 18 karat to the back of that pure gold to strengthen it, fuse that on so it’s got a backing. And then I fuse -- after that’s done, then I put the decoration on the top of it, fusing it all on, gluing the pieces on.

And the last thing I do is hard solder with high temperature solder, a threaded tube in the middle of this that’s going to go through the gold thing that’s holding all of this together. So eventually after the enameling is done, I screw the enameled section to the other section. And the enameled section -- in the early days I simply made a tube and made it go through a hole, then I would work over the edges of that so it would hold it that way. But then, if you ever had to repair it, you were going to have to fuss and fuss to get that back so that you could get the two separated. And going to Europe, all the Renaissance pieces were -- if you look at the back of them, lots and lots of screws. They loved screws, and those enameled pieces are all screwed together.

MS. YAGER: Now, did you make appointments to handle pieces and see the backs to know that, or can you see that in the exhibits?

MR. MILLER: No. I could just -- I have a wonderful little Episcope it’s called -- it comes from Haverhills -- that you can -- it’s like a little telescope, and you can go to a case and use this and really get a good view. In fact, in the Victoria & Albert [Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK], wonderful ancient granulation that they have there, they had some pieces that with the naked eye look just like soft surface. I mean, you couldn’t even see the granulation.

MS. YAGER: Like velvet dust, yes.

MR. MILLER: Yeah. But with my little telescope, I could see that it was fantastically fine powdered granules. But that’s how -- you know, Fred and I for years went every spring to Europe, mainly to northern -- to the Scandinavian countries and Germany and Austria and Switzerland and went to museums. Actually started out early enough that in the British Museum, in my early days there, I could use flash.

I’ve got a wonderful collection of photographs or slides from the British Museum and quite a few of the other museums. And then, you know, no more flash. But we did go and look at collection after collection after collection. And we saw a lot of contemporary shows too.

MS. YAGER: Tell me some of your favorite museums there, or favorite pieces.

MR. MILLER: Well, the Munich museum, I forget what it’s called [Staatliche Antikensammlungen Glyptothek]. It’s one that’s devoted just to Greek vases and early Greek and Etruscan gold. Fabulous pieces there. Have you ever been to that?

MS. YAGER: No. No, but I can imagine.

MR. MILLER: So that’s one of the really -- of course the British Museum is fabulous too. And the Victoria & Albert. But the Munich has some magnificent pieces and pieces that you still have no idea how they did them. And Vienna. Great stuff there.

MS. YAGER: Did you ever go to the Etruscan collection, I don’t remember, was it in Florence or Rome?

MR. MILLER: See, I’ve never -- I’ve been as far as Milan, simply because I wanted to take the train ride from Zurich, over the mountains to Milan. And I should have, but I’ve never done Italy.

MS. YAGER: Because that Etruscan -- that granulation I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget it.

MR. MILLER: Well, I have a wonderful book that -- well, Dorothy Payer gave me a book on the Naples -- there’s a fabulous collection in Naples. It’s a big, thick book. But the other museum in Munich -- of course the main decorative arts museum in the palace there, whatever it’s called, on the square [Bayerisches Nationalmuseum]. Wonderful enameling and early -- well, St. George and the dragon, in gold and enameling. And that’s got to all be screwed together too. If you look at it closely it’s --

MS. YAGER: So this piece -- going back to this piece on the Renwick card, the enameled form, you have this form which -- would you have done that in a pitch bowl or something?

MR. MILLER: Mainly I work with a relatively thick piece of pure gold and with a hammer, and thinning the center section and keeping the edges a little bit heavier.

MS. YAGER: Sort of stretching.

MR. MILLER: Stretching and bringing it up. And then in some cases -- some of the pieces I did work in pitch too.

MS. YAGER: And then you have all of these sorts of circular forms, which are really a type of granulation, and then some are enameled over. And then more, you know, so how would these little circular forms -- would you have cut each of these?

MR. MILLER: No. I found that, and Cyril Smith cued me in on -- this startled me so the first time -- pure gold balls, when they’re struck a certain way, because of their crystalline structure will go into rectangular. You know, you’d strike it and you think you’re going to get a round circle and you get a square with edges. And so you can see in here there are quite a few of them that are rectangular.

And that’s how they -- now, some of them I would do by taking pure gold or 18 karat gold and making the granules, putting them between two pieces of paper, and gluing them on the pieces of paper and then rolling it through the roller to get them to stretch. And of course they would elongate. Or you could put them through one way and then turn it and put it through the other way to get different shapes.

And then a lot of it was just mainly -- there’s another piece that’s similar to this. It’s all gold up here but it has a lot of very definite square shapes, big ones that were got simply because a hammer produced --

MS. YAGER: And you hit them when they’re individual balls or after they’ve been attached?

MR. MILLER: Individual.

MS. YAGER: Goodness.

MR. MILLER: Individual. And it is a shock because you think this has got to go round, and it doesn’t go round, it goes square.

MS. YAGER: And if it was silver it probably would go round, would it?

MR. MILLER: Yes. Because it’s a difference in the structure of the gold crystalline form. And Cyril Smith cued me in on this and I couldn’t believe it was happening.

MS. YAGER: Now, what was his -- he was --

MR. MILLER: He was a metallurgist and he worked on the atomic bomb with a group in the University of Chicago originally. And then he went on to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.] and was there for many years. And he bought a couple of good pieces.

MS. YAGER: That’s fabulous. Let’s see. Goodness. We could -- I would love to analyze a couple of other pieces. I mean, the level of complexity that you go to for these pieces is just astounding. But before we get to there too much, can I talk about -- I wanted to find out a little bit more about your teaching career at Cleveland School of Art, and some of what your philosophy of teaching was and things of that sort. I know these were separate issues, like you sort of -- this was your work, your personal work, and then you were teaching --

MR. MILLER: I was teaching three-dimensional design. And I wanted to keep my personal work, what I did, and so I wasn’t teaching one thing all day and trying to produce it at night. Well, I fell in -- when I came back from the Alaska trip -- this Mrs. Winter had been teaching second year design at the art school. It wasn’t called three dimensional design at that time. It was called second year design. It was -- she took over from Schreckengost when he stopped teaching it. Thelma Frazier Winter was in and we were good friends.

But when I came back from Alaska, they told me that she found it too tiring to teach three days a week and gave me the job of teaching two days and she was going to teach one day. So I, in a sense, essentially was to start teaching in about a week without any idea of what I was going to do. Well, during the war I had become acquainted with Bauhaus books, [Laszlo] Moholy-Nagy and so on, and Language of Vision [George Kepes; Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944], still hunting for what was the secret of design.

So I knew a lot about the Bauhaus ideas of teaching. So I started with ideas about three dimensional. I thought I was going try to make -- since Bates concentrated on sort of two-dimensional design totally in the first year, then I would try to go into three dimensional design in the second year. So I started out with a problem where they took a two-dimensional design and then imagined what would happen if they built on that so that it became a three dimensional idea, using color. And then I tried to get in the idea of how color could influence the way you looked at this. If it was made out of balsa wood, if it was all painted one color, you would get a certain reaction from it. [Audio break.] But if you began to emphasize certain sections of it, either planes or lines, with color. You could make people see different relationships in the piece than they would have seen if it was all one color. So that and over the years then I really started out with the idea of color and three dimensions. And I started out my classes for years with the idea of working with the idea of cool and warm color, and intense and reserved or very quiet, subtle color to try to do a two-dimensional thing where you would see it in terms of these things. And they were all to be just rectangles of various sizes or lines. But to see it as a receding organization in space.

And I tried to get – that feeling has always been to me the essential part of the art, how it makes you feel. And this thing that they were doing was to create feeling, not just to be an exercise in space, that you were to get some sort of feeling to develop from this. And so then I went usually from that two-dimensional expressing spacing on a two-dimensional surface, but through color and relationships between the forms to then creating a three-dimensional structure out of balsa wood. Still, all rectangular forms and all at right angles to one another.

And I assigned each student a different idea to start with. A form that would start from a contained rectangle and move in. And its design was sort of based on what happened when these forms coming from the outside began to interrelate in the interior. Or a form where because of the way it was colored, as you turned it, it would transform itself into something that you hadn’t realized was there before, or a line that was moving in space, changing its thickness, but made you think of it as moving in a directional way because of color and so on. And so I gave about 20 of these ideas, individual ideas, to different students, and they took off from there.

MS. YAGER: And this color analysis would have fed into your work in a really special way.

MR. MILLER: Well, I always have -- you know, color has always meant -- well, three-dimensional ideas have always -- I never -- I like three-dimensional jewelry. I mean, I like -- feeling and form is a strong part of it.

MS. YAGER: This is Jan Yager interviewing John Paul Miller in the artist’s home and studio in Brecksville, Ohio on August 22, 2004 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This is disc number three, session number one.

MR. MILLER: We’re talking about teaching. I then went on to problems where I tried to show how space and relationships in space influenced feeling in painting. Going through paintings by -- I usually spent a whole day, just one long lecture on Van Gogh, Degas, Rembrandt. Just painter after painter after painter, trying to point out how their manipulation of space I think was in a large way responsible for the type of response you got to their paintings. And how people like Degas and Van Gogh, for instance, would lead you into space or make you become involved in space in some very unusual group of relationships between the forms. Cézanne too, for this matter.

And how Rembrandt, on the other hand, often wasn’t very concerned with space. He was concerned with the feeling for light and textures and that sort of thing. But, for instance, there’s a Degas that’s a painting but half of it is just a curtain, and there’s a man playing a piano. You can’t see the piano. You just see the hands going behind the curtain, and the curtain is -- and over half the painting is just the curtain. For some reason or other, he realized that there was something about the feeling of that situation that was important to get across. Or his ballet figures. I mean, the viewpoints of the way he leads you into these.

And I started it all out by having students bring in a drawing they’d made from some sort of a landscape situation, particularly city situations. And it was just a drawing, a fairly big drawing. And then I could show them that the mind, left to its own devices, will divide things in the most mechanical way that it possibly can. And they didn’t realize it at the time, but practically everything is divided -- organized in halves and quarters and so on. It’s a two-dimensional -- the mind sort of wants to make this flat surface divide into two-dimensional relationships rather than three dimensional relationships.

And if there’s a chance to put a chimney on a house, they’ll put it right in the center section of the top of the roof, all through. At any rate, and then I took this on into advertising and the way layout could make you, without realizing it, feel something about the spatial relationships of the things that were being presented in the layout to influence your feeling. And then we went onto a problem that I usually spend almost half a year on, of working with film.

And I started working with film in, I think early 1950s or maybe even earlier, but trying to emphasize the unreality that you could create with film in no other way. And we would start out with doing things like -- everybody making a Rorschach blots in color and putting these up all on the wall, 24 of them or whatever. And then each picking a succession of these and photographing them one frame at a time in a movie camera and then projecting this image that is the composite of all of these things moving and working, and how it becomes something entirely un-seeable any other way, except through this movie technique.

And that eventually each one of them would form part of a group of usually four people, and they would create a couple of minutes of a film that would be their own devising, and not animated film in terms of a Mickey Mouse or something like that, but trying to do something really unusual with it. For instance, they do things with -- one image would be changed slightly in the forms. Maybe it would just be rectangular and circular forms. But in the next image, everything that had been white in the first would become black in the second.

And these things would move, but they’re changing. And strange things that happen with that sort of situation. And I showed them lots of unusual movies, animated and otherwise, to get the idea.

For instance, there was a man in Canada that did films simply by scratching on film and painting on film and punching holes on film. And I think his name was Ley. This was 1950s maybe. And I showed his films. But I wanted them to get the idea of feeling coming from something that was totally intangible in terms of anything that could be made as a direct statement. It had to be seen in continuity, and the eye and the mind had to be manipulated so that here was an image that was impossible to see any other way.

MS. YAGER: You spoke about two books that had a lot of influence on your teaching. Do you recall -- the one you brought up was Language of Vision. Can you pronounce his --

MR. MILLER: Kepes.

MS. YAGER: Kepes.

MR. MILLER: George Kepes. Gyorgy Kepes I guess it is. Yeah, Gyorgy Kepes.

MS. YAGER: And the other was Feeling and Form [New York: Scribner, 1953].

MR. MILLER: Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer.

MS. YAGER: Can you talk about those?

MR. MILLER: Well, Language of Vision I bought while I was in the Army. And I really didn’t understand a lot of it. But it was Bauhaus inspired and it was about all the revolutionary designers and painters of that period. And it got me thinking about relationships and design and communication. And there was a second book, and I can’t remember the name of the second book. But it was his book too.

He came from the Bauhaus and taught at the School of Design in Chicago [Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology]. What’s the name of the jeweler who was a student of his who disagreed violently with me about what jewelry was all about. Well, her name is gone. One of his books has a picture of him. She was at Asilomar [Pacific Grove, California, 1957]. We both talked to Asilomar –

MS. YAGER: Ruth Pennington?

MR. MILLER: No, no. Ruth. This was the gal -- very -- she was in the show, first America House traveling show that I was in. I’m sorry.

MS. YAGER: I’ll have to look -- I’ll look up who the women were at the conference.

MR. MILLER: She was a very famous --

MS. YAGER: Margaret.

MR. MILLER: Margaret De Patta.

MS. YAGER: Is that who you mean? Okay.

MR. MILLER: Yeah, Margaret De Patta. She was a student of his.

MS. YAGER: Yes. And Moholy-Nagy as well?

MR. MILLER: I think, yes.

MS. YAGER: And so tell me the difference you had.

MR. MILLER: Well, there is a transcript, just a little part of what we both said in that conference. And I just read it yesterday, but I can’t remember now why -- I know that she was very hostile in feeling in her speech to what I had to say in mine. And to my jewelry, too. I mean, this was something that she didn’t want to have anything to do with. And this was very early in what I was working with, but anyway. I was too much part of the past and she thought everybody should be going into the future.

MS. YAGER: Well, I guess it’s the Scandinavian versus the European and all those issues of narrative and decorative and modernist. And tell me about the book by Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form.

MR. MILLER: Well, it’s hard to put it into words. It’s just that she made this very definite connection between psychologically developing feelings through what you saw in form relationships. It’s too complicated to try to put into words.

MS. YAGER: And you said, when the tape was off, that people responded to form more strongly because people were forms.

MR. MILLER: Yeah. I think that. And there are always -- in the world around you, you’re constantly in -- you aren’t in a flat land, you’re in a three-dimensional world. Four dimensional if you want to count time. So that’s -- I think all of my teaching I was trying to get students to realize that they weren’t just involved with color and shape but they were mainly involved with how these things made you feel. It’s just -- it’s feeling, there’s so much to feeling.

MS. YAGER: And how they penetrate, the ways of entering a person.

MR. MILLER: Right. Yeah. So I had a lot of -- I mean, she wrote several books, and I got a lot out of all of them. And I think they may be totally unknown now, but that was a big thing for me.

MS. YAGER: In the 1970s you started teaching jewelry and metalsmithing at the school.

MR. MILLER: You know, it would be I would think ’75 maybe. It was when Fred stopped teaching, I went in to teach. And I felt very inadequate because my training was -- I had no formal training except -- well, I did go to the Baron’s conference and learn to do hollowware stretching. But I made only, I think, three pieces of hollowware after that. That was Fred’s thing and jewelry was my thing.

MS. YAGER: And that was all self-research? I mean, that was very self-directed research?

MR. MILLER: And I never -- yeah. I really was all -- well, Fred taught me what I basically knew, and then from there on I taught myself what I needed to know. But I’ve always felt my jewelry was fairly -- quite a limited range of -- I had the black and gold technique, which were pieces that were distinctly different from the other. And the fragment forms, which were distinctly different from the others. But it was just really those three things. I did a lot of rather technically difficult sawing on creatures, on rings, on very small things of that sort, which was sort of a whole other direction.

And some of it wasn’t very practical because I put granulation on it and I would see the ring 10 years later and most of the granulation was worn off. It just didn’t work on that. But when I started teaching, I didn’t know anything about, I mean, teaching metalry I didn’t know anything about casting. I couldn’t’ teach that.

And it was at a time when there was a lot of sort of funky jewelry being made, which I didn’t have much response to. And I just felt sort of inadequate. I could teach -- I would go to Europe, I would photograph as many modern shows of jewelry that I could find in Europe -- and I found quite a few -- and I would bring that back also with all the photographs that I’d taken in museums of ancient and earlier pieces. So I had that to offer to them.

And a chasing, I could work with them on that with ideas about the technical sides of that. And I tried to emphasize form again in the jewelry, rather than flat. And I’ve always felt the same way. If I ever had, well, a large show, that my work would be too repetitive in a way, the same ideas with variations again and again and again and again. And, fortunately, whenever I -- the one man shows I have had weren’t large shows, so that there is enough variety, and that didn’t bother me too much.

MS. YAGER: Some of what you consider limited, other people would consider focused.

MR. MILLER: Well, maybe. It is focused, I mean, because I couldn’t let an idea alone. If I enjoyed working with one, I’d see another variation and so on and so on.

MS. YAGER: Yeah. One grew out of the next.

MR. MILLER: Yeah.

MS. YAGER: Let’s see. Tell me about the issue of balancing your work with your teaching. Was that -- I mean, you seem to have worked that out, all of that.

MR. MILLER: Well, I balanced my work with my teaching, with my -- see, I did major show installations and I would take often two weeks to design and build the show, the staging of it and the hanging and the planning. And then at that time I would be working night and day, and I would get into my class for a little while but the rest of the time I was in the gallery. And I had sponge rubber mats that I would sleep on overnight often in the gallery because I would work so late it wouldn’t pay to drive all the way out here and go back to school the next day.

MS. YAGER: Goodness.

MR. MILLER: That was -- but I loved it. I loved organizing space, you know. And I had the feeling of what painting belonged with what painting belonged with what painting and so on. It was important to me. I mean, it had to get to the place where it felt right. And in a big show with crafts and all the rest of it, I loved that interrelationship of all these things, designing with it. So that was just sort of part of my joy of working at