Oral history interview with Robert S. Neuman, 1991 May 1 - June 19

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 Robert S. Neuman, 1991 May 1 - June 19, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Robert Neuman
Conducted by Robert Brown
At the Artist's home in Winchester, Massachussettes
May 1-June 19, 1991

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Robert Neuman on May 1-June 19, 1991. The interview took place in Winchester, MA, and was conducted by Robert Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

ROBERT BROWN: To begin, could you just talk a little bit about your family, your upbringing. You're from the state of Idaho?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, from the town of Kellogg, in the upper part of the state, an old mining town that has the biggest silver mine in the country. I was born and grew up there. There are no art galleries or artists or anything else there. My parents owned a small hardware store in the town and I worked there after school. For some reason I just began drawing when I was very young. I think it was because my mother and father worked in the store and I was left to my own devices much of the time.

So I began drawing. I remember as very young boy I would listen to the radio -- Dick Tracy, or Popeye, something like that -- and I would draw what I heard. It was a case of drawing with a pencil and a piece of paper substituting what you hear with something visual. I found that interesting to do, and I remember drawing endlessly, but all I had was a pencil and paper and I yearned for the day when I could have a bottle of ink and a pen and paper. It took a long time but I finally got a pen and I was in seventh heaven then. I did many, many pen-and-ink drawings.

ROBERT BROWN: A fascination when you could enlarge what you could express? I mean, looking back, or was it a different kind of mess, or --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, that pen and ink was more precise lines, more design, and blacker, clearer to the eye, and I liked that a lot. And I thought as a young boy that this must be something very professional to have a bottle of ink and a pen. Then I remember seeing in the cartoon strips that many artists did when they were young they were interested in cartoons because of the drawing aspect of it and the shorthand of cartooning. I couldn't do that with pencil, I thought I really had a luxurious situation when I had a bottle of ink and a pen to draw with.

ROBERT BROWN: Did your parents encourage you?

ROBERT NEUMAN: My parents left me alone as a child. I worked in the store, and went to school, and played in the high school and all that sort of thing. But I still had this yearning to draw. I think it was because in a country environment there was lots of time for oneself, as opposed to living in a city. Many artists, I noticed, had come from either semi-rural environments or had a great deal of time when they were young to themselves, to just meditate and absorb things around them.

I think that was my case also. All of this either came out as pen and ink on paper. And I enjoyed it very much. I didn't have any colors, no crayons, all I had was a pencil for along time and then pen and ink.

ROBERT BROWN: How old would you have then?

ROBERT NEUMAN: It went on for several years. I know I started when I was probably in fifth or sixth grade and went on from then. I had an exhibition in Boston many years later and it was well received here at Pace Gallery on Newbury Street before they moved to New York. My parents at the same time came by train to visit to Boston and I took them to the exhibition. Someone there said, "When did your son doing art work?" And she said, "Since he was old enough to pick up a pencil." Neither of my parents encouraged me to do any art work. They said, "If that's what you're interested in doing, go ahead and do it." They left me alone very much.

ROBERT BROWN: You didn't detect any pressure to pursue some career.

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, except when I decided to go to college. First I went to the university and it wasn't satisfying me so I went to professional art school in California. My parents did say at that time, "Whatever you study," as many people do, "try to find something whereby you can make a living from it." So I studied what was called applied art; today they'd call it commercial art or graphic design or something.

ROBERT BROWN: Was it fairly hard living in a mining town for your parents?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. My mother was an immigrant from Sweden, my father's parents had been there for a long time. No one had any excess cash and of course the Depression was on for a while. They didn't waste much. My mother knitted some of our socks and sweaters. They made things last a long time. I'm the only child but I three or four cousins in the town whom I related to almost on a sister-brother basis.

No one was interested in art. On the other hand, no one was un-interested in it, they just let you do whatever you wanted to do. And there was no way to be interested in art, since there were no museums or galleries or painters or anything else.

ROBERT BROWN: As a mining town, was it fairly wide open? Was it very raucous, or by then was it sort of settled down to --?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I'd say it lay somewhere in the middle. At one time it was a wild town earlier on before we came there. Most of the miners were unmarried, so you can imagine what happened on payday in a mining town. Every other door on the main street was a bar, there were brothels and so forth. But they maintained good order in the town. It was pretty raucous, though, on paydays and holidays. They had "Miners Picnic" once a year for many years -- if everybody except the women didn't have a beard, you were fined $10 and put in jail for a few hours, something like that, and there were parades about the mining industry and so on. Most of that's gone today, but they have started now to put in mining museums and the like.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you participate in any of this indirectly as a boy?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes. I was working in my father's hardware store, so all the businesses were involved somehow. I was in the marching band at the high school as a young boy and we were in the various parades in the different towns. They had pageants on the football field at night, very elaborate ones showing the history of the mining industry -- Lewis and Clark passing through the area, different Indian encampments, early settlers, Father Cataldo and the Jesuits coming there and teaching the Indians to farm and build and how to avoid floods, all that sort of thing. It was quite colorful for a long time.

ROBERT BROWN: So you graduated from the local high school in 1944, in the middle of the War. (Neuman confirms) And you enrolled at the University of Idaho in Moscow and you went into fine arts there.

ROBERT NEUMAN: That's right. Before I graduated, while in high school they had one art class -- the primary purpose of the high school was to prepare people to go into the mines and work for the mining companies, of which there were many; all over the hills were these mines. So I took the one art course and I enjoyed it but there was some regulation that you couldn't take more than one, and I didn't know until many years later when my mother told me that she had gone to the school's superintendent and asked if I couldn't be allowed to take more than one art course. After some discussion they allowed me to take that course three times -- it was a very basic thing: we painted wooden plates and we made some drawings of things, very basic drawings, but I found that very enjoyable, and I hadn't realized that she'd gone to all this trouble until many, many years later, after I was out of art school. But that was a godsend.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you use paints at all in these classes?

ROBERT NEUMAN: We used them on the wooden plates and things for Christmas presents as they would do in public schools, but I think I was introduced to oil paints there. I can't recall how exactly, but I know that the teacher had done painting at the university and showed us some of his work.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they exciting to you, as paintings?

ROBERT NEUMAN: They were adequate. They were landscapes of the wheat fields down around Moscow, Iowa, in the Peloose [phon.sp.] area but he didn't practice art any more, he was just teaching the course in high school.

ROBERT BROWN: So you were effectively pretty much on your own still, weren't you, even when you were in these classes.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, definitely. During high school before entering the university I got the urge to try oil painting and didn't know how to do it technically. I didn't ask the teacher much because he was very busy. My father's hardware store had a paint department for housepaints, automobiles or whatever, and at that time there were very small tubes that could be added to other colors to change colors. So I would borrow a few of those tubes and on weekends when my parents, say, went fishing on the lakes I would take these paints and some canvas I found somewhere and make some rudimentary paintings of the landscapes and lakes and various views you had of nature there.

I'd hike down the railroad track a few miles and find something interesting. There were float houses on the lakes from years ago when lumberjacks had floated log booms down the lakes. So I painted those. There's still one of them in Kellogg, I know. They were painted without any technical understanding, and the colors of course weren't artists' colors. So I was lucky I got anything.

ROBERT BROWN: But you were looking, and then recording what you saw.

ROBERT NEUMAN: That's right. I tried to make it just like a photograph, more or less, but I didn't know because I'd never had any instruction.

ROBERT BROWN: Still, there was something of accuracy about them, was there?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, oh it was quite accurate. I seemed to understand perspective and everything without any instruction. No, it was pretty good, but I had seen very few oil paintings, there was no place to see them, we had no art books, nothing. I couldn't have any relationship, say, to landscape painting vis-a-vis French or English or Italian, like you might have if you were in a school somewhere.

ROBERT BROWN: This was a pretty intense kind of experience, both the drawing and the painting, weren't they. Did you get extremely absorbed by it?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, that's all I thought about, really. I wasn't terribly social, although I was on the basketball team in high school, played in the band and would go to dances with everybody -- I was social enough, I guess, but my main concern, really, was drawing and painting. I knew that in the back of my mind some place I wanted to go somewhere and learn more about it, but as a high school kid I didn't know how you did that; especially in a mining town.

ROBERT BROWN: There wasn't much encouragement to go further in education.

ROBERT NEUMAN: No. My father thought I would probably just stay there and run his business and he would retire. But no one said anything to me about going to the university or to art school, although my father had gone to the university, starting his first year in the Depression and had to leave and haul gravel on highway instead. My friends started going to university and I wasn't going any place, so some of them suggested I come to the university, and that's how I went. Neither of my parents suggested that I go to college. Then, when I brought up the point, they didn't object at all, they said "well, if that's what he wants to do, let him go try it," something of that nature. I remember one person even suggesting I go to one fraternity house at the university and my father objected because he'd been in a different one and wanted me to go to the one he'd been in! So that was probably one of his interests in why I was going to the university.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you find it when you got there?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I found myself bewildered, because the high school education I'd received in which on my own part I hadn't done well, I wasn't a very good student, and when I went to the university I had to adjust and all but I had a job there working in the kitchens. I enjoyed the art classes but I just wasn't developed enough, or my mind wasn't in the right place, for the psychology and various other courses, although one teacher of an English class said if I knew more about literature he thought my writing was pretty good. I think I had little stories which were imaginative and he probably related to that, but grammatically, et cetera, they were pretty bad. So I didn't do very well at the university, I had just C's, except in the art courses.

ROBERT BROWN: What were they like? Could you describe them?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. It was a small art department at the University of Iowa in Moscow and we had a woman chairman of it who'd studied at the Royal Academy in Sweden, named Mary Kirkwood. And the commercial artist there, named Alfred Dunn [he spells it] was essentially a watercolorist. He got me involved in doing the various logos and spot designs for the University of Iowa's yearbook that year. He really pushed me to do it, so I did it and had no more idea what I was doing when I began than anything, because every unit of the yearbook had a logo -- for fraternity houses, for social clubs, for various activities, et cetera, and you had to make some kind of a design some way.

So I got out my pen and bottle of ink again and started drawing with that. As I look back on them now they're not very interesting, but they seemed to like them and printed my drawings in the yearbook.

ROBERT BROWN: Were they supposed to be sort of shorthand symbols?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, they were symbols and designs, more or less, but you had to abstract them, really -- if you took an object symbolizing a certain activity, you had to reduce it to symbol status some way. That is a form of abstraction, actually, so I started it then and didn't even know I was doing it. Miss Kirkwood, the painting teacher, left me alone. We did a lot of floral pieces and such. Later I decided to leave there and go to professional art school in San Francisco. She was very encouraging, interested that I do that. She didn't try to slow that down at all.

ROBERT BROWN: She wasn't resentful of your choice.

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, she thought it was a good idea. I probably would never have gone to a professional art school in California if I hadn't heard other students talking about it -- some of them were saying there were art schools down there where you could study essentially art with minimum academics, except for art history and maybe a few other courses but not much.

ROBERT BROWN: (laughing) That appealed to you, huh?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, that appealed to me and I was inquisitive: "What kind of a place is this? Here I'm studying here courses in psychology and things that don't make a lot of sense to me. My mind is elsewhere, or else I've got a different orientation toward visual things."

So I thought I wanted to do that, but unfortunately the draft came along and the War was continuing, so I couldn't stay at the university very long, I was only there one and a half semesters, then I had to go in the Army.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you have any choice as to what you wanted to do in the Army?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, but once I got in, I heard there was a Special Services unit which painted things and did entertainment and plays and all sorts of things, even painting KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs. So I tried to get in there but they didn't agree with me and put me in an anti-aircraft battery on a radar mount. That was at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. So I didn't get into any Special Services.

When I got out of the Army I went back to the University of Idaho again [sic, not to Iowa] and that's when I heard about the professional art schools.

ROBERT BROWN: Do you look back on the Army experience as fairly a waste of time in terms of what you wanted to do?

ROBERT NEUMAN: At the time I was a pretty young kid and I thought it was kind of adventuresome, and coming from the mountains of Idaho and the foothills of the Rockies, I was accustomed to hiking miles, hunting and fishing, one thing and another, so when I got into the Army, hiking around wasn't any problem for me. For some of the city kids was. And firing a rifle was easy for me and I immediately got an Expert badge in rifle. That part was not difficult for me at all. But I never went overseas. My outfit went to, I think, Okinawa or Iwo Jima, I don't know, but I was transferred to the Air Force to radio school for more radar and the like.

But I didn't find the Army so frustrating. I'd grown up in a little mining town and never travelled, so suddenly I was sent to Florida, to California, to Wisconsin, to Chicago --I sort of enjoyed that aspect. I didn't like the idea that there was a war going on but as far as the Army itself, it provided a certain discipline and I think it helped a lot of young people. Because they led pretty healthy lives -- they got up early, they exercised, they had dental and health care, a lot of them had never had that before. I can remember many people in the Army who hadn't seen doctors or dentists in a long time. It really wasn't a bad thing for many people.

ROBERT BROWN: Was it a time of patriotism in, for example, the university, or Kellogg, do you recall?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, there was always patriotism but there wasn't wild patriotism because they understood that you could die. And many of my classmates did who were in submarines, Marine Corps; they never came home. Everybody assumed everybody was against the Axis and so forth. I tried to enlist in the Navy, one of my cousins had, but they wouldn't have me because of my eyes and my feet, so I had to go into the Army. Near Kellogg there was a huge Navy base called Farragut, on Ponderay [phon.sp.] Lake, the second largest in-land Navy base in the U.S., I think. The sailors often came to Kellogg on weekend liberty and to see friends or something.

ROBERT BROWN: You were discharged in '46?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, I guess it was '46. And I went back to the University, just long enough to get out of there and go back to California to professional art school.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you know much more about them by then? How come you went --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I just heard that you could get into things deeper there in terms of art. In other words, at the University of Idaho the facilities weren't that grand, it was pretty much painting, commercial art, and anatomy, but there wasn't much in the way of printing, ceramics, architecture, or anything like that. Now there is but there wasn't then. So I thought I'd like to go where I could get deeper into the things and find out what it is about art -- see, I was discovering that art had quite a breadth to it -- what it was that would interest me. Would it be architecture, ceramics, jewelry-making, furniture design, what would it be? I knew that painting interested me but I thought I could do that, so I had the GI Bill and I went down there.

ROBERT BROWN: You went to the California School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, in 1947.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes; just a mile from the Berkeley city limits. I liked it immensely when I got there because suddenly I was among a bunch of people who'd think the same way, who were really interested in art. It didn't matter whether you were a sculptor or a ceramist, you still were involved in art, it was a 24-hour-a-day thing. Then I went through that and to graduate school also.

ROBERT BROWN: As you said a little earlier, you studied applied art as they called it, commercial design.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, because when I left and moved down my parents said, "Try to make a living out of it." So I looked around and saw this commercial art. So I never took oil painting in undergraduate school. I received straight A's in almost everything except color, so I graduated with highest honors. But when I finished my Bachelor's degree in Applied Art, they called it, I wasn't happy and didn't seem fulfilled. I wanted to paint.

I had been painting at home in a small apartment and my wife then was going to Mills College and we lived near there. I was painting in the living room and wasn't studying painting at the college, I was just doing it on my own. So I still didn't know too much about technical things. But I had taken other art courses --in drawing, and watercolor, lithography, sculpture, many things -- but never oil painting.

So I did this all on my own and submitted some of them to museums around there and won a prize, at the Oakland Museum; one of the first paintings I submitted. (Brown laughs) So I was pretty surprised. I was painting on masonite with artists' colors, just student-grade things. Then I started research about painting. We had art books and magazines in the college library, so I discovered various things about contemporary art. Coming from the state of Idaho to San Francisco and walking into the Museum, green as a cucumber, and seeing Clyfford Still for the first time, and Francis and Diebenkorn and all hanging there, was quite a shock. Here I'd been painting views of Coeur d'Alene Lake with the mountains!

I thought, "I wonder what these people are doing." I didn't condemn them at all -- I thought, "If they're in a museum there must be something to it. I don't know what but I'm going to look, since I'm a greenhorn just arrived here on the bus from the state of Idaho." So I did that and went to the school where they taught and snooped around, I wasn't enrolled there, asked questions and I found out.

ROBERT BROWN: This is all before you got your applied art degree?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, it was during that time. I was doing both. There was a philosophy from the 30s still prevalent out there that "if you're in art you're an artist." For instance, any artists in the 30s supported themselves doing commercial art while they made their sculpture, while they made their paintings. We had some professors from Europe, namely Wolfgang Lederer, who was my professor in applied design, from Vienna, and he worked mostly for the California wine industry but he was very angry with me when I graduated and said, "I'm through with this, I'm going to study painting." He wanted me to go on in that.

ROBERT BROWN: What was his argument?

ROBERT NEUMAN: He'd given me straight A's for four years. I had done book jackets and Sunkist oranges and poster ads for the magazines by the highway and every other way, topography and everything. He didn't want me to "waste" what he'd taught me, that was his idea. He was Germanic and a very nice person. I was going to drop out in junior year but then I thought I'd have to go a final year to get the degree, it's ridiculous to stop. So I went on with it.

ROBERT BROWN: You found it could be rather tedious and very limited in purpose, commercial art: is that right?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I wanted to express myself, not be so utilitarian. I enjoyed it if somebody asked me to do a halftone illustration of a moving picture camera or something like that, use halftone screens to do it or one thing or another, I could do that but it was mostly just a facile trip. It involved a facility and I had seemed to be able to handle that without any problem. But I wasn't getting enough personal reward from it.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you and fellow students discuss these things quite a lot?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes we did, we talked about this all the time. It seemed that while I was working on a Bachelor's degree in applied design, I was hanging out with all the painters and sculptors and not with the commercial artists. So I was happy to graduate. Then I switched over, and when I graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, my father came to the graduation. Since he'd never graduated from college, he didn't know that there wasn't a Ph.D. He said, "Now I think you should go on and get the next degree." I said, "Well, there is no next degree, that's as far as you can go." But he was quite pleased that I got a graduate degree. Then he went home and left me there: I'd better look around and find some way to make a living! (both laugh heartily)

ROBERT BROWN: A practical man, wasn't he.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You'd gotten married by this time, too? While you were still an undergraduate?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, after I left the University of Idaho, before I came to California. She was in literature. She has a Ph.D. now in literature now I guess; we're divorced. At that time she was working on her Master's at Mills College. Her name was Priscilla Federsen [phon.sp.] She was very involved in literature --

ROBERT BROWN: Mills had a pretty high-powered intellectual there, didn't they?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, Mills College was very near our apartment and in music, literature and art did a lot. In summer they had guest people. One summer they had Fernand Leger as a teacher, one summer they had Kuniyoshi, the next summer when they had Max Beckmann, I enrolled. I went there along with Nathan Oliveira, a well-known California painter, and a number of others, there were about 12 of us. That was a very interesting summer. Although Beckmann couldn't speak English and his wife more or less translated, just the aura of having him standing and looking at your painting was very interesting. He made his feelings felt some way, just by looking at him you could get the idea of what he felt.

I had a great deal of admiration for him and I thought I was painting some things that were in his arena, but he didn't see it that way. I don't know what he saw it as, it was miles from his way of thinking from his point of view, and I thought I was running right down the track there.

ROBERT BROWN: (laughing) You judged this from remarks he made?

ROBERT NEUMAN: He looked at a certain painting of mine where I'd painted a human figure with a head like a bird of paradise and that had armor on it, it looked like one of those fantastic figures in his paintings. He didn't see it at all, because the space was so different -- he has medieval space in his paintings and I didn't have that, I didn't know enough at that time to do that.

But there was another boy next to me who loved Matisse, he was leaning toward Matisse, and Beckmann never said anything about his work. So one day the boy says, "This time when he comes I'm going to step in front of him so he can't get by and I'm going to ask him to say something." Beckmann's wife told him the boy wanted to say something, so Beckmann turned to him and said, "Picasso and Matisse are not the end of the world for me" and walked off. (he laughs) That was a real shocker!

ROBERT BROWN: He was enigmatic, wasn't he, very difficult to draw out --

ROBERT NEUMAN: He was a very independent man, incredibly independent. A very nice person.

ROBERT BROWN: You were painting steadily. What kinds of things were you doing? You'd had a prize the year before. In 1950 you had exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum and at the Oakland Museum.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, a typical portrait would be a kid come from the hills of Idaho who knew zero about art but had tremendous thirst for it, and then when I got to San Francisco suddenly here was the Ecole de Pacifique, San Francisco style, in full bloom right there, as soon as you stepped off the bus. And then you turn around and you're standing next to Max Beckmann, and this tremendous intellectual discourse amongst young artists all over the San Francisco and Los Angeles and areas up and down. So the place was boiling and I really found that extremely stimulating. Consequently, my own work got involved with European schools, School of the Pacific, all influences because I knew so little when I came there.

Then I got to the point where I understood the School of the Pacific and I liked that the best, mainly because they thought the New York artists were a bunch of money-grabbers and the artists of the West Coast had a running debate with the Eastern artists -- they said, "You're all School of Paris disciples, et cetera et cetera, and on the West Coast we're independent, we don't have any money, we don't have any big galleries, we don't have nothing. And here's Clyfford Still painting, there's Francis, there's Tobey, Morris Graves and many people there."

ROBERT BROWN: Looking back, would you say some of those older artists were self-satisfied therefore? Or perhaps insecure?

ROBERT NEUMAN: They felt that they didn't receive the recognition they were due because the New York establishment locked it all up there, for monetary reasons primarily; that the New York school was "in" and if you weren't in with it you weren't going to get in. So many fine artists -- Diebenkorn was painting out there for years and nobody would pay any attention to him because he wasn't living in Manhattan or something of that sort.

As a matter of fact, he went to New York once, with his wife, drove with his car and some paintings in the back seat, from the University of Illinois; it was one of his first trips to New York. And he parked his car near Greenwich Village or some place there and went to see about showing his paintings, and somebody broke into his car and stole his paintings. He told his wife to get back in the car, "we're going back to Illinois," and he drove off, didn't bother to stay.

There was a certain suspicion and dislike between the West Coast artists and East Coast, because we had so little as an official art hierarchy there, as opposed to New York artists. Every time they made a smear on the paper there were six dealers there. We could be there for six years and nobody would come. Some of the very good people were that way, and they were just basically independent. People like Mark Tobey, he didn't always live in Seattle, he went there from New York or Chicago or wherever he was, and he led a very quiet, monastic life, except for his trips to the Orient.

So the West Coast artists had this kind of "we're-out-here-by-ourselves" thing away from the hierarchy of art in New York, officialdom. "We're proud of that but at the same time it's a detriment because you can't earn a living." And it was difficult. There were many good artists there. James Fred Dixon, whom I studied with, no longer living. He was the equal if not better than many New York City artists who were --

ROBERT BROWN: He taught printmaking, right?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, but he was -- he may have had a little too much alcohol once in a while but he was an interesting artist. But there were many others. Edith Smith, a fine woman artist, the last I knew she was living in Chicago, her husband is a musical composer.

ROBERT BROWN: Hassel Smith?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, Hassel Smith was exhibiting all over, a very interesting person. He was hard for me to get to know but I tried. The School of Fine arts in San Francisco had all these people in it -- David Park, Hassel Smith, Still, Diebenkorn, Sam Francis -- they were all either professors or students there. They became sometime later on a rather tight knot amongst themselves, it was very hard for other people --well, Jim Weeks was there sometimes -to enter into their circle. But I got to know David Park pretty well, and James Fred Dixon was a good friend.

ROBERT BROWN: What was Park like? Can you characterize what he was like at that time?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. David Park was, well, he was a painter, all he was concerned with was painting, but he was an expatriate from Boston, he'd moved to the West. He loved jazz, that was one of his main interests other than painting. He lived around Berkeley for quite a while, I think, but he also must have lived in San Francisco and he was a professor at the School of Fine Arts on 800 Chestnut Street. He was a very likable person, and very surprising. He gave me the first prize for Pacific Coast Painting for a particular painting I made entitled "Terrible War Machine." He didn't "have" to do that because there were many others whom he knew better and whose work he knew better than mine; I was still kind of a newcomer on the scene. But I did win prizes at the San Francisco Museum for watercolor and oil and the Oakland Museum and many places.

ROBERT BROWN: You were a good friend at that time of Nathan Oliveira, too, weren't you?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, we were classmates, I think he was maybe a year behind me or so. We've remained friends to this day. We still write letters and communicate by phone. My wife visited him when she was out there and we've had a good friendship. If we don't see each other for a long time, when we do communicate it's as though we'd seen each other just yesterday. It's really very close, it's good.

ROBERT BROWN: With him did you mainly talk art or did you have other interested you pursued together?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, we talked art mostly but he was interested in jazz too. In art school he had a little jazz band, he played the cornet I think it was. Peter Voulkos was also a classmate of mine. I took ceramics and once he was sitting there making this huge tub, I remember. But he's from Montana, which is near Idaho --

ROBERT BROWN: His background not too much unlike yours, wasn't it.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. He came from Bozeman, Montana, which is way out there. But he'd made ceramics before he came to art school. There's the Archie Bray [phon. sp.] Foundation in Bozeman. Bray was a man who had a brick yard and kilns there. He set it up for people to make ceramics somehow, that's where Voulkos came from. I once traded a painting or two for ceramics with Peter Voulkos. And I traded prints with Nathan Oliveira too.

END OF THIS SIDE, A of TAPE 1
BEGINNING SIDE B of TAPE 1

ROBERT BROWN: What was Voulkos like at that time?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Peter Voulkos was, and still is, a hulk of a man. Most of the artists in the West are very independent. It's a peculiar thing, because compared to Eastern artists, we don't have a history of making art that you find on the East coast. So when artists are independent they sort of make their own history, and Voulkos was like a rocket -- someone lit the fuse and he was gone. He relates to Japanese art, Japanese ceramics, Chinese ceramics, all sorts of things, there's nothing he won't do. He even went into metal sculpture for a while. He's a wonderfully creative person. His main concern, it seems to me, is breaching the bridge where people tried to set ceramics or clay work into a little niche as "craft," and he's spent his whole lifetime tearing that down.

Oliveira and I met sometime in the lithography class. He's probably one of the best lithographers in the United States, although he's known for his painting. My own personal view is that he's a better lithographer than painter. We both took the lithography course and he got more involved in it than I did. That's what he did for many years, he didn't do so much painting. I got involved in it because I liked it as an avenue of expression but he was involved in the whole thing -- the technical, the equipment and everything else. Well, I did to some extent. I bought the press, which I knocked down and kept in my apartment, hoping some day to put it some place where I could use it; then I got a Fulbright and had to go to Germany, so I had to sell it and leave it in California.

ROBERT BROWN: But you were never so interested in the technical side as he was.

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, he knows all the tricks and secrets, and I have to ask people that. I have a different reason when I make lithographs than he does, about the medium itself, but I believe he's the best lithographer in the United States PERIOD today and I wish he would do more of it. He's done hundreds and hundreds, but he's gone into monoprints now and he's oil painting, but I miss his lithographs, they're really very good. But he can make a far better living painting than he came with lithography, so that's probably why he does it.

ROBERT BROWN: You said you got to know David Park pretty well. What about the man you said you called "the big boss" at the time in San Francisco, Clyfford Still?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. He was almost a god, and it was utterly astounding to me when I found out where he came from. I don't know where he came from originally but he was teaching at Washington State College in Pullman, Washington, which is 12 miles or so down the railroad track from the University of Idaho. That's a very remote place, and he went from there to San Francisco and became almost like a god to artists after a few years there because he demanded in art a very strong spiritual attitude in the paintings.

He didn't care much for New York artists, who he felt related to the School of Paris and who weren't sufficiently independent in their work. He disliked brushes, it was he, I think, who talked about "the tyranny of the brush." You notice most of his paintings are made with the palette knife. He became head or something close to the head of the School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and then on the faculty with him were David Park and Hassel Smith and James Budd Dixon and a few others. But he was definitely the kingpin or the focal point and there were many, many people whom you could call camp followers or terribly overly influenced by his work. I was still a neophyte or pretty young when he was there but I exhibited with him in the San Francisco Museum and with Diebenkorn and those people.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you ever get to know Still or did you have any --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I never did. He wasn't very public. His wife worked at the School in the office there but he wasn't very public. He would make trips to New York because he had a friendship with Rothko. I think it was at that time, I'm not sure, that Frank Lloyd Wright came to the School to give a lecture or something too. It was a vital school -- it was so "vital" the FBI investigated it because the faculty and students were sunbathing in the nude on top of the roof of the Art School. Of course in San Francisco there's a lot of sunshine and warmth. The FBI was worried about the discussions in the School, they thought they were politically explosive and everything else.

It was a very fine painting school. I didn't attend it, I attended the California College of Arts and Crafts. I did then, in my graduate period, take a course in lithography there with James Budd Dixon and Hassel Smith, but after there was an explosion at the school politically --

ROBERT BROWN: About this time?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, it was after I finished my graduate degree, and most of those people left, the whole faculty left and they got a new director, Ernest Mundt who was out of the Bauhaus in Germany.

ROBERT BROWN: Why had there been an explosion?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, it was a painting and sculpture school then, when Still was there, and it got very elite, which didn't bother me in the least but it evidently bothered the school's financial coffers. The GI Bill was running out, or something, so they were having problems of this kind, and there were people who philosophically wanted the school to be broader -- to have more furniture design, more architecture, glassblowing, all kinds of things. Plus the basic philosophy they wanted broader. They didn't object to what was there, they wanted it broader. Douglas MacAgy was director when Still was there, he went on to Texas to be director of the museum there, I think, but he encouraged elitism. I didn't think it was bad at all, I mean, it's hard enough to get good art without having to find some place where it'll grow. It seemed to me like a good idea, but they wanted a more broad kind of school --

ROBERT BROWN: More points of view?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, and more departments -- photography and all kinds of things, and these people didn't encourage that. I don't blame them, because they had a terrific thing going there but it got to the point where even the FBI investigated the school. So they all had to leave, and Mundt became the new director. I won a first prize or something in the San Francisco museum with a painting called "Apple Town Revisited," a painting on Masonite made -- see, I didn't know a lot of artists were familiar with housepaints and such. David Park used white lead and house painters white lead and Picasso painted with enamels and Pollock also. I used various kinds of paint, I was experimenting too.

I used asphaltum in the painting and found it hard for it to dry, because asphaltum doesn't want to dry. So I won this prize and went to the opening and found the paint was running over onto the frame and about to drop on the floor. But Mundt was there, saw the painting, and said, "Why don't you come teach at the school?" So I went there then, to the School of Fine Arts at San Francisco.

ROBERT BROWN: In 1952. Mundt was for the Bauhaus background, he was trained or he had the outlook to have all sorts of media.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, he was a sculptor, made sculpture out of copper tubing, bent it and so on. It was very nice but it was more European-way. But there was a lot of bad feelings after they had to clean out the faculty and start over.

ROBERT BROWN: They actually just fired --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, they let them go one way or another. I think Clyfford Still moved to New York at that time and did well at the Museum of Modern Art. But they did let a lot of people go and there were hard feelings because some of the same students were there. When I came there it was hard to teach right because they were still having this political fracas, which I had nothing whatsoever to do with.

ROBERT BROWN: What do you mean? In terms of national or politics or -- ?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, it was a political fracas within the School's philosophy. Many of the students, possibly a third of them, wanted the School to stay like it was and they were still there, so there was this kind of bad feeling floating around the School that made it difficult to teach there. I had a different way of teaching from the people who were there before. So I stayed there for whatever it was, a year, year and a half --

ROBERT BROWN: Can you describe it -- what was your approach to teaching?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, being individualistic myself in my paintings and never having studied undergraduate oil painting but sort of picked it up along the way until I got into graduate school, and I was interested in how I could get into graduate school because I never had any undergraduate painting, but at the undergraduate school they judged you by your work rather than on how many courses you'd had in undergraduate painting.

Consequently, when I started teaching at the School, I taught in a similar way -- I tried to respect the artist's individuality. They had more or less a "party line" when Still was there -- you went his way. Which was an interesting way but it's not the only way.

ROBERT BROWN: What was his way when he was teaching students?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, it was a completely abstract way, based very much on intuition, instinct, to try to reach a certain spiritual attitude in painting. [after some hesitation] It's hard to explain something visual in words but there were these huge monolithic forms --huge monolithic forms -- and very little drawing. This was very different from the way I would teach, because I had drawn all my life, and while I try not to be, I often become a linear painter. On the other hand, I have a strong imagination because of all those years as a young boy by myself imagining things to draw. And I respect imagination. Imagination was considered somewhat frivolous by these people in the School before I came.

But I respect it very much. Respecting imagination and encouraging that, and encouraging drawing, and talking about the possibilities that exist vis-a-vis other philosophies of art, such as you might find in Europe or New York or wherever, wasn't so well received by so many of the people there but it was by others.

ROBERT BROWN: They were used to, in effect, a much more structured program, weren't they.

ROBERT NEUMAN: You could call it structured, I suppose, but it was sometimes called "party line."

ROBERT BROWN: Yes, party line in that sense of structure.

ROBERT NEUMAN: I liked their paintings very much and I still do but I think that there are people who have other ways of expressing themselves.

ROBERT BROWN: You said to me earlier there was a good deal of conformity and clubbiness, or there had been among --.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, there was a clique, like, they were almost a closely knitted group in that it was very hard to enter into that. They knew they had something very important and they didn't want to dissipate, although they were friendly enough and everything.I do know that many, many students who followed that way never went anywhere with their work, because after a while it became too much of an art philosophy party line. The originators had it but some of the ones that came after -- you couldn't just hang it on somebody like a shirt, art has to be intimately felt by the person that makes it, you can't wear it like a shirt. And therein was the problem for that sort of thing.

ROBERT BROWN: And you in that year you were there at least tried to pull some of the students out and how to begin looking at various .

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, and it was kind of an unruly time because they changed the whole faculty. That means the English professors, history professors, photography, sculpture -- everybody; a new head of the School and everything else. And that school was very famous then over the whole country. Most people on the East coast couldn't figure it out, that something had popped up in San Francisco that was so important artistically that even the FBI was out there! So that was a very unusual thing and it affected the whole West coast.

ROBERT BROWN: They took themselves seriously or they felt it was very important --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, very seriously. It was really a very stimulating environment to be in as a young artist and I'm glad I went there rather than some other place, you know. As a matter of fact, Diebenkorn -- it's in his book -- when he left there, there was this fight going on and then Still got dogmatic, he didn't think anybody could do figurative art. Well, about that time Diebenkorn was a tremendous abstract artist. Somebody decided to incorporate the figurative element in his painting because David Park had been talking to him and they had a big fight within themselves.

So, when the School collapsed, Diebenkorn decided to go and get a Master's degree at the University of New Mexico. He'd been in the Marine Corps and didn't have certain academic preparations for graduate school or something of that nature, as best I recall. But he was so good they said, well, there's a building over there --rather than have him report to a studio with all the other graduate students when he was already aeons ahead of them, they put him in a separate building by himself and let him work. Which is not uncommon, but they did that, and that's how he got his Master's degree. (Brown laughs)

ROBERT BROWN: Did you get to know him when he was still in San Francisco?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I never met him, no. I'd seen him around the Museum but never met him. I'm not a very forward person unless there's some particular I want to know. When I was in Barcelona, Spain I was offered a chance to go see Miro and I didn't go. I probably could have gone to see Picasso too, some friends of mine did. Unless there's some particular I'm interested in I usually don't do that.

ROBERT BROWN: You, then, were on the faculty there. You also taught then at the California School of Arts and Crafts -- you held down two jobs.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, I taught at both places. At Arts and Crafts I taught life drawing and watercolor. I didn't teach any oil painting there.

ROBERT BROWN: The California School had a broader curriculum than the San Francisco Fine Arts --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, it was what you call a traditional art school. They were trying to make the San Francisco School a painting and sculpture school. I thought that was terrific but it was something that couldn't continue to exist because of economics --the GI Bill was winding down, and so forth.

ROBERT BROWN: How did all this teaching affect your work? You must have been extremely busy, plus you had a family.

ROBERT NEUMAN: There were my wife and myself, we didn't have any children then. I painted all the time, night, daytime, I often had classes at night or late afternoon. So I spent my life painting seven days a week --

ROBERT BROWN: Morning, noon and night, but you were also able to do some painting and I guess a printmaking class as well.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes. I trained myself. From those early days till now I worked seven days a week, and if I'd teach in the daytime then I'd paint at night, and vice versa. Some of painting of course is conceptualizing about what you're going to do, or just studying the painting; it's not always a matter of hands-on work. So I got used to working on my painting at night for a time there. I still tend to be a night owl and I think it stems from that. I managed to get quite a bit done, however. I just worked all the time. Even now I work seven days, on Sundays now; my studio is near here. It didn't interfere that much. One has to expect to earn a living somehow.

ROBERT BROWN: About that time you also, I guess, served on some exhibition juries for the San Francisco Art Association. What did that amount to?

ROBERT NEUMAN: The San Francisco Art Association had a very nice program in the San Francisco Museum of Art when Grace McCann Morley was the director of the Museum. She was a very fine director, exceptional, and she gave the Museum two or three times a year to the San Francisco Art Association for shows. One was for oil paintings, one was for sculpture and drawings, another one for printmaking, I believe, or watercolors; two or three years a year, and then the artists voted by postcard whom they wanted on the jury.

Considering that I wasn't very well-known, that San Franciscans only knew me through my paintings pretty much, I was elected to do that a few times and it was quite an honor. They don't do that very much any more, now it's young curators tend to do the choosing. Today we have not such a good idea about these things, because the curators are often very young, don't have much experience, are very friendly with art dealers, tend to be influenced by what they put in their exhibitions. It's not the best thing.

ROBERT BROWN: Were the San Francisco Art Associations shows pretty interesting?

ROBERT NEUMAN: [emphatically] Very interesting.

ROBERT BROWN: Was it open-ended -- anybody could --

ROBERT NEUMAN: It was open to anybody in the United States but essentially, because of transportation costs and so on, 95% of the work would be from the West Coast -- Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver. They would box them up and bring or ship them over. They were very interesting shows and I think of them -- personally I find some of those shows even today more interesting than the shows you might see around here in Boston, which are too commercially oriented to whatever is commercially viable in New York City.

We didn't have that situation out there because there were very few collectors on the West Coast and there was reliance instead on the quality of the work to make the shows interesting; and the criteria, too. There were tremendous debates on who got in and who got out of the exhibitions but over-all they were pretty representative because the artists were judged by their peers pretty much. The Art Association was an avant forward-looking organization to begin with, so the peers that were elected as jurors were pretty good. David Park would often be on the jury, Hassel Smith. Sometimes they'd elect somebody in Los Angeles who'd come up for the day. The shows were very stimulating, very interesting.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you find that jurying was a pleasurable duty? Or was it difficult to exclude people or --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I don't have any problem on that because I have certain feelings about what I see, so for me it's easy. But you have different processes --some of them are secret, where you have buttons on a little piece of wood that are electronically connected to some light in another room and the person records through the light, so nobody knows how anybody votes. Then generally when it comes to the prizes in museums, which they don't give much any more but did then, the shows were competitive, judged by their peers, then everything was discussed and a vote of two out of three, or three out of five jurors would be enough to get the prizes.

I didn't have any trouble at all judging things. I have a clear feeling about what I see. I believe there has to be some kind of interior driving force in the artist that should be in the painting. I'm not worried about styles, I don't care much about styles. I'm concerned with the individual works. As somebody once said, "If it's good, it's good." That's more or less the way I look at it. That's not a very popular point of view but that's the way I look at it.

I was once invited to jury the State Fair in Tampa, Florida. I flew down and judged it and I gave some prizes to people who were pseudo-primitive for certain kinds of constructions they made, and when the jurying process was over with and they were hanging the show, I had a plane reservation to return very quickly to Boston and one official said, "It's probably a good idea you're leaving town early!" Because nobody had chosen such people before for the exhibition but they're obligated to hang them because I chose them.

ROBERT BROWN: Your earlier teaching, did you find they were a drain, did they help you think out things?

ROBERT NEUMAN: When I first started teaching I found it very interesting because I like people and especially people who are interested in art. As a young teacher beginning, you're always inquisitive about what kind of results you'll get, the class, and so on; that was all quite interesting to me. But when I graduated and needed a job I was working in my father's hardware story and went to a hardware company in Oakland, California, and said I'd like a responsible job in a hardware store there, a big state-wide store. "Maybe you have something in a warehouse at night I could do?" Then I could paint in the daytime. They looked at my resume and said, "Well, you have two degrees so we don't want to hire you, you won't stay here on the job stacking up wheelbarrows" and things like that. So I went back to my college and they said, "Well, we could use a new teacher here in the California College of Arts and Crafts in drawing the human figure." I had to go show my drawings to the president of the College. Which I did. He was from Australia. He said, "Well, your drawings are pretty good but you don't know how to draw hands and feet. You can teach a night class in life drawing." So I started out there.

I wondered about this president from Australia: where did he get his training? He told me: "When I was a young man, I was in Paris and they had exhibitions along the banks of the Seine in tents like circus tents, and anybody could bring their paintings and show them there. I came to one tent and there was this painting people were laughing at. The guy's name was Picasso. I thought they were ridiculous," he said, "because I was following Bouguereau. Now that I look back on it 40 years later, perhaps I should not have followed Bouguereau!" (both laugh heartily)
This was the man who told me I didn't know how to draw hands and feet, and ever since then I've been studying and feet.

ROBERT BROWN: (still laughing) But as you look back, you found that teaching was a help.

ROBERT NEUMAN: I liked it, and as time went on I liked it more so if there were good students and in a good school where they wanted you to teach. There are some schools where the quality of students leaves something to be desired, also the school looks down on the art department as some unnecessary evil, so to speak.

ROBERT BROWN: But that certainly wasn't true of those two art schools.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh, no, no, it was a basic thing there.

ROBERT BROWN: As you were about to leave the West coast, in summary these San Francisco painters whom you've discussed, you said at one place that some of the elements that you absorbed in those days are with you still. You mentioned broad surface treatment, calligraphic drawing, energized expressiveness, and even some Oriental influences.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, and also a kind of a tendency toward holistic surface and space in the paintings. That was a distinct difference between the East and West coasts. The East coast was still lined up with cubism and Picasso-esque kind of mannerisms which was the antithesis of what they were involved in around San Francisco. Los Angeles was a little different. It was strongly influenced by the movie industry and there was a lot of surrealism there. There was a ongoing aesthetic war between Los Angeles and San Francisco, because in San Francisco you starved to death and we thought we had the best -- and I'm sure we had the best -- [Brown laughs] paintings, but in Los Angeles there was money, so the artists down there actually sold works. Some of them made a reasonable living that way. That was never the case in San Francisco. The collectors would go to New York or Paris and buy paintings and bring them back to San Francisco, even when you could buy Clyfford Stills and Diebenkorns for a few hundred dollars.

ROBERT BROWN: But Los Angeles was looking much more over its shoulder to the East coast.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes but it was strongly influenced by the Hollywood scene too -- the fantasies of the movies and all that kind of thing. We called it artificial, but anyway they were very different from the San Francisco artists. I showed in Los Angeles twice at the Landau Gallery on L a Boulevard. One was a one-man show, another I put together myself of four or five of us. No one responded to any of the work. The dealer was very nice to make the show.

ROBERT BROWN: Because that was a rather well-established gallery.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh yes, it was, it was. I didn't realize, for me it was just a gallery to make an exhibition because I was pretty young, but I gathered everybody's work together, put it in a U-Haul trailer and drove to Los Angeles. Then they hung it. They had James Budd Dixon and Edith Smith, D-- Jo [phon.sps.] who was a Chinese painter, and myself; there may have been another person too, I'm not sure.

ROBERT BROWN: But there wasn't much reception of it, or sales, anything like that?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No. You see, most of my life has been that I've always been some place, like in the early stages; like the school in San Francisco was pretty well in bloom when I came there and finished by the time I left. But Los Angeles hadn't exploded yet as an art center. Later, when I went to Europe on a Fulbright and Guggenheim, I went to Spain and was one of the first American artists to show there after the WWII. I wasn't the first but there were only two or three of us, I think; Larry Calcagno was one.

The same in Washington, DC. I made one of the best shows I've ever had down there and Washington, DC hadn't woken up yet either. Now they have a regular renaissance in Washington. I was always ahead of all this just a little bit. I made a show up in Vermont at Bundy Museum, a private museum up in Sugarbush -- Waitsfield, Vermont, actually -- which doesn't exist any more. That was before things got exciting up there too. Bundy told me that of all the shows he's had at the museum, this was the hardest show of all for him to take down because he liked it so much in his museum, that it was a nice group of works and they grew on him as they were there.

So I was very flattered by that. But almost all these shows were -- in Germany in 1954 we showed at Amerika Haus there, people had never even seen American paintings. So I was always ahead of appreciators, and the ones who came 10 years later were very well received usually.

ROBERT BROWN: So your career didn't leap ahead because you were a little ahead of your time.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. It didn't help any except to go broke in the process.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, how come that in 1953 you looked into the Fulbright program? Was it something you'd just heard about, or -- ?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I was very naive, because coming from the hills of Idaho I thought "I'll study art and make paintings and everything else will take care of itself." Then somebody said, "Why don't you subtract your expenses from your income tax? You pay taxes on your paintings when you sell them." I didn't even know you could do that, so I started doing that. Then Leon Golden, a New York artist now, a very fine lithographer, told me, "I'm applying for a Fulbright to Paris." I didn't know what that was, and he told me.

So I applied for two years or three years to Italy and didn't get it, but they wrote me that Germany had opened up late, past the deadlines, so there were no applications for Germany and they were sending out letters to people who were alternatives in other programs. They invited me to apply for Germany, so I did, switching from Italy, and they gave me a grant. That was really a wonderful moment for me, it opened up my eyes, because I hadn't been in Europe before. Of course it was right after the War, and Stuttgart where I lived was half-bombed and burned out.

Essentially they just gave you a check each month and said "you're on your own." We did attend classes about the laws and customs of the country, and in language a little bit. There had never been a Fulbright program before, so there was no pattern.

ROBERT BROWN: Had you any notion of what kind of art was being done in Germany before you got there?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, but I enjoyed the paintings of Fritz Winter very much. They asked whom you'd like to study with and I asked for him.

ROBERT BROWN: You'd seen his paintings?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I was very familiar with them. He came out of the Bauhaus, a very abstract German artist. Then I ended up in Stuttgart studying with Willi Baumeister, nowhere near Fritz Winter. Someone told me where he lived but it was at some distance and I never got there.

Baumeister had been a great pre-war artist but the Nazis had forbidden him to paint. They'd come around and look at his brushes to see if he'd used them and all sorts of things like that. So he made underground black-market silk screens in another building where the Nazis couldn't check. For the young artist in Germany, he was the godfather, so to speak, because he was one of the few abstract artists who came out of the smoke after World War II. He's considered very important in Germany today too.

INTERVIEW CONTINUED, MAY 8, 1991.

ROBERT BROWN: We were talking about your time as a Fulbright student in Germany. You talked a bit about the German master, Willi Baumeister. You also mentioned you admired the paintings of Fritz Winter. Can you say a bit more about him and what his work was like at that time, how it influenced you.

ROBERT NEUMAN: As young American artist residing on the Pacific Coast, who had never lived in Europe or New York City, I was interested in what was called "international art" at the time, "international style." I was quite interested in that, so I'd investigated whatever sources I could and I found paintings by a man named Fritz Winter and liked them a lot. I later found out he'd been a student at the Bauhaus.

In 1953 when I received my Fulbright grant to Germany, he'd returned there, having been a prisoner of war in a Russian prison camp for I believe four years. He'd paint with a stick in the dirt in the prison yard, then wipe it out and make another painting. His work is very abstract but in a philosophic and design way it relates to elements of the world, it's not just abstract theory.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean there were some recognizable references --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, nothing recognizable, it's totally abstract but it's such that you feel that some things are the earth, or rock, or tree, or you sense that there's nature in his paintings when you see them, yet there are no recognizable images there. To me that was very interesting at the time; still is, I like his paintings a good deal. I asked to study with him and since it was the Fulbright program's first year in Germany, and we were the first people to go there after the War, there wasn't a lot of organization in place as yet and I ended up being sent to Stuttgart to the Akademie der Bilden und Kunst, on Beissenhoff [phon.sp.] on a hill above Stuttgart.

The head professor of painting there was Willi Baumeister. He'd been an abstract artist before the War, forbidden to paint by the Nazis, so he switched to silk screen so he could secretly produce prints outside his studio that the police couldn't find. I never got to see Fritz Winter. I learned where he lived but didn't go there, I hesitate to go where I'm not invited. I was invited, actually, to visit Miro, but I still didn't go; in retrospect I wish I had.

END OF THIS SIDE, B of TAPE 1
BEGINNING SIDE A, TAPE 2

ROBERT BROWN: (beginning mid-sentence) back then with Baumeister?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I had him as my professor. Initially, when we went to art school, I met another American artist whom I'd never met before, from Boston, named Thomas Geekus, (phon.sp.) another painter who does very fine work and still lives here in Boston. He and I were the only Fulbright artists in Stuttgart, the rest being in other German cities.

Everything was in disrepair, there were shortages et cetera, it was very crowded, no place to work. So Mr. Geekus went to the U.S. Consul and arranged for us to get a room apiece -- heated, quite adequate -- in their warehouse. We didn't have a Marine guard with a rifle standing outside the door when we came to paint. The War had ended a few years earlier but the country was still occupied by the four Powers, so there were still guards.

We painted away from the School, then. We forgot about it, we'd go there occasionally, then we heard Baumeister was wondering where we were. But we seemed to be more advanced than the German students because they'd been busy trying to survive, the War had taken a toll on them. Many students told us that Willi Baumeister was almost single-handedly responsible for encouraging young Germans to start painting again because of the tremendous discouragement as aftermath of the War. So his courses were well-attended, very crowded.

Eventually the Fulbright Commission in Bonn formed an exhibition of all the American artists in Germany. It circulated to Paris and Belgium, I don't know all the places, and several cities in Germany, usually to the Amerika Haus, as it was in Stuttgart. In order to form the exhibition they had to locate us all. Baumeister received a letter from the High Commissioner wanting to know where the student Geekus and Neuman were, they hadn't heard from us in months. Neither had Baumeister! So he invited us to lunch with him at his home, then asked what we were doing and where we worked.

So he came to our studios and looked at our paintings. He could see were of a little different cut. American contemporary art was so far ahead of anything in Germany at the time: he could see that too but didn't want to say it. He made a few sketches to try to help us with our painting --

ROBERT BROWN: That was about the only constructive contact you had with him?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. We would go to the critiques at the Kunst Akademie where we were supposed to be working, which were always in German, you see, and our German wasn't that good. The students taking part also spoke in German. Some friends would translate a bit but not very well, so we just went on our own. We felt we understood what they were doing anyway. There was a Japanese-American student studying there who'd won a prize -- he wasn't on a Fulbright -- from Hans Hofmann. So we talked and spent a lot of time with him. He travelled a lot and was in jail a few times too.

ROBERT BROWN: What were the attitudes of the German students towards you?

ROBERT NEUMAN: They were very pleased and happy to see us. We'd have lunch with them in the Kunst Akademie, which was usually spaetzle and beer. We had many friends there. I remember inviting one or two to my studio one day. I had a big red painting, about six feet on the vertical, almost solid with red pigment. I asked the students what they thought of the painting and they said, "Ach, Herr Neuman, sie sind sehr reich!" Because red is the most expensive color, and most Germans would paint with brown because they had no money, the War had wrecked the place, and they didn't know how they could even continue to exist in the art school. To see someone actually painting with red pigment was almost beyond belief for them. They liked the painting but they were astounded at the amount of red paint, never having seen anybody do that before.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned the Weissenhoff, the famous advanced architectural school, wasn't it?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I never investigated all the parts of the school -- I probably should have -- but you could see there was, as I recall, part of the school was a very fine piece of architecture. There had been something going on there at one time, which is what you refer to, probably. (Brown confirms) I did see part of the student exhibition at one point, some fantastic ceramics from the art education department, which was far beyond what they do in many American ceramic departments. I was astounded.

I didn't investigate the school very much because I'd never been in Europe before, and for somebody who'd come from the foothills of the Rockies to suddenly find himself in the middle of Europe and as long as he's frugal can go any place he wants to, do anything he wants to, was a real eye-opener for me. I was busy absorbing the European culture as fast as I could. So I didn't spent much time checking out the architecture and so forth.

I did check out the Germanic attitude in architecture. Part of that was encouraged by the fact that many Stuttgart buildings had the facade and nothing else -- there was no roof, back, or anything. During the War the British had made one last run over Stuttgart. Churches were bombed; the concert hall of the Stuttgart Symphony, a very famous musical organization, was just a huge facade, but one wing or separate building there had been repaired and I went to it a few times to hear the Stuttgart Little Symphony play.

ROBERT BROWN: Well, you had been living in a city near San Francisco for several years. Did you by now consider that living in the city was preferable to, say, staying in the rather remote area where you'd grown up?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I felt at that time -- I don't feel that way any more -- most of the art organizations, art activities, the museums, the critics, scholars, and other artists are located in the cities. It's where the press is, where they make the books, films, all that sort of thing. So I was attracted to the cities. But now I no longer have that feeling many years later, because I'm sufficiently interested in my own work that I really don't need that. I can get as much as I want from cities by making an occasional trip to a major city somewhere or going to the big museums once a year. I don't have that interest any more. I'm interested in my own work now and I could live in the country now without much trouble. I do spend a lot of time in the state of Maine now.

ROBERT BROWN: During that year in Stuttgart, you did what you called your "black paintings." Could you sort of describe them generally?

ROBERT NEUMAN: The "black paintings" began (stopping to reflect) in Stuttgart, I guess, or in that time, I guess, around 1953. I was using industrial paints and common house paints, as many artists were, because they were liquid with milk in a can instead of paste.

ROBERT BROWN: You mean for convenience? Cheaper?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, you could spread it, and being liquid you could do various technical things with it, but the chemical quality of the pigment itself was bad. You can name the artists who used that -- Franz Kline, Pollock, whoever -- and they paid a price for that. Even Picasso used some liquid paint. Because it's very much like dipping a brush in a bottle of ink, it's liquid, you don't have to dissolve the ink first from a stick of ink.

The paintings began there, and then continued when I returned to the U.S., to New Paltz, New York, to work at the State University of New York. My interest with the black paintings was that the world had just gone through this tremendous war, World War II, and there was a shock throughout the world from this war of the destruction and terrible things that man had done to himself. That was felt in the cultural community in a large, general way. That's one reason that you saw many black paintings -- there weren't only mine. You wondered what was going to happen next after the second War. Many creative people were very depressed.

So I made these black paintings with that in mind. Also, they always said you shouldn't paint with black, it's not a color, so I painted a whole painting black. I made a series where the entire canvas is black but I did it modulated by using different blacks, or sometimes I put gray in with the black, or a little metallic paint. There's one of those paintings now at the Brandeis Museum collection, and Mr. Alan Stone (?) of the Alan Stone Gallery in New York has most of the others. I don't own any.

ROBERT BROWN: Were these pretty big?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, they were about maybe five foot eight or seven on the horizontal, by about 30 or 33 inches vertical. I continued to make those when I got back from Germany teaching in New Paltz at the State University of New York, with Jules Olitski and William Daley, the ceramist.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you happen to go there to work?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, when I came back from Germany I needed a job in order to exist. I had a wife, no children yet. So I wanted to stay on the Eastern seaboard. When I applied for the Fulbright I thought, "I can't afford to move to New York, but if I can get a Fulbright, they'll drop me off the boat in New York when I come back. I'll have had the year in Europe and all that entails, and when it finishes I'll be in New York City, which is where I'd like to go. From that point on I'll have to think of how I'll exist."

So I gave my name to several placement agencies in New York, which sent me to Florida and a few places. At the last minute this job opened up at New Paltz, New York, and that was only about an hour's drive from New York City. So as an artist I thought "this is convenient" and took the position, teaching painting and drawing. Jules Olitski and I became very good friends there. At that time he was in the "art brut" movement, having returned from Paris where he'd lived for a number of years. He's a native New Yorker, so it's good for me to know him and he told me about things an artist could do in the city. So I went there usually about one every 14 days and enjoyed it very much.

ROBERT BROWN: You became a member of the Stable Gallery in New York.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. When I got back from Germany and got settled I went down there, looking for a New York gallery. I remember going to one run by a woman who's quite famous, I can't recall her name at the moment, who was having a show of Willi Baumeister. I was just seven days, maybe two weeks, off the boat from Germany, and went up to see the show. I was the only person in the gallery and she came out and asked, "Do you like Willi Baumeister's painting?" because she assumed I lived in New York. Having just left Willi a couple of weeks ago, I was (laughing) already pretty familiar with his work, but she didn't that.

Then I went over to a place called the Stable Gallery, having seen an ad in the paper about the show that looked interesting. There were Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Marca-Relli. So I showed my paintings, she said she liked them, would show them there. Something happened, I don't know to this day what, but she became disenchanted and asked me to take my paintings out, so I did. I was almost in a show in the Stable ---- the entrance sloped where horses used to come in --with Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and me.

ROBERT BROWN: Who was the lady who asked you to pull out?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I can't recall her name now... She was the originator of the Stable Gallery, at least she was associated with it somehow to the Company.

ROBERT BROWN: That hadn't panned out. (Neuman confirms) Before you'd left Europe -- I just want to ask --you said you did go to Paris at least once and got to know a couple of artists there.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. I traveled a good deal but the German winter was pretty long, so my plan was to stay and paint for about six months, then to travel. Thinking "I may never be here again, I'll do a lot of travelling in the next four months and paint intermittently." So that's what I did. At one point Fulbright said "we'll take everybody to West Berlin and you can visit there, peek over the Wall, and so forth." I thought, well, my time schedule was to go to Paris, so I went there instead.

I visited Georges Mathieu. That was very interesting. He took me in his old Rolls Royce to his house to look at his paintings. Initially he thought I was Barnett Newman until I explained that I wasn't, but he remained nice and pleasant.

I visited Jean Paul Riopelle, a Canadian French painter, just a few days before Pierre Matisse was to arrive from New York, so all his paintings were standing up there in his studio waiting for Matisse to select some for the New York show. That was very good and he took me down to the corner for an absinthe.

ROBERT BROWN: So each of these men was quite hospitable.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh, very hospitable. In 1950 American artists in Europe were very scarce; we were the first American artists that they'd seen in Germany, as far as I could tell. Later on when I went to Spain on a Guggenheim, I must have been the second or third American artist there also, because everybody was very friendly and you were definitely a rarity.

ROBERT BROWN: Can you describe your teaching at New Paltz -- how did you go about it? You'd taught out in the San Francisco area, of course.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Before that, let me mention that I went to Italy, England, and Ireland -- caught the boat back from there --but when I was in Rome I made a friendship with Alberto Burri, the great Italian collage artist, a very wonderful person. He was married to an American girl who had a modern dance studio in Rome. He was very kind and helpful to me while I was there.

I didn't study with them at all, I just visited them, checked in on what they were doing with their work, what their thoughts were about their work, what their feelings were about American art. At that time there was this situation called "the International Style" whereby a certain kind of abstract art was intended to be international in nature. Part of it came from World War II, part mirrored itself in the United Nations and other ways, where people wanted to be more universal, less parochial and separated. That's all gone but it lasted for many years -- that you could see a painting made in Norway or Ceylon and understand it, and you could see a painting made in San Francisco and Cairo and understand it. That was the idea, to have one art for all people, not break it all into small splinters according to cultures all the time.

ROBERT BROWN: Is that maybe one reason why artists were so welcoming of one another?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, I think so. There's always been an international camaraderie amongst artists. They were, until recently, few in number and they have generally nothing to help them, they have to do it all on their own pretty much. Although in Europe in recent years that's changed with government subsidies and such --

ROBERT BROWN: At that time, they, like the Americans, were pretty much on their own.

ROBERT NEUMAN: On their own financially and every other way. So they enjoyed seeing each other and discussing philosophies of art and seeing that you too had survived, so to speak. Because the artist really has to do everything very much on his own, and that's probably the god saving part about it -- that you don't get a great deal of help. Because a Fulbright grant wasn't so much a matter of art as it was international understanding being its purpose.

ROBERT BROWN: You weren't exactly given a stipend that allowed you to live very well.

ROBERT NEUMAN: No. You had $110 a month to live on in Germany, which was quite a bit of money when you consider post-war exchange, but whether you were married or single you got the same amount and I had my wife with me, so there were two of us living on it.

ROBERT BROWN: In Rome did you find even then a number of Americans? Not too many but there were a number who stayed on there for some time.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, there were some. I didn't visit any American artists in Rome, although I saw some of their work in a place called Gallery Schneider, which used to be very near the Spanish Steps; to the best of my knowledge it's no longer there. I enjoyed the Italian artists very much. The abstract artists of Italy were a little bit sweet and romantic because Italians are very friendly people and their artists are very warm emotionally. It's similar to comparing Futurism or Metaphysical painting; De Chirico with Cubism. There's that kind of a difference there. Italians are incredibly humanistic in their work.

ROBERT BROWN: The younger German students, you said, were painting in browns --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Black, brown, whatever was cheap because they didn't have any money --

ROBERT BROWN: They were at a very minimal level then --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Paint-wise, food-wise and every other wise.

ROBERT BROWN: What did you see in Paris?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Oh, Paris was very different, because money was flowing there in the art world. Riopelle, for instance, was showing with Pierre Matisse and people were buying all his paintings right and left. Georges Mathieu was showing with Kootz. I think it was and he had some kind of a public relations business of his own on the side with one of the big French passenger shipping lines. Paris seemed to be running very well when I was there as compared with Germany.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you ever give a thought to staying on in Europe?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Later when I got a Guggenheim Fellowship and was in Italy, I made an exhibition in Venice in 1956 or '57, the man who owned the gallery later came to New York and offered me a contract to return to Italy. But I was having marital problems, my life didn't care much to live in Europe, which would have made it difficult.

ROBERT BROWN: You taught at New Paltz for just one year, is that right?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No. I was there... let's see: I got back from the Fulbright in '54. It seems to me it was slightly more than a year. I taught the summer school too. One reason I left there was because that campus of the State University of New York never had a Guggenheim Fellow on its faculty in its history, and when I received one to go to Spain and paint, I asked for a leave of absence and the president turned me down. So I resigned and left. Everybody in the art department left, I would say, the chairman, Olitski, and everybody en masse; maybe one or two remained.

ROBERT BROWN: Hadn't that been like a local state teachers college until recently?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. When Rockefeller became Governor he poured funds into the art departments of the State University, but that didn't happen until after I left.

ROBERT BROWN: What were your students like there at that time?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, there was a growing out of a teacher's college into more of a state college and they were betwixt and between. They were very good students, I enjoyed them there, there were kids from farms and kids from the city and kids scattered all over New York and probably from elsewhere. But it was a rudimentary art department because it was betwixt and between, growing from a teachers college into a state college and they hadn't got it accomplished it yet. But it was a pleasant place to teach, a little town by the river there, in the Dutch Huguenot country. It was a historic place, we had a nice old gingerbread house to live in. I painted in the garage. I put a coal-burning stove there in the winter. I worked on the Black Paintings there. So it wasn't a bad place to work at all, actually. I even got drafted into teaching some art history, which I wasn't really prepared to teach but I could do a little bit of it. But the president of the college was one of those people who thought Ezra Watt [phon.] was the only person who should be allowed to paint pictures, so he was not too friendly to the art department.

ROBERT BROWN: How had Jules Olitski happened to be there?

ROBERT NEUMAN: He came the same way I did, looking for a position. He'd been living in Paris for some years and I believe he'd gotten a divorce, had a daughter who was in New York City with his parents. So he was looking for a place to teach. He was a very good teacher, an extremely intellectual person, very well-read. He was very much involved in Dubuffet "art brut"-Karel Appel orientation but it was non-figurative. But he was a very intelligent person. After he left there and went to New York City he struck it rich with Clement Greenberg and got into color field painting. We haven't seen much of each other since then. He's very well recognized now. But I'm more inclined to Expressionism, so we had a completely separate attitude toward painting. But he did do a very kind thing. He took some of my drawings to Clement Greenberg once but he didn't like them. Clement Greenberg helped Olitski get into New York galleries and all that sort of thing.

ROBERT BROWN: Greenberg was at the peak of his power then, wasn't he.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes he was.

ROBERT BROWN: How did you happen to look into getting a Guggenheim Fellowship? You must have thought you needed --

ROBERT NEUMAN: I didn't know what a Guggenheim Fellowship was, because I spent most of my time painting when I wasn't teaching and I had no idea what it was. I thought it was just strictly for men and women of letters, but a faculty member, whose wife is a sculptress who showed at Martha Jackson was going to get one because she had recommendations to these people at the Museum of Modern Art. So I was still a hillbilly from Idaho and I thought, "Well, I'll try this thing too."

So I wrote for those papers. I didn't have anybody at the Museum of Modern Art or any other prestigious people to recommend me, so I had the local librarian at the college, who doubled as the art historian, and Felix Rubelow, [phon.sp.] a professor of art at the University of California/Berkeley, write for me. He didn't know my work too well but he was kind enough to write a letter. Plus a few local people. And I'll be darned if they didn't send me a telegram that I had a Guggenheim. So in a very short time we packed up and went to Spain, to Barcelona.

ROBERT BROWN: You'd specified you wanted to go to Spain?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. This was 1956 when I'd be there for a year and I specified that I wanted to go to Barcelona because any place that has Gaudi, Picasso, Miro, Julio Gonzales, there must be something there and I would like to look into this a little bit on all levels -- intellectual, emotional, and artistic. That's why I wanted to go there, so they sent me there and it was a very fruitful period for me.

ROBERT BROWN: When you went over, you were still doing more or less your Black Paintings.

ROBERT NEUMAN: I was. And when I got to Barcelona I rented an unfurnished flat and one of the bedrooms I used as a studio. I was so impressed by Spain, and Barcelona in particular -- the mysticism in Spanish culture is very strong, it's in their art, it's very deep --

ROBERT BROWN: This struck you right away.

ROBERT NEUMAN: It got to me right away. The light around Barcelona was very interesting. Any little thing seems to be very chromatic. I started painting with -- Spanish paint companies produced for artists these beautiful grays. I hadn't painted with gray before because I thought it was a neutral color, but the atmosphere and the light were such that even grays seemed to contain a great deal of color. So I started using gray in many of the paintings but not all of them and the light had a tremendous effect on the way I painted there.

I also had an experience. I was sitting in a cafe in [place name] and I looked up a certain calle there: the sun was on the other side of the buildings where I was, the street was so narrow that the sunlight coming through it looked like a needle, optically. It struck me as having a very interesting compositional potential. So I made a whole series of paintings called "Barcelona Paintings," I don't know how many there are, quite a few, there are some here in Boston; Allan Stone of the Allan Stone Galleries owns a large number of them; and Senator Jack Heinz, who was killed in an airplane accident recently, bought one, which was then chosen by the Carnegie Institute for the Carnegie International Exhibition and later taken into their collection. Its title is "Piso Secundo" [phon.sp.]

This was a red painting but the Barcelona period paintings are divided between the gray paintings and these that have a great deal of red. I stopped using black. When I got to Spain I wanted to relate to where I was and the Spanish culture and life, which were incredibly interesting to me. I'd like to go back there again if I could but I painted all my painting in Spain of various parts of the city in Barcelona and most of them, the red ones, had this central vertebrae running through the middle, vertically, and they were very well received when I came back to this country. I made some more, a lot of them, in my studio in 1958, '59, '60, in Brookline Village and I showed them at the original Pace Gallery in Boston, which moved to New York later. The exhibitions were very well received, they were sold out as a matter of fact, in Boston as the town was having a small renaissance, I discovered when I came here from Barcelona after the Guggenheim was over. These Barcelona paintings went into many collectors' homes in Boston. They were very well received.

ROBERT BROWN: You've mentioned the grays of Barcelona, you mentioned this striking visual phenomenon of the needle-like light into a narrow street. You also mentioned earlier the mysticism of Spanish culture. Could you explain how you think that filtered into your --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I'm a very imaginative person, and that's why many art dealers in the current scene at this moment in history won't associate with me because it's not fashionable to be imaginative any more, you need to be a sort of halfway Marcel Duchamp today. They think painting is dead. But being an imaginative person in all ways -- in my mind, in my colors, in my hand when I draw and so forth, in my liking for certain artists -- when I found what I determined to be a very mystical quality, that stimulated me very much.

The imagination, religious and mystical conditions as you see sometimes in paintings of Tapies and many other Spanish artists, these things are close together -- mysticism and imagination. They often go together because in order to be mystical in a painting, you have to find out the way to do that, because you have to take something, usually pigment, and put it on a piece of cloth. Well, that's an imaginative act, to do that. And then you have to judge it, intellectually and so on, to see if you're there, that you've arrived at the right place.

But I was never a religious person and still am not in an orthodox way, but I was very impressed by Spain and the general mysticism in the culture and in all the arts and everywhere you look. Having been in Europe before, it wasn't necessary that I'd be impressed by this, because I'd been in Germany, Italy, Ireland and every place else where there was plenty of religion. But the Spanish way is another way. It harks back to the old saw that "Europe stops at the Pyrenees." The Moorish influence in Spain is so inbred that no one even thinks much about it but it's in that Spanish life, too; there's such a mixture of things in the Spanish culture.

Some years later I went back to Spain. On our honeymoon we went to the Alhambra and the whole thing came back again. But when I lived in Barcelona on the Guggenheim, I had a habit of going for walks through the city to different barrios and I would always investigate different museums and artistic monuments and so on. One day I found myself -- I'd gone to buy a pair of handmade shoes for hiking and failing to remember where the place was, finally found it. It was a workers' area --dingy -- this was during Franco's time running Spain and dingy apartment blocks. Walking down the street to get the shoes, I had some kind of a mystical experience myself. Looking down the street as I walked, I thought I saw an apparition. The strangest kind of surreal experience, the only time in my life I'd ever had that kind of experience. It could be just that I was heightened emotionally; being there meant a great deal to me.

I visited a large number of Spanish artists -- J. J. Tharrats, Tapies, Rafols Cassamada, and many others. I made a show there at Sala Vayreda on R Catalonia, I think it was. During conversation with various Spanish artists, some of them would ask me if I was "Catolico," and I'd say, "no, I'm not a Catholic." They'd say, (he laughs) "Too bad." It had something to do with getting into certain galleries there. Many people painted pseudo-religious paintings -- they painted monks and things like that.

My exhibition in Barcelona was reviewed in an interesting way which relates to what I just said. Once the exhibition was up, I went downtown and bought a newspaper, stopped in the gallery to see if they knew of any reviews of the exhibition. There was one, in a thing called (says he can't recall now) a slip-covered magazine published by, of all things, monks above Barcelona some place toward Tibidavo [phon.sp.]. These monks were writers, men of literature, and this monk had written such an interesting review that I translated it to English and sent it to Italy, because I went from Barcelona to Venice and made a one-man exhibition there at the Galleria del Cavallino just off San Marco.

Then the Italians translated that review from English into Italian. We used it in the announcement there -- that's how impressed I was with it, I liked very much what he said. There was another review in a Barcelona paper.

ROBERT BROWN: Did you ever get to know the monk?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I never met the man.

ROBERT BROWN: That wasn't the monks at Montserrat, was it?

ROBERT NEUMAN: It was up there some place, I never went up there either although I lived in an apartment at the foot of the hill, the cliffs, practically.

ROBERT BROWN: So you did these ones that you describe, this kind of painting, and also it's at this time that you began your Pedazos Del Mundo series. Maybe we can talk

END OF THIS SIDE, A of TAPE 2
BEGINNING SIDE B, TAPE 2

ROBERT NEUMAN: The Pedazos Del Mundo series came from having lived in Spain but I didn't start them until I got back to this country. I started them in Brookline Village in a little room I rented. That was an interesting thing, because when I came to Boston from Spain, I was unemployed because I'd left the State University of New York. So I went around on the bus, I didn't have any money, to the Rhode Island School of Design and different places looking for job. Nobody had any jobs for me.

So I started painting houses in New Paltz, New York, where I'd been living. The president of the Massachusetts College of Art sent a telegram, "We have a position for you." So I crawled off the housepainter's ladder and went back to Boston and took this job at the College, teaching lithography and drawing. I'd applied there and been interviewed but they weren't sure there was a job. The man who became president had given up the lithography job, an artist himself, a very nice man. I can't think of his name now, an exceptionally nice person.

On arriving in Boston I immediately went down to Newbury Street to the Swetzoff Gallery -- by sheer coincidence, the best gallery in town for abstract art, which was just coming into Boston. Hyman Swetzoff -- he was a poet also -- was a very good friend of Hyman Bloom. He was married to the daughter of the publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, Edward Weeks. I had some calligraphic drawings on paper, which Swetzoff looked at, said he liked them and wanted to see the paintings. I showed him the Black Paintings first and he liked those, and he showed them, with David von Schlegel, Albert Alcalay, Harold P , Mary A.....da, Hyman Bloom, Bobby Eshew, [all phon.sps.] and a few others.

I needed a studio. I told him I didn't have any money for a studio, we could just pay our rent where we lived. We had a child then. He said, "Well, I know somebody inspecting the Philippine Islands, in Manila, who told me to send him a drawing of a young American artist whose work is interesting. So give me one of those drawings you showed me." He sent it to this man, he bought it, I got $50, and that was enough to pay the first month's rent on the studio. So I moved into the studio in Brookline Village.

The next studio was Albert Alcalay, who was a displaced person from, well, he was born in Paris but he lived most of his life in Yugoslavia. He showed in the same gallery, so we became friends, having adjoining studios there. I'd never sold any paintings -- oh, I'd sold one or two, I guess, but he sold a large number of paintings quite consistently.

ROBERT BROWN: Did he have a more marketable way of painting, do you think? Or --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, he had met people here because he was a displaced person. He'd been in concentration camp in Italy, he'd met people here and they followed his work a good deal. He also had a small school there in his studio for children. Their parents would come and in that way he began to sell a few paintings.

But that's when the Pedazos Del Mundo started. My paintings are -- I'm a thematic painter, now that we look back after a few years. The first theme was Black Paintings. Then came the Barcelona pictures, the second theme. The third theme was Pedazos Del Mundo. I started the Pedazos paintings there. I still had this idea of the International Style in the back of my mind. I thought to myself, "What is it that all people could understand?" I said, "Well, they certainly know that the world is round, more or less. And everybody's interested in the world, it's all we've got, we're standing on."

So I said, "I'll paint paintings of the world." And I made these big circles. I made a great many of the Pedazos Del Mundo, number one, two, three, four, five, six like that. There are mixed-media drawings and there are lithographs; no etchings; and there's watercolors. By the time I got them finished, it took quite a while, and I never showed them to Swetzoff because a graduating student in my Massachusetts College of Art class, named Arnold Glimcher, came to me one day and said, "Mr. Neuman, I'm going to start an art gallery and I'd like to show your paintings."

Arnold was not exactly an enthusiastic art student, and I said, "Arnold, I don't think you could sell my paintings. Don't you think you should maybe use some other artists who are more saleable and so forth if you're into it as a business." He said, "No, I'd like to try." So he opened a gallery on Newbury Street two doors down from Swetzoff. I told Swetzoff I was going to leave and I moved to the initial Pace Gallery, which is now one of the most famous galleries in New York City.

ROBERT BROWN: What did Swetzoff say when you said you were leaving?
What was he like, too -- maybe you can describe him.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Hyman Swetzoff was a very interesting fellow. He had a brother named Seymour Swetzoff who ran a frame shop, who was into Far Eastern mysticism. They were both disciples intellectually, and Seymour painted some, they were very close to Hyman Bloom. That's one reason I left his gallery, because he had the best gallery up till then on Newbury Street. He had Ohashi, the Japanese painter, and there were some abstract things in there, but essentially he was mostly oriented toward Hyman Bloom's work -- this kind of Expressionism --

ROBERT BROWN: It wasn't much like your work at all --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, it's not the same Expressionism I'm involved in at all.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you particularly sympathetic to it?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I didn't like it because it was, in my opinion, a kind of nervous Expressionism and dwelt on things which were not interesting to me -- tortured bodies and things of this nature. Leonard Baskin the printmaker was involved in this too and it came out of the Boston Museum school, with Boston arts Aronson.

But I stayed there, since it was the best gallery. But then when this student opened up a gallery, the Pace Gallery, we saw a chance for a new gallery in which we could have a chance to say who showed in the gallery; the artists could have something to say about that and possibly have an even finer gallery in Boston. That was our thought. We subsequently made sure he showed Mirko Basaldella, the sculptor at Harvard, and Henry Moore, and Hans Arp, and all kinds of people that were interesting. I sold out a couple of painting shows there, and a drawings show. He was a tremendous young dealer.

ROBERT BROWN: Did he have a good deal of backing? How did he --

ROBERT NEUMAN: He had a lot of backing, that's right, from his brother and some other people. His mother worked in the gallery, and she was a wonderful person, I enjoyed her very much. But you have to understand that Boston was a boom town at this time. A cultural renaissance was taking place in Boston. It was nothing like it is today. People were making a great deal of money in industries and so on and prices of art had not caught up with the boom, so as we look back upon it things were relatively inexpensive compared to the money people had in their pocket.

So people were collecting art like mad. I can remember one, maybe within a week practically, every gallery on the street sold out their shows. It was unbelievable. I didn't think about it at the time, but now as I look back on it I realize what it was. So I went there.

Then the Pace Gallery decided that Boston was too small a town, he wanted to be an internationally known art dealer. So he moved to New York. He offered to me to come with him, but he was getting into --me and Louise Nevelson were the people he wanted to take with him to New York -- but this is the story of my life: I'm always the one of the first exhibitions of American artists in Spain, or Germany, the American art, in Washington, D.C. one of the early exhibitions of Abstract art. So I never benefited too much from it.

But Arnold Glimcher who ran the Pace Gallery was glad to move to New York and he wanted to take Louse Nevelson and me, he told me. But at the same time he was getting very heavily into Pop Art because that was the trend --

ROBERT BROWN: He went about in the early 60s then, I guess.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes it was, right in there. He was getting into this and starting to show it in Boston, all the Pop artists. Sam Hunter, who came here to run the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said, "Aha! So now we're going to have low art and high art with the advent of Pop Art." Pop Art turns me sour, I dislike Pop Art with a fervor.

ROBERT BROWN: You agreed with Hunter that it was a low art form.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, Mr. Hunter went with it because he's the curator and the trouble with American curators is they go with whatever tendency comes down the pike. It's getting a little old at this time but at that time I despised Pop Art because it's very close to commercial art and it's mass-produced and it's the antithesis of the way great art has always been made and maybe there's a reason it's always been made that way. So I told Arnold I wasn't interested in going to New York. He was saddened by that but they went.

ROBERT BROWN: He, in your experience, had been a pretty decent --

ROBERT NEUMAN: He was very decent to me. Swetzoff seldom sold my work, so my economic situation didn't improve much with him but I had no complaints, he was very kind and he was a creative person himself. Contrary to most dealers, he would hang art that he thought was very inventive and creative on its own stakes rather than whether it was in the trend or mode of the moment. That was the wonderful thing about Hyman Swetzoff. And it was a wonderful thing about Glimcher too, but as time went on he wanted to be successful in a monetary way, so he went the other way.

ROBERT BROWN: This is a good time in Boston too -- you sold out shows --

ROBERT NEUMAN: It was amazing.

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned Sam Hunter coming to Brandeis and Thomas Messer comes to Contemporary Art about that time. Did you get to know him a bit?

ROBERT NEUMAN: I got to know Tom Messer very well, and his wife. He ran the Institute of Contemporary Art the way it should be run, in my opinion, and they haven't done that in a long time but he had a curator who was a young girl, Anne Jenks was her name, a very learned girl from Smith College, who spent 50% of her time touring artists' studios. So when they made a show at the Institute, they knew what was around here, that you didn't have to send to Paris for. So on a low budget they could have very, very exciting shows. Now they don't do that at the Institute of Contemporary Art any more, they don't do anything like it.

So all we artists in the area were in the Institute exhibitions and they came to the exhibitions and the ICA was the spark. It was a very lively place even though it moved about three times. But the whole art community was there, the artists were there, the collectors were there, the university communities were there at the opening. So it was really a stimulating place to go. Now the ICA it seems to me now is more or less a social club -- they stop in for a drink on the way home to dinner or something, it's not very interesting to me from my point of view.

ROBERT BROWN: Messer, you mentioned, wrote up your Barcelona paintings for an Italian magazine.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, there was a magazine called "Evento" published in Venice; Tony Toniato, [phon.sp.] an Italian Abstract painter in Venice, told me about it. They asked me to submit something about American artists, and I did. I got hold of one of the original members of the San Francisco school, Hassel Smith -- I knew he'd written some things -- and asked him to send it in. The Italian magazine did a terrible thing: they lost the manuscript. The artist had done a rather silly thing, sent the original from California instead of making a copy; pretty amateurish. So there was some hard feelings there.

There was more than one issue --I sent some work on Jules Olitski, and Edith Smith and some other Americans too to Time Magazine when they approached me over there to send some information in.

ROBERT BROWN: You were also showing -- this is in the late 50s -- when you first joined the Alan Stone Gallery in New York, right?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. Mr. Stone had been going to Harvard, then he went to law school at B.U., so he was living up here in Cambridge quite a while. I met him at the De Cordova Museum in Lincoln one day at an exhibition, Albert Alcalay and I were there because we had works in the show. A Boston Globe photographer was taking our picture and there was this gentleman hanging around who finally came and asked if he could speak to me, it was Alan Stone. He said he was thinking of opening a gallery in New York City and he'd like to look at some of my paintings. He subsequently acquired a large number.

At one point he came to my house in Brookline and said, "How much for everything in the house??" He bought everything in the house, but of course he got a bulk rate! (Brown laughs) He is the large collector of my paintings in the United States. Allan Stone lives in Purchase, N.Y. and of course has a gallery on Madison Avenue.

ROBERT BROWN: But from him, you've had a sort of unvarying deal, right?
It's been consistent, but on the other hand --

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, he's been consistent over the years, he's shown my work a couple of times in small one-man shows. But New Yorkers don't seem to respond to my paintings much, but nonetheless he consistently acquires one or two or three at a time. So he's been very good to me and we're very good friends today. As time has gone on, his gallery has gone in a little different direction. He's into Naturalism more now than he used to be. He's had shows of course; Richard Estes and Wayne Thiebaud are his major artists he shows most of the time.

ROBERT BROWN: Artists like that would you lump to a degree with the Pop artists?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes. I don't think Thiebaud considers himself a Pop artist but he uses Pop subject matter in a similar way that Pop artists do. I knew Thiebaud when I lived in California, he made his living as a commercial artist then, and you can see that in his paintings: there's very much a layout attitude in his paintings.

I never met Richard Estes till I started going to summer up in Northeast Harbor, Maine, because Alan Stone owned three houses up there and he traded one to me for some paintings and traded the other one to Richard Estes for some paintings, and Alan lived in the other one. So we see each other all summer long. I show in a gallery up there now, called the Insbruck [sp] Gallery, run by "Thistle", Miss Aurelia Brown, of New York City.

It's just a summer gallery but she's very "loose" in the sense of her philosophy of life, she leaves the artists alone. You bring whatever paintings you want, she doesn't select them, you can have something to say about the hanging of the exhibition if you wish, and she's willing to listen to new ideas, what you should show and shouldn't show. I wouldn't bother with a summer gallery except that I had extraordinary good luck there -- it's a very affluent area in the summer. There are collectors there from London. I sold some paintings to London from there, and Washington, DC, and Detroit, New York. There are people there from Monte Carlo, it's a very international community. That's what makes it interesting for me to exhibit there in the summer.

ROBERT BROWN: Stone, on the other hand, you've mentioned, has said he wants you to be consistent, that's what sells and that sort of thing. He would like to manipulate you, if he could?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I don't think he would do that at all, but I did ask him once, since he was a successful New York art dealer what he would say it is that makes certain artists successful in New York. And he said, "You've got to have something recognizable in painting, you've got to have large production, and you've got to have a dealer that controls the production." Which is pretty much what they all do. There are times when there are few paintings available and there are times when there are a lot available -- it doesn't necessarily have to do with artists' production.

ROBERT BROWN: But, rather, the dealers parceling it out.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, the dealer's perception of how to deal in art.

ROBERT BROWN: What the market will bear.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes.

ROBERT BROWN: You continued teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art. Then in 1960 you taught at Brown University. Were you there for a bit?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, I was enjoying Massachusetts College of Art, and I was paid, I think, $3,800 a year --

ROBERT BROWN: You mentioned you liked the students there, they were from all sorts of backgrounds.

ROBERT NEUMAN: It's true. I did enjoy professional art schools a good deal because at that time, in '50, 60s, and after that the College was called colloquially "Mass Art" because the masses went to that professional art school. Most art schools are expensive, so you don't find the masses there. But this is the only state-owned art school in the United States, and one of the very earliest art schools founded in the United States -- it was founded during Revolutionary War times to do decorative work such as wrought iron and such. I enjoyed it there because of the spread of the students. There are also foreign students there. But I knew other artists in this area. Some were at Brown University -- Hugh Townley the wood sculptor --

ROBERT BROWN: Was he doing his sort of fit-it-together work at that time?
He's been doing it consistent for a long time.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, he's a student of Zadkine and after the War he stayed on the GI Bill in Paris and studied there. Many other American artists after the War studied with Leger. Many stayed there many, many years -- Jason Berger [phon. sp.] is another one who was there at the time, and Harold Tovish. They all live here in Boston.

Walter Feldman was the chairman of the art department at Brown University. I didn't know him very well -- oh no: he wasn't the chairman yet, George Downing was, an art history professor at the University of Chicago, a very fine man. I went down there because I thought it was a school with a higher intellectual interest in art than the one I was in. Sure enough, they gave me a part-time job.

I told the new president of the Massachusetts College of Art, kind of a political type of appointee, and he said, "That's against the law, you're full-time here, you can't teach down there." And I said, "Well, I'll have to leave but it's only part-time down there." He said, "Well, we'll look the other way for a little while." I told him it was only for a semester, because I wanted to see what I was getting into.

So then I subsequently decided to go there and left Mass Art and went to Brown. I commuted, I guess it was close to full-time. But then Harvard brings Le Corbusier here and builds a building next to the Fogg Museum and they have no one to teach there; Boston was really booming in those days culturally and every way you can think of. They brought Mirko Basaldella, the sculptor, from Italy, to be head of the program --

ROBERT BROWN: Had you known him in Italy at all?

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I didn't, I knew of his brother, Afro the painter, more. But Albert Alcalay who had the adjoining studio was hired because he was a good speaker but also because he was bilingual in Italian and English; Mirko's English wasn't very good.

ROBERT BROWN: So you left Brown fairly readily, then.

ROBERT NEUMAN: Well, I went there and showed them my paintings, and I recall that one of the professors at Brown, the art historian William Georgi [phon.sp.] was lecturing at Harvard at the time in this building even though he was on the faculty of Brown. He saw my paintings in the chairman's office and said, "What are your paintings doing up there at Harvard?" I said, "Well, what are you doing up there, you're lecturing at Harvard --(he laughs) I'm also interested in these things." Mirko said they needed somebody who could do everything, because most of the people did one thing -- one person did Photography, one person did Design, one person did Sculpture, but nobody could do everything.

So I said, "I can do everything." He wanted somebody to teach Silk Screen and some Printmaking. So I'm not the best in the world at that but I knew enough about it for the level they had at that. So they invited me to come there. So I left Brown and went to Harvard. I took a cut in salary and began teaching in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

ROBERT BROWN: Were you glad to leave Brown? Had you gotten what you could --

ROBERT NEUMAN: No, I liked Brown a lot, they were very nice people, they're very interesting people, they understood art very well down there. They weren't into the trends, they were solid intellectuals, historians, and the art faculty was very simpatico. They had good people there, I liked it a lot. As I look back on it, it really was a tossup.Once I got to Harvard I discovered to my chagrin that something which was a really an albatross around everybody's neck at the Carpenter Center: the architects controlled the Center --

ROBERT BROWN: The architects over at the School of Design?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, the architects in Harvard. They had very close rapport, a lot to say about everything that went on there. So there was an unwritten rule: the director came from Vienna and he was an architectural historian --

ROBERT BROWN: Seckler?

ROBERT NEUMAN: Yes, and he brought people from Austria and Germany all the time. People used to say you needed a reisepaste to take a class at Carpenter Center. There was an unspoken rule or condition that you should not teach art, you should teach visual design and make sure that that's what it was. So --

ROBERT BROWN: What is that?

ROBERT NEUMAN: -- here we were, Mirko, a famous sculptor, and I'm a painter, Alcalay is a painter, and so on -- and the students want to know about art: they told them to go to the Fogg Museum or to leave Harvard and go to an art school, that "we teach visual design." Visual design is what an architect does when he designs a building, he designs it visually on a piece of paper, the intensity of interest in self-expression is very little.

Consequently, I was always getting into trouble because they didn't want -- they called it narcissism and ego-centered and all sorts of -- if anything got expressive and Expressionism. Gyorgy Kepes at MIT was a good friend of these people and he also felt, he even wrote this in some article I read I think in a Boston newspaper, about Expressionists being madmen and neurotics and so forth. Because these people believed so fervently in -- let's put it this way: their version of the Bauhaus.

You have to remember, there were two Bauhauses in Germany, and then there was one in Chicago. I think there were four or five Bauhauses by the time they got through with it. It still lingers at Harvard but it isn't as strong as it used to be.

ROBERT BROWN: So self-expression was "out."

ROBERT NEUMAN: It was verboten. The students were hungry for it. The whole purpose of the Carpenter Center when it was established was to release Harvard students from rigid intellectual endeavor, give them a chance to release their emotions some place. And Gropius was on the board of the group that founded Carpenter Center and he very much wanted artistic expression. But these other architects -- I was with him on visiting committees and he kept reminding them they should go more into creativ