Oral history interview with Wesley C. Wehr, 1983 May 26 - Sept. 22

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 Wesley C. Wehr, 1983 May 26 - Sept. 22, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Wesley Wehr
Conducted by Martha Kingsbury
In Seattle, Washington
May 26, July 29 & September 22, 1983

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Wesley Wehr on May 26, July 29 & September 22, 1983. The interview took place in Seattle, Washington, and was conducted by Martha Kingsbury for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

DATE: MAY 26, 1983
[Tape 1]

[WESLEY WEHR had prepared much of the following material prior to the interview session.]

[Some playful exchange regarding taping procedures before interview officially begins.]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Wes, why don't we begin by talking about your early years, where you grew up and then when you began to meet painters and other visual artists.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, all right. I was born in Everett, Washington, in 1929. My parents packed up and we moved immediately out of Everett, moved to Seattle. I went to the usual grade schools and high school, Queen Anne High School, and in January of 1947 I started as a freshman at the University of Washington, enrolled in the music department, ostensibly as a music composition major. I had-- let's see, shortly after that, let's see, '47-- the typical liberal arts education, taking some cultural anthropology from Erna Gunther. There was nothing particularly unusual about the education at that point. Around 19, let's see, my music composition teacher was Lockrem Johnson, the composer. I had started studying informally with him, studied piano with him officially, in the music department for credit. Lockrem at that time was certainly one of the most talented and successful of the musicians in this area. He was a very close friend and protege of Berthe Poncy Jacobson. My introduction into the arts of this area was actually quite accidental. Lockrem had been coaching Mark Tobey, the painter, in music composition at that time. Lockrem had been introduced to Tobey through their mutual friend, Berthe Poncy Jacobson. Well, in the summer of 1949, Lockrem went back to Tanglewood to study with Messiaen, the French composer, and that meant that Tobey wouldn't have anyone to give him assignments and keep an eye on him, musically. So Mrs. Jacobson unexpectedly suggested that it might be an interesting idea to have me tutor Mr. Tobey in music composition that summer.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I never knew that! That's great.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, well, which is really silly. Lockrem would be back in the fall and then he could repair any damage which I had meanwhile done to Mr. Tobey musically. So that seemed agreeable to everyone. Mrs. Jacobson decided that she would take me to Tobey's house on Brooklyn Northeast, Northwest?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Northeast.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In the U [University--Ed.] District.

WESLEY WEHR: Northwest, how can there be Northeast Street in the Northwest?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: This is the Northeast; Northwest is over in Ballard.

WESLEY WEHR: But this is Northwest art. I'm [very, very sneaky]. (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Did you digress?

WESLEY WEHR: Sorry.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Are you saying then that you didn't have training in the visual arts in grade school and high school that mattered to you?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, good heavens, no.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You probably had early training in music?

WESLEY WEHR: No, my training was entirely in music. I didn't have any particular talent for painting, whatsoever. I was just as hack as anybody else.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh! So she took you up to Brooklyn?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, she took me to Lockrem's, no to Tobey's place. We went in; Tobey was very nice. He immediately did everything he could to make me feel at ease; he went and brought some coffee to me, of all things, and Mrs. Jacobson started talking with Tobey so that I wouldn't feel that I had to say anything. Immediately, Mrs. Jacobson, to make things easy, just started talking to Tobey as one would talk to an old friend, asking him what he had painted recently, and would he show us his new works.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Now, at this point did you know Tobey by reputation, so that it was intimidating, or potentially intimidating?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, it was only... It could have been, but, no, I've never particularly been intimidated by famous people. In high school...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Was he someone who seemed famous, then? Or was he just someone you didn't know?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, gosh, yeah. No, he was already legendary.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay. That's what I wondered.

WESLEY WEHR: Morris Graves was very famous. Tobey was famous in a different way, but in the music department my teachers, the musicians, were very aware of Tobey. Tobey, being an amateur musician himself, had many friends among musicians.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: One digression there. Many young painters would like to meet Tobey and they would say, "Well, I'm a young artist," and Tobey would often be a little standoffish, because as he put it, most young artists really wanted to show Tobey their work and then hope that he'd say that they were unrecognized geniuses, and that he'd dash off a recommendation for a Guggenheim, and that'd be the end of it. If Tobey was a little remote to young artists, it was just that he liked them if they were serious and wanted to, you know, be friends with him, but he... So often the reasons young painters came were basically rather avaricious and not very flattering. They liked his reputation and thought, well maybe he'll proclaim them geniuses. And Tobey hated this sort of thing. He thought painting was something that you worked very hard at.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And he was already troubled by this sort of thing when you met him in '49?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, of course, he loathed this idea of instant success. And he was very short with anyone who didn't work hard and realize that painting is lots of work and a very slow thing. He was very critical of Morris Graves at that time for the reason that Morris would go around saying, "Oh, we shall transcend painting," or "You have to resist painting until you can't anymore." Well, this just sent Tobey through the ceiling. Morris was making a mystique out of not working.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: This became very attractive to different young artists because you could go and visit Morris and...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And it all sounded so easy, and...

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, it sounded so wonderful!

MARTHA KINGSBURY: ...exalted...

WESLEY WEHR: You could all be terribly sensitive together and transcend painting.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Morris, by this time, lived up north. Is that right? In '49 he was out there?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, Woodway Park [near Edmonds--Ed.] What I'm doing here for a moment is to explain that when I first started meeting artists, notably Tobey and Graves, I realized instantly that I was confronted by two drastically different types of artists. Morris, brilliant, he had already behind him a sizeable body of work, he had worked like blazes for many years. But Morris had a tremendous charisma, a powerful personality, which was very attractive to young people; they admired his confidence, his magnetism and all of that. But if you went to see-- and Morris would be very flattering with artists-- he'd...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh really?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, gosh, yeah. Very generous; he'd say that's a beautiful painting. So Morris automatically, though he was quite sincere in his enthusiasm, he would attract people because they loved the idea that he'd praise them so much, and so receptive.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Did they feel, did these people often feel themselves to be his disciples and admirers rather than, say, his students? He didn't actually coach or take students?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, no, no. Morris simply didn't teach; he might occasionally make a comment on a painting, but... That was very interesting because I was simultaneously showing paintings of my own. When I started painting, accidentally, in around Christmas, 1960, well, I had the advantage of being able to show the works informally to Tobey and to Morris Graves. And that was an interesting education.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In what way? It clarified their differences further?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Well, it certainly did. I would take a painting to Tobey, a landscape, he would look at the sky and say, "Now, this area is dead. Nothing happens. Now, look at a Cezanne; when you move across the sky, it changes, there are different tints. It's an active plane. And when you move across the sky in a Cezanne, it's a journey; you go someplace. But in your blue sky, nothing happens, and nature is very active, but you have none of the variation and activity of nature in your sky; you just have a dead blue plane." And Mark would be rather technical; he'd say, "Well, put in some yellow, and vary the color here, and wake up this plane; it's dead." The next day Morris would come in to my room and I'd have the painting, the very same painting on the wall, and he'd walk over and he'd look at it, and say, "Well, it's obviously very lovely, Wes." And there'd be a pause, and I'd think, "Oh, oh, now what's he up to." And he'd look at me and he'd say, "I don't know why, but I keep waiting for a bird to fly across that sky." (chuckles) Well, this is, I thought, "Uh-uh, this is very interesting. Tobey and Graves are making about the same point." Tobey makes it in a sort of academic, teacher way. Morris makes it by inference. Morris is very sly; he makes a comment about a bird, and if you're on your toes you realize it isn't just a whimsical remark, it's a painter's remark. And on another occasion, Morris looked at a seascape I had. The water was rather tranquil. Tobey would have said, "Well, you know, it's too uniform. Do something about it." Morris [is] looking at that painting, saying, "Well, again, it's very lovely, but I don't know I wait to see an Indian in a canoe going across it."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And that kind of remark was not really a remark about subject matter; it was a remark about the painting needing something.

WESLEY WEHR: Not at all ______, yeah. Morris was commenting on a plastic deficiency of the work, but doing it in a sort of off-hand way.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Well, then, and in a way that a lot of young people would have missed.

WESLEY WEHR: Right. But that is the interesting thing about Morris; he said his points that could be taken as criticisms very lightly. I'm going to digress again, for a moment. When Susanne Langer, the philosopher, was studying cello, she said that many years ago her teacher said to her, "Susanne, you're simultaneously my best student and my worst student. You're my best student because you only have to be told once; and you're my worst student because you even have to be told at all." And, well, that was a pretty heavy comment. I think in the case of Morris Graves commenting on pictures, he would make the comment just obscure and oblique enough that, it'd be sort of a word to the wise should be sufficient.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yes.

WESLEY WEHR: And Morris'd also have a way of seemingly complimenting you, but if you're hopelessly deluded and vain, you'd say, "Oh, Morris really complimented me." But if you had at all any marbles left, or wits about you, you'd realize that the compliment was rather double-edged.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: So, I told Morris, finally, one time I thought he was a terribly good art teacher, and he looked a little annoyed. He said, "I'm not an art teacher." I said, "Then why have I learned so much from you?" Well, I'd just started, I've jumped over a whole stretch here, and sort of around 1961, here, but I'd like to pursue this because there's not apt to be much record of this sort of thing, these comments on painting from Morris.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay. Go ahead.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, yeah. I think it's worthwhile to say specifically what kinds of comments I've had from Morris.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Well, can we set the scene a little bit? If we're talking about 1960 and '61 and you're beginning to paint, now Morris is living where?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, gosh. Where is he?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Is he up on the island now, in his own house?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, no, no.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: [Has he, have you] changed scenes?

WESLEY WEHR: My! Oh, oh. 'Cause I'm talking presently about a stretch from 1961 into the mid sixties.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Where are you seeing Morris? And how often?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, he's in and out of town, he's...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay.

WESLEY WEHR: He comes to Seattle for a while.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: He went to Ireland in the fifties.

WESLEY WEHR: Right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Now, and by the sixties, he's essentially gone from this area.

WESLEY WEHR: That's right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: California...

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, that's right. California and all of that.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, well, oh for one thing, he's building his house in California, in Loleta.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And so you would see him when he came to town here?

WESLEY WEHR: That's right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Or would you go down there and visit, too?

WESLEY WEHR: I went down once to stay with him there, but I would see him when he'd come to Seattle and check in at the University Towers, Meany Hotel.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay, and Tobey has left the area?

WESLEY WEHR: Tobey's in and out. He comes here during the summers, and then he goes back to Basel, Switzerland.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay.

WESLEY WEHR: So, there's one stretch where Tobey is half here and half in Switzerland.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay, okay. Now I'm situated.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Go on with what you were saying.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. Just some things I would like to record. One time Morris comes in, and I have on the wall a painting that I just had framed, and he looks at it, and he says, "Oh, this is a very good frame; I never noticed it." (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And that let you know?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, he said, "A good picture frame is one that you don't notice; it doesn't get in the way of the picture." Okay. Well, this was Morris's specialty; he had his own way of making a seemingly casual remark that sticks. He doesn't make a polemic out of it; he just sort of drops it and then walks away from it. I'm trying to think, one time, I'm showing pictures to Tobey, and again it's technical. He finds one area where the paint is too thick, and he says, "Well, Wes, you've interrupted the tension of the picture plane; I think you should scrape this paint down a little. My eye, when it looks at the painting, this area sticks out too much; it's like a bad note. It's like when I'm trying to play Schuman and I break the legato and the note is abrasive." And so Tobey, since he and I both have a background in music, is constantly making musical analogies, like, "Now this whole picture is very impressionistic. It glows in a certain way, but this one area interrupts it, much as a musician breaks the tone in his performance of..." It's easy for me to follow Tobey's comments, because he was very comfortable in translating into musical terms. Morris is still being very cryptic. He walks in and I have a painting of eastern Washington. He looks at it, and it's his usual highly supportive enthusiasm. "Oh, that's very nice; that's real sagebrush in the foreground!" And I think, "Oh, oh, here we go again. What's he up to?" And then Morris turns and kind of looks at me in that quizzical way like, "Well, I'll try this on him." And he says, "Well, now, you know, Wes, when I look at the picture and I look at this painting in the foreground say sagebrush, I've named it. And whenever I'm able to name something, I'm through with it, and it's over."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So some unnameable and ineffable, the fact was the design ______.

WESLEY WEHR: Right. Yeah. See, Morris says, "I like better the paintings where you suggest the sagebrush, but in this it looks like sagebrush, all right, too much." (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yeah. He was quite specific.

WESLEY WEHR: Right. So, okay.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Did Tobey's commentaries frequently lead to further discussion between you and Tobey, and did Morris's usually preclude real discussion? You had to think over what he said, and make what you would of it?

WESLEY WEHR: Umm, I was bouncing between showing paintings to both of them, very interested in this. They were both very supportive. Tobey was never extravagent toward a young painter in encouragement; he just, he might say something like, "That's a very nice painting; I like it," or, "That interests me," or... He simply, if he liked a thing, or you did something that caught his fancy or he could feel an affection for, that was very encouraging. He might say, "Well, I've been thinking about what you've been doing, and I think you have a genuine feel for nature; I think you should go on with it. I think you have a feel for landscape that I find convincing, so don't rest on your laurels; get back to work, now."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Were you studying painting seriously, or was it...?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, gosh, I was just painting for my own amusement.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Was music still your primary interest, then?

WESLEY WEHR: I was trying to compose, but I had become so self-conscious with music that it was falling apart completely. I couldn't compose anything. I'd been thoroughly trained in music, and then I'd had this rigid three-year training with Theodore Roetke in poetry.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: While you were still enrolled at the university?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, uh huh. See, what happened was in music I got to the point of having so much technique and methodology in my head, that the impulsive and the intuitive just couldn't survive. The training under Roetke had been marvelous, but again I became self-conscious. Well, by the time I started painting, which was just an accident, I thought, well, I've been scorched twice; I don't want to learn how to paint. (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So you refused to become seriously trained in the way you have been.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, I just, I thought, well, I just want to paint without a procedure, without buying a book, or studying formally; I just want to stay faithful to certain experiences in nature and temperament, and...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And you've hung onto that? Because you continue to paint.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, okay. I just, I was so ambivalent about the so-called technical, classical training. I think Arp one time said we spend ten years learning all of this, and the next fifty years trying to forget it; something like that. Go ahead.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I was going to ask at what point you began to make your living doing paleobotany?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, I don't get any money from paleobotany at all.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh. Okay. This maybe shouldn't need to be part of the record, but I'm trying to sort out your parallel interests.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, no, no. I think this is very funny. I'm glad you brought it up.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That, too, is a response to nature, of a sort, but very different from your painting.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. I sound a little snide and smart-ass, but people will say, well, you're doing two very unrelated things; you're painting and you're collecting fossils, and backpacking. And I thought, well, what makes you think they're so unrelated. The thing that I find unrelated to painting is being a social creature in the art world; I think that gets very far away from art. I can't, if anyone tries to...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You're not alone thinking that, either.

WESLEY WEHR: If anyone tells me that digging into a hillside and finding the most beautiful fossil leaves in the world -- kinds that send Guy Anderson clapping his hands like we should be so inventive -- if anyone tries to tell me that that sort of thing has nothing to do with art, I'm not going to buy it. But I really felt, and I don't want to sound sarcastic and defensive, that when one wants to use painting as a way of becoming a somebody, then I think one gets a little away from art. There's a matter of being a good painter, and there's the matter of being a local burgermaster, or a celebrity, or "a legend in your own time," whatever you want to call it. I find no way of getting around the fact that becoming well-known or talked about is, oh, somewhat theatrical, not entirely accidental. Or, Yeats, "One must choose perfection of the life or of the work." To go back to where we were a few minutes ago, the reason that Tobey didn't have a certain kind of following was that he wasn't very generous in flattering one. He'd say, "That's a nice painting, but stop goofing off," and "You don't know how to draw!"

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh! He laid it on the line!

WESLEY WEHR: Well, if one was young and insecure, the last thing you wanted to be told is that you were lazy and, if you had any delusions about being a great painter, you better learn how to draw a good line and mix paint. Now I'm going to jump around, but I think the pieces will gradually fit together.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Let me ask you a couple more things before you jump away from this. The paintings that you've been talking about showing to Tobey and Morris, in the early sixties. Were those very small, like the things I know of your work, or were...?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh sure.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And second clarification, when did your responsiveness to landscape, which is what you've said was at the heart of your art, also take the form of digging up fossils? When did you become conscious of that other approach?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay. Always, all of my life-- beachcombing, my grandparents place on the beach, with my parents going collecting agates. My parents and I were rockhounds. So I had a perfectly normal Northwest life. Living here, one has a high probability of being a rockhound.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yes. Was it a long time, though, before you spent much time east of the mountains, before you became aware of fossils?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay. This is something I, all of this is something we can go into later, because the transition into being what you call a paleobotanist has a lot to do with meeting Joe Goldberg, the painter.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Okay, maybe we should say that...

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, this we have to say because that's a very important friendship...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So it's not important for the things you're describing now in the early ______. That's what I wanted to know.

WESLEY WEHR: No. He comes much later. Several things I want to add at this point. One is to go back to Morris. Tobey would be very nice and say, "Well, you have a real feel for landscape. You've gotta work!" Then he'd shortly say, "I think you should study Cezanne." And then he'd come back a few more days later at Manning's coffee shop and say, "I've been thinking about that; I don't think Cezanne's for you after all." And then he'd say, "Your color's a little stingy; maybe you should look at Nolde."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: No Nolde! (chuckles)

WESLEY WEHR: "And go a little crazy, wild, with color; don't be so stingy." So Tobey was trying to think of good advice to give me, and then I'd see him a few days later, and he'd say, "Well, I tried to give you some advice, but I'm not so sure that it's right for you." And then he'd say, "You're an odd duck; I just don't know what to do with you." So finally, Mark had me get together a body of work and leave them at the house and he was going to look over a lot of things, and think about it, and then say something the next day. So I lugged up to his house a whold bunch of paintings and drawings and left them overnight in his dining room. I guess I was being, what, inspected. (chuckles) So, the next day I met Mark and we started up the alley behind his studio, and he was very serious, and he said, "Well, I've been looking at your paintings; I rather like them. They're off to a nice start, but I must tell you, if you're thinking of becoming a painter, there are 5,000 painters alone in New York, and 10,000 in Paris. And you've gotta realize what you're up against, if you want to be a painter. Because nothing's guaranteed. There are lots of good painters. The competition is terrible. I'm not saying that originality is necessary, but the fact is we live in a time when, if you're not original, you're lost; originality is very important in our time.

[Tape 2]
[There is a bit of unused tape at the beginning of this side.]

WESLEY WEHR: Tobey decided that I should, if I wanted, go on painting, but he felt it was his sacred duty to explain that I was going into an activity that was not a gravy train, or-- if I chose to be a painter, I was asking for trouble.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Was he asserting something about the need for originality? Was he advising you to hunt for your own originality?

WESLEY WEHR: Well, he was saying that to survive as an artist, the nature of our times is such that originality is very important. We didn't live in a society or culture where excellence was all. You had to have something that was your own, a temperament, a style. And I think Herbert Reed had said about the same thing, that for better or worse in Western painting, art has become somewhat autonomous. You say this is a good Braque, that is a bad Braque, and an artist is judged by the relative merits of his own work, he becomes a closed system.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Right. Braques are judged in terms of their Braqueness.

WESLEY WEHR: That's right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And Tobeys are judged in terms of their Tobeyness.

WESLEY WEHR: Right. And so Tobey took the Fifth Amendment on whether this was admirable or not. He said it's simply a fact of our society.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It just is.

WESLEY WEHR: So he had to explain very quickly that I stepped into a thing that was fiercely competitive and all of that. Well, I appreciated his concern, but I just said, "Well, Mark, I don't really care about that very much; I happen to enjoy painting and I'm not feeling very competitive anyway. Even if you told me I didn't have any talent whatsoever, I enjoy painting so much I think I'd go on doing it even if you told me to stop." And he just stopped and looked at me and started laughing, and he said, "Well! You would defy me if I told you you had no talent, and went on doing it? Why?" [WESLEY WEHR:] "Because I enjoy doing it, and I don't know what's good for me but I know that I enjoy doing it." So he just let out a snort, and said, "Well, okay." (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: A snort!

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. So...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: He hadn't encountered this among all the sycophants who wanted to make their careers.

WESLEY WEHR: Yes. He didn't give me any compliments, but he gave me a wonderful kind of affectionate vote of confidence. No compliments, but if I had a problem he'd look at me and say, "Well, I had the same kind of problem when I was your age, but it didn't kill me, and it's not going to kill you.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's nice.

WESLEY WEHR: I think what makes me very sad talking of Tobey is that he's been turned into an Egyptian pharoah. He's been turned into all kinds of thingamabobs. And the Tobey I remember was very dear; he was a lot of fun. I would stay with him and I had so much fun with him. For people who didn't know him, and there's going to be fewer and fewer of us all the time, Tobey is simply going to be taken over by distance and time, and it's...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Can you elaborate on what you mean by "He's been made into a pharoah."?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, well, what I mean is Tobey at one time I think wanted to be a preacher. And he was a good actor; he was in plays at Cornish. He wrote and read very eloquent poetry. So in one sense he had sort of the gift of theater, and he could be oracular, he could play the role of being Mark Tobey to the hilt. And was very good at it. But he also had that sort of, "Well, now I don't have to be Mark Tobey," and he could drop the whole thing and then he was simply, you know, a lot of fun. There was no generation gap. Let's see, I think he, yeah, he was 40 years older than I but I didn't feel the distance in terms of Tobey being authoritarian or a father symbol. I only felt it in that he had lived for a long time. And he seemed so wonderfully human to me. He could jump over the 40- year distance with a wonderful kind of, oh, "I was where you are, once, and I know what it's like, so cheer up."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: So, he never spoke from a kind of cold mountain top, you know; he could sort of be where you were as a kid.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And this, is this that you're commenting on now also a contrast with Morris Graves? Like you say Tobey could stop playing the role of Tobey. Did Morris Graves play a kind of role of being Morris Graves?

WESLEY WEHR: (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Which he never stopped playing?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, oh, oh. Well. That's a good question; I can think of a number of ways to answer it. Oh God help me. (chuckles) The burning question there, at that time in the early fifties, through the fifties, for instance, the most tiresome question on University Way was, "Is Morris still painting?" And it was incredible. Tobey, of course, painted all the time, so everyone knew that he was painting. But Morris had had that incredible fame and then once Morris became famous he had all this attention on him. And I don't see how he could paint anything because, like Tobey said, "A watched pot never boils." On every side it was, "Is Mr. Graves painting? What are the paintings like?" If I were Graves I would have hated to paint because of, there was some thing like once having painted he was to go on forever getting better and greater, and it was wicked! It was, I think...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Was it oppressive to him? Could you tell?

WESLEY WEHR: Well...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Did he resent it, or play off certain characteristics against it?

WESLEY WEHR: Hmm, that's a good question. I never asked him, "Are you still painting?" One time we were driving to Eureka. We were going through the redwood forest, and I said, "Morris, I have a confession to make to you, dear." He said, "What's that, Wes?" I said, "I don't give a damn if you ever paint another picture; there are other things about you I like too." And he looked at me and just cracked up and said, "You don't care if I ever paint again?" I said, "No, I'm sorry." (laughs) And he just...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And could you tell if he liked that?

WESLEY WEHR: He liked it enormously.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Good.

WESLEY WEHR: And one time when he was staying here at the Plestcheeff [Gwendolyn--Ed.] mansion on Capitol Hill -- he'd rented that briefly -- and I went up to see him, that would be about, ooh, 1964, I think, somewhere in there. I walked in and I was having coffee with him, and Morris said, "Well, Wes, I have been painting lately, in case you are interested." (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: You know I don't want to...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So he could be ironic and self-conscious ______.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. He says, "Now I don't know if you're interested in my activities as a painter, but I thought I would mention that I have been working. And actually I've been working in the room right next door, where we're sitting..."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So naturally, you were to go see.

WESLEY WEHR: "And I've been thinking that maybe you'd like to see what I've been working on." And I looked at him. Morris said, "But on the other hand, you know, I'm a terrible prima donna. Unless I can be absolutely sure that seeing these new works, you were just going to break down weeping uncontrollably at how beautiful they are, I don't think I could take it. And I've got to tell you they're not that good, so I'm not going to show them to you." (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And he didn't?

WESLEY WEHR: And he didn't. So, what Morris was trying to say...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's like the Morris other people have told me about.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. So Morris was just saying, "You know, I don't want to show you something unless I know you're going to be swept away by it, and they're not all that good, so let's go on just having our coffee and talking about other things." I think what happened to Morris-- unfortunately his intense privacy made people more and more interested in him. Morris got into a vicious circle having so many people interested in him because he was allegedly such a private person.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And this became a spiral that fed on itself?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, it was very destructive. Consequently, if he painted anything, it would be like, you know, the second coming. God knows what people wanted.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: If he was to show up with a new show, the expectations would be insane.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think this was destructive not only to his relationships with the community, but destructive to his own state of mind in his work?

WESLEY WEHR: That's a good question. I would have to think about that; I'm not sure, but it's a very good question. I think where Tobey was more fortunate was he lived on University Way so he was taken for granted. There was no brownie points in seeking him out on a mountaintop because there was Tobey in the Market [Pike Place--Ed.], at a concert. He was so accessible that his privacy was the fact that you didn't seek him out because he was so available. But on Sunday afternoons, everyone drove out to Woodway Park to see Morris, thinking he might be lonely, and it was absolutely ridiculous. You'd find Betty Willis, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Guy Anderson. Everybody was out to visit Morris in his vast solitude.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: It was about at that point, seeing Phil McCracken and other artists that I thought if you want privacy, live in the city.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: There's a lot to that.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, be absolutely available. Then nobody'll bother you. If you want to be horribly distracted, move to a beautiful place, and everybody will come out and try to invade your solitude.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And yet his original choice, Morris's original choice to live outside the city was made because he did prefer solitude. Is that right?

WESLEY WEHR: Probably. But on the other hand he would show up at my room in the early fifties, just saying, "I can't stand it at Woodway Park. The silence is driving me crazy. I drove into town and put on a jacket, and I'll take you out for some pastry."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see. Some ambivalence on his part.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: What about the Morris Graves people would tell me about who was a prankster, a social...

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, God help us. (laughs) Right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Was that a true side of his character?

WESLEY WEHR: Yes, absolutely.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And did it persist?

WESLEY WEHR: When Ray Kass started to do the Morris Graves book, some four years ago, he came here and Morris had given him a list of people to look up. And so I met Ray Kass at the Boiserie [Burke Museum Cafe]. We had coffee and we started working together on going around town looking at Graves' works. So I saw a great deal of Ray Kass when he was here that summer staying at Marshall Hatch's house and interviewing people. We went to see Guy Anderson and all that. So Ray Kass had great cooperation from Morris; he had known him for many years and had many conversations as a friend. I've just gotten the Ray Kass catalogue on the Graves show, and...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I've seen it; I saw it in New York.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, okay. And I'm very happy about it. A few people have said, "Well, some of the color reproductions aren't good enough." You know, for God's sakes, what do you want? I just have had it with people who want to show that they have critical abilities; they just say, "Well, everything isn't perfect." If you wanted to say, "Well, which one isn't right," then maybe they wouldn't know. But they have to remind you that they have critical judgment by carping and bitching. And in the case of the Graves book, I think it's stupid to find fault with it in any way because in the way that it's good I think it's very heartening. So, what I'm getting at is the selection of the works -- I think it's wonderful that Ray Kass somehow got in that text different sides of Morris.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh, that's what we were talking about? Different sides of Morris.

WESLEY WEHR: Yes, exactly. And so I started through the text and I thought, "Boy, good for him; he's touched on these different sides of Morris." And I haven't counted how many sides Morris has, but I...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In what capacity had Ray Kass known Morris?

WESLEY WEHR: Well, he knew him years ago in California, and Ray is a painter. Ray got the idea through the friendship of guest curating a Graves show, and it just started. It was interesting working with him; I would go around, and we would visit Melvin Rader and different people, and Jack Alger. "Rising Moon" of Morris's is a wonderful one. And I noticed with Ray that he has a fine eye, a sense of quality, of good painting, and I thought, "Boy, this Ray Kass is going to put together a show that isn't categories or anything; it's going to be very sensitively done, and I think Morris Graves is damn lucky to be in good hands." So I think it's been a very propitious, felicitous -- Latin words -- it's a good combination, Ray Kass and Morris Graves, because I--

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And those aspects of Graves as character that we were referring to are well played off against each other?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh. There are certain stories about Morris's antics that are told over and over.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Many of them are from before the time that you met him.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Are there some from your experience also?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, good Lord, yeah.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: There are certain tried and true ones -- the John Cage concert, and then the Woodway Park one, and the Japanese reception. And they're all good.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: What's the Japanese reception one?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, that's the Japanese national treasure show at the Seattle Art Museum, where Richard Gilkey dresses as a chauffeur and Jan Thompson gets a beaded dress and Morris has on sneakers and they get this limousine, rented car, in behind all of the officials in the great procession to the museum. Oh, it was incredible! And then the PI [Seattle newspaper--Ed.] came out with a cartoon showing Morris standing among all these very important people wearing sneakers. I called Ray Kass when I got the catalogue, and he started talking about these different things of Morris's, and something came up about, well, when did happenings start?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In relation to things like this?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, if one's into who did what first, one could start looking into--

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You'd have to investigate all the Surrealists and all the Dadas.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh God, yes. So, for people who are concerned not with who did what best, but who did it first, the question of... Morris, obviously, is one of the great pioneers in shaking up the status quo.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And he didn't cease to be prankish when fame came to him and he moved outside the city?

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, all right, all right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Partly what I'm asking is whether that was only characteristic of him in early years.

WESLEY WEHR: Right, okay. This, I think, is important. Shortly after I-- Oh. I'm going to jump very quickly. I did start teaching Mark Tobey, teaching music composition, summer of 1949, and that began the friendship with him. Around Christmas of 1949, Mark (chuckles) had a Christmas party at his house, an open house, and so I went to it, and there was Morris Graves. He was wearing a suit. He didn't look like an artist; he looked terribly striking.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Tall and distinguished, like a businessman?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh gosh, yeah. I assumed he... Yeah. He looked like he might be a visiting professor from Oxford or something.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see!

WESLEY WEHR: And so Tobey introduced me to Morris and we sat around a while, and then I went back in the kitchen and sat with Tobey and Pehr [Hallsten--WESLEY WEHR] drinking coffee, and Morris came in and said, "Well, I have to leave now, but..." He shook hands and said, "I'll look forward to seeing you again sometime." And he was very nice, very polite. But, oh God, where were we?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I'd been asking whether he continued to be prankish?

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, yeah. This I want to bring out because I don't know who is recording what any more. Morris, shortly after that, after I met him... Oh, okay. He invited me out to Woodway Park to visit him. I took the bus out [to Edmonds--WESLEY WEHR], I walked out to his place, and he invited me out shortly after we met for lunch. And the movie, "Sunset Boulevard" with Gloria Swanson, had just come out at that time. And it, well, it was called the greatest comeback of all time. And it still is. Well, Morris, I think, was putting me on; he told Guy Anderson once that he's 51percent put-on, something like that. (chuckles) With Morris it would drive you batty, because he could say something deadpan and you didn't know whether it was a confession or a put-on.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see, yeah.

WESLEY WEHR: And you had to sort of get used to this. So Morris started walking in the woods, and it immediately came up, Gloria Swanson and "Sunset Boulevard." Well, in a way, I can kind of identify with that. I thought, "What?" Morris said, "Well, let me explain. A long time ago," -- Well, Morris could dramatize in such a way that "a long time ago" could have been six months earlier --

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: He's Irish. He said, "You know, I used to do all of these things. I was impulsive; I would do this, I would do that, and it was fun, it was acting up, and it was just being natural, but then all of a sudden people started writing about me and I made the mistake of reading this stuff. I read all of these descriptions of Morris Graves acting like Morris Graves, and all of these wild things I do. Then all of a sudden I go back to do them, and I tripped all over myself because I sounded like somebody doing an imitation of an article about Morris Graves, and it was all messed up. It had been just things I did naturally.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: The directness of it was not there.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. And he said, "This is terrible; I'm suddenly... How do I be myself anymore and be Morris Graves who's got all this attention? And people expect me to do crazy things; it's part of their idea of what Morris Graves is like." And he said, "I'm telling you; it's a nightmare."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And he meant this.

WESLEY WEHR: He meant it.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So he'd been made, he'd been forced to become self-conscious in a way that made it impossible to remain that way.

WESLEY WEHR: Right. See, in a way it's very clear why Morris had such very close friends as Jan Thompson, Ward Corley, Richard Gilkey, and still does-- and Phil McCracken. Because these are the people around whom he can be himself.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: People know him [simply] real.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So there's a sense in which he had to pull back inside a set of barriers.

WESLEY WEHR: I think so.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Leave the rest of the world outside. And Tobey never had to do that?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, Tobey had a following too.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: But he didn't need to have barriers.

WESLEY WEHR: Not Tobey. When you first met him he could be very formal and a little standoffish, and perhaps a little suspicious, like, well, with young painters. But if you said, "Well, I'm a music major," he said, "Oh, that's wonderful; I like music too! Come over and play the piano for me; maybe we'll do some duets."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: [Very loose.]

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. If you wanted to meet Tobey, you just said you were a musician and before you knew it you were having dinner and playing four-hand piano with him. But if you said you were a painter, he could be a little suspicious, like were you a serious painter or just somebody buttering him up. So he was standoffish with painters and that was ______.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: But you feel Morris had to withdraw even more. Restrict himself to what you were calling a circle of close friends.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, Morris... I'm trying to think. Good questions. I certainly don't want to make cut and dried comments where I'm not quite sure. I'd have to kind of think about it.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Sure, drop it. We can drop it.

WESLEY WEHR: When I, I get a little, when I'm talking and what I'm saying suddenly seems a little too tidy and doesn't have some contradictions in the background, I think, "Oh oh." 'Cause I think I'm getting closer to the truth when I can think of contradictions to it, certainly in Morris's case. But again, it was very interesting watching Graves be a legend.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Can I raise the question with you-- as long as we're talking about the fifties and now Morris was a legend-- of how other people felt about him being a legend: his friends and the other painters as well as he himself if you are willing to address that.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, I am. Morris being very striking, very tall. If one reads the letters in Ray Kass's book, the letters to Marian Willard, one realizes instantly that Morris has a tremendous sense of words, presence. Many times I was with him, he'd walk into a room and nothing was happening. And he'd simply say, you know, "This won't do." And he just simply turned the place upside down.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It would happen?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah! (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: From his presence?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh God, anyone...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: This is part of the charisma that you mentioned.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, yeah, and it's part of the mischief and the restlessness. Jimmy McLean, a painter, one time about 1964 or so, when Jay Steensma and others-- Jay Steensma the painter-- we were all seeing Morris at the same time, and Jim McLean said (What was it?), "Create the drama and then step into it." Morris loved that remark; it sounds like something Morris would have said. And [he said, I thought], "That's very good." He said, "That's what I try to do when things got a little dull; I create a drama, and then I try to jump in and participate." Pehr Halsten was the same way. He said, "It's so stuffy around here, somebody has to play the fool and the clown. And if nobody else is going to do it, I'll do it." I was very taken with Pehr and he knew that people thought, for instance, that he was kind of a buffoon, but there was great wisdom behind it.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: When did he come to Seattle?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, oh gosh. He met Tobey in 1940, and he came in the late thirties. Right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: I sort of jumped to Pehr there, but all I'm getting at is that's certainly one thing Pehr and Graves had in common-- when people would freak out, they [even] mentioned them in the same breath-- was this ability to come into a room and see that they had the imminent prospect of being bored and saying, "Well, if nobody else is going to do it, I'm going to do it." Okay. Oh! Can I tell a story?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Of course!

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. This is going to be a little-- okay, why not? Shortly before Mark Tobey died, the Hatches (Marshall and Helen Hatch), were in Basel, visiting Tobey, and they asked Tobey to autograph one of the Beyeler catalogues for them. And as I understand it, Tobey started to...

[Tape 3, marked tape 2, side1]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: We were talking about Tobey in Basel.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. I don't know if this story is worth recording, but I enjoy remembering it. The Hatches had asked Tobey to autograph this catalogue. Tobey, who in his last years, as I understand because of a bad reaction to some anaesthetic and an operation-- The story that I was told by Mark Ritter was that Tobey, with some surgery, had a bad reaction to the anaesthetic which gave him some serious medical problems toward the end of his life. So he'd have bad days and he'd have good days. But the day that he was autographing the catalogue for the Hatches, he managed to write Mark all right, and he started to write Tobey and he just paused like he wasn't quite sure how to spell that last name. And then he finished it. So I heard about this from the Hatches, and I mentioned it to Morris Graves. And he said, "Oh, that's wonderful; that's the final nirvana to forget how to spell your own name. Oh, I envy Mark so much!" Well, Morris wasn't being unsympathetic to Tobey, but he was saying in one way, "Boy, I wish I could forget how to spell Morris Graves." So, you see how we're coming again?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I do.

WESLEY WEHR: So, LaMar Harrington, right here at the Henry Gallery, where we are now, told me that Morris was coming up to the Henry Gallery the next day -- that would be about, ooh, 1972, perhaps, somewhere in there -- to look at some Morris Graves works that the Vellutinis [Mr. and Mrs. Ray--Ed.] had donated to the collection here. And I'd not seen Morris for some while, and LaMar said, "Well, he's coming tomorrow; I thought I should tip you off, if you want to see him again." So I told Glenn Brumett, the painter, a very close friend, that Morris would be here, and I wanted Glenn to meet Morris-- the occasions were becoming increasingly rare. So we came here that next day and LaMar said, "Well, he hasn't arrived yet, but he's due any time now." Well, Morris had always had this ability to throw me off guard by just coming into a room and saying something before you could get your bearings, and you were a shambles. And I thought, "I've not seen him for a long time, and, by God, this time Morris isn't going to open with some line and while I'm still trying to recover, he'll be off somewhere else. This time I'm going to get the jump on him."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And...?

WESLEY WEHR: "Just once, I'm gonna throw him for a loop." So Glenn and I were going up the stairs, right down here. I was still trying to think, "Well, how do I just once make sure that Morris doesn't rattle me," and just as I reached the top of the stairs, in came Morris with Phil McCracken. And Morris and I just crashed into each other physically. And I don't know. I opened my mouth, and Morris says, "It's you!" And I said in very cool stentorian tones, "Redeclare your love to me; that is all I require of you today, and then you are dismissed."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yes.

WESLEY WEHR: And it's sort of a parody of Morris being tongue-in-cheek. And he looked at me and he grinned and said, "Well!" And in a booming voice that rang down the Henry Gallery corridor, said, "I love Wesley Wehr!" I said, "Thank you! You are dismissed now." (laugh) And Morris was just smirking. Phil McCracken was thinking, "Oh God, now where are we?" And then Morris turned to me, he said, "Well! We mustn't forget LaMar Harrington. Take my arm; we will go down the stairs together to see her." This is Morris. Okay. He'd already, you know, this is our reunion, and he's already turned it into a theater. We started down the stairs, the gallery aides had come flying from all the areas to see if they should call the campus cops, and Glenn's grinning -- Glenn Brumett. So Morris and I started down the stairs, and Morris in this great voice says, "Announcing Wesley Wehr and Morris G-, G-, G-, G-, G-, G-," And then he says, "What is my last name, Wes?"

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Is this after the earlier incident?

WESLEY WEHR: Yes!

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: And what he's doing, in going G-, G-, G-, is saying, "Oh my gosh, I'm almost having to vomit on the stairs and can't remember my own last name, almost..." And then he goes, "Graves!" and looks at me and says, "Damn! I just remembered it again." Okay. So, well, that's a long story but if I tell these things, I think woven into them are examples of uncalculated comments on the pros and cons of success or being somebody. It was very interesting that Graves became very famous, Tobey was relatively obscure. And then Tobey grumbling, "Oh, I'll have to be dead before they do a book on me," and all that stuff. And then finally when Tobey becomes very famous after all that long time, he has this weird relationship to being famous which is just a panic. Tobey finally becomes a big celebrity, and the Louvre show and all of that.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Um hmm. A time like the sixties.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, exactly. And so Mark will come to town, we go downtown, first we have lunch, "Oh, let's go to the Frederick & Nelson Tea Room [large department store--Ed.]. So what does Mark do? He charges right through the center of Frederick's Tea Room where obviously people are going to look up, and he's grumbling, "Oh, for God's sakes, I can't even come here without people looking at me!" And I think, "Oh, for pity's sakes. If they don't look at you, you bitch; and if they do even look up thinking maybe you're the waiter, you're grumbling about it (chuckles)." You know, I say, "Oh, this has just gotten out of hand. You've got the typical love-hate thing about being noticed; it's like Greta Garbo or whatever it is and it's really silly." Then the next breath later, Tobey'd say, "Oh, my phone hasn't rung for days." And then a week later he's grumbling because he's had five requests for autographs. And then finally he's saying, "Well, I've decided I was much happier on University Way." And all that stuff.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Can't tell until you've tried both sides which you prefer.

WESLEY WEHR: Since I first met Morris Graves, who had peaked on being a celebrity, and was trying to find his way back to being himself, and Tobey, who was, had this love hate thing about being famous... I'd studied with Roethke, of course-- and rockhounding with Susanne Langer [he pronounces it Susan--Ed.], the philosopher. So I had plenty of opportunity to have as friends and pals, people who were in beginning, the middle and the end of fame. So it was very interesting to me.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: See how they took it.

WESLEY WEHR: To see the relative values of it. Montaigne has an essay on fame, and it opens, "Since we shall never have it, let us proceed to speak disparagingly of it." (laughs) But I've noticed when it comes to fame, the people who don't have it say it's nothing, and the ones who do have it tend to be very sarcastic about it. For what that's worth. But it saved me a lot of bother growing up around these people. I was forever talking about Roethke and friends who happened to be quite well known, and then one time Ralph Aeschliman, the young painter, accused me of being a name dropper.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Um hmm.

WESLEY WEHR: Which I am. But it always hurts our feelings to have somebody else tell the truth about us, and...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It didn't lead you to change your policy [that way].

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, God, no. So Susanne Langer showed up -- See, I'm name dropping, again -- and she was in my room and my feelings were hurt. And I'm proud of...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Right then, you mean?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, sure. So I'm proud of my friendships and I... Do you see how I've managed to weave Mrs. Langer in now?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: When, or how many times, was Susanne Langer here? I thought she came only one summer. Did she have friends and return to the area?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh. I'm told you do your homework!

MARTHA KINGSBURY: No!

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, now! She came in 1953 to teach...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I don't mean summer; I mean year.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, I think it was two quarters in 1953, I think.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yeah.

WESLEY WEHR: And then she came back in 1966 to visit. She was in California and then flew up to see Guy Anderson. And Elizabeth Bishop, the poet, was here, so I arranged for Bishop and Langer to have lunch together. I've written that all out for-- that's all recorded.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh, okay. The visit in '66 was to see people, not in an official capacity?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, she just flew up, since she was in California, to see Eva Heinitz, the cellist, and Guy, and just spend a few days here visiting and then take off again. So Mrs. Langer and Guy came to my room, and then Guy left, and I don't know why, but I said, "Well, Susanne, I've just been accused of being a name dropper, and it kind of hurt my feelings." She smiled and said, "Well, Wes, these different people you know, they're not interesting because they're famous; they're famous because they're interesting. And you happen to like interesting people." I thought, "God! That's a nice answer."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yes. And you hope it's the true answer.

WESLEY WEHR: And then just before she died, Berthe Poncy Jacobson, the pianist-- I was having lunch at her house-- looked up and she looked kind of puzzled, and she said, "I've known you a long time. You met Pierre Bernac, the great French singer, and you took him some songs, and you met Ernst Bloch, the Swiss composer, who was my teacher, and you knew Tobey." What she was saying was that I had had some acquaintanceship with different Europeans and what not, who had been part of her past, and she said, "I suddenly realized that you've known a lot of very interesting people. Now, how did that happen?" And I just said something like, "Oh, well, opportunities arose." Jacobson looked at me and said, "Ah hah! Opportunities arose and you didn't flee from them." She said, "But you weren't aggressive about it, and that makes the difference." Then she had decided it was okay. Well, I don't know why I wandered into this aspect of having interesting friends, but...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You wandered there from the discussion of fame and its effect among those people.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Okay. The fact is, to say one thing about myself, a lot of my friends were, like Tobey, older, but I honestly don't think I had a rebellious streak of thinking I had to rebell against my older friends, or I don't think I had that sense of old age and youth and rebell against the establishment. That would have made no sense to me because the older people I was around weren't intimidating authority figures to me; they were simply, kind of, older friends who... I didn't feel intimidated by them because they bent over backwards not to be intimidating. So if for a long time there wasn't any Wes to speak of-- I just seemed to be somebody who knew an awful lot of people and really enjoyed being around them. If somebody said, "Well, who are you or what are you?" I'd say, "Gosh, I never thought about that!" (chuckles) That idea of finding myself, I never was all that interested in it. It seemed like a peculiar thing; why would one want to find yourself, then you'd be stuck with being yourself. I enjoyed being a little lost. But this idea of young people wanting to find themselves...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It is a widespread idea. If it didn't bother you, you're to some extent unusual.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, I thought you never can get away from being yourself, like Elizabeth Bishop said, "We're ourselves all the time; it's just...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Well, that's the alternative.

WESLEY WEHR: Don't worry about telling the truth; we blurt out the truth all the time. It's that we don't like the way it comes out. So I think the atmosphere... Sometimes I used to tell people that it's not that the artists in the past had more character or virtues; I think there were fewer temptations. (chuckles) That's a little glib, but if the artist got on in a nice communal way, it was simply that we were all broke. And circumstances threw us together.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You're talking about the fifties?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, I think so. I don't want to be too cut and dried about this, but maybe the World's Fair in '62 or whenever it was, that seems to be a turning point. Suddenly Seattle gets ideas of not being a little town anymore, but being a great something or other. The nice thing about the time before that was there weren't so many people interested in art.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Let me ask you several questions about this since you've brought it up. One thing that happened at the World's Fair, if I remember correctly, was that there was one exhibition devoted to art from this region; there was another exhibition devoted to art from around the world. Did that lead people to think differently about being an artist here? Did it lead to any kind of defensiveness or pride, conversely, or change of perspective?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay. Yi! I think something happened during the time of the World's Fair, and I'm not sure what it was. There's a lot that I could go into.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Go ahead.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, there are a lot of things that I want to think about whether I even want to talk about them.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Want to hold this question and come back to it?

WESLEY WEHR: I think so, because then I'm going to have to talk about the rise of art committees in this town; I'm going to have to talk about how the collectors become a collective force in this town; I'm going to have to get into a lot of things that are going to show how biased I am.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And those things you think happened from '62 on?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, and I really wanted...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Let me ask you another question related to, indirectly to the Fair. Do you think-- well, you just remarked that before the Fair fewer people were interested in art in Seattle.

WESLEY WEHR: That's right.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think that the artists themselves, as a result, formed a more easy- going, but also cohesive group, before the Fair?

WESLEY WEHR: Ah, it's very tempting for me to just say absolutely, yes.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Really? So that there was no town-gown thing before the Fair... There were no ins and outs...

WESLEY WEHR: Pehr would say, "Tobey, Mark, where are all the young artists that used to drop by in the evening?" Tobey'd say, "Oh, they're all out busy digging their private goldmines." And you know...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Would say this when? In the fifties?

WESLEY WEHR: Umm, in the early sixties.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In the early sixties, I see.

WESLEY WEHR: Sure. Okay. What I mean is suddenly the government steps in, we have one percent for art; we have all these infernal grants.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh, most of that didn't happen 'til the seventies, really.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, yeah, okay. But I came out of a time...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: The urging toward it began in the sixties, the national endowments were set up in the sixties. But there was no real local money in the form of one-percent programs until the seventies.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, I came out of the tradition of Helmi Juvonen, of Tobey, of Morris-- of live by your wits. I don't want to say the scroungers, but I come out of a very interesting bunch of what is it? But the sudden availability of more and more funding -- I'm not all that keen about it. I can make a big speech about private patrons. Oh, okay, something has come up lately. When I got back from a field trip, the first thing I heard from five quarters was Sue Ann Kendall's article about support for the artists here.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: A recent article, yes.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh God, I haven't read it, but I got phone calls-- "What do you think of it?" and I still haven't read it. But, and I talked with Regina Hackett about it yesterday, and Marshall Hatch last night, and I've just got to put my foot on this damn nonsense. Why not? (chuckles). Anyhow.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Put your foot down on which side? That there needn't be institutional support?

WESLEY WEHR: No, I told Regina lately I wanted nothing to do with this nonsense that this area is not supportive of the arts; I think that's ludicrous.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh, I see.

WESLEY WEHR: And I think anything said like that is just unsupportable; I think it's ridiculous. With Dr. Fuller's support of the artists, with the Henry Gallery in its Washington year, with all the shows... Well, I happen not to like Charles Cowles, but I would have to say that he certainly introduced a lot of artists in this area. I happen to have some very serious criticisms of Matthew Kangas, but I don't think he's worth talking about in some ways. But on the other hand, though I happen to dislike him strongly on certain polemical grounds, I think the way he's working very hard to introduce a lot of artists and draw attention to them is thoroughly commendable. I happen to dislike his being a category factory; that's another matter. But the fact is that I don't want to dislike people so much on certain grounds that I'm oblivious to the good things they do. But to very quickly say, Fuller... Oh, and we have many, many little museums here. I think artists have a tremendous support here. This nonsense; it just sends me through the ceiling. My God, what do the artists want for...?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In reference to the distinction we were making before '62 and after '62 a minute ago, is part of what you're saying now that there's almost too much support now?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, not too much, but it's certainly...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Or of the wrong kind?

WESLEY WEHR: What bothers me very much is when the support disappears for things that are very expensive, like theater, symphony. This is a very serious matter, when the symphony is threatened or major dance groups and all of that. But I don't like it when I, from any quarter, get the idea that any artist thinks the world automatically owes him a living for being creative. Then I think it's getting stupid.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You think with the increase in funding, in the sixties and seventies, that happened to some degree.

WESLEY WEHR: Well, yeah.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Compared to earlier.

WESLEY WEHR: There comes a point at which very often one will hear a howl if the public is not supportive. It comes from some gallery or from some painter. And I think, "Oh buster, I got news for you. What you're whining about isn't worth buying. I mean if people aren't buying your works, maybe it's not that the public is inappreciative but that what you do really isn't very good." So all I'm trying to say is sometimes the ones who complain the most bitterly about being unappreciated aren't really doing anything that's worth appreciating.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Sometimes.

WESLEY WEHR: Sometimes. Okay.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You think the opposite can be the case also?

WESLEY WEHR: Well, okay. This is something I talked to Marshall Hatch about yesterday. I think the times are very difficult; there's no doubt that we're not in an economic boom for the arts. It's not fashionable to buy and people are worried about money. But so the broad support for the arts, and for artists and paintings, is obviously in trouble. But on the other hand, I'm kind of reminded of something Tobey said, "No matter how bad the times are, if you're doing something which has quality, there's usually a patron somewhere that'll keep it going."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And did Tobey generally maintain that for the time you knew him?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Okay, yeah. And I think it's all very well to carp that the times are bad in a broad sense, but art patronage, which generally, as Zoe Dusanne put together a collection by skipping lunch in New York, there're usually people that have such a serious love for the arts that if they find works that they believe in, they'll somehow get them, they'll somehow keep artists going. And they're the real continuity. It doesn't basically interest me, the ups and downs of economic trends, how many paintings sell a day; my real interest is in the continuity in an area and that continuity is in the quiet patrons and collectors who don't serve on every board, and don't have a high profile. They're the unacknowledged contributors to our culture.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And you think Seattle is a sound and healthy environment in that respect?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, okay. And that's where I really would have to be a little sharp. There, I know for a fact there are in this area many people whose names are generally unfamiliar, except to artists, who quietly deprive themselves of trips and vacations to buy paintings because they believe in the artists. They do it quietly, discreetly, and they keep the whole thing going. So I simply think it's utterly unfair to publish an article which adds fuel to a kind of bleak picture when at the very same time I happen to know of all kinds of wonderful people who bend over backwards to buy paintings.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And was this also the case when you first became involved in the visual arts?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, that's what I want to get at. I don't know...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: In the fifties, was it the case?

WESLEY WEHR: Sure, of course. That's what kept Tobey going, and it's what's keeping many of our best artists going now, quiet patronage by people who really believe in what they get. I think the more shallow aspects of being an art collector are going through a shake-up. And just as well; I'd just as soon see-- I don't love money so much that I want it that badly, but that's an aside. It just bothers me very much how we ever got into box office and statistics that they measure the culture (and I underline that word) of an area is based on how many people buy how many paintings. I think that's a very shallow definition.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think the prominence of that kind of definition has increased with the introduction of significant numbers of galleries to Seattle? In the fifties, there was almost no gallery scene. The last ten years there has come to be one.

WESLEY WEHR: I think the Frankenstein monster has been the idea of art as investment.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oh, okay.

WESLEY WEHR: And I think the people who perpetrated it deserve to have the thing come back and bite them, the way it is.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And those people are, what, gallery people?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay, well, good question. Very often if I bought a Tobey painting from Seligman or from Mark, Mark would be very worried; he'd say, "Well, I like that Tobey painting, too, but Wes if you get broke, you'll have trouble reselling it. So I don't think you should get that one, because you might need the money and you won't be able to get it back."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Now who would say this?

WESLEY WEHR: Tobey! If I bought one of his works.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So you're tracing this attitude right back to the heart of the creation!

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. So Mark, if I bought things -- and, you know, I was buying Tobeys all the time, and, you know, that was fun; I liked having original works -- but then Tobey would say, "Well, this one I feel good about you getting it; I like the painting and if you get in trouble, you can always get back what you pay for it." So Mark wasn't concerned about art as investment; he thought that was nonsense, but he was concerned that if I got into trouble at least I could sell the painting and get out of trouble.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: But doesn't the one attitude shade into the other? To be concerned with whether you can get back what you paid is just elbow to elbow with being concerned with whether you can get a little more.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, good point. Is it?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It's being aware of the dollar implications.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, okay. Let's put it this way. When you have an area which has more and more painters, all painting, and aside from what the promoters say, the degrees of difference in the talents aren't all that different. There'll be a handful of superb painters, and then, well, yeah, then I put in a plug for Joe Goldberg and [Francis--WESLEY WEHR] Celentano and all that, sure. But if the talents and the accomplishments aren't really all that different, the ones that survive are going to have to have other things going for them.

[Tape 4]
[There's a bit of empty space at the beginning of this tape.]

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, we were just going to sort of warm up today and I'm just rolling. Shall we just...?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Sure, just continue!

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Because I am doing the very thing I didn't want to do, and I'm pontificating.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's why we have all these tapes.

WESLEY WEHR: Right, okay. (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Not to worry.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Well, how do artists, if their talents and accomplishments aren't notably better or worse than everybody else around, how do they survive? Through becoming personalities, so that you don't buy a painting by that somebody, you buy a religious trophy of this saintly personality. You're not buying a picture; you're buying a souvenir of...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Of the name?

WESLEY WEHR: Of the name or personality.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Or the brand?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. You might as well collect religious reliquaries, something like that. So, or you buy something to save face or a little better than Tupperware, I hope. You buy, well, oh God, ambivalence, status symbol, all that bore...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yeah, I do understand what you mean.

WESLEY WEHR: Sure, all that boring stuff. Okay, somehow it is -- I don't think they realize they're better or worse than anybody -- yet the idea that to survive and be noticed, they've got to be talked about, they've got to be, yeah, something of a local celebrity. Dealers, or painters selling their own work, can give a sense that their works and they are going someplace, and the collector in buying one of their works is having the opportunity to buy a painting by an artist whose work is -- God knows where it's going to go. It'll become part of the fictions and legends of its time plus a billion dollars and all of that.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It's that you're objecting to?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, okay. What I'm getting at is somehow, through Madison Avenue or whatever it is-- New York machine, and the other places, God knows, Paris is the great place for making reputations and careers. This whole thing got started as spiraling, quick skyrocketings of values-- it was like oil, what they call it, oil wells. Art can be identified with the excitement of vast fortunes. So of course the dealers cashed in and the painters cashed in-- it was all very lucrative-- and it got to the point of don't even bother whether you like the work or not. Buy in fast.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think that before, say '62, there was little or none of that mentality here?

WESLEY WEHR: Not much.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And that there has come to be that?

WESLEY WEHR: Well, I think one thing that happened was when Tobey had the show at the Biennale and then at the Louvre. Suddenly it's-- after the Biennale I know Seligman came back and I go into the gallery and the prices had all multiplied by ten.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Ah hah. And nothing like that had really happened in Seattle before?

WESLEY WEHR: No! We have a hometown painter who gets the grand prize of the Biennale. Seligman comes back; I saw this...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And it's reflected directly in the financial structure?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Times ten! I'd been buying them. After I bought a drawing for $35 Mark sent me a letter for being a patron!

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And suddenly it was all out of reach? Another ballgame?

WESLEY WEHR: Joanna Eckstein, bless her heart, comes in. Seligman has everything times ten. She says, "Otto, now look. Between you and me those were so-so Tobeys last week, and now that he's got the Biennale, they aren't any better." (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: (chuckles) Did he take the tags down?

WESLEY WEHR: No. He said, "Oh my God, get her out of here; she'll spoil everything." So Joanna told the truth, Joanna Eckstein, and she rocked the boat because, you know, suddenly we have a hometown painter who makes it big, and suddenly, we have an international superstar.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think that single fact, or that Morris Graves' earlier thing changed the whole game for other people?

WESLEY WEHR: That's exactly the point I'm leading to. I think one thing that happened was Tobey literally opened the door by this enormous world fame. Good old Tobey who you could see on the corner overnight became one of the big international, big bananas, as Guy [Anderson--Ed.] would say. So all of a sudden the big question is who's the next Mark Tobey?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Who's next.

WESLEY WEHR: Which company to buy into next.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So it changed everyone's hopes and everyone's expectations, everyone's criteria. Not everyone, but it changed some people's expectations, hopes, buying criteria.

WESLEY WEHR: I think it made a difference because in no way am I going to... I've got to say again that there has been a very serious group of people here buying art because they loved it. And I'm not talking about them. Not at all. But I am talking about the bunch that came rushing in to buy the Tobeys at the new times-ten price. That weren't interested in them before. And they were pathetic. The ones that I would take into Seligman, saying it's a beautiful Tobey; it's only $125. They'd say, "Well, oh, I don't know." They were the very ones that came rushing in to buy the Tobeys at the new prices, because then the question was, do you own a Mark Tobey? And there was a lot of racing around to save face and sort of get your Tobey up on the wall, and pretend that you've believed in his work for a long time.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: This is only part of the group here. So I think what happened, money entered the picture, an overnight Cinderella kind of success-- it was pretty heady stuff-- and then the businessmen, God bless them, got interested in the arts more. It never occurred to them that-- they were so into stocks and stuff like that-- it never occurred to them that art, especially local artists, might be a possible source of big profit. So you suddenly have a lot of people saying, who should we buy next? Who do you collect? Who's the next Mark Tobey? And suddenly everyone's asking everyone, "Who are you buying? [Who, where, what] are you collecting?" And there's a certain aura of, you know, tips on the stock market. Well, this is very good for business; everybody's out, even the ones who don't know what they like or what to believe in, are out sort of like betting on all the horses, buying everything so the good painters, the bad painters, everybody's having a field day because Tobey, and perhaps to some extent Morris, had opened the door on the possibility that local artists can be extremely lucrative.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Well, when this happened in the early sixties, here in Seattle, it certainly paralleled developments and changing attitudes around the country at large.

WESLEY WEHR: That's right. Okay.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Then do you think something peculiar in any way has happened in Seattle, because in Seattle those who achieved fame and opened the door, as you just said, then left.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And we have this peculiar excitement about people who aren't here anymore.

WESLEY WEHR: I know. It's weird!

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It's a stange void.

WESLEY WEHR: It's a very strange situation. Tobey is dead. Morris lives in California. Callahan is off on the beach. Guy Anderson, I can be accused of being biased, but I think Guy Anderson is just at the height of his powers. What amuses me terribly is that Guy is at an age where most painters are sick and tired of painting, but he gets such a buzz often, I think this is terribly funny.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: He's tremendously vigorous.

WESLEY WEHR: I know. I think Guy and-- Now Guy isn't going to be too fond of this, but to hell with it. I happen to think that Guy Anderson and Helmi Juvonen are two of the best things in the area.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: What won't he like? Your saying that? Or your linking them?

WESLEY WEHR: My linking them.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I see.

WESLEY WEHR: And that's just too bad. (chuckles) I'm sorry. But one simply can't think, guess how the chips are going to fall; what I think is terribly funny is that Helmi is 80. She's still, she has no script for painting, and she just, oh, goes on being horribly creative. Guy just, God, he doesn't stop! And so what we have, you know-- I think this is just marvelous-- two painters who just go on.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: But they're not present in the minds of people who are wondering who will be the next Mark Tobey.

WESLEY WEHR: Not particularly. No.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Is that what you're saying? I mean they have their eyes on younger generations, less known people.

WESLEY WEHR: And that's kind of interesting; I think the thing backfired terribly and I really think this is funny. A lot of these painters who bought for investment, the point came when they thought, "Well, I don't like the work. I only bought it for investment. And I sure don't like it around my house." Then they took it back on consignment or to resell it. Well, having bought some rather dumb stuff, they decided to cash in on it, and since it was dumb stuff...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: It didn't work.

WESLEY WEHR: It didn't work. (chuckles) So, when they decide really to cash in on their imaginary stocks and bonds, they find that something's kind of wrong, if they bought dull work for proper reasons. And then it creeps into the suspicions of some of the collectors that maybe they've been had.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You think that has happened only recently, this entertaining of suspicions?

WESLEY WEHR: I think it's going on now, and I'm glad it's started. I shouldn't put it quite that way, but nothing delights me more than to see shallow, materialistic reasons for collecting art go through a big shakeup. If I say I'm not all that gung-ho about the popularity of the arts, things that are popular, I tend to be a little... Well, just because it's popular doesn't mean it's necessarily bad. But the thing I like right now is I think, maybe it's just wishful thinking, that something may be happening in this area which is going to make it very hard on painters to survive.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Which is what?

WESLEY WEHR: And I don't think it's going to kill them. I think we're going through, you know, the recession and all of that. Okay. I think this is marvelous in one point. And I don't want to sound heartless and unsympathetic, but I think if this area is going to produce some underivative, genuine-felt, true work that's really interesting and genuine, it'll come partly out of a transition into sort of why do you paint? Do you paint to become a superstar or somebody important? Do you simply love to paint, and you're going to paint because you want to? And in that sense, I welcome an economic bad time here, because I...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yeah, I'm thinking that a degree of hardship is a kind of test of integrity that will leave the field to those who remain, leave the best.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, it's also a test of why one does anything. Is it out of deep enthusiasm or out of personal ambition? And I think in that sense, I'm delighted to see the arts become not too fashionable and the collectors confined to the more serious patrons. In that sense, trying to take the long view of it, the long, lean hungry look of Cassius, I think the Northwest masters have become sort of like Burgermasters... Oh my God, the amount of junk that has been sold in this area, Tobeys that should never have left the studio, with incredible prices. I will go ahead and just take a slam at Kenneth Callahan. It's the only tactless thing I've said so far, that I do feel in the case of Callahan, though we have a nice acquaintanceship, that he has allowed just abominable stuff to be sold with his signature. Well, oh, why not say it, yeah. It's just, I think an artist gets to the point of being a local success, and my God, the junk they let out. And this is the very time to, when you become famous, you've just got to put your foot down and say I don't care how acceptable I am, I'm not going to let that junk out of here.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Given this area now has enough historical development behind it to have several generations of painters, don't you think it possible that an economic hard times, like you were just speaking of, militates against younger innovators and in favor of...

WESLEY WEHR: Conservative?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: ...the older slightly mythologized people like Callahan that you were just speaking of?

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay, yeah, right. Yeah, I think from some...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: ...continues the production of all sorts of stuff, from a recognized studio?

WESLEY WEHR: Ooh. It's a terribly good point. I think Regina [Hackett--WESLEY WEHR] may have made the point lately, surveying the galleries, that the established artists survive, and the young good ones are having a hell of a time.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So if you think of hard times in the twenties or thirties when there essentially was no older generation, hard times would weed out the good young from the bad young. But now it may weed out the established from the younger, in a way that operates differently from before.

WESLEY WEHR: I can't get around your point; I think it's absolutely the way the cookie crumbles.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's not so hot, in my opinion.

WESLEY WEHR: I know! It stinks. Again, to dodge that situation, I have to go through my set speech of enjoy luxury, but don't count on it. You know, to live by your wits. Private patrons, again. I just have this thing about it's better to have one or two serious collectors behind you than the vagaries of being fashionable and unfashionable. You turn into a screaming neurotic if you're dependent upon being in and out of fashion.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You need private patrons who are not tied to the established fashion of an older generation and feel themselves free of that.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Also you need private patrons who could not give a damn about being local social climbers. They are either so lofty that they don't have to become anybody, or they couldn't be bothered. It's the ones in between that are the creeps. I mean, I knew once a baroness from Germany, and she could get on with other baronesses or with the maid, but she said, "It's the people in between I can't stand." And she's got her point. So the marvelous painters are the ones who don't want to become socially something via their activities in the arts because to be a social somebody is a pretty symbiotic thing. It depends on what everybody else thinks of you. And all I'm saying is that when you set out to be social, you may, you become very clever, but you don't become very wise. And socially ambitious people do become terribly clever. And especially when they're artists that want to be socially ambitious, too. They become...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Yeah. I don't know that hard times alone are enough to eliminate those motives at all.

WESLEY WEHR: But when artists become socially ambitious they become clever, calculating. I'm not saying it feeds back into the work, but they become locked into a thing they've had a taste of it, they don't want to let go of it. They're sort of hooked. My God, I've certainly ______ the old [boy, way].

[Break in tape]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Wesley was going to tell me a story now, and he says that they'll all say it didn't happen, but I said, "Wes, go ahead and tell me the story anyway, because this is our coffee break."

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, right. Is it on?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Uh huh. It's on.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. There are stories that I tell painter friends or friends occasionally after I've known them for a while. They're the stories about friendships with different painters here. Some years ago a student came to me and said she was doing a paper on Mark Tobey and Zen Buddhism and she wanted to ask some questions. And I kind of looked at her and I thought, oh, oh-oh, she looks like she doesn't like the present very much; she looks a little repressed. And I have a suspicion that this poor dear has fled into history because it's behind her and it's negotiable. And I thought, oh my God and here she is asking me about Tobey and Zen Buddhism, and I don't like it.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: She doesn't know what she's getting into.

WESLEY WEHR: So, what I said was, "My dear, when Tobey painted these paintings that you're curious about, I can say this much, he was alive when he painted them." Which was kind of a little nasty. Okay. Then I said, "If your relationship to the past is looking for tidyness, forget it. If you want to go into the past into Mark Tobey or Morris Graves or whatever, I have one suggestion. Do you know any painters now? She said, "Well, no, I don't." And I said, "Well, if you want to understand Tobey in the past, I'd suggest you start going out and dating some painters, get drunk with them, you might even think of living with them. Whether you get married or not, that's up to you. But I can assure you that if you want to understand Tobey and Morris and everybody else, I don't want to contribute any more to the bullshit of their being stuffy and as tidy as you historians sometimes want to make them. I would suggest, bang around with a lot of painters, find out how materialistic they can be one minute, or genuine the next, and find out how filled with contradictions they are, and then maybe you're ready to start backwards. But if you're looking for a consistent Tobey or a consistent Graves, there isn't one. The thing that can only be said about them is that they were-- like they said about Victor Hugo, he was like everybody else, but nobody was like him. And this is the thing about Tobey. When he was ambitious, he could be the most calculating, contrived, polishing his career, imaginable. He was brilliant. When he was fed up with ambition, he was the pure, intrinsic joy-of-doing-it artist as you couldn't believe it. But being around Tobey, you had to simply give up the idea that there was one Mark Tobey. But the thing is, each of the Tobeys that you saw in this prismatic way was absolutely brilliant. It kind of made you feel that you weren't much of anything; you were just sort of a pastel, homogenized nothing. But here was Tobey and he was just a whole Shakespearean cast of being petty and bitchy and cranky and absolutely boring, and then the next minute being absolutely moving and eloquent and human and vulnerable, and you just had to sit back and say my God, is that Tobey's greatness that is he is so many things all at once.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And did this young woman marry a painter?

WESLEY WEHR: No. I was, I had a terrible feeling that she might have been one of your students, and I had a, I thought afterwards, oh my God, she's studying with Martha and she's going to go back and say, "Who is that jerk at the Henry Gallery? He told me if I want to write about Tobey I should go out and have an affair with a painter."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: She must not have been my student.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, thank God! (laughs)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I never had a student who took that tack, that I know of.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. I'm afraid I meant to call you in those days and say, well...the art history majors are coming by to ask me questions. I'm telling them terribly raunchy stories. Okay. Let's see. A few stories about Morris. Okay. Anyhow, here we go.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You want me to turn it off?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, for just a second.

[Break in tape]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Now, what were you just saying?

WESLEY WEHR: Well, I just...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: When you first came here.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, okay. Before I met Morris Graves, I had heard many stories about what a legend he was, how handsome he was, and how many people had been in love with him-- past and present. He certainly was one of the most colorful people on University Way; there are all kinds of
stories about him, legends of-- you didn't know what was true and what was simply invented. But the fact was that he simply was the subject of enormous myth and all that.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: But with some grounding in fact.

WESLEY WEHR: And the same thing was true of Roethke; he was somebody who was alleged to have had many affairs and all kinds of names of different students were, you know, sort of did he have an affair with her? Was it true about Roethke's affair with so and so? So the two people on University Way who were in a sort of legendary classification, shall we say having a past and having a present, certainly Roethke and Morris Graves. And when I... I knew Morris Graves' paintings a little bit from books, and then I met him. Ward Corley and I had exchanged rooms at the Kennedy Gallery (chuckles), God. [Kennedy Building--WESLEY WEHR]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Delusions of grandeur. (laughs)

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, next to the post office. We just traded rooms. People came looking for Ward and found me and vice versa. I got to know a great many people accidently by trading rooms. So there was a knock on my door, 103 Kennedy Building, and I have a bed, a wash basin, a bare lightbulb, and an upright piano. I open the door and it's Morris Graves, who I'd met at Tobey's house. Morris looked startled and says, "Oh, it's you! Where's Ward?" And I said, "Oh well, we've traded rooms." He said, "Well, it's nice to see you again." And I said, "Well, won't you come in?" Morris walks in, and the bare lightbulb, which is blinding, but he is too much of a gentleman to say, For God's sakes put a lampshade on it." So he sits on the bed and he sees the piano, and he says, "Oh that's very nice. Would you play something for me?" And I thought, "Oh, good God." So he sprawls out on the bed and says, "Well, I'm tired, just, I'll relax. Play for me." So I improvised something in Eb Major, God knows, and tinkle away, and after about half an hour, Morris says, "Oh, that was lovely. Thank you very much. I must leave now." I thought, "Oh, good heavens! That was Morris Graves." He walks in, takes a nap on my bed, asks me to play the piano, says it was lovely, and disappears.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's when he's rested.

WESLEY WEHR: This is how he got a reputation for being so bird-like. But then different friends start telling me of Morris' alleged liaisons and how many people have loved him and all of that. So he invites me out to Woodway Park, and we go out for a walk after lunch, and Morris says, "Do you have a beloved? Are you in love with anyone?" And I say, "Oh, yes, I am." He says, "Oh really. So there's somebody you love?" I said, "Well, yes." "Are the two of you happy together?" I said, "Well, yes, very happy." And he says, "Oh, I see. Would you care to talk..."

[Tape 5, marked tape 3, side 1]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: So he said would you care to talk about it?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, without naming names, another painter said, "Wes, if you don't tell these stories, nobody else will. Everyone is so protective about Morris that..."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Quite right. So go ahead.

WESLEY WEHR: "...you'll be the only one to be so tasteless as to tell these stories." I thought, gee, thanks. Anyhow. So he says, "Well, are you happy together?" "Why, yes, I am." He says, "Oh well, that's very nice." And then he says, "Now let's go back and have some more lunch." Huh! So Morris is very nice to me; we become very good friends. I see a great deal of him. He's a marvelous friend to me many years, and around 1964 or so, I'm sitting in a house where I live-- we had a mutual friend, Bob Mony, a pianist-- Morris would come by to visit me, and I'll come to visit Bob Mony, and I go into the room and Morris is sitting there, and I'm sitting with Bob and Morris talking. Morris says, "Wes, I have a question to ask you. And it goes back a long time, and I've gotta ask you, because I can't take it any more." And I said, "Well, what's that Morris?" He said, "Well, when we first met, and you came out, I asked you if you had a beloved, and you said yes, but you wouldn't say any more. And I was very curious who it was. I asked Guy, and he didn't know. And I asked so and so, and I asked all around if anybody knew who your lover was. And nobody seemed to know, because they never saw you with anyone and we couldn't figure out who was your secret beloved. And this has been very frustrating. So for God's sakes tell me who was it." I said, "Oh, well, as a matter of fact, I was absolutely alone. I had no beloved." He said, "For God's sakes, why did you lie to me and say you had?" And I said, "Well, Morris, I'm very vain and I'm very insecure, and just before I met you I had heard all these stories about all these people who were hopelessly in love with you, and I had the impression that, a lot of times, that in a very [complicated], if something went wrong and all of that and you and I are still friends. We've had a wonderful friendship, and I'm afraid I just invented an imaginary great love on the spot." And Morris said, "Oh, you didn't!" I said, "Yeah, I lied." Why is it I'm telling this story?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Go ahead.

WESLEY WEHR: So Morris just let out a snort, and he said, "Oh for pity's sakes, I should have known even at that age, you tricked me!" And he just started laughing and he was so nonplussed that, you know, my first meeting and how he could have asked me a serious question and I invent an imaginary happy affair, and then explain that it was my vanity to put a wall between us. [WESLEY WEHR added later: I didn't want to become just one more person in Morris' past.]

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That's perfectly credible.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. (laughs) It's sort of...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: (laughs) What did he do about it?

WESLEY WEHR: He started laughing, and he said, "Oh good Heavens!" So years later Joe Goldberg and I were driving to the Mojave Desert-- we were on a trip-- and we went through Eureka, California, one night-- I think around, oh, 1968 or so, someplace in there-- and I called Morris from Eureka, and he said, "Well, why don't you come out to the house? But be sure you're here at exactly eight o'clock. Be punctual. And I thought, oh God, here we go again. Morris being imperious. So we went out, and I took the alarm clock and told, "Well, Morris means it."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: (laughs) Did you wait outside the gate until the alarm clock rang?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, exactly. We had to find our way through all the gates and everything to find the house in the woods at Loleta, and I thought, well, all right Mr. Graves; you said eight o'clock, and it'll be eight o'clock. So we synchronized our watches, sat in the woods chain-smoking, and we thought, by God, we can play this game too. So Morris knew that by telling us to be there at eight o'clock, he was presenting difficulties. And I was thinking, well, the way to get on with him is... Okay, so anyhow, so promptly at eight o'clock I went [knocks three times] on the door, and Morris opened the door a little surprised that we were there exactly at eight because that wasn't all that easy. And he said, "Well, do come in; how nice to see you." And he said, "I do have to apologize that I can't let you stay any later than ten, but so if I shoo you out at ten, you know, don't be disappointed, but I'm awfully glad to see you. Do come in, and can I get you some whiskey? And I thought, oh my God, I haven't seen him for a long time, but here we go again. So we sit on the floor by the fire and Morris is talking to Joe-- Morris had met him briefly before that-- and then Morris says, "Wes, I don't understand you. You used to write me such sweet letters that are like little love notes, you know, that you like me, and you don't write me letters anymore. How come?" And then he said, "Well, come to think of it, I haven't answered your letters," and he said, "You know, Wes, if you really loved me, you'd write me, and you wouldn't expect answers." Oh, God. So he said, "I still have the last letter you wrote me. Let me go to find it." So he rummages around and he comes back with this little letter and reads it to me, and he says, "You know, how come you have forgotten me?"

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Giving you a hard time!

WESLEY WEHR: And I think, oh for pity's sakes, you know, Morris, let's stop this, and can't we just be friends, and stop all this nonsense because, with Tobey, he was just a very straightforward creature, but with Morris I got sort of tired of all the little games and things like that. Because with Morris, he's very real and very wonderful, but he's got this compulsive side there from Dada; it just wears me out. To the point of, one has this sort of love/hate thing toward Morris until you just don't care anymore. I'm not speaking for his other friends, but I simply found the friendship with Tobey fine, but with Morris I got tired of the ups and downs of all this nonsense. But anyway. Morris says, to Joe Goldberg he says, "How do you feel about death?" And Joe says, "Well, Mr. Graves, not having died yet, I really don't know, but when I do, you'll be the first to know. (laughs) And I thought, Morris, oh.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: ______ of you too?

WESLEY WEHR: So Morris is, you know, asking big questions and all of that. So he says, "Well, Joseph, I've known Wes for a very long time now; we've had a very good friendship for a long time. He is the kindest, most loving, gentle creature in the world." And he starts praising me about what a nice guy I am, and I think, oh good God, now what? He's setting me up for another of these double-edged things. And I just grit my teeth and think, here we go again. And then Morris says, "However, I can tell you, Mr. Goldberg. Should Wes ever decide to be cruel, God help us all." (chuckles) Okay.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You were used to it; you knew what was coming.

WESLEY WEHR: I'm used to it. So these stories are rather trivial, but I guess that if I'm making a point... Speaking for myself, I found that in the case of Morris, one can be terribly grateful to him for friendship and on the other hand experience a sheer exasperation like, for God's sakes, stop this nonsense. But I have to be careful what I say about Morris because it can be a mixture of tremendous warmth toward him plus sheer exasperation. And never toward Tobey did I feel that way. It's just Morris is a very ambivalent subject for me, so if I talk about him I go in circles. Oh good, yeah. [Seems to be relieved that MARTHA KINGSBURY is suggesting the tape be turned off--Ed.]

[Break in tape]

WESLEY WEHR: One thread I'd like to pick up about Mark Tobey, and going back to this old ambivalent thing about fame and success. Let's see. I've gone blank for a second. Okay. You know I thought of two things at once, and they canceled each other out. One thing about Tobey, for instance, when one was with him, he could be continually complaining, just, on some days you'd think he was describing to you the end of Western civilization. He'd been to New York, and all the painters are getting worse and worse and you were witnessing the death of feeling and that [soul] in contemporary painting. Tobey would just tirade day after day until you thought, my God, I've heard it, I've heard it. If you're going to complain, find something new to complain about. So if anyone thinks for a moment that, oh he wished he'd known Mark Tobey and what a great thing it would have been to have known Tobey, I can say that on some days and some times it was wonderful to know him; he was marvelous. And other days, you thought, my God, you looked at your watch and tried to think up an excuse to get away from him. Because when Tobey was in a good mood, he was wonderful, but when he was on one of these other kicks, he was the most insufferable complainer in the world. Until you thought he's just-- his needle is stuck. So it was a favorite thing of Tobey to explain patiently to you how practically all the painters of our time were just getting, you know, it was a very bad time. And I couldn't understand in many ways how, why Tobey wasted so much time yapping about the things that he thought were no good. And then he would of course be talking about being neglected, how all the other painters, Pollock and the others, were having spectacular reputations and here was poor Mark, no book published and all that stuff. So finally, when he started having all this international success, some of us thought, well, now he's finally having it, and so we won't hear about any more complaining. But, oh no! He would somehow brush aside the Louvre show, and the Biennale, and that was all very good, and he'd be back to bitching again. And you thought, well, what is going on? What's he complaining about? Well, he'd suddenly remember that when he was young he applied for a Guggenheim. Then suddenly there he was telling you that the man who took him out for lunch said, "Well, I'm sorry, Mark, can't give you the Guggenheim. We had better material this year." And Tobey had set the clock back decades and he was going back to some early rejection and tirading, and this went on and on, and I couldn't understand why, even when Tobey became terribly famous and successful and had all the things that most people would think were the end of the road, he found so much to complain about. So finally, I asked Berthe Poncy Jacobson, "Well, why is Tobey such a complaint factory?" And she laughed and she said, "You've got to understand one thing about Mark: He's an artist. Artists are like oysters; they don't produce pearls unless they're irritated!" Tobey has an instinct. He realizes that acceptance and fame and all of that, that's the end of your tensions and you fall asleep. So when Mark gets all of these things that he says he wanted, well, that's all very well, but what do you do? You've got them and then there go your tensions. So Mark has to ransack his past or the environment to find something to be upset about because that's how he sustains his tensions. So don't pay any attention to what he's complaining about; that isn't what's going on. Mark is simply guarding his slights, and it's that sense of..."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Guarding his slights. Yeah.

WESLEY WEHR: "...because they're what keep him irritated and on his toes." And that was a very interesting remark from Mrs. Jacobson because I thought maybe she's getting down to something a little biological and a little fundamental about artists that, if they're complaining a lot, how valid are the complaints? Do artists have an instinct for the importance of tension and frustration? So...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Or at least some artists, who are doing some kind of art.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah. Do they, is their fear not of rejection, though they scream that they hate rejection, is their real fear, in even a subconscious way, that, God help them, they may be accepted and then what happens? There goes their sacred hunger. There goes their desire, their drive, and that's what... Yeah?

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Do you think that's true of Tobey? That even in his successful years and even in his late years he always maintained that irritability?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, I think so.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Oyster-like irritability.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, I think so, and even though it sounds a little tidy, I think there's something to it-- Tobey had a razor-sharp relationship to things. He was very tough on himself, very severe with his own work. What's happened is dreadful-- there are many paintings that he did which were casual, trivial. Many people came through the studio, and they'd see something. Mark was very generous; he'd say, "Oh you like that? You can have it." Just a souvenir, a thing given casually to a friend.

Later on when the works became very valuable, then of course, often out of necessity, the people owning them would put them up for sale. And the galleries, of course, knew there was a market for an original Tobey. Well, what's happened in this area, which is very serious-- an enormous number of really dreadful trivia, if not junk, circulates endlessly with enormous pricetags. Tobey himself would be the first one to deplore that it should have been thrown away, but it's gone on, there's no way, the works are simply worth too much because of Tobey's having done them. No one is going to destroy them. So what we have going on now is a rather nightmarish thing that the very bad works by Tobey and by other artists are endlessly circulated.

The legends about Tobey and these different painters are very intriguing, but a young artist or somebody new to the scene that doesn't know the range of their work-- when they'd painted some good things and how much junk and stuff they ground out-- suddenly goes around and is aware of these local, huge reputations and is confronted by a vast amount of just inexcusably bad stuff. It's enough to make any young artist cynical about the basis of success because he sees these enormously big reputations, such as Mark's and Morris', and then matches them against this God-awful mess of...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Of the stuff that's around in ______.

WESLEY WEHR: ...of trivia. Yeah. And this is dreadful, what's going on, because the young artist coming on the scene being confronted by this schism between reputation and bad works circulating is going to have every reason for believing that reputation is...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Is all hype.

WESLEY WEHR: ...is all hype. And in that way, I think the whole thing is very unfortunate; it just lends more weight to the cynicism that reputation is hype, that the actual merits of the work itself is not a serious matter. So what's happening now, in these perennial reviews of what they call "let's look at the evidence" of the Northwest School, is really a terrible thing for me to have to watch. The lack of what Robert Sarkis calls "con-nos-ser-ship" [WESLEY WEHR is deliberately misprouncing "connoisseurship".] (chuckles)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: What a friend of mine calls "con-noise-er-ship". (chuckles)

WESLEY WEHR: Con-noise-er-ship. Well, we're seeing a great deal of it now. A lot of people who want to serve the cause of Northwest art duly bring out genuine works by genuine Northwest artists, and think that's where their responsibility stops. But I'm afraid what's being done is the most inadvertent hatchet job on the past imaginable. The works that should...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: By ignoring distinctions of quality?

WESLEY WEHR: By ignoring distinctions of quality. They think that to bring out inferior works, not knowing that they're inferior, but they trust them-- the work should have been destroyed; they should not be brought out. If you're going to revive a thing, it should be revived well or not at all.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I want to go back in relation to that question of quality and in relation to the story you were telling about Tobey and maintaining tension. Do you think that the way Tobey conceived his art was particularly related to maintaining a certain kind of tension that entered into the creation of works?

WESLEY WEHR: Ah, that's good, yeah.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That that was a more important characteristic in other words for him and his art than it might have been for other people.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay. One thing I noticed about Tobey and it's quite true of Helmi, for instance, too. They didn't have a formal platform of what their painting was all about. They might have some general kind of kinky, kooky ideas of, oh, I want to combine the East and the West or the North and the South, but it was a kind of open-end. They didn't have polemics and didactics as such; they had sort of loose ideas. They were often more intuitive, a little unprogrammed. A painter today, if he's the victim of his own press promotion, is going to suddenly realize that in order to go on being himself he's got to be like a certain breakfast cereal that's the same old product with maybe
vitaminC added-- carefully calculated degrees of "progress," and if any...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: The continuity?

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, the continuity.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: A recognizable continuity.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, and it's really a kind of packaging; it's the Quaker Oats that your grandmother grew up on, but it's got alfalfa added.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: You think Tobey was not in that mind?

WESLEY WEHR: No. He was too smart for that. If you look at his work, it's filled in some ways with all kinds of contradictions. I go into the studio, and on a given month he had painted some very ethereal, abstract, rarified things. Over in the corner were some life studies done from the model. There might be some satirical things, which are really quite funny, little drawings, quite irreverent. There might even be a still life. And if you went into Tobey's studio, you thought, my God, this man is stylistically schizophrenic. But what the works all had in common was that whatever painting he was engaged on at the moment had his entire attention; it became a thing which he went into as well as he could.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: When you go to his studio and find sometimes this diversity of work, did you then or do you now have the sense that distinctions of quality might reside in the different kinds of work, so that when he did one kind of work, it was good Tobey, or was any type of work apt to result in a good sometimes. I know that's good work.

WESLEY WEHR: Oh, I like that. Yeah. Tobey was interesting; he called himself old-fashioned in that he would be the first one to say that anyone who says that figure painting or still life or landscape had had their day is a God-damned jackass. He was impatient with anything to say that only good painting can be done in a certain ism. He thought that was absolutely stupid.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: And was he right with regard to his own work?

WESLEY WEHR: I think so.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: That some of the still lifes were good; some of the caricatures were good.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, there are good paintings and there are bad paintings. And when he had the big retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum, the thing that was surprising was that going through it one noticed an enormous range of kinds of painting. But then you thought at the end of the show, well, somehow there's something that holds it all together, and what is it? I think it was quality of Tobey's sensibility; it wasn't just a still life here or different categories, it was something that the level of Tobey's aesthetic energy and tension and all of that somehow gave it-- continuity to this enormous variety of work. In other ways, I think one reason he remains one of the more interesting painters for me is that he didn't short change himself by saying, "Well, now that I'm Mark Tobey, I can't paint the figure any more or I'm not supposed to do this or I'm not supposed that. Which I think is a problem with young painters today; they're...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: I'm thinking. I know some for whom it's a problem.

WESLEY WEHR: Yeah, we could really go into that one. But where I think Tobey was well off, he might, in collaboration with the dealers, show works that fell within being Tobeys, because the dealers didn't want to confuse things too much.

MARTHA KINGSBURY: He kept right on working at whatever he felt like.

WESLEY WEHR: Okay, but there was the Tobey that was exhibited, and they went on looking more like Tobeys, but if you went into the studio, that was another... Even some of the drawings are quite erotic and wonderfully licentious; they'd be very lusty, busty nude women and all kinds of things; you'd say that can't be a Tobey. And there'd be an owl with a wedding veil, and eighteen pandas in a row, and there's tremendous fantasy. And you walked into Tobey's studio and looked around and said, good God, this man paints by boredom, restlessness, whimsy; like, oh I'm bored with doing that, I'll do something else today. So Tobey was always saying very dogmatically, "Now you shouldn't repeat yourself; you must press on, press on, [create a ______, or some French expression?]" So one day I walked in and he was doing something in the white writing idiom, and I said, "Mark, you've been telling me now an artist shouldn't repeat himself, well, isn't that white writing? Aren't you kind of repeating yourself?" And he went, "Humff, now you know your music, boy, I'm not repeating myself; I'm just recapitulating."

MARTHA KINGSBURY: (laughs)

WESLEY WEHR: [Mark Tobey speaking here--WESLEY WEHR] "In a piece of music you go back and touch on the whole thing, and I'm not for a moment going back and repeating myself. I'm just like a pianist that likes to pick up an old piece of music and play it through again and see if he can still do it. And don't you try to tell me I'm repeating myself." So all I'm saying is Tobey could be very dogmatic, but when you pointed out to him that he wasn't the best example of his own dogmas, he usually found a way...

MARTHA KINGSBURY: Back at you?

WESLEY WEHR: He didn't take it very well. He usually explained to you that you weren't quite aware of the difference.

(Tape 6, marked tape 4, side 1)

MARTHA KINGSBURY: We had felt last time that one of the things we wanted to talk about was why Mark Tobey eventually left this area, the Seattle area, during the period when Wes Wehr was friends with him. And so why don't we begin by talking