Oral history interview with Gerald Nordland, 2004 May 25-26

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 Gerald Nordland, 2004 May 25-26, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Gerald Nordland
Conducted by Susan Larsen
Chicago, Illinois
May 25-26, 2004

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a digitally-recorded interview with Gerald Nordland on May 25-26, 2004. The interview took place in Chicago, Illinois, and was conducted by Susan Larsen for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Gerald Nordland and Susan Larsen have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written prose.

Interview

MS. LARSEN: We’ll begin this. Okay, we have to wait until –

MR. NORDLAND: Making a little noise.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Okay –

MR. NORDLAND: Not nearly as big as my Walkman.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. All right. I’m here with Gerald Nordland.

MR. NORDLAND: Should we put it like this?

MS. LARSEN: Sure, you’re the important one. I’m here with Gerald Nordland – art historian, curator, critic, museum director – and we’re in his home in – on Sheridan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. It’s May 25th, 2004. And interviewer is Susan Larsen.

So, good afternoon, Gerald.

MR. NORDLAND: Hi.

MS. LARSEN: Good to go. I’m going to be asking you some just basic questions about your life and about – and we’ll proceed chronologically for a little while if that’s okay.

MR. NORDLAND: Certainly.

MS. LARSEN: You were born in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a big place. About –

MR. NORDLAND: I was born in Hollywood –

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: – near Sanborn Junction, where Santa Monica and Sunset come together. And my parents worked in the film business. My father was a printer, and he taught my mother how to be a printer. And she, subsequently, after his death, became a cutter, not a positive cutter, but –

MS. LARSEN: What does that mean?

MR. NORDLAND: Assembling a film, the final film, for presentation.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: She didn’t get screen credit.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, she didn’t?

MR. NORDLAND: It wasn’t the editor, but it was a person that was doing the work that finally got to be okayed and became the film.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, and did she –

MR. NORDLAND: She worked for Columbia and then for Desilu, and he had worked for Warner Brothers.

MS. LARSEN: Oh. And when did your father pass away?

MR. NORDLAND: When I was 10.

MS. LARSEN: My goodness.

MR. NORDLAND: 1937.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, my goodness. And so did you then grow up in the kind of film industry milieu?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, my uncle lived in the valley, and he was a film credit editor for Paramount. And his wife was – did work similar to the work that my mother did. And they actually tied up and worked for Desilu when that was an important kind of facility that supported the whole industry in Hollywood.

MS. LARSEN: Did she work on “I Love Lucy”?

MR. NORDLAND: I think she did. And I think she worked on “Zorro” and all kinds of things, you know? But I don’t think there was any particular aesthetic involved with it. It was just a technological kind of responsibility. The lights had to be just right, and you mustn’t overexpose or underexpose, and keep everything very disciplined.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. And so you lived in Hollywood?

MR. NORDLAND: I lived at 4243 Virginia Avenue, which crosses Hoover, and then Vermont would be the west – the biggest north-south street near there. And it was a small house that my grandfather had built in the 1930s.

MS. LARSEN: So you –

MR. NORDLAND: – depths of the Depression.

MS. LARSEN: And you go way back then into Los Angeles?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Oh.

MR. NORDLAND: I went to Lockwood Street School and Thomas Starr King Junior High School and John Marshall High. And then I took two degrees at USC before I went to Yale.

MS. LARSEN: Now, was Thomas Hart King? Is that what –

MR. NORDLAND: Thomas Starr.

MS. LARSEN: Starr.

MR. NORDLAND: S-T-A-R-R. King.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, good. We’re sort of doing that for the transcriber.

MR. NORDLAND: Sure.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, so when you were in, say, junior high and high school, what were your enthusiasms?

MR. NORDLAND: Jazz. I played drums, string bass, and fooled around with cornet, which I never got to be adequate at. But I was acceptable on drums and string base. And I used the string bass from high school. I took some kind of band program. Theater. I wasn’t thinking at all about art. I was going to be a lawyer.

MS. LARSEN: Oh.

MR. NORDLAND: And when I went to USC, of course, I had a debate scholarship, and all my colleagues were planning on law. And it was only when I got into law school that I realized that I didn’t like lawyers –

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: – and I thought that the adversarial life would be unpleasant. And so I spent a lot of time in the LA County Museum, which was across the street then.

MS. LARSEN: Now –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, the LA County Museum of History, Science, and Art was across Exposition Boulevard. And I went – instead of having lunch, I went over there to look at things anyway. So I got to know most of the curators, and –

MS. LARSEN: How old were you then?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I entered college when I was 17, and I graduated when I was – I graduated from law school in ’50 when I would have been 22 going on 23.

MS. LARSEN: And you went to USC Law School?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Aha. And since we both have a background at USC, I just wanted to ask you what USC was like at that time? What, if any – did you take any art classes at USC?

MR. NORDLAND: No.

MS. LARSEN: No?

MR. NORDLAND: No, I took poli-sci and the requirements, you know? And –

MS. LARSEN: Did you live at home or did you –

MR. NORDLAND: I lived at home until my grandmother died, and then the house was sold. And then I lived on campus, a block or so from Fraternity Row, in a – what had been a living room of a place, but two of us shared this as a bedroom and had our desks and our rather limited wardrobes. I still had a set of drums and a record player.

MS. LARSEN: Was SC – was it a serious, serious school? A party school? Or what kind of a place was it?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I don’t know that I’m really a good person to comment on it, because I was living a very monastic life. I didn’t – I was not a member of the fraternity group. I was usually working as well as studying and going to classes, and I thought somehow that I would either get a PhD. in poli-sci or go to law school, and as I got closer to law school I had more reservations, but I finally made the leap. I was deciding not to go toward the PhD. And –

MS. LARSEN: Did you take a degree in law?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: You did?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: A JD, 1950. And, as I say, I spent a lot of time in the museum, and I found the museum people were very encouraging, and so –

MS. LARSEN: And who was there?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, James Byrnes was the first curator of contemporary – or 20th century art I guess it was called in those days. There was a woman – I think it was Nauman – who was an educator there. And she had been a junior high school teacher of mine, too. Francis Nauman I believe was her name. And there were a variety of people. There were people in prints. And at the time I knew their names, but I can’t dredge them up right now [Ebria Feinblatt, Print curator and Henry Trubner, Oriental art].

MS. LARSEN: Did you go – did you just introduce yourself and go back into the offices, or did you just happen to meet them or –

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, I don’t know how it was that Dr. [William] Valentiner gave me his book on modern sculpture, but he did. And he said, “I want you to bring this back.”

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: And I did. And, of course, that was where I first encountered Brancusi, which was a pretty wonderful thing for somebody to introduce you to. And I started going to galleries and seeing what was going on, and there were a lot of galleries. I was – in law school, I had – I was also doing some teaching. I was a TA in poli-sci and American history. Those were sophomore requirements.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And so I – those were big classes, and you had to have discussion groups, and so I led those discussion groups and made up – helped to make up tests. I didn’t make up all the tests myself.

MS. LARSEN: But you helped to grade them I bet.

MR. NORDLAND: But – well, they were done – they were multiple-choice tests. And – but you had to do, you know, 400 questions to get 200 good ones. So we would do that. And as a result of that, I had colleagues, and some of them had cars. And as a result of that, I was able to get around and see what was going on in the galleries. I encountered Gaston Lachaise at a gallery in Beverly Hills.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: Might not have been Beverly Hills exactly. It was on – off of Little Santa Monica toward Beverly Hills. It might have been just on the edge of it, or it might have been just on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, but it was a big gallery that had a New York outlet. It was a New York gallery, but they had now a California outlet. I think it was called the AAA [Associated American Artists]. And a man named Frank Perls was operating it. P-E-R-L-S.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And he had the Floating Woman – the small Floating Woman, 1922-24. And that was quite a revelation to me. I just found that very perplexing, and so I may have spent more time in the art library than I did in the law library at USC. And I found that there was a monograph that had been in done in ’33 [1935] by Lincoln Kirstein at the Museum of Modern Art. And I found in an Art News that Kirstein was planning a book and he was doing a show at Knoedler. I think it was in ’48, and I was in law school in ’48. And there were some remarkable reproductions, including the Striding Woman, 1926, a wonderful, wonderful, powerful sculpture. And so I began corresponding with Lincoln Kirstein, saying, “When is this book coming out?”

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: After two or three years he said: “You know, I’m falling out of love with him; I think you should do it. I’ve got another project.” And it was later that I discovered that his other project was Elie Nadelman. Of course he did have work to do. I mean, he had been the founder of the ballet program that we now refer to as the City Center Ballet or the – then the Lincoln Center Ballet. It’s not named after him. It’s Abraham Lincoln.

MS. LARSEN: Did he also write for The New Yorker and other things like that?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, he was an inveterate writer. I have a bibliography of his. It’s a sizable book, and it’s just a bibliography. But he wrote for the Dance Index. He founded a dance magazine. He wrote about the neo-romantics. He wrote about some of the surrealists. He wrote about Tchelitchev for the Museum of Modern Art. He did the Nadelman show for the Museum of Modern Art. He did the draft catalogue raisonné on Elie Nadelman for Eakins Press. And he did the catalogue for the Whitney Museum Nadelman show, not as good as Barbara’s, though, show – recent show, which was just right.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s great.

MR. NORDLAND: It’s something to be able to do a show that’s compact and still touches all the bases, which she certainly did.

MS. LARSEN: So, when he said this to you, that you should pick up the Gaston Lachaise project, what did you think about that?

MR. NORDLAND: I took a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad and saved some money and put new tires on a ’38 Ford and headed toward New Haven.

MS. LARSEN: Gosh.

MR. NORDLAND: [Laughs.] That took a little while.

MS. LARSEN: Now, you were going to Yale?

MR. NORDLAND: It took me about nine months to put together enough money to be able to do that comfortably and get rid of my apartment, and my wife and I headed out toward New Haven.

MS. LARSEN: And that was to attend Yale?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, that was to use the Sterling Library’s rare book room where the Lachaise material had been deposited by Madame Lachaise, Isabel, who was still alive. And my first thing was, of course, to call on her. My second thing was to call on Lincoln, and Lincoln put me in touch with Donald Gallup, who was the head of the rare book program and who later became the librarian of Rare Books at Yale. And I was a resident there for two years.

MS. LARSEN: Gosh, now, were you – did you have this arrangement when you – before you left, or did that evolve as you came?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, Lincoln helped a great deal. His word with Don Gallup carried gold weight.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, and so at that point – you did this out of love and enthusiasm and excitement. Did you think it would lead to a career? Was that the –

MR. NORDLAND: No. I didn’t know what it would do. I just felt it was something that was worth doing, and I didn’t think of being a lawyer or – I didn’t think about going back to the idea of being a political science professor was – I’d already had seven years of university, and I did come upon some quite wonderful people at Yale, and I discovered in their lecture programs that there were all kinds of ways of looking at life that I hadn’t seen at USC. SC was basically a Harvard-type case method law school. Yale was very much more sociologically oriented, very much more concerned with the objectives of public policy.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. So the lectures you attended were in political sciences?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, no, they were much more in art –

MS. LARSEN: More in art.

MR. NORDLAND: – but they were – it would be dependent on who was there that day. I –

MS. LARSEN: Who was there? Do you remember any of the people there?

MR. NORDLAND: [George Heard] Hamilton was on the faculty, and he was very interested in Dada and surrealism. And, of course, the Yale collection’s greatest strength is the Societe Anonyme, which was founded by Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Now, Man Ray had been a friend, and I had a couple of Man Rays with me in my –

MS. LARSEN: You did?

MR. NORDLAND: – ’38 Ford.

MS. LARSEN: You met him in Los Angeles?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, yes, he lived the Second War in Los Angeles, and I owned five Man Rays.

MS. LARSEN: Hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And he had also encouraged me in this whole business, and of course he’d introduced me to Max [Ernst] and to Marcel [Duchamp] and to visiting firemen as visiting firemen showed up.

MS. LARSEN: Now, how did you meet Man Ray?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, it was well known that he was around town. He showed at the Fraymart Gallery and he showed at a variety of other galleries. He had an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. It wasn’t called the Pasadena Art Museum then. I think it had another name. But he had the Fraymart show on La Brea. And I got Josephine Kantor, who was Paul Kantor’s wife and was really the brains or the eye of that combination, and Jo made a date for me to go to see Man Ray.

MS. LARSEN: Great.

MR. NORDLAND: And I kept doing that about every other week for a long time. It took me a little while to find a little bottle of scotch to take with me.

MS. LARSEN: Until you learned the ropes, huh? [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: But I was very taken by him. Then Bill [William Nelson] Copley was having a gallery on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. I have the catalogues. And he showed Man, Max, Magritte, Joseph Cornell –

MS. LARSEN: Magritte, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: – maybe [Robert] Matta. And he was building a collection. I remember going to Copley’s first show at a gallery called the Royer Gallery, which was really a bookshop. Royer – R-O-Y-E-R.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And years later I would talk to people like Herman Cherry or others in the New York school who had actually run the Royer Gallery for the bookstore.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: Because it was just a –

MS. LARSEN: Oh.

MR. NORDLAND: It was kind of like a mezzanine up above the bookstore where you could have some works of art.

MS. LARSEN: It was like the coffee shops now.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, like a coffee shop

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] Yes, right.

MR. NORDLAND: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. And –

MS. LARSEN: Interesting. Well, that’s heavy-duty exposure to real artists. I mean, that’s very intense stuff.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, you know, there was also a gallery called the Modern Institute of Art, and it was on the same street as Copley – Bill Copley’s gallery. And people like Vincent Price and the [Walter and Louise] Arensbergs and Ruth Maitland – distinguished names among private collectors – [Wright S.] Ludington from –

MS. LARSEN: Santa Barbara?

MR. NORDLAND: – Santa Barbara. Movie stars. Big names. Edward G. Robinson. I mentioned Vincent.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: I can’t think of all of them now, but people lent things to this, and a fellow named Ross – there was one director – a German-speaking PhD – and then [Kenneth] Ross was the second director. And it – I don’t think it lasted two years.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: I have a catalogue or two. They did shows that were, in a sense, anthologies of European modernism, maybe with an American picture or two. Maybe somebody like [Arthur] Dove, maybe [Marsden] Hartley would get included along with Picasso, [Georges] Braque, Juan Gris. The Germans were mostly excluded, though occasionally there’d be a Paul Klee or two. But I mean, the real expressionists, the Kirchners and the Heckels and the Muellers, wouldn’t have been included.

MS. LARSEN: Did sculptures –

MR. NORDLAND: And no sculpture.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, no sculpture?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, no German sculpture. We didn’t know Germans did sculpture in those days, though God knows there was Lehmbruck, wasn’t there? Anyway, there were some very good shows there that were very illuminating. And to have Bill Copley doing Joseph Cornell or [Rene] Magritte or Ernst or Man Ray or the various things he did – and that wasn’t very long either. I don’t think it was more than nine months that he was in business. But it was sensational. And he made a pledge that he would buy a couple of pictures – or he would sell a couple of pictures, and, of course, as he didn’t sell them, he had to buy them. And he was buying them for 1947-1948 prices.

MS. LARSEN: Well, that collection – a bunch of it – ended up in Los Angeles collections and then ended up in the museums. So I think of the Magritte of the woman cut into parts. I know Edwin Janss bought that. I don’t know, you know, how many hands had it before him.

MR. NORDLAND: I think he got it from Iolas in New York. But there was a great Picasso crying woman, a Dora Marr kind of, you know, crying woman, that was – that – of Bill’s that went to the County, and I think the Magritte went to the county – a cutout figure with various apertures in the torso. And I think there’s at least one more from Bill’s holdings that somehow got there. He was an adventurous guy.

MS. LARSEN: Good connoisseur.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, really.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes. And, of course, he was beginning to paint, and that’s why he did the Royer show. And I didn’t take it very seriously, but I was very impressed with his girlfriend.

MS. LARSEN: Who was that?

MR. NORDLAND: Gloria de Herrera.

MS. LARSEN: Aha.

MR. NORDLAND: Who ultimately did work for Matisse and – in the cutouts and whatever. And Jimmy [James] Byrnes has made a kind of a archive of her work, which I think there was some talk about it going to the Getty, but I don’t know whether anything happened about that or not. But I do see Jim. We’re always – we don’t talk on the phone every day, but we – when I was out there for the Woelffer show, I saw him. And when I was out there for my talk on Ynez Johnston at the Norton Simon the other day, why, I saw them a couple of times – once in the evening of the talk and then once the next day in Torrance with Connor Everts and his wife.

MS. LARSEN: Where does Mr. Byrnes live now?

MR. NORDLAND: He lives on – oh, my – that famous drive that has been memorialized by the British artist Hockney.

MS. LARSEN: Sunset?

MR. NORDLAND: No, no, no.

MS. LARSEN: Mulholland?

MR. NORDLAND: Mulholland Drive.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: It’s also got a movie title in it.

MS. LARSEN: Sure, sure.

MR. NORDLAND: He lives up there in a [Richard] Neutra building that I think he sold his Rothko to buy.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, well, art for art, you know?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I don’t know. I think I’d rather have the Rothko. A beautiful painting. He got it from Mark.

MS. LARSEN: Where did it go? A private collection or you don’t know?

MR. NORDLAND: I think so.

MS. LARSEN: Not to a museum, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: I think so, yes.

MS. LARSEN: So two years working on Lachaise, and –

MR. NORDLAND: And then I got drafted into the US Army. So I got in a 1951 Ford now, which I bought from somebody – I’d met a Cuban at a writers’ conference at Storrs, Connecticut. And I bought this car from him, and we had a decent, safe car to drive to LA to get drafted. And we went through the South and my first visit to New Orleans, and I didn’t say that – in that ’38 Ford – that I stopped off in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in September 1951 to spend an evening with Richard and Phyllis Diebenkorn.

MS. LARSEN: Now, how had you first met him?

MR. NORDLAND: I met him at, I think, an exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art. I think it was the centennial exhibition in 1949 that was put together by James Byrnes, and there was a party afterwards at Mary Stoddard’s in Pacific Palisades or Santa Monica. And we had our first meeting in the kitchen there, and –

MS. LARSEN: And you had some exposure to his work or a lot?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, I knew his work already.

MS. LARSEN: By that time you did? Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: I knew his work already. Paul and Jo Kantor had shown a couple of his pictures around. There had been a picture in the 1948 annual that Paul and Jo bought and eventually gave to the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum of Art, in Pasadena. And it was a wonderful ‘48 picture by Dick that – it was a kind of a definition of abstract expressionism. You know the picture?

MS. LARSEN: I think so.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes. And so I knew that picture. And then in ’49 he exhibited a picture called Miller 22 [1951], which was an Albuquerque picture, I believe. Now, he didn’t go to Albuquerque until January of ’50.

MS. LARSEN: Had he been there for an interview?

MR. NORDLAND: Could be. This picture – we didn’t move pictures around in those days the way we do now. This was a pretty good-sized picture, much larger than this one, and horizontal. I have a catalogue where they reproduced that. If it isn’t reproduced, at least it’s listed as Miller 22. I’m confusing things. The ’49 show was another show. The ’51 show at Miller 22, because he did that picture in the spring of ’51 as he was coming up to the period of graduating with his master’s degree in June of 1951. That’s when Miller was done.

MS. LARSEN: What does “Miller” refer to? Do you know?

MR. NORDLAND: I don’t. I never asked him.

MS. LARSEN: Okay. Who knows? [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I mean, you did your share of interviews with him, and aren’t there an incredible number of obvious questions –

MS. LARSEN: Oh, sure.

MR. NORDLAND: – that didn’t think to ask?

MS. LARSEN: Oh, absolutely. You bet.

MR. NORDLAND: I must have spent 100 days with him, and I mean grilling him.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. He wasn’t easy to grill though, was he?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, well, you know, I’ll tell you another thing. He never let me use a tape recorder.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: But he’d let you use them.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, I don’t know why.

MR. NORDLAND: He forbade it.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh. Well, I’ll tell you the story of that first interview when we’re off the tape. You know –

MR. NORDLAND: Sure.

MS. LARSEN: – take time for –

MR. NORDLAND: Sure. Anyway, he had a picture in that ’49 show that was a San Francisco or Sausalito picture. And I told him that I wanted to write about him, and I corresponded with him a little, and, of course, nothing came of it. I didn’t have a publisher, and I didn’t have a museum, and you know?

MS. LARSEN: You wanted to write at length about him? Is that what you meant or –

MR. NORDLAND: I wanted to do something to make him – make his work known and to interpret it for people. Anyway, nothing came of it. I had also – in subsequent years when I was working at the library, I talked with Frank Lobdell about it, too, and maybe with others, because I was very struck by the depth and seriousness of the San Francisco group and little knowing that I would eventually go to a San Francisco museum. In those days my objective was to go to a place like Santa Barbara.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: I thought that would be just heaven.

MS. LARSEN: Just heaven. Well, it’s very nice there, yes. So we have you getting drafted.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: And how long did that last and what did you see?

MR. NORDLAND: Two years.

MS. LARSEN: Did you go overseas?

MR. NORDLAND: The Korean War.

MS. LARSEN: Were you in Korea?

MR. NORDLAND: No.

MS. LARSEN: No.

MR. NORDLAND: No, I did have a law degree. I sold myself to the staff judge advocate, and I worked as his secretary for a few months, maybe a year, and then I –

MS. LARSEN: In California?

MR. NORDLAND: – then I – at Fort Ord.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: And – near Monterey, California. And then I became a clerk of military justice and eventually become a sergeant. And I was out in two years, while the people that took – the people who were willing to take a commission were in a minimum of three and a half, four. And I was anxious to get back to my book. But then we – my wife and I – had a baby, and I had to do something else. I – while I was at Yale working on the Gaston Lachaise book, almost every weekend I was going somewhere – to Maine, to New York, to some place in Connecticut – to interview Carl Van Vechten or – let’s see – Edward M.M. Warburg; Gilbert Seldes; [Philip] Goodwin, the man who designed the Museum of Modern Art; people who had been friends and collectors of Gaston Lachaise. And, of course, I spent time with Madame Lachaise in – both in Lexington and in Maine.

MS. LARSEN: Where – this is Lexington, New York?

MR. NORDLAND: Lexington, Massachusetts –

MS. LARSEN: Massachusetts, okay near Boston.

MR. NORDLAND: – where her son was in a government hospital there as a result of trauma he suffered in World War I.

MS. LARSEN: Where in Maine did she live?

MR. NORDLAND: She lived in Georgetown, Maine.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: Or near Georgetown, Maine. And she lived very close to the Zorachs.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: In fact, they – her first – she had had a place in Maine with her first husband, Nagel, and then she found this other place, and Lachaise bought it for her. And then I don’t know whether you know this, but Lachaise gave [William] Zorach a set of carving tools.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: He was a watercolorist.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And sometimes an oil painter. But he was primarily a watercolorist. And Lachaise really inspired him to be a sculptor.

MS. LARSEN: Gosh, when was this? Probably – what – the teens, the ‘20s?

MR. NORDLAND: I would put it in the early ‘20s.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: I’ve never – I never asked – I never knew Lachaise, you know? He died in ’33. I did know Madame Lachaise, and I lived in her house for a while. And, as I say, I visited her often. But while I was doing all of this, I was also working for Winchester Repeating Arms half – four hours a day, and I started out just doing menial work, putting 50 calibers into boxes and then crating them. And – they were machinegun loads for the Korean War. And then crating the boxes that would be rationed to each weapon. And the – one of the people in personnel who was involved with training asked to have an interview with me, and so I interviewed with him, and he found out that I had done college teaching, that I had a law degree – he knew that – that I had an undergraduate degree with poli-sci and government and economics. And he said, “How would you like to teach for me?” So I began doing industrial teaching for the development of supervisory skills and talents and procedures for Winchester. So I was four hours a day at the Winchester Repeating Arms. I was four hours a day, or maybe 5, I could squeeze out, at the Sterling Library. And then on the weekends I would go to do my interviews –

MS. LARSEN: Busy, busy.

MR. NORDLAND: – with these people. And I got drafted, and so that was all done. But as soon as I got back from each of these interviews I would transcribe my notes. And, as you know, if you transcribe your notes within a day or so, you can remember what you didn’t write down –

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: – and you could fill in “blah, blah, blah, blahs” which otherwise two or three or four or five or 10 years later you wouldn’t know what you’d said or what happened. So I had hundreds of pages of typed script with all the people that I visited with. And that was – when I finally got back to working on my Lachaise book, I had very good records, and most of these people were dead.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. And you had a definitive collection material that could be gathered it sounds like.

MR. NORDLAND: That could no longer be gathered.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, right, right.

MR. NORDLAND: And I – because Gallup had given me a carrel in the Rare Book Room, had given me a typewriter, one of those awful, old typewriters that were so-called “silents.” You know, they’re quiet ones?

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: They’re all muffled, but they’re also – they have no –

MS. LARSEN: No snap –

MR. NORDLAND: Not like my wonderful Royal. But anyway I did the two years.

MS. LARSEN: Now, did you – you know, other people around you were studying art history and taking art history degrees. Did that ever – did they ever offer you something like that, or did that occur to you? Or had you figured you –

MR. NORDLAND: I was quite busy, you know? I didn’t – if Hamilton were to do a lecture, I would certainly go to hear him, and I knew every work in the Societe Anonyme collection better than the curator did.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, yes. And you already had an advanced degree, so maybe that didn’t seem to be –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, you know, a JD [juris doctor] is hardly equivalent for anything except to practice law, but, no, I wasn’t thinking about that. My present wife kicked me around the block most of our life together for not having gotten a terminal degree in my sphere, but I said, well, you know, what could I prove with a PhD? That I could do some original work?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, you already did.

MR. NORDLAND: I have done it. I’ve done it. I’ve got 75 publications that I’m proud of.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And some of them are quite substantial.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, it’s great. Right. Well, it always struck me as surprising that faculties would meet and huddle over resumes for artists, you know, and they would toss out anyone who didn’t have an MA. And I thought to myself, well, de Kooning doesn’t have an MA? And they wouldn’t hire half the wonderful artists in the world because –

MR. NORDLAND: They wouldn’t have hired Hans Hofmann –

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: – and they wouldn’t have hired Josef Albers.

MS. LARSEN: Right.

MR. NORDLAND: And, you know, both of them made great schools.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, they did.

MR. NORDLAND: They built great schools.

MS. LARSEN: They defined their –

MR. NORDLAND: And they created curricula.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, they did. Sure.

MR. NORDLAND: And they changed the world.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, right, and it’s curious, you know? School’s are very curious in that way.

MR. NORDLAND: Did you know that Mr. Albers was the only professor at the Bauhaus who was a trained teacher?

MS. LARSEN: No, I didn’t know that.

MR. NORDLAND: The only one. His father had said you can’t make a living at art, you’ve got to make – you’ve got to get yourself a teaching credential.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: So he taught grammar school, he taught German, he taught everything, you know?

MS. LARSEN: He learned how to teach.

MR. NORDLAND: He did the whole thing. And when he went – when they asked him to come to the Bauhaus, and you know he went to the Bauhaus to make glass, stained glass –

MS. LARSEN: Oh.

MR. NORDLAND: – abstract stained glass, very quickly, you know, the powers that be – Kandinsky and Klee and all of these people – were saying, “[Johannes] Itten has to go” –

MS. LARSEN: Itten, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: “Do you think we could do it with Eupie [Josef Albers]?” And so they brainwashed Eupie to become their teacher. And look what he did.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Look what he did.

MS. LARSEN: Then he went on to Yale and –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, or he came to Black Mountain.

MS. LARSEN: That’s true.

MR. NORDLAND: He founded a whole college curriculum.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s right.

MR. NORDLAND: Remember?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s true.

MR. NORDLAND: He was something. He was really something. And, you know, I know that a lot of people considered him arrogant and a lot of people thought he was, you know, so dictatorial, and if you took his class, he didn’t want you doing homework for other teachers; he wanted you doing homework for him. And if it wasn’t right, he wanted you to go back and start over. But he was trying to teach something, and he knew you taught yourself best. So, anyway, he was magnificent. He was a great, great man and a powerful influence. His students are so loyal.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, they are, almost to a fault sometimes. Yes, they –

MR. NORDLAND: We’re not going to talk about [Neil] Welliver.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. [Laughs.] He lives near me. I see him all the time.

MR. NORDLAND: [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: He is a very interesting guy. Okay –

MR. NORDLAND: Do you know about Clarke & Way?

MS. LARSEN: No.

MR. NORDLAND: The publishers, printers?

MS. LARSEN: W-E-Y –

MR. NORDLAND: W-A-Y and Clarke with an E and Way, New York City.

MS. LARSEN: No, no.

MR. NORDLAND: Or those people at Ives and Sillman?

MS. LARSEN: No.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, they were students of his that formed a printing shop.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: And Clarke & Way did wonderful printing for me when I was at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and published my Albers book, and wonderful typesetting and, you know, hot type, old-fashioned. And [Norman] Ives and [Sewell] Sillman did these original silkscreens, and the kids in the class tipped them in – one yellow, one green, one red.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes. Elegant. Yes, hard to come by.

MR. NORDLAND: An edition of 1,000, except that about 90 of them were ruined. So it’s even a smaller edition.

MS. LARSEN: You don’t see that anymore.

MR. NORDLAND: No, you’ve got to have people that really – you know, they have this real devotion and they want to see it done right and they know you don’t have any money and we’re putting it together with just sweat and –

MS. LARSEN: Sweat and love.

MR. NORDLAND: – and love. And so they did their part, volunteered.

MS. LARSEN: That’s what makes things special like that, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes. It creates morale.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, it creates art too. It creates great things. Okay, so I was – in my questions, I was wondering were you drafted, and you were. And so then you were discharged, and about what date was that?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, the end of June 1955.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, then was it back to Los Angeles?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, I was at Fort Ord, and down to LA. And I think my wife was pregnant again. And I got a job with the Civil Service Commission as an industrial trainer from the experience at –

MS. LARSEN: New England Harbor – Winchester, I’m sorry –

MR. NORDLAND: – at Winchester. And I had been corresponding with Kirstein, Madame Lachaise, all kinds of people – Charles Egan, Betty Parsons, Sam Kootz. I had bought my Motherwell my first day in New York. I bought three Diebenkorns on that evening in Albuquerque. I told him what – “I want to buy that painting; if I get to New Haven, I’ll write to you and we’ll set that aside and I’ll get it.” And I did.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: It took about a year to pay off these things, you know, because –

MS. LARSEN: This was the Albuquerque –

MR. NORDLAND: Albuquerque Number Three, 1951.

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: While I was at Yale, Paul and Jo Kantor formed a gallery on Beverly Drive. Beverly Drive? I believe – I think it’s Beverly Drive.

MS. LARSEN: Was it Beverly Boulevard?

MR. NORDLAND: Maybe it’s Beverly Boulevard.

MS. LARSEN: I think it is.

MR. NORDLAND: Okay, Beverly Boulevard. It doesn’t sound quite right.

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: Ynez Johnston opened the gallery with her show. She did a mosaic for the front to be in the cement. The people that installed it broke it, ruined it. She made a quick ceramic substitute, which was installed and is still there. The second show, I think, was a Diebenkorn show. This was the cover – this was the folder that announced the show. I didn’t have possession of it. He had moved it from Albuquerque to LA with his other pictures, and they chose it for the cover. They thought it was the most distinctive work and it would be the best reproduction. I have a copy of it. In the army I would be writing back and forth to Jo. She was a really good friend, the greatest personal friend of Ynez. And, for example, out of the first de Kooning show at Egan –

MS. LARSEN: The black and white show?

MR. NORDLAND: – she wanted to buy the whole show.

MS. LARSEN: Smart.

MR. NORDLAND: Only one picture sold to Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd of Philadelphia. See, Kantor didn’t have this nerve. She had the nerve. She said “This is – this guy is great.” Anyway, she took one of my – this was McCarthy days. I was being investigated by the CIA because I had associated with all kinds of radicals as a kid on campus, and –

MS. LARSEN: You had all these French friends and all this other stuff –

MR. NORDLAND: I had some friends who were, I guess, possibly members of the Communist Party, but – I didn’t know that, but I was – I subscribed to the Socialist Labor Party newspaper. I was a student of poli-sci. I was trying to find out what was happening. And I went to meetings, and I attended things. And I was photographed, and I saw the pictures.

MS. LARSEN: Who showed you the pictures?

MR. NORDLAND: The CIA.

MS. LARSEN: They –

MR. NORDLAND: I was being investigated.

MS. LARSEN: They came to you?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, man, I went back to the judge advocate, and I said, “Colonel Turman, I may get discharged; I may get thrown out.” He says, “Don’t be silly; we’re not going to let anything like that happen.” I was worried.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: But as it all worked out, it was McCarthy days as you know, and there were hearings on radio and television. I didn’t have a television, but I heard them. In the office of the staff judge advocate I heard generals being humiliated by Joe McCarthy in New Jersey.

MS. LARSEN: Just hearing the voice you knew what the content was, even just the tone of voice, you know? Terrible.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I wrote to Jo about things like this, you know? And I did – I told her about going to the San Francisco Museum of Art and seeing these shows, and I explained to her why these people were all communists and radicals and this, that, and the other thing. And it was all in high-spirited foolishness. And she showed my letters to Gifford Phillips, and as soon as I was in LA, he said he’d like to have an interview with me. And we sat in a car outside of the Paul Kantor Gallery on Beverly Boulevard.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: And he said, “How would you like to try to write a few things for me?”

MS. LARSEN: Cool.

MR. NORDLAND: Monthly articles on, you know, what’s going on in LA. And I did that for 10 years.

MS. LARSEN: And what was the publication?

MR. NORDLAND: Frontier Magazine.

MS. LARSEN: Frontier Magazine, and what – since I’m not –

MR. NORDLAND: Published in Westwood.

MS. LARSEN: Okay. And was it a general cultural magazine?

MR. NORDLAND: It was the West Coast New Republic.

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: Not The Nation.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, right.

MR. NORDLAND: The New Republic.

MS. LARSEN: Right. And who else wrote for Frontier?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, let’s see. Giff did. Do you know who Giff is? Gifford Phillips?

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: He’s a, you know, famous collector.

MS. LARSEN: I know him as a collector, yes. Mm-hmm, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And he’s a member of the board of the Museum of Modern Art.

MS. LARSEN: Right.

MR. NORDLAND: I think he’s emeritus now, but he doesn’t do a lot of work.

MS. LARSEN: I think I went to his house.

MR. NORDLAND: He gave them a de Kooning. He gave them a de Kooning of 1948. He gave a Diebenkorn, which they don’t use. He’s given them a lot of nice things. He’s on the board of the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. I think his wife is on the board of SITE Santa Fe. They have a house in Santa Fe. They have a house in Palm Springs or Palm Desert or – I don’t know. One of those places.

MS. LARSEN: Artists always spoke very fondly of him, of his very high level of intelligence about art.

MR. NORDLAND: Very intelligent. Very modest. Very straight. No haggling. If the price is there, if that’s the price, then you either pay it or you don’t pay it. No adjustments. And they’ve been extremely liberal about giving things to museums, to the county, to Albuquerque, to Santa Fe, to Colorado Springs. He was born in Colorado. And he’s in the same family, of course, as Laughlin Phillips –

MS. LARSEN: Oh, uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: – and – who is his cousin, and Duncan, who was his uncle.

MS. LARSEN: So that was a – so there you suddenly – I’ll ask, but I think I know the answer. Did this provide a living?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, no.

MS. LARSEN: No? Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: No, no. No, no. I was, as I say, at the Civil Service Commission. I was teaching night school.

MS. LARSEN: Where?

MR. NORDLAND: At LA Trade Tech.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And I was – and then I was writing – every Saturday was in the galleries and every Sunday I was writing and preparing – and then I went to the public library and continued the same thing.

MS. LARSEN: No, I’m not understanding. What did you do at the public library?

MR. NORDLAND: I was personnel officer for the LA County Public Library.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Because I had all the knowledge that goes with the Civil Service Commission itself. Actually Rick Brown tried to get me to be personnel officer for the LA County Museum, but his board wouldn’t let me, even I didn’t have enough experience they thought.

MS. LARSEN: Wow.

MR. NORDLAND: But Rick did.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, mm-hmm, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Anyway, then I went Los Angeles County Public Library for about three years. And then I went – then I was invited by – oh, my – the director of the Chouinard Art Institute to come down. Mitchell A. Wilder – who had been the director at Colorado Springs and went to Colonial Williamsburg. Then he came to Chouinard. And he went from Chouinard to the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, where he died.

MS. LARSEN: After a long time or very shortly thereafter?

MR. NORDLAND: Ten years, 12 years, something like that.

MS. LARSEN: You know, Chouinard is a very famous place that many people have on their resume. Can you tell me what the purpose of Chouinard was as you understood it?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, it wasn’t a fine arts school

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: It taught drawing and painting, but they were as tools to be used by illustrators, fashion designers. In the war years, in the – well, not in the war years, but in the years after World War II, we had such a magnificent crop of young people, mature young people, who were ready to take on the world and felt that they lost three, four, or five years in getting to this point. Their sense of possibilities were kind of unlimited, and in those – in that period, why, I would say that maybe 25 percent of our people turned out to be professional artists.

MS. LARSEN: Hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: They were successful.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Now, some of them were in advertising. Some of them were in illustration. Now, illustration doesn’t exist anymore. Some of them were – for example, we didn’t teach photography. We taught etching, but we didn’t teach anything else.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: When I came in there, I said we’re going to teach wood block, we’re going to do monotype, we’re going to wood block, we’re going to etching, we’re going to do –

MS. LARSEN: Silkscreen?

MR. NORDLAND: – we’re going to lithography, and we’re going to do silkscreen, we’re going to do the whole thing because all of these are techniques that artists need. And it isn’t just fine artists; it’s commercial artists have to do it too. And then I built in photography.

MS. LARSEN: Look at Andy Warhol, who had a sort of recipe there for silkscreen and photography and – now, it was founded – was it Ivan Chouinard?

MR. NORDLAND: No.

MS. LARSEN: No?

MR. NORDLAND: It was – her name was – gawd, she broke practically every bone in her body while I knew her [Nelbert Chouinard].

MS. LARSEN: I can look it up.

MR. NORDLAND: I can’t think –

MS. LARSEN: It’s okay. I can look it up.

MR. NORDLAND: I can’t think of her first name.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: There’s a book called The Selling Out of Chouinard, which Dick [Richards] Ruben was very fond of. It was written by a guy named Perine – P-E-R-I-N-E. I can give you the exact title [Chouinard: An Art Vision Betrayed, The Story of the Chouinard Art Institute 1921-1972,1985].

MS. LARSEN: Okay. So was it really –

MR. NORDLAND: If not –

MS. LARSEN: You know, there have been a number of notable art schools in Los Angeles that have a certain kind of a spirit that less – that’s sort of unfettered, and they’ve flourished for a certain amount of years. Were you there at a time when this was a very dynamic place?

MR. NORDLAND: It was a very hot school. We had people like Dick Ruben, and we had Bob Irwin and Don Graham.

MS. LARSEN: Was Ken Price there as well? No, that was Otis –

MR. NORDLAND: Ken went to USC, and then he went to the wonderful school in Upstate New York where Bob Turner is.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Alfred [New York College of Ceramics University, Alfred, New York].

MS. LARSEN: Yes, okay.

MR. NORDLAND: [Stepping away from microphone.] This is a Bob Turner. I did his first great museum show at Milwaukee, and I did [Richard] DeVore’s first great show at [Milwaukee] – I did Voulkos show, but my Voulkos show was sculptured bronze. It was at SFMA.

MS. LARSEN: Right, right.

MR. NORDLAND: This is probably the wrong order.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s okay. This happens, you know? Loopy like –

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] Okay, so you were –

MR. NORDLAND: I was only there four years.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, were you the director or where you the program director?

MR. NORDLAND: I was dean and director, yes.

MS. LARSEN: You were dean and director, okay, so you were in charge – were you in charge of curriculum and faculty and fundraising as well?

MR. NORDLAND: Ultimately, but Mr. Disney handled my fundraising.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, so –

MR. NORDLAND: He picked up – we usually ran around $100,000-$110,000, my deficit at the end of the year.

MS. LARSEN: Wow.

MR. NORDLAND: And he was quite disturbed when I decided to leave. But it was only – it was a stage for me. I was – I thought I wanted to be in a museum. And I got my opportunity in Washington.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Now, this is not a – I’ve seen this in your resume. I should ask you, though, before – a couple of things. When you were writing for Frontier, did you write about the Ferus Gallery?

MR. NORDLAND: I probably did more than anybody.

MS. LARSEN: And what was that like? Was that one of many in your esteem? Or was it –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, it was one of the classic galleries in the city at the time, and you noticed when we were going down the hallway I couldn’t remember where this guy’s show or that guy’s show – Oscar Mayer was the name of the antique dealer from whom I got the Cypriot pot and from whom I got a Proto-Corinthian pot –

[END TAPE 1, SIDE A.]

MR. NORDLAND: – which I gave to my assistant in Washington, who just died. And then I jumped to Ray Lewis, who was a very good print dealer in Frisco, who I bought my Kirchner from. Another wonderful dealer [Ralph Altman] did primitive art on La Cienega near Melrose. I think he’s memorialized in the Ethnographic Museum at UCLA, where his wife worked there after he died. But that’s the fellow who – probably closed about ’75 – that you wouldn’t have had a chance to know.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, right, that I wouldn’t – yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Emerson bought a lot of good things from him. Emerson got a New Ireland piece that is, you know –

MS. LARSEN: Magical, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, top museum quality. He paid a lot of money for it, but – I mean, in those days it was a lot of money.

MS. LARSEN: And then there was Landau –

MR. NORDLAND: Altman. Altman.

MS. LARSEN: Aha! Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: Ralph Altman – A-L-T-M-A-N. I don’t remember the name of his wife. Quite a pretty woman, brunette. She went to the Ethnographic Museum and handled things. Now, how do they call that museum now? It has a name.

MS. LARSEN: I don’t remember. Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: I don’t remember.

MR. NORDLAND: I think it begins with a “K.” I can’t –

MS. LARSEN: It’s a nice – it’s a great place. So there was like the Landau Gallery.

MR. NORDLAND: The Landau Gallery was a pretty good gallery. And he got better and better. He asked me who were the great sculptors, and I said, well, the great sculptors are – there are just three of them, Americans. There’s Lachaise. There’s Nadelman. And there’s Nakian. And he made a lot of money on all three of them. He would learn.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Paul Kantor had a good gallery. Frank Perls had a very good gallery. Frank Perls was already showing [Jean] Dubuffet, and he was showing Giacometti, and he was showing – well, of course, he always showed Picasso. He was getting the new prints, you know, the new wood cuts. That was a very exciting moment. Paul was starting out with Kirchner. Well, he started out – I told him about Weyhe [Weyhe Gallery and Book Shop] on Lexington Avenue. I said there’s a Solander box there with Gorky. He went and bought the whole box.

MS. LARSEN: Wow.

MR. NORDLAND: Dove.

MS. LARSEN: And so in all of this mix – from my perspective –

MR. NORDLAND: Then he moved into the Germans, and he was getting things from Germany. I don’t know he did that. He was very – Jo pushed him on Diebenkorn, and then Diebenkorn pushed him to show [Elmer] Bischoff and [David] Park.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: Now, he only showed each once.

MS. LARSEN: Really? Hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: He didn’t really cotton to that. And he didn’t cotton to Diebenkorn’s figurative period.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, really?

MR. NORDLAND: He got rid of it.

MS. LARSEN: Happily, there were takers who were far better able to help him. So that’s good.

MR. NORDLAND: There was Ellie Poindexter [Poindexter Gallery, New York City].

MS. LARSEN: Yes. And now –

MR. NORDLAND: And he stayed with Ellie for years, very loyal even though she didn’t sell, even though she didn’t know anything about pricing art, but she loved the art and she was loyal. He eventually went to Marlborough.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And he left Marlborough as soon as he legally could. He had three shows, five years. And I wrote the first catalogue. Russell wrote the second one. The third one doesn’t have a text.

MS. LARSEN: You could feel the weaning of the relationship that way, huh? So from my perspective, like the people in my generation who came along in the mid ‘70s into the ‘80s who were looking back on that time, a lot of the texts and accounts of it focus very heavily on Ferus.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: And –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, a lot of those are – I gave it a lot of credit. I treated it as an important aspect of what was going on, but there was a lot of not very good stuff there. It wasn’t so clear. It was one thing when Ed Kienholz was running it. It was another thing when Irving [Blum] was running it. Blum was more involved with glitz and flash than he was with content, and he did bring a New York point of view. And that, of course, is why he went with Stella and why he went with –

MS. LARSEN: Warhol.

MR. NORDLAND: – with the Warhol things. Well, you know, the Warhol things had not been shown in the East, and then he bought the whole thing. And, of course, that was his retirement fund right there.

MS. LARSEN: But it also kind of put a period to the end of the – it kind of – the LA artists who were gaining a perch and who were exploring being out there as artists and exploring the community suddenly were upstaged by this tidal wave from New York, and I don’t think they ever – I mean, they all struggled, I think, to find another perch, to find another time when they could address the audience in that continuous way they had before.

MR. NORDLAND: [Craig] Kauffman had been shown at Felix’s [Landau]. And then he came over to Ferus. And Chico and he were buddies.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Dick Ruben knew everybody, and he was quite a bit older. He was born, I think, in ’25, while Chico was probably born in ’32, or something like that.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Maybe less. Maybe – because he was still in college when he was running the Syndell Studio. That’s why the place was never open. I made appointments with him, and he never came. I never saw the Syndell Studio. I made appointments to do a favor for him. He never showed up.

MS. LARSEN: And he didn’t show up.

MR. NORDLAND: He never showed up.

MS. LARSEN: Who is Chico?

MR. NORDLAND: Walter Hopps.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, okay. Right.

MR. NORDLAND: I wonder what happened to his wife.

MS. LARSEN: I don’t know.

MR. NORDLAND: Did you know Shirley? She also married Blum –

MS. LARSEN: No, I didn’t.

MR. NORDLAND: – later.

MS. LARSEN: No, I didn’t know her.

MR. NORDLAND: She was the first Ph.D. from UCLA.

MS. LARSEN: Really? Wow.

MR. NORDLAND: Art history.

MS. LARSEN: No, I didn’t know her.

MR. NORDLAND: I don’t know what happened to her.

MS. LARSEN: When I came, the relationship between UCLA and USC was up, and there was very little discussion and there was frank – a very frank enmity. And I didn’t even – I wandered into that not – you know, kind of not knowing.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: And then I got busy and I didn’t care.

MR. NORDLAND: Sure.

MS. LARSEN: You know? So it never was a big deal for me. But there wasn’t a warm open door or collegial back-and-forth. It was strained. So – and I’m sure it was the creation of people before us, but we just knew that was there.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, there were some awful people at UCLA. [Jan] Stussy and [Gordon M.] Nunes were god-awful people. They got rid of Dick.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, he told me about them, but I’d like to hear a little, whatever you wish to say, you know?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, whatever he said is right.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Whatever I say is –

MS. LARSEN: Well, he –

MR. NORDLAND: – is second-rate.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, he was so discreet about it. He just said that he explained to them that his work was starting to sell well and there was a lot of demand for his pictures and the time in the studio was really precious. And he asked most respectfully to have a half-time appointment or a one-semester-a-year appointment or some kind of reduced appointment and retain his teaching. And he didn’t lay it out for me, but I could pretty well figure that whatever they were paying him was pittance compared to what he was making as an artist. So some of these other people were so envious and so narrow-minded that they said, “No, no, you either show up and do the full load or forget it.” And that’s what he told me that I remember.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, they didn’t have anything to say in the studio so they liked to sit around and drink coffee and -

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: – and philosophize and talk forever about who would be promoted and who wouldn’t and this, that, and the other thing. And he just couldn’t give it the time.

MS. LARSEN: Right.

MR. NORDLAND: He always said, with David Park, that a professional artist has to work every day. Every day, 365 days a year, unless it’s a funeral or you’re out of town or – you work every day. That’s the way it is. Ulfert Wilke had a German phrase for it, and you may know it. But –

MS. LARSEN: I don’t, no.

MR. NORDLAND: – the essence of it is “if you leave painting for a week, it leaves you for two.”

MS. LARSEN: Yes, I’ve heard that. Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Dick always worked. Now, let’s say on Sunday maybe he would not work as many hours, or let’s say, if they were having a dinner party, he would cut it short a little and try to do a little something for Phyllis, but Phyllis really was very understanding that he had a vocation.

MS. LARSEN: Sure, sure.

MR. NORDLAND: A real vocation. And –

MS. LARSEN: And to be busy with all of the school’s business, a faculty member at a big university is already a full-time job, and I remember, you know, just feeling that it made perfect sense to me that – but I think they probably felt he saw himself as above them or better than them. And, of course, he was.

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, he was.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, so –

MR. NORDLAND: A damn sight better.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, but a long shot.

MR. NORDLAND: And, you know, they were – Nunes said that he would – said about my stewardship of the galleries that he’d rather not have a gallery on campus than have the kind of thing I was doing.

MS. LARSEN: Hmm. That’s a typical thing that goes on with faculties and art galleries, though, isn’t it?

MR. NORDLAND: He didn’t think I should bring Houdon [J. A. Houdon 1741-1828], that it had no relevance to the 20th –

[AUDIO BREAK.]

MR. NORDLAND: We did what needed to do with the Washington Gallery of Modern Art?

MS. LARSEN: I think so, unless there’s –

MR. NORDLAND: And –

MS. LARSEN: – something that you remember that we should – see when this starts, and – okay, I think we are moving along here now if I move this further over toward you. Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: Okay.

MS. LARSEN: You’re the important speaker. One thing we didn’t talk about was CalArts, and that – I’m a little unsure where that fits in terms of –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, while I was serving as dean of Chouinard and before Mitch Wilder left to go to Ft. Worth to the Amon Carter, there was a Pasadena lady who was interested in music and the LA Conservatory who was speaking to Mitch and Walt Disney about the possibility of having something that would be parallel to Caltech that would be called CalArts, California Institute of Arts, and that it would involve the fine arts, the applied arts – music, dance, probably opera. And we began to collaborate and work together with the LA Conservatory, and we rented an Elks building which was down the street from Otis. And I employed my humanities staff, and you know, I hired them from Pomona College and USC and UCLA and Cal State University - Los Angeles. And –

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. That’s nearby.

MR. NORDLAND: And I got my faculty like that. I had – for example, when we taught astronomy, we didn’t do mathematics, but we had a man from the observatory come. And I tried to do things that were visual.

MS. LARSEN: Sounds great.

MR. NORDLAND: I had a botanist – a fabulous teacher, a fabulous teacher. And they were dissecting flowers, and they were taking plants apart, and they were learning the scientific method. They were getting what they needed, but they weren’t taking physics or chemistry.

MS. LARSEN: Sounds terrific. Delightful. [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: And they didn’t have any math, you know, because they couldn’t handle that.

MS. LARSEN: Where do you sign up?

MR. NORDLAND: But we also had a department of industrial design. You see, we hadn’t had one, so I brought in John Lautner, the architect, and a couple of very spiffy designers, and we had an annex down the street from Chouinard on the opposite side of the street. It was a kind of a warehouse. And I used to paint that thing three times a year because, you know, artists are so rowdy.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: But in the basement of that I had the technical school, and I also had a requirement for – it was like a foundation course in handling materials. It was called Materials and Methods, and we had all the electric saws and sanders and everything that you could possibly want to have in the making of wooden and plastic and metal objects. And everybody had to take that in their freshman year, even if they were fashion designers.

MS. LARSEN: Oh. It probably helped in some way or another –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I kept saying you mustn’t make a decision about what you’re going to do until you know what the supermarket has in it. And until you’ve been through a couple of years here, you’ll not going to know what your choices are. I mean, you can’t make your choice in high school because you don’t know anything about the world. Now, of course, some people say, “I’m going to be a fashion designer,” and that’s it. Or somebody says he’s going to be a painter, and that’s it. But if he finds out that there are other things, he may decide to branch. And –

MS. LARSEN: Sometimes you find out that the thing you might want to do you’re not especially gifted at doing, but you do have a knack with something else.

MR. NORDLAND: I had taken a class – I taught modern art history, and I did a class one meeting a week – it was about an hour and a half – for graduating people. And it went all through the year, the senior year, and I would have, like, an accountant come in and we would talk about why does one need an accountant and what does one have to do if one’s an artist and how to set up things in order to have a business-like kind of protection for yourself. And I had lawyers, art critics, curators. And I had one girl I brought in every year. She drove a rather fancy Mercedes-Benz convertible, and she lived in the Hollywood Hills, and she went to Europe twice a year, and she painted most of the time. But she also did about 20 to 30 swimsuits a year, and the swimsuits, of course, supported this lifestyle.

MS. LARSEN: She sewed them or designed them?

MR. NORDLAND: She designed them.

MS. LARSEN: She designed them.

MR. NORDLAND: She designed them, and she went to see what they were doing in France, what they were doing in Italy, and this and that. And she came back and did what she did, and she got them made up and she went back to her studio, parked her Mercedes very carefully. I always felt that she was real example for those kids, you know? But, as I said, I had about 30 guests a year. I didn’t pay them anything. They all – they did it just to be – to give back to Chouinard. And I thought that was wonderful.

MS. LARSEN: Sounds great.

MR. NORDLAND: I mean, it gave them a sense of contact with the real world, and I had doctors come in and talk about the side-effects that come from breathing certain kinds of materials that are used in industry, because, you know, at that time there was an awful lot of playing around with synthetics and there were people that were going to hospital or even people dying. Do you remember a fellow named Robert Mallary [b. 1917]? M-A-L-L-A-R-Y

MS. LARSEN: Yes, uh-huh..

MR. NORDLAND: Well, he was a close friend of –

MS. LARSEN: Thiebaud.

MR. NORDLAND: – Elaine de Kooning’s.

MS. LARSEN: Okay. And also Wayne Thiebaud.

MR. NORDLAND: I didn’t know that.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, we talked at length about Robert Mallary.

MR. NORDLAND: I’ll be darned. Well, he died from some kind of synthetic plastic material that he was using in the preservation of his sculptures and the making of his sculptures.

MS. LARSEN: Was this kind of period when Craig Kauffman and Larry Bell and –

MR. NORDLAND: It was a little bit before that.

MS. LARSEN: – all of those guys were doing that.

MR. NORDLAND: A little bit before that.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Because those kids were still in school.

MS. LARSEN: Right, okay.

MR. NORDLAND: But – I also – as often as anybody came to town, like Ray Parker was having a show at USC or he was having a show at Dwan Gallery, I had him do a talk. He didn’t want to do a talk, and it was a burden, and I said, “I’ll give you a wonderful lunch.”

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: And Reinhardt did, and Reuben Nakian did. Mallary did. Larry Rivers did. Whoever was dropping by, I had them talk at lunch time. I put up a public address thing, you know? And in our atrium everybody would line inside and on the second floor, and they would get an idea of what was going on. On average I would have them about once a week.

MS. LARSEN: That’s right. Now, this was at Chouinard?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: So as this CalArts idea was cooking –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, we – so the dean of the college – of the LA Conservatory and I and Nelbert Chouinard – I finally got a name, Nelbert – and Mitch Wilder and I think a representative of the Disney Corporation were the incorporators of CalArts. And this lady from Pasadena who had the concept of CalArts/Caltech, a great institution. And, of course, eventually Mr. Disney thought, “Well, you know, I can give this piece of property that’s of no use to me up in Valencia, and I’ll give them $20 million.” And –

MS. LARSEN: There it was.

MR. NORDLAND: There it was.

MS. LARSEN: Now, had you any – so, now, had you any interest in going to Valencia or being involved with that program?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, if I hadn’t gotten the museum position I would have done it, but I – because I loved my years at Chouinard, and I – when I went out to the Disney concert hall, Los Angeles [Ghery Building] opening with – I was just inundated with – old kids, you know? They were all bearded and aged and all.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Nobuyuki Hadeishi and Jerry McMillan and Larry Bell and, you know, all these people. It was just – George Herms.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes. Yes, he’s an old friend of mine.

MR. NORDLAND: It was very affectionate. They really treasure their experiences at Chouinard.

MS. LARSEN: Well, it always sounds, when people speak of it, as a place of true experimentation and a place that didn’t feel stultifying, but felt invigorating and it –

MR. NORDLAND: It was fun.

MS. LARSEN: They look back on it as a – as you say, as a time that was productive and fun.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I stayed over with Connor and Judy – Connor, I had him come in – I think I told you that Dick Ruben had taught etching at the school.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And when he went to Pomona, I brought in Connor, and I said, now, I don’t want you – because he was an etcher – “I don’t want you to teach etching; I want you to teach the whole thing about the processes one uses, all of the processes.”

MS. LARSEN: Now, Connor is Connor –

MR. NORDLAND: Connor Everts. E-V-E-R-T-S.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, yes, that’s what I thought.

MR. NORDLAND: And so he not only created the curriculum; he built the studio. And he kept it so that etching thing down here would not etch the lithography stones down there. [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: That’s good.

MR. NORDLAND: You know? And he would start them out with monoprints – the whole idea of you’re doing something here and putting it there and having it reversed. And then he would take them to woodcuts. And then he went all the way along until finally he was working with photo processes. And, of course, he really came to his fulfillment at Cranbrook [Academy of Art], where he was the master of printmaking there. And they had all the photo things. We started the etching thing before I’d brought Edmund Teske and a variety of people in to do photography.

MS. LARSEN: You brought in Teske to teach, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: What kind of teacher was he?

MR. NORDLAND: Very tender. Yes. And then Edmund didn’t work out. Alexander Hovsepian took over for him.

MS. LARSEN: How do you spell Hovsepian?

MR. NORDLAND: H-O-V-S-E-P-I-A-N. I collect Armenians.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] There are a lot of them in LA.

MR. NORDLAND: There’s Altoonian. There’s Sarkisian. There’s Nakian. There’s Tchakalian. There’s Hovsepian. God knows I’ve got more.

MS. LARSEN: There were a lot of Armenian people on the faculty and boards at USC.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes?

MS. LARSEN: Lots. In powerful positions. Especially when I first came there because I kept seeing all these “-ian” names. I thought what’s that. Okay, so in 1966 you decided to move to San Francisco. How did that come about?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I – in ’64 I went to Washington, and, as I said, after a little while, after a year or so when some of my shows were circulating in the country, why, I was invited to go to San Francisco, and it was very flattering. But I felt like I had unfinished work and I said no. But it didn’t seem to impress my board that I had done this, and one of my board members said to me, “You know, we appreciate your thinking about us and your loyalty, but, you know, you have to think about yourself too, and that is one of the most important places in the country, and it’s a great, honored institution, and, anyway, thanks, but ...” So when they came back and invited me again I went out and accepted.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. Now, who did you – who was your predecessor there?

MR. NORDLAND: George Culler.

MS. LARSEN: And how do you spell his name?

MR. NORDLAND: C-U-L-L-E-R. And he went to the Philadelphia school. I always call it Philadelphia College. It was called The Museum College, and then it changed its name to Philadelphia College of Art. And I think it has changed its name again now. I did a show for them of Fred Sommer.

MS. LARSEN: For the San Francisco –

MR. NORDLAND: No, no. For the Philadelphia Museum School once.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And that’s quite a famous essay. Metzger was – do you know that name? M-E-T-Z-G-E-R. Metzger? Was the head of photography at the school.

MS. LARSEN: Ray Metzger?

MR. NORDLAND: I think it’s Ray Metzger. That’s the name that comes to mind. Again, I never met him. I’ve seen his work, and we’ve corresponded. But I did my work entirely with Fred. So I – and I did take the show to San Francisco. I took my own show from Philadelphia. Yes, and I had –

MS. LARSEN: What year was that? What –

MR. NORDLAND: I had done a Fred Sommer show before that. I did one in Washington. Fred made a deposit of material at the Pasadena Art Museum with the idea that – he could refer people to them and they would make the loans and all and he wouldn’t have to go through the ordeal of packing, crating, shipping, insuring, etc… by making a deposit there. Walter Hopps was at the Pasadena then, and the condition was that they would make a show. Well, Walter never got around to the show. So through Fred I approached Walter and said, “Why don’t I do the show?” So I did the show in Washington, and then I sent it to Pasadena.

MS. LARSEN: Now, is this about ’65-’66?

MR. NORDLAND: This would be in ’65, ’66, yes, something like that. Anyway, that was how they really justified having their collection, which – you know, because he had given it to them that they would do these things, and then they weren’t doing these things. You know, he did a Jasper Johns show and there was no catalogue.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: He did a Marcel Duchamp show, and you know what he did? He cut up the Lebel book [Robert Lebel. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Grove Press, 1959] and reprinted it – as a collage.

MS. LARSEN: Wow. Without permission, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, maybe he got permission.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] Oh, no.

MR. NORDLAND: What do I know?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that was weird.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Well, catalogues are daunting enterprises, and often people have no patience and no wish to work that hard.

MR. NORDLAND: That’s what endures. It’s because you’re able to find this.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: You’re able to find this – [picks up a catalogue] – with all its documentation, these pictures, these – you know, this is – boy, that’s something. That’s not –

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: I mean, there he is at Tamarind.

MS. LARSEN: That’s Emerson Woelffer.

MR. NORDLAND: There’s his storage room.

MS. LARSEN: Sure. The show is just a memory in those who’ve – the eyes of those who’ve seen it without a catalogue.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, yes.

MS. LARSEN: And artists know that too.

MR. NORDLAND: And I use – well, as you see, I can find these things –

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: – if you give me a little time.

MS. LARSEN: Very well organized.

MR. NORDLAND: [Laughs.] No, I’m not.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, but you are.

MR. NORDLAND: I –

MS. LARSEN: Better organized than most of us. I can tell you that for sure. So by hiring you, they were hiring a native Californian. Had they ever had a native California director before who had a passion for the art of California?

MR. NORDLAND: You’re talking about?

MS. LARSEN: San Francisco.

MR. NORDLAND: They had Grace Morley, who wasn’t a native, but she was a very fabulously connected woman – connected to the Rockefellers; connected to the Museum of Modern Art, which is, of course, the Rockefellers. She was a scientist, you know? She wasn’t a PhD. She had an honorary degree. But she was, I think, an earth science major in college, and – well, she was a brilliant woman.

MS. LARSEN: And she was director when?

MR. NORDLAND: She was director from ’33 until George Culler replaced her, and she went to work for Jim Sweeney at the Guggenheim. And after 18 months or so she went to New Delhi to run one of the museums. And by the time she was through she was the Commissioner of museums for the state of India.

MS. LARSEN: Remarkable lady.

MR. NORDLAND: She said some very nice things. We met in Milwaukee at a AAM [American Association of Museums] thing, and she was very generous. She knew what was happening.

MS. LARSEN: She knew that you were –

MR. NORDLAND: She knew what was happening, and she was pleased that – because George really fell on his face. Imagine getting rid of “Slow Swirl,” but he didn’t know how to evaluate it. And Katharine Kuh was a con girl.

MS. LARSEN: Now, how did that – I mean, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but how did that happen? This is the Mark Rothko painting, Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea [1944].

MR. NORDLAND: “At.”

MS. LARSEN: Oh, “At the Edge of the Sea.”

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: It’s a monumental, very important painting in terms –

MR. NORDLAND: Dick always related it to the Bayeux Tapestry [ca. 1077].

MS. LARSEN: Yes, and the whole San Francisco school of painters referred to that painting as well.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

MS. LARSEN: And how had it entered the collection and how did it leave?

MR. NORDLAND: I think it came from – I want to say Peggy Guggenheim. I have the catalogue, of course.

MS. LARSEN: But it was there – how long –

MR. NORDLAND: It was then when – I think it came in probably at the time of the Rothko show, probably around ’44.

MS. LARSEN: And it would have been just about brand new at that point.

MR. NORDLAND: And you know Gorky had a show at the museum. He and his – and Mougouch [Agnes Magruder Gorky] had come across the country, and on the way back they got married, I think in Nevada. And Bob Motherwell had a show.

MS. LARSEN: And what entered the collection out of all of that?

MR. NORDLAND: A Gorky was given by Jeanne Reynal. A Pollock – there was a Pollock show. A Pollock was given by – I think it was Peggy, too, I think it was an Albert Bender fund purchase. Nothing from Bob. The Gorky came afterwards. And then Bob Howard, gave a smaller oil on canvas, probably about – you know –

MS. LARSEN: Twenty inches or so?

MR. NORDLAND: Twelve by 18 or something, just not a – I always wanted – you know, I couldn’t afford a real Gorky. What we had was a Picasso Gorky.

MS. LARSEN: Hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: It was a late, high-achieved Picasso Gorky – a fine picture, but it wasn’t –

MS. LARSEN: It wasn’t –

MR. NORDLAND: – the contribution that he made when – you know, it wasn’t a picture like Slow Swirl. It wasn’t even as – it was not quite as good as the Pollock, Guardians of the Secret [1943].

MS. LARSEN: Which is a wonderful painting.

MR. NORDLAND: Which is an important picture. But, again, it’s not a drip picture, though it has a panel in the center that suggests where he’s going.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, but it’s a –

MR. NORDLAND: But he didn’t know anymore than we do.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] But it’s a picture of scale, and it’s a very transitional picture –

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, important picture, more important than the Gorky. But we had the Rothko, the Pollock, the Gorky. I did a Motherwell show, and I bought a Motherwell for – as a memorial to a couple of trustees that died. And after I did the show, Bob gave me two big Open’s [1968-72] – one brown, one blue –

MS. LARSEN: How nice.

MR. NORDLAND: – and 24 works on paper. Then he gave 24 to the Modern and 24 to the Met. And then I bought an etching collage, and I got 10 lithographs from the Spanish suite. They’re like the drawings he did on the walls when he and Frankenthaler first married and went to Spain. And I think that was his first trip to Europe. Yes. She had been to Europe, but he hadn’t. She was from a very wealthy family.

MS. LARSEN: Yes. Well, that’s really –

MR. NORDLAND: The name I said yesterday of the woman who was married to Julian Eisenstein – I got the name wrong. Her name is Lewisohn from Lewisohn Stadium in New York where the concerts used to be given. And her father was a demon collector, and those pictures that she had in her dining room were all from her father.

MS. LARSEN: Those were the Manets and –

MR. NORDLAND: Degas and, you know, just ordinary Vuilliard, Bonnard.

MS. LARSEN: Your ordinary home décor that we all –

MR. NORDLAND: Ordinary little things. Gawd, I was gauche, such a kid. I was 24 or something, I don’t know. Well, I was – I mean, I was out of the army, but I was – let’s say I was 30.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: But I was not worldly.

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes. [Laughs.] Didn’t know quite what to make of all this, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, it was just – it’s so boggling. I mean –

MS. LARSEN: No, it is. It’s shocking, because those things you see in a museum, you don’t see that in a house.

MR. NORDLAND: Exactly, exactly. And –

MS. LARSEN: I’ve had that reaction too.

MR. NORDLAND: And she was – he was a genius, a cryogenic physics PhD, and she was a historian at George Washington University, also a PhD. How often do you find two PhDs in one family?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, especially at that time, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes. Yes, now you do, don’t you?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, well, more people have, you know –

MR. NORDLAND: My assistant, Eleanor Green, called Sue at WGMA [Washington Gallery of Modern Art] when I left for San Francisco, taught here and there and then got herself a PhD, and then she ran Maryland – the museum at the University of Maryland, which is, you know, just a step up the road. It’s not like going very far. But we all lived in Maryland. [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, I know. My boss lives in Maryland. [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, so, that was – her husband was secretary of the Air Force or something, and he was a Caltech PhD.

MS. LARSEN: Well, it takes –

MR. NORDLAND: It’s rare.

MS. LARSEN: – a lot of your youth away. It really does. And, anyway, so when you walked in the door there –

MR. NORDLAND: In Frisco now?

MS. LARSEN: Yes, when you walked in the door there, what did you find in terms of the building?

MR. NORDLAND: Well –

MS. LARSEN: And what did you find in terms of the collection?

MR. NORDLAND: It was the same building that I haunted as a kid, that I had gone to all the time that I was in the army, that I had written these absurd tracts about the radical communist infiltration of the art world that had piqued the curiosity of my friend Gifford Phillips. And – because they so amused Josephine, she showed them to him, and he said, you know – anyway, I found that you had an entrance not on Van Ness but around the corner on Post Street. And you went in there like a side door and “Joe sent me.”

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: And there was an elevator, and you went up in this little, tiny elevator. And when you got up there, you got into a bookstore that was kind of jammed and whatever. And then you turned left and the space went up 25 feet. I always thought those were wonderful spaces. They had floors that were plastic tile. And they had been checkerboard, but they were not checkerboard anymore. And then there was a kind of a chair rail around the room. And there was fabric on the walls.

MS. LARSEN: Really?

MR. NORDLAND: Where am I? And there was the great room. There was the vault room, the huge, long south gallery, a corner gallery, a great, expansive gallery similar to the first gallery at the end, and then a tiny end gallery. The space on the north side had been entirely devoted to classrooms and the so-called members room. And there was a little kitchenette, and there was a members room with – very dark, a few paintings on the wall, a few sculptures, and it was a place you could lounge around in I guess. Anyway –

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. Was it a – since I don’t know much of the building’s history, was it a remade space that had been –

MR. NORDLAND: No. No, no, no. No.

MS. LARSEN: It was made to be an art museum?

MR. NORDLAND: They partly – the SFMA [San Francisco Museum of Art, now MoMA] paid for part of this in the building in the very early ‘30s. The architect was a man named Brown, who also did the building next door, the opera house, and the building across the street, the city hall. And the building was a war memorial, and the top floor –

MS. LARSEN: That’s interesting –

MR. NORDLAND: – the top floor was the museum, and it was the San Francisco Museum of Art. And – but the veterans call the shots. The front door was veterans. The two big elevators were veterans. Everything was marble. And they had their exercises and, you know, whatever they – whatever Elks and Masons and veterans organizations do, why, they did them: their secret societies, their voting people in and voting people out and blackballing people and all those kinds of things. I was able to negotiate, by agreeing to pay for the renovation of their part of the building, to get them off the third floor, and I would then have the fourth floor for exhibitions, the third floor for offices, classrooms, a conservation laboratory, the rest. And that meant that the spaces upstairs that were used for classrooms would go back to being exhibition spaces. Now, in addition to – There was a great rotunda in the center, which was an auditorium, and we always had to set up chairs and all that sort of thing. And that meant that the rotunda was a kind of a building in itself. And there were corridors, and these corridors I usually had drawings in one and photographs in the other. Then outside the rotunda there was a kind of a little anteroom where I would have occasional special shows, like I did the Clyfford Still show there. I was courting Mr. Still, and I planned to devote a room to Clyfford Still forever, as to Motherwell, as to Diebenkorn, and as to –

MS. LARSEN: Now, that was your list of people that you thought –

MR. NORDLAND: Were associated with –

MS. LARSEN: – were the pillars of –

MR. NORDLAND: – associated with the museum. And I was thinking of Rothko, but it ended up that the collection developed around Guston, not Rothko.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, so can you tell me your list again?

MR. NORDLAND: It was Still, Motherwell, Diebenkorn, Rothko, but as I say, the Rothko thing didn’t develop and “Slow Swirl” – I wasn’t able to get “Slow Swirl” back. I met with Mark at Bob Motherwell’s – just outside Bob Motherwell’s. I was going, and he was coming. And I said: “Mark, I need to talk to you. That ‘Slow Swirl’ is part of Western American art history. It’s got to go back.” He said, “Gerry, it’s only money.”

MS. LARSEN: What is that supposed to mean?

MR. NORDLAND: I don’t know. I think what he meant is that I could give him the money, and he would let me have it back. I said, “Can I meet with you tomorrow? I’m going home on Wednesday.” He said, “Well, not this time; next time you’re here we’ll do it.” He killed himself.

MS. LARSEN: Shortly thereafter? Yes. Now, you told me yesterday how that exchange happened, but it was traded away for a lesser painting?

MR. NORDLAND: It was traded away for a very much lesser painting, which I – want to see it?

MS. LARSEN: Sure.

MR. NORDLAND: Does it matter?

MS. LARSEN: The lesser painting?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Sure.

[Transcriber note: Pause as Mr. Nordland gets up to fetch SFMA Handbook with a reproduction.]

MR. NORDLAND: There was an issue of the “Chronicle” when I was fired at San Francisco that I wrote a piece about what I considered a prize collection that I had put together. I think it’s in the color. Yes, I’ve got a little color section here. That was the cheaper way to do it. Well, it’s not coming up.

MS. LARSEN: What color is it?

MR. NORDLAND: There’s our –

MS. LARSEN: Oh, yes. And he made a comment, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: That was the Gorky. And it’s a good picture.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, it is. I’ve looked at it for years. I’ve taught it.

MR. NORDLAND: It’s a –

MS. LARSEN: It’s a juicy picture.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, it’s a nice picture. And that was my de Kooning.

MS. LARSEN: Wow, strong.

MR. NORDLAND: Oil on paper.

MS. LARSEN: Strong.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, I got it from Paul Kantor. Well, we’ll go back to here. “69 by 50, 1960, acquired through a gift of Mrs. Peggy Guggenheim.” So she gave “Slow Swirl,” and when we traded – when – what was it? He traded in 1962.

MS. LARSEN: Well, you know, at a certain point –

MR. NORDLAND: And I guess I didn’t think it was good enough even to reproduce in color.

MS. LARSEN: At a certain point right around that time I don’t think people were looking at the earlier work of Gorky or that of Pollock or Rothko as being as important as their mid-period work.

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, yes, that’s –

MS. LARSEN: And it took a generation of scholarship to be interested in this earlier work –

MR. NORDLAND: But the artist – and I was in tune with the artists. Dick Diebenkorn has said to me, “The only reason I went to that place was to see that picture.” Where did he go? He went to see Jerry [Jermayne] MacAgy’s shows at the Legion of Honor. That was the stuff that was exciting. And Jerry MacAgy gave him a show, long before the San Francisco Museum of Art realized that Dick Diebenkorn was a force. And, of course, I also have a tendency to like early work.

MS. LARSEN: I’m just saying that what –

MR. NORDLAND: I mean, I don’t put the Gorky as important as, say –

MS. LARSEN: Garden in Sochi [1941] or something like that.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, yes, or – well, maybe I do. But certainly not up there with, say, The Waterfall [1943] or, you know, some of those absolutely wonderful pictures, which were still available to buy after he was dead. You know, he left a pretty solid estate.

MS. LARSEN: Even despite that fire, he did. Yes, yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And do you know about the Everett Ellin thing?

MS. LARSEN: No.

MR. NORDLAND: Everett – do you know – does that name mean anything to you?

MS. LARSEN: No.

MR. NORDLAND: Everett Ellin had a gallery on – I want to say Hollywood Boulevard, but maybe it was Sunset Strip in Beverly Hills, up above – you know, up high. And it was just as the Strip began. And he had a drawing show of Gorky coming to him from New York, and the plane crashed and burned.

MS. LARSEN: Ooooh, no! Oh, no!

MR. NORDLAND: So Gorky not only had the fire, not only had the business, not only had the colostomy bag, the broken neck; he –

MS. LARSEN: Terrible.

MR. NORDLAND: The only kind of luck he had was bad.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s true. The only thing he had was a great gift. Wow, that’s surprising that so much has sort of – you know, a certain number of solid things have –

MR. NORDLAND: But it was a wonderful show just now at the Whitney of his drawings. I only went once, but – I went twice to the Guston show at the Met. It was wonderful.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, yes, Guston was – I love them both. They’re so different though.

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, yes.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, a totally different deal.

MR. NORDLAND: But the Gorky was – you know, he –

MS. LARSEN: They can make you almost cry.

MR. NORDLAND: He’s as big an artist as we’ve had.

MS. LARSEN: The further that you go down the road with him, the further there is to go. And that comes out as the sign of a great artist, like Cezanne. You know, when you think, okay, I’ve looked and looked at this for many years, and I’ve sort of gotten – penetrated a little further in there, you know, and then as far as you go, there’s more to go. And that’s –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, you noticed that there’s a – there was a lot of Miller 22 in this picture [Referring to Albuquerque #3, 1951 by Richard Diebenkorn, hanging in the dining room].

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: But, you see, he saw his first Gorky show after Miller and before this.

MS. LARSEN: Wow. Mm-hmm, so who knows, huh?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I mean, there’s some stuff in there.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, there is.

MR. NORDLAND: You know?

[Transcriber note: Both speakers step away from the microphone to discuss a painting.]

MS. LARSEN: That area there, no question. There and there. That little loop there. That – all that there. And these sort of inter-penetrating areas.

MR. NORDLAND: And then the drips go this way and the drips go that way, as they do in Gorky. [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. Yes, it’s a great wonder you have here. I’m so glad to see you still have this, it’s great.

MR. NORDLAND: It’s funny, but I – I always remember this as a big painting.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: But, you know, it’s really a small picture.

MS. LARSEN: Well, you know, not really. If you were to put it up in a museum space, it would still hold a big wall.

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, I’ve seen it hold a lot of big walls. I saw it at the Phillips Collection. I saw it – I used to show it at San Francisco from time to time when I was there, and – but I mean, I’ve seen it in – you know, it’s been in all those shows.

MS. LARSEN: I love all the reds in it too. You have every kind of red from brown-red to blue-red to – it’s really wonderful.

MR. NORDLAND: I –

MS. LARSEN: It’s a real –

MR. NORDLAND: At the fair I had to see a picture that those people in New Mexico wanted to show – wanted me to look at, and I told them it’s not a Diebenkorn. I don’t recognize anything about it. I don’t recognize the material. I don’t recognize the signature. Anyway, when I actually saw the picture, it was even worse.

MS. LARSEN: It wasn’t the one that was on eBay, was it?

MR. NORDLAND: No, no, no. I didn’t get involved with that unfortunately.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] Okay. I saw it on eBay. I remember looking at it and saying I’m glad I don’t have to be involved with it.

MR. NORDLAND: [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.]

MR. NORDLAND: Smart girl.

MS. LARSEN: No, no, I – I never heard a peep, and I didn’t expect to, but I was just glad I didn’t have to figure that one out.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, yes.

MS. LARSEN: Okay. So there was a space and there was a collection, and did you know immediately what you wanted to do, or did – how long did it take you to kind of think what should this be?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, first of all, they weren’t originating their shows, and they weren’t publishing. And so I decided that I was going to get into the business of originating shows and publishing and then circulating shows, because at Washington my Diebenkorn show had gone to New York and Newport Harbor. I had been on the board of Newport Harbor, you know? I had been a guide and a counselor to them. And so I, you know, kind of supported them, and I wanted it to be in California, but I didn’t want it to go to Frisco and I didn’t want it to go to LA. I wanted it to go somewhere that didn’t get a chance to see it, somewhere it would carry the colors. And so I started – I was also trying to save money by announcing four or five shows at a time on one card.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And I remember announcing like five wonderful shows – bing, bing, bing, bing, bing – that would be coming in the spring.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: And that would have been – let’s see, I went there in –

MS. LARSEN: ’66 I have.

MR. NORDLAND: ’66, yes. So that would have been in – and with the spring of ’67 would been a big plan. I found a family – a man named Hunter Land and his wife Susan – who were – they wanted to help, and I got him on the board, and he gave me, I think, $10,000 or $20,000. And I took a gallery – one, two, three – this gallery back here on the far corner just across from –

[END TAPE 1, SIDE B.]

MR. NORDLAND: – And I started experimenting with it, I put in new floors, I put in new walls and I put in new fabrics and I discovered what I wanted to do in terms of renovation.
MS. LARSEN: A little like having like a test case or – and you did it – sort of – little by little –

MR. NORDLAND: I did this just as a test case, yes. Yes, I just retired that room for a while, and then I would put things up in it. And then I kind of came to the idea that I wanted very thick plywood walls, very deep so that I could hold hundreds of pounds of hanging material without – with impunity, you know? And I decided I wanted light floors, wood – light wood floors that were easy to walk on and would give me a lot of bounced reflection from my skylights. And I put in all new lights and filtered lights in the corridors where I had my drawings and my photographs. And as we moved along, people started to feel that there was need for us to move to another building. Pasadena had just built its new building. It cost $7 million., while studies in San Francisco said that we could probably raise three [million dollars]. I didn’t have any endowment.

MS. LARSEN: Really.

MR. NORDLAND: Forty thousand dollars, I think.

MS. LARSEN: My goodness.

MR. NORDLAND: We were operating very thin. Twenty-eight people, including guards.

MS. LARSEN: Did you have a curator?

MR. NORDLAND: I had two curators. I had Anneliese Hoyer, who – Dr. Anneliese Hoyer was a German PhD in art history. She – I – the first year I asked her to do – “I want you to do four shows; I want you to do a local etcher. I’ll give you four names, and you choose the one you want. I want you to do Ynez Johnston, Leonard Edmondson, and Sam Francis.” And she didn’t know any of them, but she had a wonderful time.

MS. LARSEN: Good.

MR. NORDLAND: She was ready to retire, and I said, “I want you to stay for a year and do these things, and I’m going to bring in somebody to be the first professional registrar.” Because my registrar, a wonderful black guy [Hayward King], went to Richmond to run the Richmond Museum, and he did a Dick Diebenkorn drawing show.

MS. LARSEN: Good.

MR. NORDLAND: And – he’s dead now. She said, okay, she would do it, and she did the Ynez Johnston, and she chose not to write about her. But she forced Ynez to write something.

MS. LARSEN: Huh.

MR. NORDLAND: And at the talk in – at the Norton Simon the other day I read about a half of what Ynez had written because, you know, she just – she’s very bright, very. She’s an impressive woman. She’s capable of doing unusual writing, but she doesn’t think she is.

MS. LARSEN: [Laughs.] So, happily, someone got her to apply herself to it.

MR. NORDLAND: And I was – and so she got her to do that. And I was so proud of that. And I saluted Dr. Hoyer and Ynez at the same time in my reading this piece and said, “Nobody’s ever gotten her to do that ever before.” Ynez wrote me the nicest letter I think I’ve ever received saying how thrilled she was and how the research and the care that I had used – and how I got just the right slides, and you know, I had 200 –

MS. LARSEN: Well, that’s good.

MR. NORDLAND: – and I got it down to about 68. But I also showed her influences: Picasso, Matisse, Braque –

MS. LARSEN: Klee maybe?

MR. NORDLAND: Klee. Two Klees. Miró. And who was the last one? I don’t know. Sometimes my mind is a blur.

MS. LARSEN: Well – [unintelligible] –

MR. NORDLAND: But everybody was really kind of full of consternation: “What is all this about?” You know? But the thing – they were her influences, but she transformed them so that you never would know. I mean, she so uniquely and personally herself that – but – except for the color, the wonderful color. You know, she gets better as she grows older. She’s 84 now, just a couple of days ago. And the color is fabulous.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, color is great. Color is –

MR. NORDLAND: And you know she worked with so many different materials. It wasn’t just watercolor and oil and etching. She worked with so-called “liquid steel.” She worked – kind of something that you’d think Dubuffet would have played with and then carved into it.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, those I’ve seen.

MR. NORDLAND: And then the silks and the –

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm, fabrics.

MR. NORDLAND: All of these – all these strange chemical dyes on silk, and the color! My gawd, Mark would have loved it. They knew each other.

MS. LARSEN: Did they?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, they met in Colorado when she was teaching for Jimmy Byrnes at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. Mark was teaching a summer at Boulder, and they met. And she said he was very generous, very generous, and told her some things about her painting that she didn’t recognize at the time.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, which helps you a lot. It helps you move ahead faster sometimes.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: And that was when you’d see Emerson smoking with Mark. It was when he was in Colorado. Yes.

MS. LARSEN: Well, that doesn’t fit the history books, I must say.

MR. NORDLAND: No, no. And you know Bob Motherwell was there teaching one semester, one summer semester, with Ynez. And that was how he first met Emerson and how that – because that was really a companionship. The rest of their lives they were really close.

MS. LARSEN: Those are gifts you can’t – beyond measure. So your one curator was Dr. Anneliese Hoyer.

MR. NORDLAND: Anneliese Hoyer.

MS. LARSEN: And the other one –

MR. NORDLAND: And the other one was John Humphrey, and John was capable of doing anything. He was a trained painter, but he had a particular bent for photography. And he was a person who had been around from the Clyfford Still days on, so he knew a lot about art history. So whenever we did a survey of Bay Area painting, John always did it.

MS. LARSEN: Aha, so he –

MR. NORDLAND: And he was ardent in the photography area, but he never was – never had any money to buy anything. So I got him some money to buy things, and we had a show – as long as I was in the museum, we had a photography show on at all times.

MS. LARSEN: That’s great. And – but who were the – just for the record, who were the photographers that you felt were important? Was it the whole Carmel area group?

MR. NORDLAND: We’d start off, first of all, with Edward.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, Edward Weston.

MR. NORDLAND: Ansel [Adams].

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm.

MR. NORDLAND: Imogen [Cunningham].

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: Wynn Bullock.

MS. LARSEN: Mm-hmm. Minor White?

MR. NORDLAND: We didn’t – we had a Minor White or two, but Minor was in the East, you know?

MS. LARSEN: Right, in Boston.

MR. NORDLAND: So he was like out of mind. We showed [Henri] Cartier-Bresson. We showed the international people. We showed [Aaron] Siskind. We showed Fred Sommer. We showed – I mean, we were doing an international kind of program, but we didn’t ignore our f/64s and the locals, and we kept collecting.

MS. LARSEN: That’s great. Was there at all a photography collection before you came?

MR. NORDLAND: Well, there was just a few things that people gave to John and he put in – not much. Not much. We had some successes, you know? And we did – like our Wynn Bullock catalogue went into a second edition. That’s unusual.

MS. LARSEN: Yes.

MR. NORDLAND: When I renovated the building –

MS. LARSEN: Now, when did that begin?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, gosh –

MS. LARSEN: It was finished in ’72, right?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes. It was finished – we opened, I think, in October ’72. We were never closed.

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: You know?

MS. LARSEN: Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: But we were partially closed, and we did a lot of foolishness. We had four shows: Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park Pictures – about 13, and he sent us 14, and we bought the fourteenth that my board – a group of people, the Lands, bought it. Well, they wouldn’t let me buy it.

MS. LARSEN: Was this the Friends of Gerald Nordland painting?

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: That – I wrote down the title of it, which is – it looks like a wonderful thing.

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, it’s as good as there is.

MS. LARSEN: It’s Ocean Park No. 54. 1972.

MR. NORDLAND: This is the one I had in –

MS. LARSEN: Oh, I love that one.

MR. NORDLAND: – Milwaukee, and of course, it’s on the cover.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, I love that one.

MR. NORDLAND: Much better reproduction here. This is the old reproduction. This is the new one. There it is.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, that’s about as good as you get. You’ve got it all. Beautiful.

MR. NORDLAND: I hadn’t chosen this picture. I had chosen the show and I said I’m going to reproduce everything. Some of them are black and white, but I’m going to reproduce, like, six in color. He sent this along, and it ended up being the best picture in the show.

MS. LARSEN: Well, he –

MR. NORDLAND: I had a $10,000 grant, and I matched the $10,000, and my acquisition committee wouldn’t let me buy this picture because they’d already decided to buy it. [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: What did you think – did they try to – was it a surprise then?

MR. NORDLAND: It was a surprise.

MS. LARSEN: It was a surprise.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: That’s nice.

MR. NORDLAND: It was a surprise. And I don’t even know if they spent – what they did with the 20 grand that I had, because I not only got the grant, but I got a matching grant.

MS. LARSEN: Wow. So that was a very nice time –

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, it was good.

MS. LARSEN: – around ’72, you know, and –

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, yes.

MS. LARSEN: So the building –

MR. NORDLAND: Well, I was – you know, I was also out the door. [Laughs.]

MS. LARSEN: Well, yes, I noticed – that’s the old cliché, that a person builds or renovates a museum and then shortly thereafter it somehow is like everyone takes a breath and they’re on to the next thing.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: But it happens all the time.

MR. NORDLAND: James Johnson Sweeney of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, on and on and on – even your successor, John Lane.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, but he told me that Roth had decided that I had to go, and he told me I should be looking for a job.

MS. LARSEN: Why?

MR. NORDLAND: He thought there ought to be turnover, there ought not to be – people shouldn’t rest, and he said, “I need people with fresh ideas.”

MS. LARSEN: But you were only there six years or so.

MR. NORDLAND: Six or seven years, yes.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, which – and there was a lot to do over there.

MR. NORDLAND: Well, it – back to the what did I do, I did the Diebenkorn show.

MS. LARSEN: Right.

MR. NORDLAND: And I had the biggest bronze that has ever been made, the Peter Voulkos. It had to be taken apart and re-welded on my new floors.

MS. LARSEN: That’s a portent of things to come in contemporary art, you know, that like the –

MR. NORDLAND: And I also bought Hiro II [Peter Voulkos, 1967, 8’ x 27’ x 8’] a wonderful smaller piece – a better piece – at the same time, and I had it on view in the new –front entrance, where we had the two elevators, the bookstore and new floors –

MS. LARSEN: That’s the museum I know.

MR. NORDLAND: – we had new lights. So we had Dick and Peter. Then we had an Ansel Adams show of photography. And then we had the Joseph Monsen Collection of Ceramics from Seattle, and he was an economist who had decided that, if he put together a really definitive collection of this material, it would be worth much better than any other investment he could make.

MS. LARSEN: Now, which – was it American ceramics?

MR. NORDLAND: American ceramics coming out of Voulkos and coming out of everybody that had worked with him at Otis and worked with him at Berkeley and the just widening circles, and that included Kottler – the white one there that we saw that was next –

MS. LARSEN: How do you spell Kottler?

MR. NORDLAND: K-O-T-T-L-E-R or C-O-T-T-L-E-R. C-O-T-T-L-E-R. [Transcriber note: The actual spelling is Kottler.]

MS. LARSEN: And first name?

MR. NORDLAND: I think it’s Howard, but I’m not sure.

MS. LARSEN: All right, I’ll look it up.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes.

MS. LARSEN: So, and it was a good investment, I would think?

MR. NORDLAND: Oh, yes, yes, yes. But that’s a funny kind of collecting. John Mason, [Paul] Soldner. It was a good show, and – but then I had hired an associate curator or an assistant curator from the Walker Art Center, Suzanne Foley, who came in to be registrar and set up a registration, and then when Anneliese Hoyer retired, Suzanne moved over and took that job.

MS. LARSEN: Who was that?

MR. NORDLAND: You know, right now I can’t think of her name. She later directed the gallery at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. I can get her name to you.

MS. LARSEN: Hmm, boy, it’s a ringing a bell here. It isn’t Karen Tsujimoto. She was later.

[Transcriber note: Mr. Nordland walks away from the mike, speaking from a distance.]

MR. NORDLAND: No, no, not her. Karen worked for me.

MS. LARSEN: Uh-huh.

MR. NORDLAND: Yes, Karen worked for me, but she didn’t have – [unintelligible].

[Transcriber note: Mr. Nordland returns after a long pause.]

MR. NORDLAND: Suzanne Foley.

MS. LARSEN: Okay, yes. Okay.

MR. NORDLAND: And she was from Virginia, I think, or she was, you know, down somewhere around Washington. And she had this job at Walker, and she came to work for me. And this is the catalogue.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, it’s –

MR. NORDLAND: And John did – John Humphrey did the Ansel Adams catalogue. I did the Diebenkorn catalogue and the Voulkos.

MS. LARSEN: And this was all on at the same time?

MR. NORDLAND: This was the opening.

MS. LARSEN: Yes, wow.

MR. NORDLAND: Now, in addition, we had masterpieces from our drawings and photographs in the hallways. And –

MS. LARS