Oral history interview with Roland Reiss, 1997 Aug.-1999 June

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 Roland Reiss, 1997 Aug.-1999 June, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Roland Reiss
Conducted by Paul Karlstrom
At the artist's home/studio, Los Angeles, California
August 22 and September 9, 1997 and June 11, 1999

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Roland Reiss on August 22, 1997. The interview took place in Los Angeles, California, and was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Roland Reiss and Paul Karlstrom 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

[SESSION 1, TAPE 1, SIDE A]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, an interview with Roland Reiss. The date is August 22, 1997. The interview is being conducted in the artist's studio/home, at The Brewery in downtown Los Angeles. The interviewer is Paul Karlstrom. Again, this is a first session of several. This is Tape 1, Side A. We were talking about doing this interview just a little while ago, and, as I said then, what I'd like to do is begin by getting an idea of your own background in terms of biographical or auto-biographical information. We can go back just as far as you feel it's appropriate to the extent that where you came from makes a difference, and perhaps in some ways it explains the career you've chosen and things that have happened to you along the way. Why don't we start out by saying when you were born, and where, and maybe something about your family?

ROLAND REISS: I was born May 15, 1929 in Chicago, Illinois. And my parents are of Austrian, Romanian, Italian heritage. My mother was first generation; my father came to the United States when he was four. I was raised in Chicago. I have a sister, Marilyn, who's four years younger. She's presently teaching art in Novato, or teaching elementary school in Novato, California. I went to Catholic schools through that whole period, and it was during World War II. My mother who was a housewife actually worked as a machine gun inspector and my father was a streetcar conductor, so actually, I was a Depression baby.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Very much working class people.

ROLAND REISS: Working class people, Depression baby. My father had a job but they had a hard time. He always talked about standing in milk lines and certainly was incredibly thrifty, work-motivated and never borrowed, which was not a great lesson for me to learn. He was a very stern disciplinarian, and that probably figures into the equation of becoming an artist and his effect on my choices. The only other noteworthy thing I can think of, because we were pretty well stuck in Chicago, was a trip that we took to the Black Hills of North Dakota. My father was raised in North Dakota. So there was that other connection with the part of the family that had settled there who were wheat farmers, who were basically a German Romanian mixture. My grandmother on my mother's side was Italian. Her mother was the maid to an Austrian family and was an illegitimate child. In fact, last year I went back and found the school she went to. I had her report card. I went to Lana, Italy, to find where she came from, but it had been in Austria at another point in time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: That was her mother? Was the maid in Austria?

ROLAND REISS: Her mother, yes. He [grandmother's father] was an Austrian military officer. My great grandmother's name was lost, and she was sent to a convent school to be raised. She had six children after they came to this country and settled in Chicago. I think her early education had given her a feeling for art. I remember when I was in a choir singing in downtown Chicago, my father didn't want to go and my grandmother lectured him about going. Even with a large family in Depression days, she managed to go off by herself to see movies, especially foreign films. She was very supportive of me and my interest in the arts. That's why I sought out her history as a young girl and have such fondness for her.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How much did you find on this quest over there?

ROLAND REISS: I found the convent school that she went to. The young man she met and came to America with had been a carver of sculpture and grave stones in the neighboring town of Prutz. There's an old medieval church and they have thousands of grave stones in Lana. So I gather that he was there carving grave stones when they met. That had to be and it was a church, so it had to be where they first came together. I remember she had calendars with hand-colored illustrations of the Tyrolean Alps in her bedroom in Chicago, and they were in those weird off-colors because the printing wasn't very good in those days. I later realized that this woman had come from what is now the fruit basket of Italy, with incredible mountains all around. So verdant you couldn't believe it!

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's northern Italy.

ROLAND REISS: Northern Italy, right close to the border. She had moved to Chicago! And spent the rest of her life in Chicago and those calendars were a reminder of the beautiful place she had left.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Why did they move?

ROLAND REISS: I really don't know. I mean, the area seemed to be very rich. It could have been partly because of the sense of scandal that she just wanted to get away, and have a new life. A lot of people were moving to America, so there could have been an economic problem at that time. I don't really know the history of the area. But to see the school and have it actually still there since the late eighteen hundreds was absolutely amazing!

PAUL KARLSTROM: So she was a presence then as you were growing up, I gather.

ROLAND REISS: She was the "Grand Lady" in the family. She had six kids and my mother being one of them. It was a grand, happy family. My father's family was very dour, dark and unhappy and they didn't speak to each other for long periods of time. They were Germans who settled in Romania. My mother's family held parties and sang all the time. It was a great place to be. My father was a very difficult man. My grandmother was the one person he would not confront. It was absolutely amazing that she had that kind of power. We took her on that trip to North Dakota. I never got over my father inviting her along and she rode with us in a Model A Ford.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And that was to visit your relatives?

ROLAND REISS: Well, to see family on my father's side, to see some of the farms. I'd never been out of Chicago. I'd never seen a cow before! My cousin squirted me with some milk from a live cow and I was humiliated.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You never visited the stockyards, I gather.

ROLAND REISS: You could smell them, but I never visited them. I guess my fondest memory of Catholic school was that the nuns were so chauvinistic about Chicago. I've never forgotten this. They would tell us that we were in the best country and we were in the best city in the world. We had the Shedd Aquarium and we had the museum and all that stuff. We had the best accent in the world. Radio announcers were chosen from Chicago because we were mid-country and had a balanced accent. It was just an enormous sense of pride they instilled. I remember thinking, "God, how lucky I am! I'm a Catholic; I'm in Chicago, I'm in America!" I mean, how could you do any better than all that!

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that's nice that you had that.

ROLAND REISS: It was a lovely thing, but I probably went to four different Catholic schools. They were stern in most cases and it was not a pleasant education. In 1943, we moved to California. My father had been in the Army out here, up at the Presidio, as a young man. He'd always wanted to get back to California. One of his friends who worked with him as a streetcar conductor had moved to California, and then passed away, but his wife and children were out in California. He'd just be hankering to get to California, which he saw as paradise and had never been back. It was probably the most courageous thing my father ever did. In 1943, he packed up the whole family and we got in the car. In those days, that was a big deal. Now we're so mobile it's hard to imagine what an enormous move and undertaking that was, without a job. He left his job, and just drove us all out to California. He knew that we could stay with these friends, who were in Pomona.

PAUL KARLSTROM: There were four of you then, you and your sister and your parents. Is that right?

ROLAND REISS: Right, the four of us came to Pomona. Pomona was a very sleepy, little agricultural town at the time. I went to junior high school, and we moved into a house that had been taken from the Japanese, one of the Japanese families that had been dislocated. I never got over that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Felt guilty?

ROLAND REISS: In fact, I didn't at the time. I didn't know enough. Under the window sill there was a long cupboard and I remember neighbors lifting the cupboard and saying, "That's where they had the wireless to talk to Japan." That's what all Americans did; they had to justify their actions. I remember that the house was surrounded by asparagus fields and there were a lot of people from Oklahoma living in South Pomona. There had been a great wave of migration from Oklahoma and it had a great effect on California. A lot of the people in school with me were Oklahomans. There was only one black student in my junior high school in South Pomona. He became my best friend, but when I brought him home, my father told me never to bring him home again because he was black.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was junior high, South Pomona Junior High?

ROLAND REISS: Fremont Junior High School. The end of my father's life at age eighty-six, he actually had friends who were black. It's a personal testimony to the decline of prejudice in my own lifetime.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was his name?

ROLAND REISS: Tilton Smith was his name and he had an older brother named Jimmy Smith. Jimmy was an art student at Claremont. I remember going to his home a lot. The home was always full of music. Everybody sang; the piano was going all the time. He [Tilton] contracted severe arthritis and died within a year and a half. I went there constantly to see him. We were both taking an art class. His brother set it up so that he could take photographs of little table-top things while he was in bed. Jimmy's alive today. I still see Jimmy in Claremont.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh, Tilton died.

ROLAND REISS: Tilton is the one who died, and Jimmy was our hero. He was in Claremont. He was an artist.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Your father, despite his prejudice at that time, didn't interfere with your visiting a black family.

ROLAND REISS: No, he just didn't. I think he didn't want him seen going into our house. Other than that I don't think he had a problem. Of course, the Mexican American population was a very different issue in Pomona. That was the time of the Pachucos.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you know any of them? You didn't hang out with them, did you?

ROLAND REISS: Well, there were kids emulating Pachucos in junior high school, the baggy pegged pants, and chains. They were a group pretty much unto themselves, because there was a large Chicano settlement in South Pomona, Oklahomans and Chicanos, which is where we were living. North Pomona was the presumably higher class territory. As you approached Claremont, it got higher and higher class. You're going up the hill towards Claremont

PAUL KARLSTROM: So in other words, your story is a great success story because you started out in South Pomona and you ascended to Claremont.

ROLAND REISS: I came into junior high school, which was a public school, with a good education from the nuns, so I was really like a year and a half ahead of the students in California. There were two English teachers who doted on me. I became editor of the school newspaper and I did all the writing and illustrations.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You had literary interests as well as an interest in art.

ROLAND REISS: Well, the literary interest came first. I wrote everything for the school newspaper. It was a two sheet newspaper or something, but I designed it and I did all the drawing for it, too. I did the cartoons and the masthead for it. I was like a multi-dimensional kid! These two young women teachers, who I had in English classes, kept talking to me about being a writer and filling my head with that kind of excitement. It all sounded great to me and I was doing well with them. I went home and told my father that I was going to go to college, and I was going to be a writer. And he said, "No. You are going to work when you get out of high school and you're going to bring money home because that's what you're supposed to do."

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes, that's what you're for.

ROLAND REISS: Exactly.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me interrupt just a moment. Maybe you would lead up to this. But, that attitude in fact seems a bit counter to much of the immigrant experience where education was emphasized.

ROLAND REISS: Oh, they were upwardly mobile and wanted you to have some education, but my father's attitude remained very old world. He was a very bright man but did not complete high school. So the idea of even completing high school was an achievement as far as he was concerned. I think being from a class that struggled with the Depression, money was very, very important. It wasn't big money; it was just money, just being able to survive. Of course, my experience in the schools was altering my view of the world.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How did that come about?

ROLAND REISS: Well, I think they [nuns and teachers] were all sort of instilling values of public good, public service.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So this came from school, not from home.

ROLAND REISS: From school, not from home. Maybe from my mother a little bit. She was a very sweet lady and she wrote poetry, sort of the Edgar A. Guest variety.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you get reinforcement from your grandmother and your mother about doing something beyond generating income, work and income?

ROLAND REISS: Yes. I also remember winning prizes with little posters and things when I was in the Catholic schools, and looking at our music books that had illustrations that were sort of like Prince Valiant illustrations, and thinking, "Oh! If I could draw like that! I'll never be able to do that." I remember thinking that, but anyway, the writing thing. When I went to those women teachers and told them what my father had said, they immediately abandoned me. They just wrote me off. They didn't talk to me any more. They saw me then as one of those kids who wasn't going to be able to do it. I still don't understand why. They didn't advise me about resources that might be available or how to cope with my father. They just backed away from me. I'd been taking an art class taught by this wonderful man named Art McCann. He had been the Superintendent of Art Education for the whole Pomona Valley [School] District, and had been demoted because he made some political remarks at a meeting somewhere. He was demoted to a junior high school. He was a person I could talk to, so I went to him and I said, "I don't know what to do. "I want to be a writer and these women won't even talk to me now. I'm just really depressed." He said, "Look, you are a really good artist. Why don't you go into art? You have great talent for it." Then he began to say things that these women didn't say. He said, "You could go into commercial art and you could make money and your father would be happy, but you would need to go to art school a couple of years. You just lie to your father. Tell him you're going to make a lot of money and that art school will produce this for you, and go to school as long as you want! "

PAUL KARLSTROM: No matter how long it takes.

ROLAND REISS: That's probably the most wonderful thing he said. I went home and told my father I was going to be an artist.

PAUL KARLSTROM: And your father liked that?

ROLAND REISS: Oh no. Oh no! He said, "No son of mine is going to be a queer."

PAUL KARLSTROM: He thought all artists were homosexual?

ROLAND REISS: Yes. He had very limited experience in life. I went back and told my teacher and he said, "I want your father here. You tell him I said he must come to the open house." My father had never come to the open house before, but he did. He didn't know what he was in for because Art McCann was a large, hairy, burly man. My father walked in with me and he walked up to my father and he grabbed him by the collar and he slammed him against the wall. He said, "What's this you've been telling him about artists?" And he went on to just lecture my father about my talent and what was he trying to do to me and all this stuff. And my father never bothered me about it again. It's actually a great story. He went on to become an osteopath and he knew he was leaving. I don't think it bothered him to throw my father against the wall. In those days you didn't sue people or call the police for things like that, in fact, my father was that kind of guy, too. It was just that McCann was much bigger.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You were presumably fifteen years old or so, and then you went on to high school, grade ten through twelve, is that right? Where was that?

ROLAND REISS: Pomona High School. It was then Pomona High School and Pomona Junior College. Remember, this was wartime. World War II was still on. They had a small junior college in Pomona at that time. I remember they had a six-man football team, because there weren't enough men to have a larger football team. At Pomona High School, I was sort of the class artist. I was active in drama. I was active in sports. I played baseball and tennis, but I took art classes throughout because I knew this was my direction. There was a man named Adolph Kath who taught the art classes. I did a cartoon for the school newspaper called Podunk which was about a high school kid. He didn't live in Pomona, but he represented high school kids in general.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Kodunk?

ROLAND REISS: Podunk. P-o-d-u-n-k. It was the Pomona Red Devils so I designed the red devils for all of the schools visual material.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Is Podunk how you felt about Pomona?

ROLAND REISS: Well, I thought it was at the time. I thought it was a cool and dopey word. It was a combination name, like Pomona Dunk or Pomona Dumb, that sort of feeling to it.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But you were, from this point on after Mr. McCann interfered and took matters into his capable hands, focused on art school?

ROLAND REISS: Committed to being a commercial artist, yes. I was just thinking, during that period Disney was raiding all of the high schools for talent to make war films. All of the other kids, who seemed to have the most talent, left while they were in high school and some right after graduation, and went to work for Disney.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I didn't know that. So they went directly from high school with just the basic art training you get there, and not by way of the Art Center School or anything like that?

ROLAND REISS: No. They went right to Disney. Now, I think Disney had run some classes for those people. I remember seeing the work by some of them who Disney sent back to recruit us. For some reason, I don't recall, I resisted the idea, because it would have been logical, I could have had a nice job and a paycheck. I would have come home and said to my dad, "I'm doing fine."

PAUL KARLSTROM: And wouldn't that be a very reasonable career to work for Disney Studios?

ROLAND REISS: Sure. Now there were some other factors that maybe played into it a little, one was Millard Sheets. He had graduated from Pomona High School and was the reigning genius in Claremont. He was well known as a watercolorist. I was just beginning to get a glimpse of what this was all about, but probably the medium I use most in my art classes was watercolor. He came down to my high school class and gave a little talk to the art students, which was really quite marvelous that he did that because he was a very high-powered man. I was impressed with that. At the time, I wasn't quite sure what a fine artist was. I'd bought some books on Picasso and things like that, but they [reproductions] were all in black and white in those days. I think he probably began to give me an inkling of what it meant to be a real artist.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[SESSION 1, TAPE 1, SIDE B]

PAUL KARLSTROM: This is Tape 1, Side B. I believe we were hearing a story about your encounter with Millard Sheets.

ROLAND REISS: This was during the war and he did that series of paintings in India, which were published in Life Magazine, and of course that made a big impact on me because they'd been published in Life. I think also because I thought watercolor was probably a very, very important thing to do. I did a lot of watercolor and later showed with the California Water Color Society [now the National Watercolor Society] several seasons some years later. When I think about it, he had more of an influence on my early work than I realized.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I am very interested in your art activity that it had a fair amount of watercolor.

ROLAND REISS: I'm trying to get the timing of this right. No, it was a little later. I got a job at the L.A. County Fairgrounds when it was a prisoner of war camp. A lot of people don't know it was a prisoner of war camp. They had German and Italian prisoners there. They were cutting ducks, those amphibious assault vehicles from the South Pacific, apart with torches and salvaging parts of them. I was in charge of the equipment. In fact, a little piece of history, when Dachau and Belsen were discovered, I was working there. I will never forget that they put up about twenty giant billboards all around the fairgrounds with photographs of Dachau survivors for the prisoners to look at. They wanted the prisoners to see that. They said, "This is what you've done." Of course, the prisoners all denied they knew anything about it at all. Most of them were farm boys and they'd been captured early in the war, so they probably weren't even around when some of this was happening.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you personally have any interaction with any of these prisoners?

ROLAND REISS: Well, I got to talk to them all the time. We weren't supposed to talk to them.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you speak German?

ROLAND REISS: No, but we managed to communicate and a few of them spoke English, so we would communicate. I was working with them and I wasn't working with many of the Italians, but it also meant that I was connected with the fairgrounds. I left high school and went to art school in Chicago. After that I came back to California and got a job at the fairgrounds again. This was two years later.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was that?

ROLAND REISS: Oh, it was just a dirt job. I joined the Hod Carriers Union and I was breaking blacktop with a pick axe. Someone asked one day if anyone could replan because the fair [ground] was reconverting back into a fair. It was all being painted in brilliant colors chosen by Millard Sheets. There was an art building and Millard Sheets took charge of the art shows. We were asked if anyone could read diagrams illustrating where to put some chairs and things in one of the buildings. I said, "Well, I can." So I did that and the next thing, I got a call. I went in to interview with a man named Bill Bruce, the principal of Emerson High School in Pomona. He was in charge of the school's exhibits at the fairground underneath the grandstand. The political payoff for all the racing above was that they could have the school's exhibits underneath. He said, "I've heard you know something about art plans and things. Would you like to go to work here?" I want to mention at this point that Millard was using the space of the upper floor of the Grandstand to paint a large mural during the off-season and it was sent to a different location afterwards. Sue Hertel was his main assistant. She was always his main assistant for most of his career, she was his main assistant. H-e-r-t-e-l. She was married to Carl Hertel for a long time and taught out at Claremont. Sue was there mainly executing a giant mural. Millard would come in and out so I never talked to him. I didn't really know him, but I would see him go in and out. I would talk to her. I may have even met him briefly. I was the kid downstairs and she was the big assistant for him and she was older than I was.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You said she was his assistant.

ROLAND REISS: She was his main assistant all the years he had the place across the highway on Foothill, in Claremont, even in later years after he had left Claremont, she was still executing work for Millard there. She had his style down and could do anything with it. In fact that was her problem, even though she did finally distinguish herself with her own work with horses and things, she had to fight her way out of that style. It dominated her work. The whole story of artists' assistants would be an interesting story. I know a lot of people who worked with artists a long time and did major work for them who are unknown. It just some how ought to be known that they were there and they were mainstays in these large careers. She certainly was for Millard a major person. So there was that consciousness. I have to say also that those shows at the L.A. County Fair were very important. He pulled off shows there that the fairgrounds would never mount. They were major regional exhibitions. He did a historical show of American art that meant a great deal to me. I'm sure that show was hugely influential for all artists in the area because there was so little available to us. . He did wonderful shows of interior design and a big competitive art show several times. I remember the year that Keith Finch won the big prize, and I began to learn all those names.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So this really was your first real contact with art in Southern California on a professional level?

ROLAND REISS: Yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You began to learn the cast of characters and the important people in about '48?

ROLAND REISS: '49 probably, somewhere in there. In fact, I entered the competitive show as a novice and I got in. They hung my painting on a door which was sometimes open and sometimes closed.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was the painting?

ROLAND REISS: I was a young boy. It was a girl, a nude, with some flowers. It's funny because people I got to know years later at Claremont like Paul Darrow, were working there at the fairgrounds for Millard. Paul worked there as an assistant. I want to back up just a little bit to say several other things about my high school experience. One of the things I did was get a job in downtown Pomona in what was the best of the two men's clothing stores, the John P. Evans Clothing Store. I was hired there because I was the class President. I was very visible at school and they chose those kids to help attract high school business. After a few weeks, the owner came to me and said, "I think I've got a special job for you. How would you like to work on window display?" They had a wonderful window display guy, who did crackerjack windows. He took me on as an apprentice and taught me window design. That's what led to my display work at the L.A. County Fair. They would have contests with window display and I actually won the prize for the best window at Christmas in Pomona one year. The other person I want to mention who was very, very important to me was a man who lived in south Pomona named George DeBeeson. He was an incredible man! He worked for Disney and left over a dispute about one of his inventions. He painted California landscape school oil paintings and he was kind of a Renaissance man misplaced. He had invented the first automatic pilot for the airplane. He showed me photographs of him with Marconi. He had flown "Jennys" [Curtis JN-4D] and all that sort of thing. He had a ceramics factory in south Pomona where he made black panthers and tigers. I have to show you this one of little girls with lambs which in those days were sold at Bullocks. They were never painted. They were glazed white. The tigers and panthers were glazed in color. I painted some of them for him. I would just come in and work on things now and then. Before meeting George, I signed up for an art class at the Recreation Department and a graduate student from Claremont was supposed to teach this class. He came down twice and then we were told he wasn't going to come any more, but we'll get an instructor for you. So the next week there was this old man named George DeBeeson standing there. He immediately adopted me as his art apprentice. It was an incredible experience because behind his large concrete block factory he lived in a tarpaper shack. He was probably sixty-five years old and his wife was twenty-four. She was a church organist and he built this giant organ for her to rehearse in the home. His son-in-law was Korla Pandit, who was the great figure on television in the early days, who played the organ and all the women would sigh over his playing. Korla would come out on weekends and they would have dinners and I would always be there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How do you spell his name again?

ROLAND REISS: K-o-r-l-a is the first name. P-a-n-d-i-t is his last name. He was a Hollywood East Indian. He would talk to me about walking on coals and East Indian philosophy. DeBeeson also had this life-size plaster fountain in which one of his sons was peeing amidst a group of swans. Even though it was in their backyard, it became a major scandal in the little town of Pomona. He was an incredible character. I think what impressed me was his restless, inventive mind. He was firing ceramic tests for the government which would later become the kind of ceramics used in space technology, ceramics that would withstand very high temperatures. He taught me California landscape school painting. I would go out on weekends with him to do that. He made me study Michelangelo, Vermeer and Cézanne in large books published by Phaidon. He taught me everything he could teach me. He was just a wonderful, wonderful man. I recalled years later when I finally wound up at UCLA and thought I was really a hot shot. I brought back all my slick junior year work to show him. He was very wise, he said, "This is exactly what I'd be doing if I were your age." And then he said to me - I will never forget this - "You are better than all those people in Claremont." Millard set off this terrible love/hate relationship with all the artists in the area. He was so powerful. He obscured the existence of other artists. All of them had to contend with him and even George was feeling Millard's shadow in South Pomona. Not that he was out there competing in the same arena as Millard, but all the action was in Claremont.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Where was Sheets teaching?

ROLAND REISS: At Scripps.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So he was all entrenched there.

ROLAND REISS: He was entrenched there, and there he became a "Wunderkinder." He designed things; he built that rammed earth home, everything that he did turned into money and magic. He was a model for a new kind of contemporary artist with business savvy.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean?

ROLAND REISS: Millard could talk straight on in those days with major business people. Very few other artists could do that. He had the charisma, the intelligence, and the confidence. He knew how to charm and he knew how to handle himself. I would say many artists now can do that. Many artists today can speak with corporate heads and make things happen actually convince them of projects and all of that. He was one of the few artists who could really do anything like that, certainly in the Southern California area. They called him "The Genius in Claremont."

PAUL KARLSTROM: I'm very interested in the stories about Sheets and how he fits into the bigger story of the development of art in California, because there are very strong feelings about Millard Sheets who's viewed in some ways a touchstone for certain directions in California art.

ROLAND REISS: Yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Peter Selz, who knew the scene because he was down there at Claremont, thought that Millard Sheets was a very bad presence, damaging to what Peter viewed as the healthy proper unfolding art in the area. I think he particularly would cite the story of Millard Sheets firing Pete Voulkas at Otis. You were in a position there to interact with and evaluate this kind of influence that Millard seemed to have. I'd just be interested to hear anything you have to say about your own view of the role he played.

ROLAND REISS: Well, he was very, very important. He was not only beloved by many of his students, he was also feared. He was just very strong, and at times something approaching ruthless. I often tell my students, most artists are quite ruthless in order to get done what they have to get done. They really can't tolerate much that gets in their way. I think he was pretty much like that. He did cast some people aside, apprentices and so on. Jon Helland had been a graduate student with Millard before he worked with me at the Fairgrounds. He was devastated when Millard refused to grant him his MFA degree because he hadn't completed work for Millard on one of Millard's projects.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did Millard expect his students to basically follow the correct path, which would be his own style?

ROLAND REISS: I can't answer that. McPhee was there and he had some small influence. I think he was so powerful and so dominating that people just automatically followed his style. But there were people who didn't. Karl Benjamin did not. There were some who worked like McPhee. They didn't want to work like people outside of Claremont I must say, Karl was the most independent of the bunch in a marvelous way. The relationship between Pomona and Scripps is one that extended forward in time and is very interesting in that Pomona always styled itself as the intellectual school. On a scholarly basis, it was the most impressive school. They saw themselves exclusively as committed to fine art. Millard's net was very wide at Scripps. it included all the crafts, and that was still going on when I arrived at Claremont. In fact, the Pomona faculty voted to do away with ceramics when it had begun to develop spontaneously. So, Millard's embracing of the crafts and of projects involved with industry, fairgrounds, ocean liners, and the banks was seen by some as crassly commercial. Remember, Scripps had the Ameses who did the enamel cloisonné and always had very good potters there. Before Soldner, they had Petterson.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh yeah, the Eames. You mean.

ROLAND REISS: Not Pomona. I'm speaking of Scripps. Not Eames, Ames.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I want to make sure.

ROLAND REISS: Two of the Ameses at Claremont, A-m-e-s, were both very noted for crafts, especially enamel cloisonné. Ricky Pederson in pottery before Paul Soldner, who was world famous, was at Scripps College. The Pomona College art department saw crafts as a corrupting influence up until recent times.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Low brow.

ROLAND REISS: Low brow, corrupting of fine art and of course with some envy because Millard and all of his friends, like Betty Davenport Ford, a former student, just dominated the whole area, in fact, almost dominated Southern California for a period of time. I tried to pick up the legacy of the success of both the Pomona and Scripps art programs when I came to Claremont because it had been largely lost before I arrived.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I don't mean to interrupt, but you see in many ways then Millard's presence and, for instance, sort of embracing philosophy towards art as a positive influence.

ROLAND REISS: Yes. My views are very catholic about art and I'm not an elitist. I think much of that work, which has been trashed recently in critical circles, will be re-evaluated. I think that work is better than current critical outlooks are willing to acknowledge. I mean, just because much of the work appears corny and dated now does not mean that it was not good and that it will not re-emerge again to be appreciated. The renewed respect for the work of someone like Thomas Hart Benton when understood in context would be an example. Some of Millard's work was quite marvelous, as was work by many other people in that period. He was a great watercolorist, but that medium is currently out of favor. Milford Zornes, Phil Dike, David Scott and Jim Fuller were among the many great watercolor painters from Claremont. I think the work will be appreciated in the future.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's interesting. I don't want to interject myself or my recollections of Millard's remarks.

ROLAND REISS: Although it helps me bounce off of that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But, on the other hand, I think important because here was a major presence in Southern California, one that came to stand for what was counter to progressive tendencies. Millard Sheets is practically an anathema, along with a few others, unfortunately, and even more unfairly, Rico Lebrun

ROLAND REISS: I have a lot to say about Rico Lebrun when we come to that. I think that whole group, with Millard at the head, had to be seen as regionalist painters. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think that's a very important contribution. No one has painted the California landscape, those hills, well, but certainly he's one of the people who painted those hills in a way that's really very special. It really captures the unique quality of Southern California landscape. The modernists abhorred the regional outlook and it formal limitations and these are reasons this work did not become important internationally. Nevertheless, Millard was a force and his ideas were carried out of Claremont to Otis and eventually across the West Coast.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Continuing an interview with Roland Reiss. This is Tape 2, side A. Roland, we found ourselves right in the middle of a key issue. We started talking about your encounter with Millard Sheets and the influence that he had and then we moved on from that to the consideration of the very influential, important role he played in the art scene in Southern California. At one time he was the leading artist of not only Southern California but of California.

ROLAND REISS: Millard went on to Otis and then on to CalArts [California Institute of the Arts]. I know at CalArts they considered him a very troublesome character on the board. Millard did want the position of Dean of Visual Arts at CalArts that he did not get and left over that issue. For my own part, from the perspective at that point in time because I was just beginning things at Claremont, he was never really pleased with the program that I began to develop at Claremont. Not that he had much to do with us, because he was also unhappy with what was going on at Scripps. He would come back and say, "These students don't know how to draw anymore." He had super conservative views about art education. I don't know how much that's the product of a basically conservative view, because I don't view his watercolors as that conservative, and how much a product of an old man getting cranky and maybe more conservative with age. He never really did a non-objective painting that I know of, he must have experimented with it, but there are no examples I am aware of.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Except in, perhaps, the sense of design -- that would be it as far as I know.

ROLAND REISS: Certainly there were a lot of derivative elements in that work. Gauguin figuring very heavily in the stylization of horses, figures and so on, but there are derivative elements in everybody's work. Again, I think, that takes perspective. But to look on the other side of what was happening in the latter part of his career in Los Angeles, there were two major figures, Lorser Feitelson and Rico Lebrun. It was like two camps. The third camp was on the wane, never really became that important, and that was Stanton Macdonald-Wright with Jan Stussy and Gordon Nunes at UCLA as his protégés. So maybe you could say there were three currents, but the dominant currents were Lebrun and Feitelson for new ideas in Los Angeles. Lebrun did figurative work, highly romantic, affected by Picasso, as you well know. Feitelson represented non-objective art. In my mind, by the early 50s he was representing that, earlier than that I really don't know Feitelson's history.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, there was that whole post-surrealist movement, which was actually very interesting. Some people think that's the most interesting part of Feitelson.

ROLAND REISS: Of course, that is in early Rothko. It was in the work of most of the non-objective painters in the early phase of their work in that period.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Feitelson, Lundeberg and the post-surrealist movement of the 30s is actually quite interesting. They probably made more of a claim to a position in American art history with that movement.

ROLAND REISS: Really? Because I certainly know that about her, but for some reason I never knew . . .

PAUL KARLSTROM: She was a student, of course.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, but she remained in that territory until later and he moved into non-objective painting. They were the two big figures. Actually, I got caught right in the middle of that. There's another funny story, about another graduate student at UCLA, named Paul Rivas. We were in a seminar with Fred Wight. Seminars in those days had only two students in them.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was Wight teaching at that point?

ROLAND REISS: He was running the gallery at UCLA and he taught art history, and, of course, this was an art history seminar. He had us work on a Morris Graves catalog that he did, and then we were to undertake a project. We took these two currents which were affecting our own work at the time. Paul took Lorser Feitelson and I took Rico Lebrun. As a result, I have a tape of that interview somewhere with Rico. If I can locate it, I would love to have you hear it. I don't think it was Fred's idea; we gravitated to these two artists. I wanted to do Rico Lebrun and Paul Rivas wanted to do Lorser Feitelson. I didn't have any particular problem, of course, with Feitelson. There is a funny anecdote which has to do with this. Underway was a lot of discussion about hiring Rico Lebrun at UCLA. Bill Brice, who was at UCLA, was one of Rico's protégés, the other big one, being Howard Warshaw. Rico was angling for this job at UCLA and there was considerable interest at the time in hiring him. Bill Brice was the main one who was connected, but Jan Stussy, through his interest in Berman, was also interested in Rico Lebrun and that romantic, figurative work.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Because of his close connection to Macdonald-Wright. How does that work?

ROLAND REISS: Yes, Wright's late figurative work could lead that way and his earlier abstract work could lead into Feitelson. My anecdote starts with an interview with Frank Perls in my research for Rico Lebrun.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did you tape it?

ROLAND REISS: No, I just made notes. The weird part about this story was, while I was interviewing Frank Perls in his gallery, Paul Rivas came in to see the show and listened to this interview surreptitiously and then reported its contents to a faculty member at UCLA. At first it was thought that I had broken Frank Perls confidence. The man who had complete faith in me, who stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks, was Bill Brice. I said, "Bill, I didn't do this and Paul should step forward and apologize." Of course, he wouldn't come forward and Bill just stood by me, and he is still my dear friend to this day. It was tense stuff. The politics were very complicated and there was a group at UCLA that didn't really want to see Rico Lebrun come to teach there; after all, it meant bringing a powerful figure to the faculty who would have obscured the rest of them. In fact, that went on when Diebenkorn was on the faculty. Ultimately, Rico was not hired there. As a result of my interview, I with Rico himself, I worked as his assistant, sporadically, because I was a graduate student. I would go in now and then and I would also show slides for him when he lectured. He seemed to think that since I was a graduate student I could handle his slides.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Wait a minute, you worked as an assistant for Rico? He was teaching at UCLA?

ROLAND REISS: No, he wasn't teaching at UCLA. As a result of this seminar, I did an interview with him.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Where was he teaching?

ROLAND REISS: I don't think he was teaching anywhere. He had a studio on San Vicente at the time. I think all he was doing was working.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What about his slides?

ROLAND REISS: He was doing the big collages. He needed somebody when he was called on to lecture to show slides for him. Sometimes he needed help in his studio. I wasn't a regular assistant, I want to make that clear, but he needed additional help occasionally.

PAUL KARLSTROM: We don't know exactly when this is and we need to. You're a UCLA graduate student.

ROLAND REISS: This has got to be 1955, '56. His studio was on San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood and he lived about ten blocks away. So it was really handy to UCLA and I thought maybe he got the studio there because he was expecting to get the teaching job at UCLA. I don't know that story for sure, but it never worked out.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Who did they like at UCLA besides themselves?

ROLAND REISS: I can't think of who it would be. Rico was very good to Bill Brice. He got him teaching. I think they had a very good friendship. Bill admired Rico's work and was influenced by it, especially in drawing. I learned the Lebrun style of drawing at UCLA and that is probably one of the reasons Rico liked me.

PAUL KARLSTROM: There were really a lot of politics in this art scene during that period, more than I realized. Of course, the view has been of the Bay Area that there really wasn't an art scene in Southern California. Of course, I disagree with that and we know that's not the case. It seems that these camps were more polarized, at least within the schools. That matches very much the current situation in the Bay Area.

ROLAND REISS: I would say that's true. I think that the scene in L.A. was less advanced than in San Francisco, absolutely no doubt about it. Feitelson's brand of abstraction really relates to constructivism and things like that. All of the San Francisco development relates to contemporary ideas in painting. In fact, I remember in that period, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy writing an article in which she claimed that when Abstract Expressionism was in full flower the true line of abstraction had been lost. She was referring to the brand of formal abstraction practiced by Feitelson and her husband [Laszlo Moholy-Nagy].

PAUL KARLSTROM: You started out talking about Millard and from that gave a quick description of the different camps, which actually didn't make a Millard camp. You talked about the Rico camp, the Feitelson camp, the Macdonald-Wright camp, but where does Millard fit into this?

ROLAND REISS: It was already fading. The last of it was the California Water Color Society, with people like Leonard Edmundson and other figures. It was fading and by that time Lebrun and Feitelson were so important. There were still a few people like the young Jack Zajec and Doug McClelland, who was teaching at Claremont and was my immediate predecessor. Felix Landau Gallery was showing these people, but Millard was disappearing from the picture.

PAUL KARLSTROM: In his interview for the Archives of American Art, I got the sense that his story was one of being eclipsed and that he was history, but what I'm hearing from you is that you are willing to give him a lot more in terms of his role and even the quality of his art that his detractors aren't. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

ROLAND REISS: As I've already mentioned, I think his role was very important and the quality of the work is higher than anyone wants to admit. It's the same kind of argument against Andrew Wyeth, who I also think is a marvelous artist. The year that they said that Wyeth and de Kooning had sold $50,000 paintings each, they represented extremes within art production and it's sort of wonderful that they both sold at those prices; but, of course, the art world saw Wyeth as a trivial artist and de Kooning as the reigning master. I think a similar thing happened to Millardm that he wound up representing the figurative tradition on the West Coast. It's interesting that he became more prominent as an administrator, director at Otis, and then a trustee at CalArts. That seems to be happening to me, that one is eventually viewed less as an artist and defined more as an administrator. In a way, the interest in his work was decreasing. So on balance, he became even better known for his skills as an administrator later in his career. Many artists become bitter as their careers wane and paranoid about revisionist history. Thank God not all of them. Many of us do worry, however, that particular groups may preempt historical moments and exclude other significant artists and developments. I am sure this is one of the reasons that many artists appreciate the opportunity to do these interviews. Certainly, a variety of voices will produce a larger overview. Different perspectives can produce entirely different understandings and evaluations, especially in retrospect. It is important that Millard was able to tell his version. I know that Clyfford Still was obsessed with the notion that history would be rewritten to the advantage of other artists. It was for this reason, he told me, he kept extensive notes on interactions he had in the art world. My own experience of developments in Los Angeles in the 1970s, for instance, is very different from the current official critical version of that period. Millard Sheets was an early artist celebrity on the West Coast. I imagine it was difficult for him to confront the criticism of his life work in later years.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I have to watch myself because I can come into this discussion 50-50. Millard's success, as you suggested, ironically in part, was because of his whole package and personality, his ability to work the patrons, and work the press, but exactly the skills that have served many contemporary artists so well. It becomes a media war not just an art war between Millard and his camp, which has been described as an anti-modernist in the extreme and reactionary. He makes a case for that, but it seems inherent in his approach and the way he structured a career, which he claims he didn't do strategically. He acts as if all these marvelous and wonderful things happened to him.

ROLAND REISS: I just thought of another aspect of the work that caused a problem. He was open to the influence of Mexican artists like Jean Charlot, Rivera and Orozco. Charlot did many of his mosaics in Mexico, and brought an interest in Mexican Art to Southern California and to his paintings. You can see Orozco in Millard's famine figures from India which were among his best paintings. I think he absorbed more Mexican style into his work than did Rico

PAUL KARLSTROM: Of course, Lebrun studied in Mexico for a while with Siqueiros. I'm not sure of that.

ROLAND REISS: I know he was in Mexico. Who he studied with, I don't know. With Lebrun, it was always historical artists he talked about like Signorelli or European and American contemporaries like Picasso and de Kooning. Millard's involvement with Mexican art was an anathema to those in Southern California seeking a place in the international art scene. Mexico was not seen in those days as a great art center. The Mexican muralists were recognized as important figures but Mexican art was largely regarded as provincial and nationalistic at best. It had no vital relationship with the developing issues of modernism, so the idea that people like Tamayo . . .

[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Continuing an interview with Roland Reiss, Session 1, tape 2, side B.

ROLAND REISS: I think the soft, romantic figurative aspects of artists like Tamayo, which he [Sheets] supported did not represent hard-core modernist kinds of interests, and was, therefore, an embarrassment. The new perspective embracing cultural diversity is a recent phenomenon allowing contemporary art to expand its range and engage in cross-cultural dialogue. We are not talking about Mexican art being done in the United States by Mexican artists or by Americans of Mexican origin. We are talking about contemporary American artists in general deriving expressive and stylistic qualities from the art of Mexico. Having grown up in Southern California, I feel very much related to Mexico. My minor in college was Anthropology, and Pre-Columbian art was my main interest. I took courses in the history of Mexico and I took classes in Spanish. I grew up in Pomona where Spanish was spoken everywhere. While in Claremont, Millard developed a similar affinity for Mexico and for its art before it was artistically correct to do so.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What's happening now in this post-modernist era we are opening up and willing to even give Millard Sheets his place. I find this all very interesting, particularly from the standpoint of your perspective.

ROLAND REISS: The appeal to modernism in the work of Feitelson and Lebrun is all European in its orientation, I think, Picasso to [Kasimir] Malevich, but it doesn't find deep roots in Mexico. There was an embarrassment about being a California artist, if you wanted to be an international modernist. In its own way, Regionalism was important and that's why Millard's brand of Regionalism managed to be quite distinct. It doesn't look like Thomas Hart Benton or Grant Wood or Anton Refregier or other artists who represented regional territories. Millard lead a very distinct regional development.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's interesting that you mention Refregier, because there is a lot of interest in him, whereas, not the same kind of interest in Sheets. I'm inclined to think that it is the political dimension to his work.

ROLAND REISS: I think Sheets' work was very romantic, poetic and sometimes historically didactic and it didn't strive to do things other than that. We may come around to thinking that's enough, at some point, for an artist to do. I have never chosen to be highly political either. I've been criticized for that because politically-driven work has been fashionable in critical circles. I just think there are more important issues beyond the political. In my miniatures, I wanted to be more philosophical, which differs from the romanticism of Millard's landscapes. Many artists have chosen not to get highly political in their work. Certainly, art has a much greater range than that. I believe there will be a reevaluation of a lot of work when a larger perspective returns to the field of criticism.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Before we abandon our friend, Millard, you said something earlier and it occurred to me that ironically he was most inclusive and, democratic about his approach to art and what qualifies and what can be included, which is very much the cry of the time.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, but as you point out, I think it was right on, there was none of the political dimension, the stridency or the angst that comes with it. In Millard, if it's there at all, it's seamless. I recall the painting he did of the California hills, some round hills, and sent out to all the schools in Southern California. Someone decided that the hills looked like two breasts. It was a giant scandal and the paintings were removed from many of the schools, because of its supposedly subversive intent. That's as close as he got, as far as I know, to a political controversy involving his work and it was an erotic issue not a political one.

PAUL KARLSTROM: There are certainly several anecdotes that are repeated about some completely distorting the work where the "red baiters" were looking for subversive messages.

ROLAND REISS: Right. When I say that Sheets' work is better than is allowed, I wouldn't put it up there with Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko, or someone like that, but in terms of regional importance, I certainly would put it on the level of Thomas Hart Benton.

PAUL KARLSTROM: The issue is the term regionalism as a way of explaining the problems that Sheets and the California school encountered and to be identified with a place.

ROLAND REISS: I would say essentialist/internationalist.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So the closer you get to the specific, unless it's some sort of explosion of Abstract Expressionism, the further you're working away from anything of significance.

ROLAND REISS: Generally speaking, unless it is very political.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How do you respond to the notion that art among of other things responds to the environment, not necessarily the landscape. What's different about this place, Southern California, and to what extent is that appropriately expressed in the art?

ROLAND REISS: I think that's very, very important; to some extent, it's inescapable, I think, when artists try to become international, they try to eliminate their personal environment from their work, but it creeps in nevertheless, even in the most minimal kind of work. The difference between Ed Moses' monochrome paintings and Brice Marden's monochrome paintings reflects the psychology of place. You can tell one is a California painter and you can tell one is a New York painter.

PAUL KARLSTROM: For you, how does that show?

ROLAND REISS: I think you can see it in the color, the density and even the attitude about paint. In a positive way I would say that the Moses' paintings are more decorative, just in the application of the paint. I'm talking about the very hermetic way of painting in both cases, but in Moses' work the touch causes color to expand and sit more lightly on the canvas. The paint itself is less dense, more open and almost playful. Marden's work seems aesthetically focused; more urban, closed and ultra serious in the workman-like application of paint and its greater density. I think their work exemplifies their individual environmental experiences, psychologically and physically. These artists would probably reject my thesis, but ultimately, whether it is conscious or not, I believe the influence of place cannot be discounted. I don't know. The dilemma is that on one hand you have arguments for regionalism and for national in the work and then you have the drive toward an international art where primarily nationalistic and regionalistic work is less acceptable. At the moment it is fashionable to emphasize different national characteristics in the name of diversity in large international shows. It is clear, though, that work which is exclusively national or regional in character seldom rises to a sustained position of importance. There are, of course, some exceptions. It is a post-modern idea that national qualities can be played out and subsumed in international art. Basically, there are two arguments going on. There's an argument about government getting smaller and smaller communities and with an art centered on its own roots and its own immediate environment, rather than the whole world. The other argument is that the whole world is getting smaller but our environment is getting larger and we will all be absorbed into a global view, and cultural differences will be extremely minor. This may be where electronic communication and world economics are taking us. I think artists are beginning to examine the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of artists in the world and most can have a meaningful local career of consequence while not being major players on the world stage. We are still a celebrity-oriented star-crossed culture, but I see more artists moving toward a deeper, more meaningful and less competitively destructive relationship with their own art by embracing a sense of place and community.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You are obviously in good position to observe that because you have been head of the graduate art program at Claremont and obviously you interact with students all the time.

ROLAND REISS: I have all of my life, forty years of teaching.

PAUL KARLSTROM: The pattern, as it seems to me in the 60s and 70s, became careerist and the notion was that you have to participate in this big international art world, which is basically centered in New York, so a number of artists make that decision to go to New York. What I hear you saying is that other factors came strongly into play and it's not just careerism or the perceived advantages of being in the center.

ROLAND REISS: Things have really changed since the 60s and 70s in terms that centers for art and art careers. Realism is now centered in the schools, students realize that some professional artists today can support themselves on art sales, can have extraordinary exhibition opportunities, make serious money and become celebrities. Young artists now have many opportunities that were not available when I entered the art world. In the 50s, there were perhaps only a hundred or so serious fine artists in the country who could live off their work. Los Angeles and other centers have come of age and it is possible to have a full-blown career outside of New York, although with a few exceptions New York artists command larger reputations and bigger prices. I think this is because the East Coast controls the major art publications, there are more important collectors in that area, and the sense of critical history runs deeper than anywhere else. The enormous growing population of artists is overwhelming a burgeoning art scene. Competition makes success ever more difficult for most artists to achieve. I think it is for this reason that artists four or five years out of school and beyond their "emerging artist" shows are beginning to take stock of their lives and seriously entertain a less driven attitude and the acceptance of their place in a regional setting, even if it is within a larger art center. Highly successful artists today tend to be somewhat sociopathic, manipulative and ruthless of the intense competition. Fortunately, I think, younger artists are being compelled to develop a larger perspective about their lives as artists.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But it isn't automatic, I gather, that they graduate and some still try to go to New York and think that is the only place to achieve success.

ROLAND REISS: No, they graduate and try to make the scene anywhere they can. Of course, many of them have to pay their bills and pay off their loans, so they can't do much of anything for the first couple of years. A few years after that they begin to see careerism for what it really is and how intensely they will need to hustle. It means redefining their belief system and values, it means where you live and virtually all friendships and activities will be totally focused on career opportunity. Many buy into it for a while, but increasingly more artists are opting for a healthier path.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This seems to make sense, since the focus of so much art that we have been discussing seems to be on the self as a whole cult of the individual and the autobiography and personalism and I guess, if that's the case, then you are going to have to face these issues, "Who am I?" Is that asking too much?

ROLAND REISS: I don't know, but I remember a review of Judy Chicago's autobiography in which the reviewer said that the problem with the book is that Judy's life lacked panache. I actually thought Judy's life had panache, but I thought, "My God, is that the important part of an artist's life and work?"

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let's break here and pick up sometime soon.

[END OF SESSION 1, TAPE 2, SIDE B]

[SESSION 2, SEPTEMBER 8, 1997]

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Continuing an interview with Roland Reiss. The date is September 8, 1997. This Session Two is being conducted at the artist's studio/home at The Brewery in downtown Los Angeles. The interviewer is Paul Karlstrom, and this is Tape 1, Side A. Roland, we were just reviewing a little bit what we talked about last time and how we meandered around a little bit but, I think, productively. And what we would do is sort of move back a little bit now and fill in some of that which may have been missing from the latter part of our interview, in terms of chronology. And I think you wanted to go all the way back to art school in Chicago.

ROLAND REISS: After I arrived in Chicago in 1947, I worked in a large commercial art studio by day and went to the American Academy of Art at night. It was the largest advertising studio in Chicago, named Bielefeld Studios for its owner. During my time there I formed a friendship with the owner's son and as a result he developed a personal interest in me. After a year there he suggested I go to college before doing any more commercial work, and I took his advice. I also wanted to mention a man who was at the American Academy of Art because he got me a scholarship there. I couldn't afford to continue in school because I was only making twenty-one dollars a week. He believed in my potential and arranged for me to attend school for free. His name was Alexander Mirsky, and a years later he was implicated in an authentication scandal. He was a Russian immigrant who had studied under Repin and he taught figure drawing at the American Academy. . After class he would take a small group of us out for coffee and rolls, enough rolls so we could each take one home for breakfast. Anyway, I came back to California and took a job at the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, designing displays for the schools exhibits underneath the grandstand in order to support myself. Some of the display fixtures I did back in 1949 are still in use. It was a great job for me and I got to handle a lot of school children's art and draw upon my experience in window display, sign painting, and fine art. We showed art work collected from over 300 schools in L.A. County. Installing this work and helping run the programs for the schools during the Fair was challenging and great fun. I was also going to junior college. Adolph Kath was my art teacher at Mt. SAC, the same art teacher I had worked with in high school.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Mt. SAC is Mt. San Antonio

ROLAND REISS: Mt. San Antonio College. Yes, it's in Walnut, California. I was in actually the second class after college began. I spent two years there doing college prep for UCLA. After graduation I did not have the funds to support myself in order to enroll at UCLA. It was during the Korean War, 1951. I was drafted because I did not have a college deferment. I was the only member of my high school class in the draft call-up that month, I was very bitter about that. There was some irony in the fact that I had received an award as the "Outstanding Senior Boy" at Pomona High School and then being one of its few representatives in the Army because I lacked the financial resources or family connections that others used to avoid service.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean?

ROLAND REISS: The others found ways to get out of it. If you were in a defense industry, you were deferred. My school friends all went with me to take the physical but later I was the only one of us to get on the train to Monterey.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What was the year?

ROLAND REISS: I think it was '51. I keep going back whether it was '51 or '52. It was like our worst moment in Korea. We were being pushed way down south and we were drafting massive amounts of men. I was sent to Ft. Ord for basic training. After training they gave us a series of tests and wanted a small group of us to become officers, but it would have meant signing up for an additional year. Those of us who refused the offer were sent to Camp Roberts to train new troops. I was fortunate because most of my basic training company from Fort Ord were killed or badly wounded. I discovered there were several places on the post where art was being done. I transferred into one called Training Aids because they needed someone to paint a mural. They had had a contest and an artist from San Diego had won but he had transferred out of Camp Roberts. I had painted that mural with George De Beeson and large things at the Fair so I applied for the job. I was sent to San Francisco to buy materials, given a warehouse, assistants, a scaffold, and a promotion to corporal. The mural was actually a full stage backdrop that unfurled as the commanding general made his speech each month to incoming draftees. It was pure Norman Rockwell in style, with infantry and tanks going up a hill under fire and with the 7th Armored Division insignia emblazoned in the sky against rays of light. : General Partridge was very pleased with it and gave me an official commendation with a promotion to sergeant-first-class. And I was put in charge of art production for Training Aids. This was a position equivalent to art director and I was supervising the work of about 50 artists. We produced all the visual aids for training the troops. We did charts, graphs, maps, plans, billboards with lots of illustrations of machine guns, camouflage, tactics and so forth. We had sketch class at night with WACS for models. We lived in the Headquarters Company with the clerk typist and band members, who basically wanted to be writers, poets, and musicians. We ate our meals at the WAACS' mess hall. We had our own little art world there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: This was just at Camp Roberts?

ROLAND REISS: Camp Roberts. And I was put in charge of -- that is, of course, the officers were really in charge -- but I was the one who was like an art director where I really handed out the work and supervised the work for some fifty artists, because all of the education was done with these giant oil cloth charts which were illustrated. They would take them out in the field and unroll them and show them to the troops. We did billboards and illustrations of machine guns and camouflage and everything imaginable with lots of lettering. There were a lot of people doing lettering and we had kind of a little art school at night with models, which was great! We ate in the WAC's mess. We were in Headquarters Company. All the clerk typists were writers and poets, so it was like a little art world there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean, some sort of military bohemia.

ROLAND REISS: Well, yes, sort of. We did have permission to wear paint-splattered fatigues. This is a digression, but I really learned something about the human need for decoration and art. Everything in the Army was supposed to be "G.I." which meant plain, khaki-colored or olive drab. One day someone would get an idea their unit should have colored shoe laces, next it would be epaulets and neckerchiefs, then helmet liners with decals, multiple colored stripes and chrome plating, The uniform would become more and more decorative approaching the splendor of an Aztec warrior. This was true of the equipment as well. I think it reflects the human tendency to distinguish ourselves as individuals, members of subcultures. A new colonel would arrive and say, "Out! G.I.! and then it would slowly start all over again. There was also a sense of being an artist at the court, painting portraits of officers and their families, decorating for their parties, making special furniture for them and so forth. Serving an elite class has always been part of the artist's role. There was another art area called Special Services where they made the posters and set up things for visiting USO Entertainment. Robert Irwin worked there but I did not meet him at that time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you never served in Korea.

ROLAND REISS: No. They had a time limit beyond which you could not be sent over seas, so when my time limit came up, they put me on orders to Korea. I was given shots and told to report to Camp Stoneman for overseas duty after my leave. While on leave I got married and we went to Catalina for the honeymoon. While there I received a telegram from Camp Roberts ordering me to return. They had received a telegram from the Pentagon stating I had won the Army Art Contest in Washington, D.C., which said that if I concurred I would be sent to Arlington, Virginia, to teach sketching to Secret Service. I did not concur because they told me my overseas transfer had been stopped and I could reassume my job at Camp Roberts, which was nearer to my new wife who was a graduate student at UCLA. Bob Irwin and I both won prizes that year. He won 1st prize at Post level and I won 2nd. He submitted a painting of a G.I. with a rifle. In later years I kidded him about that. I was doing a lot of that kind of painting on my job so I submitted a watercolor of a stream at Mount Baldy. [Wilhelm R.] Valentiner, a San Francisco art critic, reversed the prizes at 5th Army Headquarters, Presidio of San Francisco, and I spent a week up there doing "This is the Army" television. Our paintings went on to Washington where we both won prizes. It saved me from going to Korea so I am really grateful for that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What happened to Bob?

ROLAND REISS: Well, Bob must have had good things flow from it, too. I don't really know, but I never did meet him in that whole period.

PAUL KARLSTROM: One would think that you would have had some occasion. You're at the same place, right?

ROLAND REISS: A big military base. Probably twenty or thirty thousand men were there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But not that many artists.

ROLAND REISS: No, but we were in very different parts of the base and it was a very large place.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You were both what?, in your early twenties then?

ROLAND REISS: Yes. I stayed on at Camp Roberts and got out in two years which was the minimum if you didn't go overseas. Oh, what I wanted to mention that many artists survived first by volunteering to work on the ship's newspaper on the way over and then getting assigned to various areas of visual work in Japan. Since we were in a Headquarters Company, we had contacts in Japan who would help artists find work reading aerial photographs in mapmaking, illustration, and filmmaking. I look back on my time in the Army as a great experience. I got to do a lot of art and was able to choose premium assignments with the work we did with illustration, posters, advertising, and display design and brochures.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Basically you were working with educational imagery.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, educational stuff of all kinds.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What about propaganda? I suppose it's how you define it. But, did you get much involved with that?. .

ROLAND REISS: Actually, much of our work was kind of psychological propaganda, some of it almost subliminal. For instance someone had discovered that only one out of three soldiers actually fired their rifles in combat. There was an investigation of this problem and we were asked to put billboards around the camp showing soldiers firing rifles.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I'm trying to figure out the sequence here. You hadn't gone to UCLA yet?

ROLAND REISS: No.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So you had been a practicing artist in different ways.

ROLAND REISS: Painting, illustration and display design.

PAUL KARLSTROM: In what way did that focus your interests or help clarify what you wanted to do with your art? Or did it at all?

ROLAND REISS: I don't know that it did particularly. In junior college I certainly glimpsed the fact there was something called fine art. Before that I didn't really know the difference between commercial and fine art. I was aware that there were famous people like Picasso and Matisse. After my discharge I went to UCLA as I had planned and where my wife was a student. I went with the notion that I was going into fine art, not commercial art. I didn't sign up for commercial art courses. I only took one course in illustration while I was there with Don Chipperfield, who was a great teacher, but basically I went into a fine arts program. By then I knew what I wanted to do.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What is your wife's name?

ROLAND REISS: Her maiden name was Betty Ravenscroft.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Was she an art student there also at UCLA?

ROLAND REISS: No, her main area of study was languages. She was a real scholar. In fact, when we got married we thought that she was going to be a scholar and I was going to be an artist. We weren't going to have any kids and we'd be completely committed to our professional life. We wound up having six kids - which is sort of ironic.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, that seems to me that she is part of this story. Ending up with a brood like that had to have a considerable impact certainly on your time, certainly on her time.

ROLAND REISS: Right. Well, she was further along because she'd been going to school while I was in the Army. When I came back, I still had my last two years of undergraduate work to do. So I went to school full-time. She had completed her studies and was planning to do some graduate work. For a brief time, we were in a little house down on Cotner near the phone company in West L.A., waiting to get into G.I. housing. I was one of the first Korean veterans to go into G.I. housing, which was still full of WWII veterans. It was just over the hill from the university right along the upper end of fraternity row. It was prophetically called maternity row, and indeed my wife became pregnant shortly after moving in and we had our first child there. She became involved in raising the baby and eventually stopped taking classes while I devoted myself completely to school.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So she didn't finish then?

ROLAND REISS: I think she got her Master's. She was a brilliant student. She had been class valedictorian at Mt. SAC and received outstanding honors at UCLA. When I started at UCLA, the major figures were Gordon Nunes, Jan Stussy and Clinton Adams. And Gordon and Jan were considered to be the protégés of Stanton Macdonald-Wright who was still there in his last few years of teaching. He was beyond retirement age but he was still there. Two important women on the faculty were Dorothy Brown and Annita Delano, and you know that Annita was Robert Delaunay's niece. Students felt pressure to choose between Stussy and Nunes as mentors, Jan was very extroverted and Gordon was a quieter more mystical sensibility. Jan taught life drawing and anatomy and I was very interested in him because I had considerable skill in drawing. There was only a handful of graduate students. There was Jim McGarrell, myself, Craig Kauffman, Les Kerr, Adele Feinberg, Art Lindgram, Ray Brown and several others. It was a very small graduate program.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Les Kerr then ended up in San Francisco, and we actually have some of his papers in the Archives from Mary, his widow.

ROLAND REISS: Oh really? This little group was a very select one. We thought we were all hot shots. We were all working on M.A. degrees because the MFA had not yet been instituted at UCLA. It was very competitive for teaching assistantships, and if you knew your stuff in life drawing/anatomy, then an assistantship with Jan Stussy was almost guaranteed. He also had large night classes. He was running fifty people at a time and his courses were in great demand. so I set my sites on that. I took his course in anatomy and determined that I would learn the material twice as well as the other students and it worked, I got the job. I think by that time I knew as much as he did about anatomy. Jan was a great showman, and very inspiring to beginning students.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Let me interrupt. We did talk about some of the faculty and those years at UCLA. Jan, of course, is renowned almost an adopted son of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. And if you were assisting Jan, did that give you certain entree to Macdonald-Wright?

ROLAND REISS: The faculty tended to stay quite separate, and I felt really privileged to visit Jan's home at the time because they seldom socialized with their students. Stanton was very aloof and very tough and very fearsome to students. You bring up an interesting point, because for some reason he took an interest in me. He invited me to go landscape painting with him. He wanted to teach me oriental painting, which was a great compliment, but I was not able to do it at that time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Would you have had to travel somewhere?

ROLAND REISS: No. It was just a day on weekends. It was all very distant. It was just this invitation. He seemed to see something in my work and in me.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you suppose it was? .

ROLAND REISS: I don't know. Well, I'm thinking, I wonder if that had something to do with the fact that I was a veteran and a bit more mature than the other students. In class he was very stern and didn't appear to have favorites. Several times he made us sit there and look at a painting for three hours. We couldn't go to the bathroom while he stared at us. It was his way of teaching us to look at painting, and maybe I stayed awake better than some of the others. When I came back to school, I loved it! After the Army, I thought I was in paradise that made my perspective different from some of the other students. In fact, none of the others had been in the Army that I know of. Ed Moses was an undergraduate and I don't believe he had been in the army, but I'm not certain. I just thought school was terrific! I was dead serious about it and really into it. My fellow students had an air of casualness about them that I didn't have, perhaps because the Army had been such a deprivational experience for me in contrast.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[SESSION 2]

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Interview with Roland Reiss Session 2, Tape 1, Side B.

ROLAND REISS: I don't know how much you want me to talk about these individual instructors. One of the reasons I became interested in Jan Stussy was because of an article about him in American Artist Magazine which said he painted 15 watercolors a day. So I took his watercolor course, and I set out to paint twenty-five watercolors a day. It was really good for me.

PAUL KARLSTROM: He was sort of your model at that point, is that right?

ROLAND REISS: He was a model when I started at UCLA. I think he was a terrific teacher for beginning students. The problem was that he did not seem to be able to help with dialogue and critique at a more advanced level. A lot of people brushed him aside as they gained more experience. He had great value as an introductory teacher. He was very dramatic and made art seem really important. Another teacher there, Clinton Adams had a big influence on me, too.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How was Clinton?

ROLAND REISS: Well, Clinton was very dry and nit-picking about everything. I remember him calling me to account for things I said. He'd say, "You can't say it that way." He would stop you in your tracks. It was humiliating at times, but I developed enormous respect for his rigorous mind. Adams and Wright exemplified the intelligent artist for me. Wright was just mind-blowing, and, of course, he was a living piece of world art history.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did Wright talk about world arts? Did he bring the whole world of history and ideas into his teaching?

ROLAND REISS: He tailored ideas and his own history constantly plus endless anecdotes about his time in Paris and people he knew. He didn't talk about his later interests very much. I remember he'd get onto Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas and he would say that Alice was the brains behind Gertrude. And, of course, we all knew his brother was Willard Huntington Wright, the first great American contemporary art critic, and also SS Van Dine. Did you know that?

PAUL KARLSTROM: No.

ROLAND REISS: SS Van Dine was the greatest mystery writer at that time. The day before yesterday in Texas I repeated one of my favorites of Wright's anecdotes in which he recounts that there was no electrical light in the early days in Paris. Artists went to the cafes and they argued all night, and then he said they would run to their studios when the sun came up to paint their arguments. You could make a case for that being the beginning of art theory, if you don't want to go back to the academy in Florence. He knew most of the important figures in early modernism. When he talked of Matisse, we listened. When he said, "Picasso said," we knew we were getting it first hand. It was almost overwhelming because everyone worshipped Picasso when I was in graduate school. All of our instructors talked about him, but to be talking to someone who actually knew him was really something.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Was Wright admiring of these figures that he would talk about? Was he respectful?

ROLAND REISS: I thought it was balanced. Obviously, in repeating their names, he was giving them respect. He was putting himself on a par with them in terms of dialogue. I don't think he ever tried to downgrade them. He never questioned their accomplishments. It was mostly "he or she said" and "I said." You were aware that he knew many of these people quite well.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But he obviously brought to the students a sense of a larger art world.

ROLAND REISS: Oh, yes.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It was a very exciting thing to participate in.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, the department at UCLA was also adding impressive new faculty members who further helped to expand our horizons. Jack Hooper came my second year as a graduate student and we became great friends. Jack had an interview with Wright many years earlier. And Stanton said, "You want to be an artist? Go to Europe!" So Jack went to Paris for a while, and then worked with Siquieros in Mexico before coming to UCLA. If you really want to be an artist, go to Europe. That had been very common advice before the success of Abstract Expressionism. Of course, I was one of those who didn't go, but thought I probably should have. I had other things in life to deal with that didn't allow me that choice. In retrospect, I don't regret not studying there at all.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes, you had a few responsibilities.

ROLAND REISS: It has certainly all turned around in my life time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What do you mean, the necessity of going to Europe?

ROLAND REISS: Yes, instead artists would come to the United States rather than go to Europe to study.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Jackson Pollock is famously quoted as saying that's a bunch of shit.

ROLAND REISS: Oh, that you should go to Europe? Well, that's because French art has been so dominant in recent history, but with the rise of American painting in the 50s things were reversed. Artists gravitate to the centers of action in their fields.

PAUL KARLSTROM: But you were able to experience that while at UCLA at that time because of the presence of a few people, some of that second hand, admittedly, especially through Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

ROLAND REISS: Oh yes. I mean, that was the whole orientation. The original faculty was almost exclusively oriented toward Europe and not New York.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Tell me a little bit if you would about Clinton. He can be a little bit curmudgeonly at times.

ROLAND REISS: Well, he was. I don't know. He was a difficult instructor. He was always challenging you, putting you on the spot, but somehow, I respected that and understood it was a teaching persona.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Again, I don't want to set us off in another direction, but your work has been viewed in many respects as being heavily laden with ideas, basically intellectual, conceptual, and smart. It just occurs to me as we're talking that this could have been a key moment for you not just introducing yourself to that way of looking at the world and thinking.

ROLAND REISS: Absolutely! The first word that comes to mind with Clinton is "rigorous." That was the first time I encountered it. Wright was grand in his intelligent style, but in contrast Adams was precise, he was a perfectionist about language. I don't think I ever got close to him in terms of rigor or clarity, but it certainly made me sharper than I was.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Also, it would seem that you could maybe draw up some connection to the whole idea of language and the importance of language and meaning for some artists, which was their right.

ROLAND REISS: Right. Well, I just remember thinking to myself, if you're going to be an artist today, you have to be smart. You have to be intelligent, so I'd better start to improve my mind. It's not just about making work. I wanted to mention that my oldest son, Clint, was named for Clinton Adams out of admiration.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You obviously respected him and his mind.

ROLAND REISS: I think he saw something in me because, years later, he wanted me to be the chair at the University of New Mexico, where he was Dean. We hadn't had all that much contact over the years except when I was a visiting artist at the University of New Mexico for a week. I remember also spending time with him the year I was on a panel at the College Art Association Conference. I came to realize he had a lot of respect for me. His work was extremely modest. He did those meticulous little egg tempera paintings and taught us all how to do egg tempera painting. He was very good in critiques. I learned a lot from watching him do that.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I can understand a bit of what you're saying because there is a precision in his speaking.

ROLAND REISS: I think most people feel a little sloppy around Clinton. He was the graduate dean at New Mexico for many years. He was at home in academic circles. More than any other artist I can think of in that period he was a true academic, a scholar I have come to know a warmer side of him in very recent years, perhaps because we have a kind of academic parity now. I think that the rites of passage in those early days were meant to be much more severe. It's still like that in a lot of South American countries and in Italy where professors still require deference and submission.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I certainly don't want to turn this into a kind of equal time conversation between us, but this seems to me that your experience was rich with potential and implications. I don't want to say that art was approached without a sense of meaning and of understanding, but that was a period when Abstract Expressionism was ascending.

ROLAND REISS: I have a great story about that. I've got to mention a few more instructors. Just don't let me forget that, because it's all connected. I wanted to talk about Annita Delano, who's very important to me. At the point I met her, she was an older lady. Students were no longer interested in her. I took a watercolor course from her and she had this terrible habit of grimacing and looking down as though to say, "You won't really care what I'm saying." But she did say something that caught my interest. She said "Henri Matisse, said. . ." and I realized she . . . said it to me. She went on to say that her goal was to bring three-dimensionality to the color of Matisse. I thought, "WOW," she really knows Matisse and she has a really interesting idea. After class, when I walked in she just lit up. Eventually she told me her story. She would go to Canyon de Chelly every summer by herself, to camp out and paint. Then everything about the Barnes Foundation, where she worked with Matisse and the philosopher, John Dewey came out. She taught me the Barnes system of analysis which is still of great value to me in teaching. Do you think it's worthwhile to talk about it?

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes.

ROLAND REISS: Well, it does relate to education in that period. Basically, you would sit in front of an original work of art and write. It had to be an original. You'd start by writing what you thought the artist's intentions were, and then you would go into an analysis of line, light, space, shape and color. The idea was that you would write as long as you could on each formal element. You'd sit in a chair in the hall at UCLA writing because that was there, believe it or not, they had original paintings hanging by artists like Courbet, Marin, and Léger. I remember analyzing Matisse's painting, Tea, while it was on loan from the Stendahl Collection. At the end of the analytical work, you did a synthesis in which you discussed how these elements supported the artist's intentions. Intent was broadened into social, psychological, political, and philosophical areas. We did not entertain the bizarre value judgments Dr. Barnes had attached to his system.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So starting with basically the formal elements, you describe as thoroughly as possible.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, It really taught you to see. It was actually parallel to Wright's idea of looking at a painting for hours at a time. Both methods created a deep immersion in the work. Anyway, Annita gave me all that and I am grateful to her, but, like with the others, her basic orientation was European art. Then, new instructors appeared at UCLA, Sam Amato, Bill Brice, and a little later, John Paul Jones. I believe Sam had been in the Navy with Jan Stussy, which probably had to do with his being hired. Sam, too, loved European art, but he was much more American in outlook, very warm and poetic, in his analytical method. Analysis was very much in fashion at that time and it was a tool for making the connection between art history and contemporary art. In studio classes, all of the instructors talked about Vermeer, Velasquez, and Piero della Francesca incessantly while teaching at the University of Iowa. It was a part of Bill Brice's repertoire as well, but at the same time he was the most contemporary in outlook. He was a brilliant man, towering above all others intellectually and physically. He, too, was analytical, but with a romantic sensibility that made him very open to new art and new ideas. He was a fabulous storyteller complete with accents and amazing insights about virtually everything he discussed. It was fascinating to hear him talk about a movie, for instance; it still is. I still see him, and love to hear him talk about anything. Bill was showing in New York when he came to teach at UCLA and his whole orientation seemed to be more American and creative. He was seen as a protégé of Rico Lebrun along with Howard Warshaw. I know Bill does not agree with that, but he did teach a version of Lebrun's drawing method. I learned that from him and found there was a strange connection to Stussy's style derived from Eugene Berman. Also at USC there was Francis de Erdely drawing in a related manner. There was a romantic quasi anatomical quality in each of these styles which in one way or another connected to the Jepson School.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How different was it from the California School of Fine Arts/San Francisco Art Institute at the same time? My impression is that they were polar opposites, very different approaches in the instruction and in the goals.

ROLAND REISS: Things were very different that were going on in San Francisco. The orientation there was much more contemporary perhaps because of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still being there. I know they were bringing visiting artists out from the east. I was becoming aware of Abstract Expressionism. Craig Kauffman was one of the few artists in L.A. who seemed to know anything about it. As a graduate student, Craig was the "enfant terrible" of the department. His first show had been at Felix Landau Gallery at age 17 or 18. He projected an air of superiority over students and faculty alike. He had a log of what we now call "attitude," but many years later I came to like him a lot. His father was a California State Supreme Court justice and it was very clear that he was much better off financially than the rest of us. He was very mobile and well acquainted with the art and artists in San Francisco. In a way, at first, Jim McGarrell , Les Kerr, Ray Brown, Idele Feinberg, Jack Hooper and I, we knew much less about what was happening, especially in New York. This was partly because our teachers were not very knowledgeable about contemporary developments. I began to read and hear about Motherwell, de Kooning, and this thing being called Abstract Expressionism. I did a paper for Fred Wight on Abstract Expressionism. Bill Brice heard about my paper and asked me to give a lecture about it to the art department. I remember being scared to death because all of the studio instructors came and Jan Stussy, for instance, had not caught up to Modigliani. So I did introduce Abstract Expressionism to the art department at UCLA. Also, the Dwan Gallery had opened in Westwood during that time and mounted some extraordinary shows. The Yves Klein show made a huge impact on me.

PAUL KARLSTROM: What year was that show? Do you remember?

ROLAND REISS: Well, I have to guess around 1955. I could be a year off, but it's right in there. There is a famous story about that show, but I only know it second hand. They flew Yves Klein in from Paris to give a gallery talk and during the lecture he said, "There's an inner eye and an outer eye." And John Altoon called out from the back of the audience, "There's an inner asshole and there's an outer asshole and you're all assholes." People who were there remember that and quoted that over and over again, that confrontation. I didn't know him, but I'm told this was a typical Altoon. So we were just getting the picture about Abstract Expressionism when a show of San Francisco artists, doing Abstract Expressionist paintings, appeared on the Santa Monica pier.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You mean the Merry-Go-Round . . .

ROLAND REISS: The Merry-Go-Round Show. That show illustrated the gap between Los Angeles and San Francisco. After all, Rothko and Hoffman had been up there and not in Los Angeles. Craig Kauffman knew most of the people in the Merry-Go-Round show. I think he was in it. I don't recall for sure, I do remember going with him to see the show. Those of us at UCLA were oriented to the Frank Perls, and Felix Landau Galleries. Also to the Paul Kantor Gallery, that showed people like Marino Marini, but later introduced Richard Diebenkorn to Los Angeles. Craig eventually hooked up with the Ferus Gallery, afresh and exciting place mainly showing people who had come out of Chouinard. Ferus represented the beginning of a whole new phase in Los Angeles art.

[END TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

PAUL KARLSTROM: A second session of an interview with Roland Reiss on September 8, 1997. This is Tape 2, Side A.

ROLAND REISS: So my own painting got more abstract as I picked up interest in Abstract Expressionism. As a graduate student, I began to enter competitive shows across the country and in the San Francisco area and had considerable luck winning prizes. Competitive shows were a bigger deal in those days than they are now. A little anecdote, fast forward 30 years so, while I was making the miniatures, I was on a panel at the Southwest College Art Conference and afterwards I was waiting to go to dinner with Jim Turrell who was serving on a different panel and one of the panelists was Mel Ramos. After his panel finished I introduced myself to Ramos and he said, "Oh, I know who you are." I said, "You do?" He said, "In the early days I used to work at Brueggers, an art shipping company. And he said, "When they came up from L.A. you were one of the guys we were always waiting to see." It was a touching compliment about my early work.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Where would these juried shows be in San Francisco?

ROLAND REISS: Places like the California State Fair in Sacramento. I won first prize at the California State Fair one year. The year before, I won a prize in the College Student Category. It was considered to be an important show in those days and, like the shows at the L.A. County Fair, it was juried by major artists and critics.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Did they have the jury or open competitive shows that you participated in at the [California] Legion of Honor?

ROLAND REISS: Yes, I think so. A lot of competitive shows, and sometimes I won prizes, but my work was abstract and it seemed to strike a chord in San Francisco. I have always felt that San Francisco was and is more responsive to my sensibility, perhaps because I have always been in what is happening there.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You said that there were opportunities to see this growing awareness of Abstract Expressionism. Was there a broad interest among the other younger artists in this area?

ROLAND REISS: No. I'd say for a while at UCLA Craig and I were the only ones and, for me, a little later than Craig. I didn't really know much about the Ferus group. Fred Wight had a show at UCLA that had Motherwell and some other things in it, so some of that work had been seen in town. I think it received a quiet reception and Abstract Expressionist work began to emerge slowly in Los Angeles after that. I made trips to San Francisco where I saw the Clyfford Stills at the museums. They were paying a lot of attention to his work up there. I remember standing in front of that work I was trying to understand, but I couldn't get it. I couldn't get it. Finally, one day I almost fell on the floor. I could see the scale of this thing; understand the vastness of the sensibility exposed by the work. I began to understand what abstraction was really about through Clyfford Stills' paintings.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So that confirmed the direction in your own work.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, although I always continued to draw figuratively. The two were separate because, if you did abstract painting and figurative drawing in those days, the figurative drawing would be a mark of bad faith that you didn't believe in abstraction. Arriving at an understanding of non-objective painting was a difficult achievement entering a rarefied atmosphere that artists needed courage and faith in order to sustain their belief and convictions in the face of misunderstanding and doubt on the part of other artists and the general public. People were not even able to grasp the analogy of music as another form of abstraction. Non-objective artists, therefore, adopted an exclusionist position somewhat defensively. Figurative work was seen as retrograde. So, while I was in Colorado, I almost never showed my figurative drawings.

PAUL KARLSTROM: So for how long were you working with abstract painting?

ROLAND REISS: All through my 15 years there, but I was also drawing the figure continuously. Actually Joan Brown wound up with some of those drawings.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Why was that?

ROLAND REISS: During the time she was married to Manual Neri, I brought her in as a visiting artist to the University of Colorado. I was the professor in charge of visiting artists and running the graduate program there. We're digressing a little bit.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I don't know. Why don't we talk about that, I mean, unless you feel that we've moved up to that?

ROLAND REISS: I don't know if we wanted to hit a few more of the instructors that showed up at UCLA or not. Well, let me do a few more of the people who probably should be mentioned if you're interested in that period. John Paul Jones showed up while I was a graduate student. He was fresh out of the University of Iowa, a printmaking teacher with the stamp of [Mauricio] Lasansky all over him, but he was a wonderful guy, quiet, warm, and very intuitive. I took printmaking from him as a graduate student. He used to send graduate prints off to the competitive print shows. I really wasn't that interested in prints, so I developed a quick technique to make them, which involved scratching into the plate varnish with a scraper, biting it deeply with acid and printing it. I won the prize at the Boston Print Annual and John said to me, "You could be a great printmaker, but I know all you want to paint." I think for a moment he thought he could sway me toward printmaking. In those days you made a commitment to one area or the other. Not surprisingly, years later, John left printmaking behind for painting and sculpture after that. Another important person I forgot to mention is Ray Brown, a graduate student at that time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Oh sure, Ray Brown. He ended up teaching at UCLA.

ROLAND REISS: He was the chair there in recent years. He was a very good painter, but his concentration really was in printmaking. David Glines was an undergraduate, who turned out to be a printmaker. Basically, John Paul Jones brought the Iowa intaglio printmaking aesthetic to UCLA. I also studied sculpture with Tony Rosenthal who was all embroiled right around that time in the controversy about the public sculpture he had done for City Hall in downtown Los Angeles. It was one of the first big commissions for contemporary art in the city. He did a generic family in bronze that looked like the Oscars and Emmys. Someone decided they were naked in spite of the absence of genitalia and it became a huge controversy. Rosenthal was very busy with international commissions and often did not come to school. He was hard-of-hearing and had difficulty teaching. Charlie Eames substituted for him when he could not be there. I had run into Eames a number of times earlier around town when I would be doing watercolors and he would show up to film the same unusual material. Rosenthal was replaced by Bob Cremean. I had him one year out of graduate school. I don't know that we had any communication. His work certainly met a certain UCLA criteria UCLA had maintained through all of this commitment to figurative drawing and Cremean fit that very nicely. Actually, this aesthetic developed nationwide and included people like Tovish and Baskin in other parts of the country. I was leaving that work behind for more abstract interests. Jim McGarrell and Les Kerr exemplified that point of view. Craig's work was already abstract.

PAUL KARLSTROM: I was going to ask you to what extent art history was a part in the course of training?

ROLAND REISS: Art history was considered an essential basis for studio studies. UCLA had some excellent historians and we studied along side Ph.D. candidates in Art History. Karl Birkmeyer had originally come over with the Salt Mine collection on tour from Germany, and Berkeley hired him and then he wound up at UCLA. He was a very important professor for me, because he understood an artist and a historian. He respected contemporary artists, and that was not typical of most historians. And over and over again, he would have me critique historic works in front of the class, Neverlandish painting. It gave me a lot of confidence. I remember in one course as I was about to graduate, I had an interview for a job out of state coming up. I went to him and asked if I could take the final early or delay it till after my trip. He said to me, "This job is more important to you than any final. I'm going to give you an "A"; just forget the final." What I learned from that has stayed with me throughout my career as a teacher/administrator; students are human beings and your support of their life's journey is more important than enforcing academic rules if they have been serious about their studies.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's interesting about Birkmeyer. I was intrigued, of course, by the stories that would add to his symbolism, and I thought he was a wonderful teacher, but I found him very difficult, and also very demanding like you would describe Clinton Adams on some very small points, not very forgiving.

ROLAND REISS: This is great then to be able to tell the positive side of the man. I thought he was a very intelligent, warm and caring person.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It's an experience that I had that actually more than anything else shifted me into American art because I was unhappy.

ROLAND REISS: Of course, of course.

PAUL KARLSTROM: My wife and I house-sat for him one time when he was off in Europe. I think it was our first year at UCLA. He had a dachshund called Roger van der Weyden. What I would like to raise is that with you he was dealing with an artist and with me he was dealing with a would-be art historian. I think probably there were very different academic standards relative to that. I can't imagine he would have given any of us an A without doing the paper and taking the exam.

ROLAND REISS: I was in the studio program and he knew the difference in category. I had received A's, however, in all of my work in art history. When he asked me as he did a number of times to critique historic paintings in front of art history graduates, I'm sure it was because he wanted them to hear an artist's point of view. By doing that he also made history live for me. He was very open to contemporary art as were a few other great historians like Panofsky and Shapiro, who were among his favorites. He probably thought that history students like you required a dose of the same Germanic discipline he had been subjected to.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, I have to say I always admired him. I thought his courses were among the best.

ROLAND REISS: He knew his stuff.

PAUL KARLSTROM: His courses really made me begin to understand what was involved in art history as a discipline. . This is the whole experience you clearly had at UCLA which was a thoroughly and intellectually stimulating experience.

ROLAND REISS: It was all an important part of what would happen later in my work. You also had to have a minor and mine was Anthropology. I specialized in pre-Columbian and what was called the American Indian before the phrase Native American came into use. In fact, UCLA required an outside member on your committee and I had a member of the Anthropology Department on my M.A. committee. I loved anthropology. I had taken courses in the history and art of Mexico. When I was on the trip to the Black Hills with my father, I got an autograph of an old Indian Chief at the trading post who drew a bear and signed it Standing Bear. I learned later that he had been one of the famous Sioux Chiefs at the Little Big Horn, and he was spending his last days at the Pine Ridge Reservation. As my art developed it reflected the nature of these academic studies, a special way of looking at information. An art critic once called me a social anthropologist in relation to my miniatures. I think that was perceptive.

PAUL KARLSTROM: It seems that at UCLA there really wasn't initially a much broader exposure that would provide information that could expand to ideas of what you could be. But along the lines that have very much to do with the knowledge of the world, not just the knowledge of self. The program at the [San Francisco] Art Institute, frankly, for how it's embodied, tended to be extremely self-referential and almost self-indulgent.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, the academic view was a broad one at places like UCLA, but almost to a fault. The fault was in not focusing on art as a profession. In the art schools there was a sense of commitment to a profession, even if there were few real opportunities out there. At that time, there were probably a handful of artists in New York supporting themselves on their work, but there was the notion that you could be an artist in the art schools. In academia it was training to be a teacher and to be an artist simultaneously. So that meant that the M.A. degree in academia -- there weren't many MFAs at the time, UCLA didn't have one - you had to cut the academic mustard to get the degree. You were challenged with art history questions in those exams even though you were earning a studio degree. That was also true when I went to teach at the University of Colorado, the same attitude. Actually, when I came to Claremont, I felt I was inventing the idea of what I called "transitional, professional education" in reaction to the notion at universities that people were being trained to be teachers. I felt that art students were often given a very heavy academic program at the expense of development in practice. So I guess we could leave UCLA now.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Yes, we've done UCLA pretty well. So how did you get to Colorado, when and how? We talked a little bit maybe last time.

ROLAND REISS: Yes, I went to Colorado immediately after graduate school. I had applied around for several jobs. Gibson Danes was the chair at UCLA and was a great help to me in looking for a teaching job. Back then a chair could be very influential in placing a student in a teaching position. It was a period that a lot of the jobs had been gobbled up by World War II veterans. They were many of my teachers at UCLA. I was at the tailend of job opportunity that had been created by the G.I. Bill. Many of the schools had grown large art faculties to deal with the influx of veterans. I was offered a job at the University of California, Riverside, by Jean Boggs. At that time they were planning to open a tiny experimental elite campus. I thought an art department faculty of three was too small to give the students a serious studio education. I was also offered a job at California State University, San Diego. There was no UCSD [University of California, San Diego] at that time. The chair down there said, "I'm offering you this job because Gib Danes says you would be great." He wanted me to teach color on a musical scale that would set up his advanced courses, so I turned the job down. My friend, Paul Lindgren, took the job and stayed there the rest of his life. So there I was without a job. And people began to think I was too choosey. Finally, one of the jobs that came available was at Colorado, so I flew out and interviewed for it. I had a wife and a child and I had to get to work. The University of Colorado had a large art department and I liked what I saw there. The department was large and very alive. I thought it would be good for me to get away from California and people who had influenced me in order to find myself as an artist and as a teacher. So I accepted the job there as a painting teacher. Believe it or not, I was the senior painting teacher, right out of graduate school. Don Weygandt, the painting teacher who I replaced, was still teaching there in a year of grace after he was fired. He was an excellent teacher and wound up teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz after he left. Most of the students were still World War II veterans, and they were older students. The chair was a stuffy Anglophile who had been trained at Yale and Iowa named Alden McGrew. He had gone into conflict with the graduate students by maintaining that the MFA statements had to be written in the third person. The graduate student veterans maintained this rule was ridiculous and made Don Wegandt their faculty champion in their argument. McGrew was not just chair, he was Department Head, he was in a powerful position and so he just fired Don. As his replacement I found myself in a tough sport being resented by the students who were his supporters. Don and I became friends, a testimony to the kind of person he was. There was a wall separating our studios and we sometimes talked to each other through it.

[END TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B]

PAUL KARLSTROM: Continuing our interview with Roland Reiss. This is Session 2, Tape 2, Side B. Roland, we have you in Colorado being resented a bit by the students.

ROLAND REISS: Well, he [Don Wegandt] called these students in and asked them to treat me fairly and from that moment on I had a wonderful time teaching there. There were about twenty graduate students at the time I arrived and that went up to about forty-five by the time I left, fifteen years later. Of course, larger programs like the University of Iowa and San Jose had from 100 to 150 graduate students at the time.

PAUL KARLSTROM: You really helped to expand the program.

ROLAND REISS: It seems I have a compulsion to do that. The faculty was growing and I guess our best friends were George and Betty Woodman. She became probably the most celebrated ceramist in the country at this point in time. She shows at Max Protetch. We used to buy her things at weekend sales to keep her going as a faculty wife. Their daughter, Francesca Woodman, has become a major figure in photography. My other five children were born and we moved from a little tiny, rented house eventually to a Victorian house and with a big studio on Mapleton Hill.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How many years were you there?

ROLAND REISS: Fifteen years. It was a good stretch. In the fifties I had already begun to work in plastics. After Leo Amino in the forties, Bob Mallory in New York, my friend Jack Hooper in California, DeWain Valentine and I were among the very first artists to work with it. DeWain was one of my students at Colorado. We went on a trip together to Los Angeles and he moved there the next year. We all started out with acrylic polymer; it was marketed to artists. There actually was a point where De Wain had stayed in Boulder for a while after he graduated and got heavily involved in fiberglass work. Jack Hooper and I started out with polyurethane and epoxy. There was Roger Katowski., who was teaching at Denver University and also working with plastics, mainly polyester resin. Time magazine came out to write an article about us, about artists working in plastic in the Denver area, but they did not publish the article. About four or five years later we saw an article in Time magazine about the plastic movement in Southern California. By that time DeWain had moved out to California. I don't think he introduced plastics to California, I think it had begun to develop there on its own. I am still amazed that I opened the magazine one day in the sixties and saw Craig Kauffman blowing Plexiglas painting. By that time I had been blowing Plexiglas as well. I had no idea he had been working with a similar process. It's almost like it was in the air that this kind of art would materialize independently, in different parts of the country by artists of a similar background many of whom had worked as 2nd generation Abstract Expressionists and wanted to concretize form, to replace the gestural excesses of action painting. That meant making painting more dimensional, more of an object, more sculptural, and plastics were a key to that. The fact that plastics could also be used to produce transparent volumes led to castings by artists like DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Annie McCoy, Fred Eversley, and myself. There is a direct connection between that work and Light and Space art which has not been fully explored from a critical or historical standpoint.

PAUL KARLSTROM: How did you start out working in plastics?

ROLAND REISS: First, I began a canvas bulging forward in relief created by various objects I put underneath, like large coffee cans that made volcanoe like shapes. I bought acrylic polymer from Rohm and Haas to use as a paint medium because it remained flexible over my volume trim and radically stretched surface. I found a plastic house in Denver so the next step was to freeze the three dimensional canvas into position with fiberglass and polyester resin. The interest in the volume led Jack Hooper and me to use polyurethane foam because it formed volume by itself as it expanded. He came to Colorado from California and worked with me one summer. We did a lot of experimentation with liquid foams and epoxy. I had a show in Denver a month later and they were selling large pieces of foam. I said, "What are these?" They said, "This is a new movement. There's an artist who has just done a show here with foam, we call them three-dimensional canvases." Of course, the artist had been me. The following year, I sent three of my polyurethane epoxy-coated, shiny plastic paintings to the Mid-America Exhibition at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha [Nebraska]. The paintings were rejected and the next year at Mid-West College Art Conference I was shown slides of foam paintings by painters at the University of Nebraska faculty. I said, "When did you start working with foam?" They said, "Well, we saw your work at the Mid-America Exhibition last year." I said, "I wasn't in the show." They said, "Oh, we saw it all in the store room before they were sent back."

PAUL KARLSTROM: So there wasn't anybody that you knew who was doing this at the time?

ROLAND REISS: Only Jack Hooper and me. Jack did not work with foam for very long. The person who received national attention for his work with polyurethane was Roger Bellamy from San Francisco. I remember I was at a national sculpture conference in Kansas many years later with my friend Fred Spratt from San Jose, who was also a pioneer in working with plastics. Roger Bellamy was the featured speaker and he was introduced as "the first man to have worked with polyurethane foam in painting and sculpture." He had the grace to say, "I'm not the first person who worked with polyurethane. It was some guy around Denver." The problem with Denver was that there was "no there, there." The planes and critics did not stop there. They flew back and forth from coast to coast. I recall doing a performance with William T. Wiley in Boulder, and he said that it was so hard to do things out there and nobody would know what we had done. The sixties was a period of great ferment and creativity. I think a lot of interesting and important work was being done outside of New York and Los Angeles, but that work was ignored and seldom shown. Artists in the center often received attention for work similar to that being explored elsewhere. One of the more painful aspects of being out in places like Denver/Boulder was being ripped off by more successful artists who came out our way as visitors. This was particularly true in relation to new materials. We were caught up in Marshall McCluban's idea that "the medium is the message." Unique material and processes into new expressive territories presented the originator with a competitive edge. I remember Billy Al Bengston viewing my work in Boulder and saying, "You know, I have a reputation for stealing." I took that as a compliment and indeed he did not take from me, but some other out-of-state visitors did. I could continue to generate new possibilities indefinitely.

PAUL KARLSTROM: Who else was working in plastics at about the time or shortly thereafter? After all, this is one important aspect of what came to be described as a Southern California esthetic.

ROLAND REISS: I don't think that what happened in Southern California had anything directly to do with Colorado, it was a parallel activity maybe starting slightly later in California. When De Wain came to California he joined others like Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman, and Ron Davis, who had been working in plastics. Robert Mallory had pioneered polyesters in New York in the mid-fifties. My friend Jack Hooper was not really part of the later California developments and by the time I came back to California others like Terry O'Shea, David Elder, Fred Eversley, who had worked in Denver, and Ann McCoy, one of my former students, were all casting with polyester resin. Mowry Baden, Tom Holland, and Bill Geis, up north, were using polyester and fiberglass. Newton Harrison was using that combination in New Mexico. Bob Irwin here, and Bruce Beasley in San Francisco were working with cast acrylic. The "Last Plastics Show" at CalArts in the early 70s was a kind of round -up of all those involved including Ed Moses, Carol Caroompas and others. I'm sure there are many artists I'm not mentioning because the interest in plastics had grown exponentially. The whole development in plastics took place over a fifteen to twenty year span. After that it was just another medium.

PAUL KARLSTROM: In other words, obviously it wasn't an invention constructing thing