Oral history interview with Tom Wesselmann, 1984 Jan. 3 - Feb. 8

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 Tom Wesselmann, 1984 Jan. 3 - Feb. 8, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with Tom Wesselmann
Conducted by Irving Sandler
At his studio on the Bowery
1984 January 3 - February 8

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Tom Wesselmann on January 3-February 8, 1984. The interview took place at his studio on the Bowery, and was conducted by Irving Sandler for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

IS: Irving Sandler
TW: Tom Wesselmann

IS: I think last time we got you down to the Cooper Union, when you'd come to New York. Perhaps you could speak a little bit about that. First of all, last time you said you began at Cooper Union in cartooning, and then at one point the art curriculum and art itself began to impinge on you.

TW: O.K. Now it's beginning to come back, what happened to me at Cooper Union. I was continuing my very, kind of cocky way in my attempt to be a cartoonist going to Cooper Union to stall for time, again on the G.I. Bill. I'd taught myself to draw cartoons, and the art school I viewed as a completely separate phenomenon. It had nothing to do with cartooning or with me. It was just something I had to endure to get my G.I. Bill. What happened though was I fell in with the wrong crowd, with people who thought and had ideas.

IS: Who were they?

TW: It doesn't matter, because the wrong crowd becomes the environment of the wrong crowd, an environment that for the first time in my life stressed things like thinking, examining your values. Actually, I'd begun to take education courses just before Cooper Union, and so I began to read. Now I'd read in college some, but I was a kid. Reading in college didn't mean anything. Now I began to read as a part of required education courses and I read meaningfully. I read John Dewey. It was very important to me. It was the first time I can recall being made to think so rationally, so specifically. And then going to Cooper Union and encountering students who were all oriented toward art and therefore a little bit precocious from that point of view. They tended to think and examine their values -- and teachers who would stress that kind of thing. I began to read. That was the first step. It didn't happen right away. It happened after a while. I guess the earliest thing I can remember is the idea of being excited by some of the teachers -- like David Lund, Charles Cajori. These are from the first year, I think. I don't remember whether it was the first year or not -- and the general environment, and the idea being to approach painting -- not to accept everything. Like Marsicano said.

IS: He was the second year?

TW: No, Marsicano was the third year. They didn't let us paint in the first year. We didn't paint until the second year.

IS: So you were doing drawing with Lund and Cajori.

TW: Lund was two-dimensional design. Lund was the first year. That was an important class to me because Lund was an articulate man, and he had something to teach that I'd never encountered before, which had to do with composition. He was very involved with composition, a very inventive kind of composition. There were no rules. Sometimes I couldn't figure what the hell he was getting at, but I seemed to succeed at it. I think that he gave me my first sense of confidence -- that maybe there was something that I could accomplish on some creative level. It was my first experience except for cartooning. And Cajori was challenging because he was so damned hard to figure out. He was just, oh, God, like he had an axe to grind. He had a really kind of specific thing to get across to us. Hard as hell to get that across to some kid who that had never encountered art before. In fact, I think I got the only C I got in the whole thing . . . .

IS: From Cajori.

TW: At the same time the teachers were talking about the importance of not accepting -- because they were aware of what was happening in the art world; it was the Fifties -- the Abstract Expressionist, the New York School, was rising and there was a lot of excitement about it. The whole premise of that in a large part was not to accept everything that had come before it, but to be open to something new. And John Cage and all these other things and you hear stories about it. Ippolito saying -- I mentioned that in my book, I guess -- he would put his brush into his paintpot not knowing what color, he didn't want to know what color -- it was just suddenly up there on the canvas, and he had to be able to respond to it. And all those kind of things you'd hear made a climate that really was very encouraging of examining. I started to examine everything I was ever taught about anything. For me it became a crucial personal thing -- to examine God and all that. I had grown up irreligious but with an idea of God. I grew up avoiding Sunday school because I didn't like the social ill-at-easeness. So I went to church with my parents and daydreamed all through the sermon. I got very turned on the first year at Cooper Union to the idea, the possibility, of becoming an artist. It was still just an idea; it was just an abstraction at this time. I hadn't even painted yet. I began to get excited about it as one might be a writer, a poet or something. So I was thinking about it for the first time; and I'd go back to Cincinnati and say, silly things like, "It's important. You've got to be able to pick your nose in the subway." [Laughter] It's O.K. You've got to be able to not be afraid to do something of what people will think. I'd go through all these things. An architecture course taught by two guys, a man named Stone and a man named C-- went on to be a-- One of the most important courses I ever had was architecture. It taught me about design and composition. Shall I ramble on like this or do you want me to stop?

IS: Sure. You're fine.

TW: Because I've got all kinds of details.

IS: Go ahead.

TW: They seemed important to me at the time. We had to . . . a little weekend house. This is a big lesson for me. It sounds like a silly lesson, but I did a wonderful little weekend house, kind of shaped like a triangle, all glass on one side facing the light. I put the roof on in little, hidden columns, about a dozen of them punctured the roof. And one of them also was a chimney -- it came through the fireplace. I presented this with great confidence, and Stone said, "Hey! That's terrific! If one of those things can spout smoke, think how great it would be if all twelve of them could spout smoke!" [Laughter] So I realized my first lesson in design. He was right. You can't do it that way, and I learned a lot of things like that from the non-art courses. Like the calligraphy course.

IS: Who taught that?

TW: Standard. I didn't learn anything in the class, except that I learned something about being. I don't know quite what I learned. His sense of integrity communicated itself to us even though we didn't intend to be using calligraphy; it didn't have much of a purpose. It was just the integrity of what you do on a piece of paper.

IS: But to finish the other thought, Tom -- it sounds like you were kind of really moving into a crisis if it involved a religious crisis for yourself and then at about the same time you were about to go through a marital thing.

TW: It was a true crisis. I told you the last time that when I was in the Army and I took my wife down to the Army camp that I'd begun having something; I didn't quite know what it was. Later I understood that they were anxiety attacks; they were frightening and rather disabling. And that was something I'd never known before, really, and I began to experience it at Cooper Union. In the second year when they let us paint, I was on fire to paint. I'd come into class - one day a week was all we could paint -- and I'd take my brush and make a vigorous stroke on the canvas a la deKooning and with that one outlet of emotion I would have a full-scale anxiety attack, unable to paint for the entire day. I'd just sit there and look at the paint. It was so debilitating and so horrendous. So I was in tremendous conflict, conflict about what to do about my marriage, conflict about what to do about God and all those other things -- at the same time believing that I was involved in a struggle to throw out everything my parents had ever taught me, not to throw it out but to examine it and throw out that which I felt wasn't true and try to keep certain things. Those are all so abstract now that I can't remember what in the world I was talking about, except the idea of God was important. I had to take a stand there -- it was either yes or no. I began along in here psychoanalysis. No, that comes later. I got ahead of myself.

IS: What church did your parents belong to?

TW: We went to whatever one where for some reason or other my father liked the minister and we'd switch later if he liked another minister. It was always Methodist or Presbyterian. One of the courses at Cooper Union that was perhaps the most stimulating and enlightening of all was taught by a man named Cortina. Did you ever know him?

IS: No.

TW: Boy, what a guy! Three dimensional design. Nobody in the class ever had the slightest clue what he was getting at. But he inspired us to try to understand what it was that he was getting at. I forget, now, what the problems were. But they were so abstract you couldn't begin to come to grips with it. So abstract! But it was there I encountered for the first time really the idea of abstract thought. Trying to make a physical reality out of abstract thought. I never had to think abstractly in Cincinnati. You don't do that sort of thing. I wasn't trained that way. I wasn't equipped for it. I remember one of his problems was to have us walk around New York City and record something about space. All I can remember is that I was struck walking down Thirty-fourth Street and walking under a Macy's marquee and suddenly I was inside the store. It was very exciting to me to realize what kind of space you'd forgotten. The first year was what they called the foundation. I think we took sculpture, too.

IS: Who was that? Do you remember?

TW: I can't quite remember his name. But the thing about the first year that was interesting was that it opened me up. I still was completely committed to cartooning. It opened me up to all these other things I'd never been exposed to -- it exposed me to all these things. So when the second year came along they continued that idea. They made us take advertising. It was a very interesting course. They let us paint the second year. [I had] Charlie Stide for painting, and I think Charlie was good for me because he didn't teach anything. It was, if I recall, a technical kind of thing. He didn't get involved in philosophy; he was more involved in technique. In a way I kind of appreciated it because I had no philosophy. I had no technique either, but I needed some technique. Gregory Gillespie was in my class. He was precocious. He'd been painting for years. I was doing in that class the very first painting I'd ever done, and he'd been painting for years. He didn't want to participate with the teachers; he'd go off the corner and do his moody cityscapes, very gray, slatey gray and brown, turgid things and ignore the teacher. I was there to get as much as I could from the teachers so we were quite different. I looked up to him because he was experienced; at least he'd made paintings. Crisis I was beginning to encounter really it was in this year, I guess, mainly. The first year I don't recall too much. The second year when it began to occur, I'd try to paint and couldn't paint. When I was excited about Abstract Expressionism, Pollock, deKooning, painting like that -- that's the way I painted.

IS: Then you were on Tenth Street? I mean you would go to the galleries there and other galleries here?

TW: First of all in the second year I was still a cartoonist. I didn't know about painting. I really didn't know about it. When I started painting -- I think my first painting was more like Paul Klee than anyone. I didn't know what I was doing. I had no point of view. I hadn't seen paintings. I hadn't seen anything. I hadn't gone to galleries yet or to museums. But as the year progressed I began to get a little bit drawn into painting and I decided to take a walk to Tenth Street. I think because Alex Katz was having a show then and I saw those little collages.

IS: Was he a teacher?

TW: No. I don't know quite why I knew him, except that he did teach at Greene Camp. He was an assistant at Greene Camp that year. As a matter of fact, maybe I saw his show after that. I've lost my sense of time. Alex, as I said in my book, was very important to me. We went to Greene Camp the end of the second year and did landscapes, real landscapes. That was the first time I had taken a serious position in relation to art. Up until this time I was still a cartoonist; I wasn't a painter. I was riding right on the surface of art school. I went away to Greene Camp. It was raining for the first five days and we were painting outside from inside. I'm painting this tree - I'm trying to design this silly tree. And Alex gets frustrated trying to explain something to me, and takes the brush from my hand and says, "This way; this is what I mean." And he showed me something -- and all of a sudden with that one thing I understood the difference between painting and design. I'd been designing all this time. Suddenly I thought, "What an enlightening feeling! Now I know!" You don't design a painting; you create a painting out of some other thing. You don't design it. So I started to paint with a kind of earnestness about those landscapes. And by the time of the end of the spring term I felt like I was going to be a painter. In the two weeks I made that kind of transition, and I was proud of what I had done. I came back from Greene Camp, took my easel and canvas and went up to Westchester and sat down to paint landscape one day and realized that I didn't have a clue. I was confronting reality. I didn't know what I was doing. I was nothing, nothing. It was at that point that I kind of decided that I couldn't be a painter. I was going to have to wind up in advertising design if I couldn't make it in cartooning. My personal crisis at this time has probably been building within me. I had a conflict about the marriage; what to do about being a painter. I realized that, if I didn't have a strong enough need to paint, there was no sense even bothering. I didn't think I had that much need. That was a serious issue, by the way -- feeling that I didn't have a need to be an artist, that it was a choice. It was like choosing a career, and I don't think you choose to be an artist that way; you're driven to it. You have to do it. But the fact was that I couldn't make the clear commitment within myself. I felt depressed because I was going to do something I didn't want to do -- advertising design. By this time I'd lost my cartooning ability because I'd lost my sense of humor. I kind of skipped ahead a little bit. The thing is, I got so involved in my intellectual personal crisis that it became my delayed adolescent rebellion. I never had an adolescent rebellion; I never challenged anything, anything! Oh, maybe while I was in college. While I'm on that subject, it was an early lesson. I went to a little college named Hiram.

IS: Yes, you mentioned that.

TW: I don't think I mentioned anything about the religious class.

IS: No.

TW: I guess it was a trivial detail, but it did tell me something about the world. It was one of the early lessons I got. We had to write a term paper about our feelings about God, I guess, including things like the hereafter and all sorts of stuff. And I really laid it on the line, the way I felt. I still acknowledged that there might be God and all that, but couldn't go very far with all that stuff I'd gotten in class. It was a church kind of school. My roommate, who was my best friend who was a complete con man, wrote a whole lot of bullshit because he knew what they wanted to hear, got an A. I got either a C or a D. I thought it was a very good paper and I really wrote it from the heart. But the guy said -- wrote on the paper, said, "These are dangerous views." Dangerous views! So, back to Cooper Union and New York City and trying to make this decision about marriage and painting and throwing out God and finally deciding, yes -- throwing out God. John Dewey had a lot of intellectual clout with me,plus my own feelings. I've kind of gotten lost here. Rambling too much.

IS: No, no. You were talking about this whole sort of coming together . . . .

TW: Let me go back just for a moment. The problem with my sense of humor was that I'd gotten so involved in serious matters in my own personal crisis that I lost my ability or any desire to make fun. So I couldn't be a cartoonist if I'd lost that. I lost touch with it, walking on the streets now, deadly serious about life for the first time, on fire by the end of the third year toward graduation. I was on fire. The good thing about Cooper -- they didn't teach us very much, but they set us on fire to do something. And I was really on fire by the time I graduated. I decided I wanted to be an artist. My fear was that I didn't need to be an artist. So there was this adolescent kind of self-created conflict. I think the separation from my wife . . . .

IS: That took place after you graduated?

TW: Yes. Literally immediately, and it was almost ridiculous in its timing.

IS: And when did you go into analysis? Before that?

TW: After that. I'd gone to see an analyst in Brooklyn, a guy named Rockala which was a hideous name for a hideous man! He spent a session with me and said, "You don't need psychotherapy; you need shock treatment." That was the end of that. I wasn't about to have electrodes. He was quite dead wrong. I did need psychotherapy, but not from a guy like him. But he said to me, "If you don't come to me, your marriage will be through in a very short time." Which was true. I think I must have unconsciously decided that anyway.

IS: But that all took place after the psychoanalysis.

TW: The visit to that first psychiatrist was in Brooklyn where we lived for two years. I was still in art school; no psychoanalysis yet. The marriage breaks up. It was very upsetting to me in two ways: because it was so cold on my part -- it was something I knew I had to do; it was cold, awfully cold. So I felt badly about it. I began psychoanalysis because I think I was somewhat desperate. Ah, yes. O.K. Teaching school. I spent that first summer after graduation from Cooper Union, taking required classes to be a school teacher.

IS: Where were you teaching then?

TW: Hunter College. They were the basic education courses to be a teacher. I found the courses quite stimulating. I liked them. I just had a hard time getting used to this strange existence, on my own for the first time ever, my own apartment. Desperately lonely. I didn't know anybody. Anybody I did know was out of town for the summer. The place was in the village, a studio about ten feet square. I need to get my bearings here. O.K. So I started teaching school and I began having these anxiety attacks about teaching. Jimmy Dine told me about a friend, I forget who it was, but this friend was having severe trouble emotionally, so severe that he was even having trouble controlling his bladder and he'd gone to a psychoanalyst. That literally saved his life. He said this psychoanalyst was terrific. So I got his name and I tried him, and he was very good. He was so good that he assumed kind of a major role in my life from the point of view that he was brilliant, I thought. He was a brilliant man intellectually in his ability to deal with intellectual and emotional things at the same time. And to make poetry of it. I mean poetry -- to this day I regard psychoanalysis as kind of a branch of poetry.

IS: Yes. I regard it as a branch of history and art.

TW: But the imagery they deal with and things the guy came up with you really could have made poetry out of it, just the thoughts -- it was very touching. [TELEPHONE INTERRUPTION]

IS: Let's put off the discussion; I want to get back to that -- the psychoanalysis, the break-up of the marriage and the teaching and the decision to be an artist. I want to pick up some other things. Of course this . . . unless you want to continue in this vein.

TW: I don't even know where I was. I get carried away.

IS: That's fine. You were just beginning to talk about the psychoanalyst, but we had jumped over the chronology. We're still back at Cooper Union, and just to pick up on the third year and some of your teachers, you talked about Stieg and the courses you had to take, including advertising. But you haven't talked about Marsicano yet or other painting teachers. Incidentally, did you manage to get over -- these anxiety attacks had taken place in the second year, and obviously you were painting. You must have been through painting in the second and third year.

TW: Let's change this chronology, I think. The anxiety attacks began in the third year, because it was the second year that I was doing these non-existing paintings. They really didn't exist. The third year I began taking things so seriously and that's when all the anxiety could be lumped into the third year because it was the third year -- now I've got to go back and change the chronology here. I didn't start seriously reading challenging things until the third year. It all came at once -- the challenging reading, the stimulating ideas . . . .

IS: That would have been '58?

TW: The fall of '58, yes. And it was at that time I began to feel that I could be a painter. I'd just finished Greene Camp.

IS: With Alex.

TW: Yes, and Marsicano.

IS: They were both there and then you continued with Marsicano.

TW: Marsicano was the main teacher there. He's the only one I remember except Alex doing that one thing. But by this time in the fall of '58 I was then a completely transformed person. Now I wanted to be an artist; now I was reading, now I was throwing out things, now I was challenging. Before I think I was beginning to challenge things only on a more cerebral level when I said I'd go back home and say, "pick your nose in the subway," and that sort of stuff. Maybe that was late into the second year. I don't think I did any of this in the first year because I wasn't that involved. So, to set the chronology straight, first you could use benign art school exposure continuing the emphasis on cartooning; second year cartooning still the emphasis, but beginning to be pulled into some other philosophical thinking; the third year was explosive, really explosive. I almost came apart, literally came apart at the seams.

IS: Talk a little about Marsicano, because he entered the book.

TW: Marsicano was such an important teacher for me. I feel he was the teacher. All the other teachers were interested in challenging, but Marsicano was more important than all of them put together in that he was so damned bright; he's a very articulate man, very bright man, very literate man. So to have that kind of person to start with as a teacher and then have such a nice man on top of it, was important. But what was important was that he didn't try to teach us anything; he just simply tried to nudge us into higher levels of awareness, which [he] was very good at. It was literally the truth to say that we would be working on a painting, Marsicano would come by and sit down and talk fifteen minutes about that painting, deeper and deeper -- and you'd get more and more insight into it, "Yes, really, really." He would walk away and it was like a bubble had burst.

IS: He's still doing it.

TW: There was nothing left, but somehow it was the journey he took us on was so important that it gave me the feeling that somehow I had the capability to get up on those planes he was dealing with. I didn't know if I could or not, but he was inspirational. He didn't teach me a damned thing, in fact he put a few stumbling blocks and little prejudices he had that he communicated and I said that in my book. One day in class I stuck a thing onto my painting, and he came over and actually took it off and said, "Now do it in paint because you're a painter." So when I got out of art school, I took that prejudice with me. For at least three years I didn't do any of these dimensional things because I was a painter. And it wasn't until I found this loaf of bread that was-- So I simply couldn't resist it. It had to be used. So I let myself break that barrier. I knew I was going to break it, I guess, because I'd been accumulating things like that, that I was drawn to.

TW: What I have to say about Marsicano I guess comes down to that literally, because I wasn't that receptive by and large or that involved with my teachers that I could say too much more about Marsicano than that. Except that I liked his painting.

IS: What about fellow students? Were you close to any of them?

TW: A few. I would say I was closest -- I'm picking third year -- to Mark Ratliff Do you know Mark?

IS: Yes, I did then.

TW: Mark was a precocious painting student. He was the best painter at Cooper Union by far. He could paint rings around everybody. He was so talented, a really gifted painter. And I couldn't paint at all. When he graduated though, he stopped painting, and I started painting. An odd sort of thing.

IS: It's not infrequent.

TW: He was so good he was almost too good; it was so easy for him.

IS: Is he still around?

TW: Yes, he's doing very well. Doing advertising graphic design mostly for the art world. Like Emmerick catalogues and ads. In fact, half the New York Times ads are done by him. A very successful businessman. He was, I suppose perhaps the most serious painter friend I had at the time. It's funny, there were a couple of other students -- they were just students. That's all they were, students. My current wife -- my wife -- that's a cartoon, my current wife! [Laughter]

IS: Thurber did something like that where he said, "And the first Mrs. Brown is over there and she's crouching on top of our bookcase." I still use that, "The first Mrs. Brown."

TW: Claire was in my class and we became somewhat friendly during the advertising class. That was a class we shared in common. I thought she was the best female painter in the school. She's quite a good painter. She also, when she graduated -- maybe because of my presence -- she simply didn't paint. She did a couple of paintings -- she was very good. She did a painting of her father that Michael Abrams saw and said, "Hey, I'm in big trouble." He thought she was better. One of these days I still think she's going to paint. Other than that, my contact with the other students was rather casual because I would go home at the end of the day being married, and work on cartooning. I was still doing some cartooning in my third year. My teachers were understanding enough to let me take off every Wednesday morning and come in late because Wednesdays was "look at" for cartoonists at the magazines. And I was beginning to sell some. The Saturday Evening Post for the first time let me come in person because it was basically a mail-in magazine, but the woman for some reason was going to be in town. I guess they let it be known they'd see people. I'd been rejected by them all along in the mail, but she saw me and she bought two right off. I began to have a little success finally, and within about two or three months I'd given it up.

IS: About your style at Cooper -- you said you were working in an Abstract Expressionist style. You mentioned Pollock and deKooning.

TW: I was doing women. I was doing nudes. I was very oriented toward deKooning. In art schools in those days they were really painting like Kandinsky. We didn't know it. But it was a kind of combination abstract and figurative shorthand language. I was taken by deKooning's paintings of that year. I think I'd seen his show of '57 and '58. He was in a show at the Janis Gallery, and I was quite taken by deKooning. It was in the third year, '58 to '59. First of all, I didn't know what else to paint except nudes. I didn't know how else to paint because I had no historical relationship to art. I painted like what I was immediately encountering -- which was abstract painting on Tenth Street. I tried to figure out what the hell they were doing; I don't think they knew what they were doing either in most cases. But I sure couldn't figure it out. I could tell that deKooning knew what he was doing, but I'd see some of the guys on Tenth Street and I'd figure they didn't know what they were doing. It just didn't seem right. I'm trying to go back in time and get a hold of something.The thing was as a kid I would walk into the art class,I would want to make a painting. I didn't know anything to make except what I was inspired by immediately which was deKooning. So I had to paint that way, and there was a nude model up there. So I would paint the model trying to make an exciting deKooning kind of composition out of it. Once I deliberately took a deKooning Merritt Parkway painting and used that painting to get compositional frame for a nude of my own. I mention that in my book.

IS: Yes, you do. The deKooning show at the Whitney Museum . . . .

TW: There's not a single Merritt Parkway painting in it.

IS: I know. Well, they apparently couldn't get them or didn't try hard enough. They didn't have the Met's picture; they didn't have Gotham Nudes. The only picture that represented that style -- there were two styles, you know. There was the Guggenheim picture, that beautiful red one, but from '57 to '59, that four-year period when deKooning was at the top of it! Of his career and the top of the world!! They only had three pictures: Park Rosenberg, Rosy Red-fingered Dawn and the Lost Point and the Guggenheim, red picture.

TW: Dali almost gets into that era, but to me it wasn't quite as . . . .

IS: He did a similar thing. I'm glad they put that little painting where he just pasted a head on top of that loose landscape.

TW: But I was astonished because those are by far deKooning's best paintings. And I kept waiting and they only had three in the whole show. It was shocking! It was a great show, wonderful paintings of genius and all that, but there should have been more. It wasn't balanced right. It was those paintings that so moved me when I was a painting student. I also have to keep saying "as I said in my book." I'm self-conscious for having said it already.

IS: No, no. You're actually saying very little . . . I mean you're elaborating in a way that you simply couldn't in your book because of the nature of the book.

TW: What I'm about to say is what I did say in the book. I really would go to the Met and look at that Easter Monday and be torn to pieces because I was so angry that this man had done my painting before I could get to it. Of course, I was robbing him of all the genius of doing this ring. The implication was that I should be doing that painting. Of course it was his painting, not mine. That's what I came to realize, finally. After I graduated and I was confronted with this fact . . . . What do I do about this? I can't build a career out of somebody else's painting. I realized that, so I tried to work from deKooning. Someday I'll have to show you some of those ones.

IS: Thank you.

TW: I tried to work from deKooning into something else, still abstract. Actually I went back more to Kandinsky, really. I'd do those shorthand things. This piece of collage was a bridge. And this piece of blue was a . . . . lake -- that's my way of making shorthand notations much more like Kandinsky than deKooning. But always with the idea of deKooning there. And that just wasn't quite satisfying, I felt. I was getting a little bit too frustrated by it. And this is while I'm taking education courses in the daytime; I don't have very much time here either. I was very gloomy, I guess, having to study a whole lot to get through these courses, being completely alone and lonely, and occasionally trying to paint. It was just as if I didn't have the resources to bring to bear at that point. So when I did try to paint, it wasn't fulfilling to the painting or to me.So I tried a few experiments. I tried to learn where I was. I did this one collage one day that was totally abstract; it was rather nice. I didn't know what I was trying to do. I didn't know why I was doing it, what I was even trying to accomplish. I didn't know anything. Now this was all determined probably from my emotional state as well, because I was going to be getting in trouble at this point, close to some kind of a serious breakdown of some sort. But literally with a flash of insight which was important, my reaction to itthe proper one I realized that since I didn't know what I was trying to do; it was just somebody else's work I was trying to do anyway. I had to throw it all out -- like I had recently denied God; I threw God out there. I had to throw out deKooning, because he really was after all a god to me in terms of art. I had to throw all his art out, as much as I could possibly throw out and find my own ways of doing it. Something Marsicano said, too, is, "You have to find your own way of doing everything. Matisse found his way of drawing eyes; you've got to find a way of drawing eyes. You can't do what Matisse did." It was a hell of a challenge that you had to find you own way to do it. Really! Scary as hell. But I had to find my own way of doing all that stuff. And that kind of saved my life, because for the first time I began to have something that was mine. I really felt this. The very first work that I did was that little portrait Collage Number One. It literally was the first; and it saved my life emotionally as well as artistically, because now I could make my own rules. I was like the king of the turf. I wasn't inhibited by deKooning or anybody else. I could go on in too much detail about this.

IS: We'll get back to it. Were your fellow students mostly painting in the Abstract Expressionist vein at Cooper Union?

TW: I would say my memory is that everybody was trying to do it in one way or another. When I look back on it now, I call it Kandinsky kind of feeling, not so much Abstract Expression, but more like a Kandinsky kind of abstraction. But not look like Kandinsky. Leonard Frye was quite a good painter. He alone went off in a completely different direction. He's the actor, you know; quite successful one. He was doing a kind of color field. I'd never seen anything like that before. I don't know where he saw them or where he got into them, but I don't think anything was being done quite like that at the time. They were rather diaphanous but good.

IS: What about the other Abstract Expressionists? You mentioned Motherwell in your book.

TW: I mentioned Motherwell only because I went to the Modern and looked at a Motherwell -- one of the Elegy paintings on the stairway landing and had the first aesthetic experience -- the first time I got a physical thrill, actually a thrill in my stomach. I never had that happen before. It's quite exciting to be able to react that way to a painting, because before that I could look at paintings and record them but I couldn't experience them. That's the only reason I mentioned him. He was no figure to me otherwise except when I finally saw his show at the Modern, I was quite impressed.

IS: What about Kline and Guston?

TW: Kline I wasn't quite ready to appreciate fully enough until he did his color painting. I liked that a hell of a lot. He did his first black and white -- but I wasn't advanced enough to really get excited by it. I could respect him, but he didn't have any impact on me. Guston was on the scene. He was part of the scene -- he didn't stand out as a painter to me. He stood out as an important part of the scene. And that's still the way I look at him. It's not a very fair attitude towards his work.He was so beautiful that he could almost singlehandedly hold up the value of beauty in painting. He was a beautiful painter, and this is in a time when we were beginning to think about ugly as a virtue and beauty as a sin. So in a way Guston helped to make beauty sort of legitimate and not to be ashamed of it.

IS: Let's see. Hofmann. You wouldn't have been interested in Newman. Well, Newman wouldn't have been known. Rothko is . . . .

TW: That didn't exist as far as I was concerned. I didn't know anything about that at all. I began to see some of the paintings up at Lootz-Hofmann and some of the others. I wasn't advanced enough yet. I was just beginning to get involved. When I finally did see that Newman show at the Modern, boy, was I impressed with that! Wow! I'm not a great Ellsworth Kelly fan. A lot of people like him immensely; but when I saw Newman, I thought he knocked Kelly right out of the box. I was really very impressed with Newman.

IS: You did mention that you went form theology to existentialism in the book. Did that tie up in your mind at all with deKooning's paintings? Did you make that connection?

[END OF SIDE ONE]

IS: ...from that session that you obviously hadn't taught. So that when the kids asked a question you answered without having the protective layers that teachers build up. In other words, they hold a lot back and you didn't know. So you were completely candid. The kids were just overwhelmed by it. It was just wonderful.

TW: I don't remember that aspect of it.

IS: Oh, you were just absolutely open. That was the high point of the sessions. But we were talking about whether you had connected your own interest in existentialism and the move from theology to existentialism -- with rhetoric around the painting of deKooning and other Abstract Expressionists or whether that was your own . . . .

TW: There's no relationship at all.

IS: Had you at all begun to read Sartre?

TW: Yes. I guess in the third year, the last part of the third year, and then after I got out I started to read more. I had read a little Sartre and a couple Camus. I was impressed by Camus. But I was primarily moved by Kerouac's On The Road, anything by Kerouac was very important to me. I identified with the emotion. Like On The Road really tore me to shreds because that was me on an emotional level -- I was stranded and set adrift at the same time. I was kind of between engagements -- I was between home and wherever I was going. I didn't know where I was. I had no place, no identity, no being. In a sense I was literally adrift in a huge city and lost in this idea of suddenly finding myself a schoolteacher and wondering, "Is this my life? Am I going to be a schoolteacher for the rest of my life?" It was a terrifying prospect -- and in a tough school in Brooklyn. And reading these things and I was beginning to read some poetry -- Howard Hart's poetry moved me quite a bit.

IS: Did the Americanism of the Kerouac books strike true?

TW: The Americanism?

IS: One the Road was an American experience -- or was it more the rootlessness of it?

TW: I suppose so, but I don't think I was that aware or that I had that kind of discrimination.

IS: Go on on the poetry.

TW: I got involved with the Beat poetry to the extent that I got involved with almost anything that came my way in those days, unlike as I am now -- I don't get involved with those things now. But then I was very sensitive to dance, poetry, reading -- all those things I'd never done before -- suddenly were very important to me. Very important to help me get started as an artist. Once I got started as an artist, got a big head of steam up, I had less and less time, less and less room in my body for that. Now I have no room. I was very impressed with the theater. I'd read Becket's Trilogy which really I thought was sensational. The third one was so damned abstract it was a little bit tedious reading; but I took it as a religious experience to get through it. I forget now what the name of it is, the third one. What was it? Maybe it was the unnameable.

TW: Yes. The thing which I admired immensely for the achievement whereas I didn't want to go through it again. And I mention in my book the plays of Ionesco. It was my latent appreciation for humor -- Ionesco caught my appreciative humor and my visual interest, because he was humorous and he was visual. It almost didn't matter -- anything I read in those days. I selected the right things. I was open to so much and I selected the right things, I guess. Everything I read or encountered seemed to have some kind of effect on me.

IS: You also mentioned Henry Miller.

TW: Oh, yes. That comes a little bit later. That's clearly after art school by another year or two. He was important, too. I don't know why . . . .

IS: So at the time that you're building towards this crisis everything's literally opening up.

TW: Yes. I was losing control in the sense, too, that I was encountering so much that I never encountered before. It took me off on all kinds of avenues that I'd never been on before. Even Henry Miller becomes like On The Road in that respect; he was in kind of the same kind of spot -- a crummy telegraph job he had and kind of hanging around and he was kind of lost. So I identified with that aspect of his work as well as with other things. And Becket's work, in a sense that's what his work was about -- being lost. And I felt very lost even though when I found this work, these things It's kind of like the idea of being lost was a transitional course, as it was -- and I got found by art, I was sort of saved by art, by the fact that I got a hold of this form for myself and by my relationship with Claire which began. And since I was saved by her and by the art at the same time . . . . [INTERRUPTION]

TW: Are you going to organize this material?

IS: It will be transcribed. The material will go on file at the Archives of American Art.

TW: You don't have to edit it?

IS: No, it just goes in raw. And you have the discretion of letting anyone you choose or not choose who wants to use it, use it. However, I want the material for myself. In other words, I'm fascinated by this material. I may or may not be able to use it. It doesn't matter. I'm not saying this very elegantly, Tom. I'm interested in your work; I'm interested in you, and I'm interested in anything that illuminates the shaping of this body of work. And everything you're saying now is right on the point; it's right on a lot of points. There's nothing wasted. There is really nothing here that is beside the point. In fact you may think you're going too slowly, but in many ways you're going almost too fast.

TW: I feel like I'm hopscotching around . . . .

IS: No, no. That's fine. I've got kind of a structure here, but I'm also taking off from things that you say. So I'm building another kind of structure as we go along.

TW: Before you go on, I'm going to get back to where we left off. I was making a point I want to complete. I was aware, growing up and in Cooper Union, of something about being a boy and being immature and lacking real strong identity, that sort of thing. Through the process at Cooper Union, a more demanding intellectual process and all the reading, I began to feel the experience of beginning to mature, feeling more like a man. And when I became a painter and was just beginning these collages, I felt that I'd done something of my own. I began to feel a sense of identity and greater confidence in myself. And in my relationship with Claire. I felt instead of loving her like a boy, I was loving her like a man and she was a woman, a complex and beautiful woman. It was at that point I began to grow. It was as though I'd been a boy until I graduated from Cooper Union and suddenly I entered this transition into the adult phase. It was rather exciting and at the same time it was all too difficult for me to handle. That's when I began analysis, after I graduated.

IS: Let's talk little bit about the collages that you started to make. Part of it as you indicate in the book was a reaction against the kind of aggressive, tough raw painting that you experienced in deKooning's work that you felt attracted to but at one point began to realize that it wasn't of your nature. One of the things that you don't talk about in the book, but I wonder how important it is -- you spoke of the time when Marsicano takes the little piece of paper off your surface and tells you, "Paint it!" But at one point you simply moved more and more toward a collage, collage and painting. Painting the "Great American Nudes" had collage elements. But before you really begin painting from what I gather from the reproductions even that one, the first one, the figure by the window -- the collage element becomes very important, and in a sense it's a denial of painterly gesture. Was that in your mind at all? You said there was a reaction on your part against Abstract Expressionism.

TW: I believe everything I'm about to say is in my book.It may be in answering it, I'll elaborate on it. Maybe I will; maybe I won't. I don't know. Two things: first, when I threw out deKooning I tried to throw out every influence I was conscious of, including Matisse. So I wanted to find a way that in a sense was the opposite of it. DeKooning worked big; I'd work small; deKooning -- also Dine and all the guys I knew worked sloppy; I'd work neat. I wasn't all that neat, but I was neat by comparison.

IS: You bet it was.

TW: They worked abstract; I'd work figurative . . . . At the same time there are other things here, like I deliberately wanted to work figurative because it was the one mode that I so scorned . . . . It was the only way to go . . . .I had no point of view, and I was really approaching figurative art as a naive . . . . I had no point of view about figurative art. I had never seen any, except Norman Rockwell. And that was kind of intriguing to start off that way.

IS: And the same way you introduced collage because that's sort of anti-gestural.

TW: There are complications here, too many to try to get out at once. I introduced college, I think, mainly because I was impatient, terribly impatient, and I had no point of view about painting. That was the main thing. If you have no point of view about painting, you can't paint. You can't paint a tomato without having some point of view about a tomato. And I literally didn't give a damn. I didn't give a damn about the tomato. All I wanted to make was some kind of exciting painting . . . . I didn't care about what I was saying. That was a very liberating thing for me and I liked that. It's somewhat schizophrenic in consequence. But I was in a position of being able to take literally anything I wanted and put it down without caring at all. So when I say it was literally caving in -- maybe in a good way -- to the influence of John Cage only just as an idea . . .wanted to know what color I was putting on and by extension I said, "I don't give a damn what tomato I'm cutting up; I'll take the first tomato that comes my way." That's it. All my collage elements in the first pieces were born with that very cavalier attitude. Since I was embarked on something that was so exciting -- I mean, I could hardly contain myself -- that is, creating my own art form. Also, I was much less inclined to care about the details of it. Couldn't care less about any of these things. But I remember the day quite clearly that I decided I had to throw out all this stuff. It happened literally in one day. I went out in the morning walking in the Greenwich Village streets, and in the gutter was a piece of gray wood. It looked like a nice piece of wood to work on; so I took it home. I suppose I wouldn't say in one day; more like one week, because in the preceding days I'd run across that Pharaoh cigarette in Washington Square. A couple of nights before I'd gone to an Hawaiian restaurant and brought that leaf back. I guess I can't remember whether I did all this deliberately or I knew what I was going to do or it was beginning to think I was going to do some thing like it. At any rate, in a matter of a few days I had accumulated a few collage materials....out of envy of Jimmy Dine who worked with staples at the time, because he was fast. God, he was just so fast! So I wanted to retain some of the looseness and abandon, so I imitated that. I smudged up materials. I still couldn't get away completely from the painterly idea. I had to do something to it. I put charcoal on it and smudged it in and made it dirty here and there. What . . . later I construed . . . to be a kind of a poetic thing I had to get rid of. I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months. I began to anyway. I guess it took me a couple of years to get rid of that. In fact, I guess it waa a good two years before I began to come around to the idea that was also voiced and reinforcing myself by Alex Katz when I heard him say one time that his paintings looked brand new, like they'd just come out of a box. This was part of the climate at the time. It was all coming together in about 1962, I guess. More and more, I mean, because you had Lichtenstein coming on the scene, and Warhol and Rosenquist. Things were kind of clean and slick. It was just kind of in the air at the time. Quite naturally it affected my show in '61. I had a one-man show at the Tanager in '61. I was still involved with some idea of painterliness. By the time my show opened at the Green Gallery a year later, I'd gotten rid of about seventy-five percent of that, not all of it by any means. I used collage primarily because I was impatient and secondarily because I didn't have any point of view to paint the things myself and I felt very unskilled -- I'd never done this before. I'd never painted anything -- never painted or anything before. So I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings. I was doing these strange little paintings, these collages; I guess I'd done about four, five or six. The first living artist to set eyes on them was Jimmy Dine who came down one day. He said "You may be one of America's great painters." That never occurred to me. It was a very important thing he said to me. It was quite helpful; gave my morale a boost because I wasn't sure.

IS: To jump ahead for one second, in the book you stress when you turn to the early nudes, you stress the erotic character of these images, but you tend at least to play down the fact that you were using things cut out from advertisements, DelMonte cans -- these common objects. I remember being far more shocked by the use of those images than I was by the erotic character of the nude when I saw your work at the Tanager Gallery. Matisse had prepared me for the nudes; so had deKooning. But I wasn't prepared yet to that -- because you just would cut a DelMonte can and put it on the surface.

TW: At the Tanager Gallery the only thing I cut out really was a McCall's Magazine. There were no cans yet. I take that back. In the little ones there were. In the big works there were none of these things that later came to be called Pop. In fact I thought it was the McCall's Magazine only that got me pushed into a Pop Art movement at that time because I hadn't done anything yet that had used common objects except on the little things I had to a small degree, but they weren't very much.

IS: Then I may be telescoping the Green show and the Tanager show. But when you first began to use those common images, those advertising images cut out, did you have any reason for that, because obviously as you said in your book, you went to great lengths to find just the images that you wanted?

TW: My first Green Gallery show I was reviewed by I think Natalie Edgar.

IS: Oh sure.

TW: She's still around? I thought I saw her name, but I don't read the magazines so I can't . . . .

IS: I don't think so much as a writer now, as a painter.

TW: I thought I ran across her name a couple of years ago.

IS: She had a show at the Ingber Gallery.

TW: She came down to review this first show at the Green Gallery, and I was pretty full of myself. I really thought I had something special. She cam away and basically the review said, "Nothing new; the same old stuff," which was good for me to be sort of thunderstruck about it. Apparently the world wasn't to be swept off its feet. Let's see, what was i getting at? I was aware that other guys before me had used collage, nothing new in using collage. The only thing that I was trying to bring to it a little differently was I was trying to be inordinately literal about it. A tin can was going to be used as part of a still life, and it was going to be almost inhumanly literal, right down to the end. That was really all I had to offer-- kind of inside out, intensive -- play it by rules. What made it somewhat different though was the scale, really. It was important. Maybe the same thing. I don't know. I can't think right now. I don't know enough about art history. It could be that some other guy fifty years ago made a still life collage just like I did or even similar things. But somehow the scale was important to me. To do it that size transformed it into a whole different existence -- especially with the billboard. I discovered the billboards. I realized that the scale was a critical, crucial factor. It's still an idea which hasn't been explored enough either, a big still life.

IS: Yes. Really big. I deal with it a little bit in my book on Alex Katz. I suggest that one of his major contributions to American paintings on one level is to use billboard scale perceptual realism, and on another level to make that convincing and make pictures, realist pictures that can compete with the huge Abstract Expressionism works in visual impact. I go into a rather rudimentary exploration of the whole notion of scale, and scale in figuration.

TW: What's interesting about scale, and I confronted it especially with the nudes, is historically still life has a certain reality and scaled to real life generally . . . . Cezannes and all that, but it's as though you are literally looking at the real thing only in painted version. But when you paint real big you're throwing away that whole pretense. You're no longer suggesting it's real life, it's completely different. And I realize a twelve foot nude has no erotic meaning, no erotic appeal whatsoever. And it becomes something almost dangerously thin. It is almost like a big blow-up from one of those Italian movies.

IS: What was it? A Fellini movie?

TW: Maybe that's all it is -- just some big old thing. Of course, I was desperately trying to make it something more. And a big still-lifes, the same kind of thing -- obviously no longer a still lifes, but they are using still life as an excuse to make some kind of peculiarly intense sort of thing. This was 1964; I was doing collages and still lifes. I was getting sort of sophisticated by this time but I still didn't give a damn about still life. I was fascinated I guess with the end product, whatever it was, whatever validity its strange intensity had.

IS: I want to still stay back in this period. We'll probably come back to 1958 at the beginning of the next session, but I wanted to introduce another topic in this session. At one point you become a founding member of the Judson Gallery. Mark Ratcliff and Dine and Oldenburg were very quickly involved in that.

TW: I think that Dine was there from the start.

IS: Yes. Talk a little bit about how that happened, and about the formation of that gallery, and I also want to keep in my mind the potential role of Lester Johnson and how Grooms fits in, if at all.

TW: All right. Bud Scott was the assistant minister at the Judson Church. Mark Ratcliff lived there in the dorm. So he and Bud spent a lot of time together. Bud Scott was interested in using the space down there for something and Mark was a good painting student, and I was a painting student. so the idea was basically Mark's, quite possible to make it a gallery, I'm not sure. But Bud Scott was the main factor here in that he wanted to make some kind of cushion here, he wanted to get the church involved in the arts. I don't think they were doing anything at the time. They didn't have the theater or dance yet.

IS: That happens after '62.

TW: So they had this space. We fixed it and we painted it and put burlap on the walls and we painted it white.

IS: That was the cellar space?

TW: Yes. IT was a little tiny room but we wanted to have a gallery. I guess Mark felt that he was good enough to show; so we did have a show. It was a two-man show, he and I. I was still a student. Much too soon to have a show. It was meaningless on my part, but he had these very good student paintings and he sold some.

IS: This would be your third year, now. This would be '59?

TW: I can't be sure. It could have been the second year, because the work was so bad; it was meaningless, so student-bound that I can't quite put it in my third year. I would have to think it was probably second year.

IS: Probably '58.

TW: Yes. It was much too soon . . . silly. But that's how the gallery got started -- with that show. There may have been another one-man show; I can't remember what his name was or who he was, some guy we knew.

IS: Were there other people involved?

TW: Andy, who was a friend of Jimmy's. I think maybe Andy showed some prints. My memory is quite vague until we get to shows that are more serious. We had a Christmas group show. We invited all kinds of people that we were just beginning to know, like Red Grooms, Lester Johnson maybe. I still remember Red's paintings -- it was most amusing. It was just a red tee-shirt with a tobacco pouch with the label hanging out. It was just the actual shirt. He was a most amusing guy. But there were . . . .a lot of painters. Most of them I couldn't remember now.I guess that was probably my third year at cooper -- no, no. I'm graduated, I think. Let's back-track here. I don't remember anything about the Tanager Gallery until I graduated from Cooper, because I then had a two-man show with Mark in which I showed these little collages.

IS: Tanager?

TW: I was talking about the Judson. I'm so screwed up in my ability to keep things in order that I have to go back yet again.

IS: It's a long time ago, too.

TW: Yes. Well, here's what happened. The Judson Gallery is formed; we had this little, dumb, two-man show that was much too soon to have. It actually got reviewed by somebody, maybe even Arts Magazine. It shouldn't have counted. Somebody else showed there. My memory is completely blank. The gallery may have been relatively inactive until I graduated frOm Cooper Union and we had a group show. I put a couple of these early collages in of which I had a review -- the first review I really ever got -- Irving Sandler?

IS: Really?

TW: It said, "Wesselmann shows weird collages of women."

IS: Was I the one that said that? God help us! I read it in the book, but I didn't check to see.

TW: I think what you were referring to was that one up there which I recently reacquired. That may have been the only one in the show or there might have been one other. And I didn't take the review as being bad because I thought it was really right to the point.

IS: [Laughter] Really weird! Oh, dear me! I had forgotten that.

TW: But that was part of a group show. The next show was a two-man show in which I showed these things in depth along with a show of Mark Ratcliff. I didn't feel strong enough on my own as an individual to command a one-man show. In fact my things were so little that I was willing to have a two-man show. It was kind of like when Mark and I used to sing at parties. I like country music. I would play the guitar, but I couldn't sing unless I had Mark singing with me. I needed somebody else to accompany me. I was shy. Then we had the group show in which Red Grooms showed and a lot of other people. Then the gallery became more serious, because we began to attract people. We had the Oldenburg show. I guess I bypassed that. That was the first serious show. Damned good show. Very interesting show. And then the two-man show. Then Jimmy Dine began to attract like a magnet other elements which took over the gallery -- much to the good of the gallery. Kaprow . . . .

IS: He and Oldenburg began doing Happenings.

TW: Oldenburg and Dine really vitalized that place with those Happenings and made the gallery come alive. Of course, then it became a Happenings gallery almost exclusively It became very theatrical with the Happenings and performance.

IS: I attended that two-day -- or was it a whole week thing? When Jimmy Dine did "The Smiling Workman," which I still think is the greatest single act.

TW: I don't remember that. I remember others more keenly.

IS: Did you get to know this group then? Did it constitute a kind of loose group? Yourself and Dine and Oldenburg?

TW: I was so busy painting that I didn't get out very much. I painted as much as I could. I knew them and I liked them and all that, but I didn't branch out beyond the immediate guys -- like Oldenburg and Dine.

IS: You did know them?

TW: Yes.

IS: Were there discussions where ideas were kicked around?

TW: No. I knew Dine because he was from Cincinnati, and Mark Ratcliff was too.

IS: I didn't know that. So the three of you were from Cincinnati.

TW: Yes. Jimmy and Mark were friends at the same high school. I didn't know either one of them in Cincinnati. But because they knew each other they continued their friendship here and I became a part of it. I was the kind of guy who if Jimmy got a new apartment I would go help him paint it. I was always doing that sort of thing. So I was friendly with him, always giving him a hand with those kind of things. I found him a most amusing fellow. He'd come out to visit me in Brooklyn once in a while. But at no time was art ever talked about that I can recall. My relationship to that whole scene was like this: first of all the Reuben Gallery came along then. They did the Happenings and had regular art shows. I had no gallery. I was beginning to feel that I was losing my grip, out of touch. I was doing all these little collages and getting no feedback. I wanted some appreciation. I wanted some response. A lot of my friends were getting shows at the Reuben -- Jimmy Dine, Oldenburg and a few other people, and I kind of somehow was thinking Anita should give me a show. Although I realized that I wasn't in her vein, somehow I felt like it was my gallery and I was entitled to it because all those others were there. But I was to remain frustrated in that respect. Oldenburg by this time had started doing Happenings on Second Street. It seems to me there was another place before that, too.

IS: The reason I asked that question was because the two of them, and that's where Lester Johnson comes in, were thinking of making figuration in art a kind of program for themselves in a sense and I wondered whether you remember any of that -- because at the same time you're suggesting that your own thinking involved the figure as a way to move way from what you didn't want to do. Incidentally, very quickly, there were other people working in collage -- Rauschenberg, for example, as early as 1955. Did they influence your thinking at all?

TW: I kind of draw a blank with that because I don't recall seeing Rauschenbergs until I went back to Cincinnati one time and stopped en route at Carnegie. There was a Rauschenberg there. I was rather impressed. I don't think it was a collage as I recall. I must have been oblivious to some of those things is all I can say. I was certainly aware at some point though that he did things with objects -- like clocks. But it was almost as if I missed that whole period in his career and then suddenly stumbled on it when it was in full bloom. I'm very good at that.

IS: Another quick question before we go back to the Judson Gallery. Did you attend the Club at all?

TW: Once. I didn't quite know what to make of it. Guys standing up shaking their fists. I fled the scene. I just wasn't part of it.

IS: Do you remember who was on that evening?

TW: NO. I have no memory of that at all. I seem to remember one guy was shaking his fist -- a guy you think of shaking his fist.

IS: Resnick?

TW: I think it was, but I can't be sure.

IS: But go on back. I'm sorry I cut you off.

TW: While I knew Dine and Oldenburg, I had nothing to do with them in any kind of meaningful way, except Oldenburg would always be short of actors and he would call me up and ask me to be in a Happening. But I would never have time. I was too jealous of my time to do it, unless he had a part that required no rehearsal. So he would give me these bit parts.

IS: Yes.

TW: my relationship was formal in that respect. We didn't talk about art or anything. Dick Tyler was always on the scene. Do you know him?

IS: No.

TW: He was an interesting guy. Every Sunday he would put his push cart outside the Judson Gallery. He had a press. Did you ever run across him at all?

IS: No, I didn't run into him. Dick Tyler -- tell me a little.

TW: Dick Tyler and Dorothy somebody -- a couple. A big mustache. He was something of an anarchist -- not really, but that's the way I remember him -- a slightly demented, creative genius of sorts, printing on his own press these tracts that were his art works. You had to run across him. You couldn't not. He was always there. I'd go there sometimes just to see him. I lived just a couple of blocks away. I'd go to the Judson Gallery and hang around. Sometimes Oldenburg of someone would show up. It was always just socializing, never talking about art. Dick Tyler once supposedly took a plate of spaghetti and mushed it all over the TV set. It struck me at the time as a really unusual thing to do. I mean to really do. Ask me something else.

IS: What about Matisse? We didn't talk about him. When does your interest in his work begin?

TW: I think Matisse comes in right around the time of graduation from art school. I'd acquired some little, cheap book of his reproductions. I'd seen a few here and there before. Obviously I must have. I just didn't remember them. But having a book in my hand I got a look at them and they were meaningful to me. I was stuck by various aspects of them. I didn't have too much to say about it except that I was awed by him as I was deKooning. I can sort of look back at whom I was awed by; just by saying Matisse and deKooning. What got me about Matisse -- and put me on my guard at the same time -- was how overtly, stunningly beautiful his paintings were. They were exciting. You couldn't look at a Matisse without feeling some kind of excitement. You just couldn't do it! And I was taken by all kinds of things. I looked at the Matisse paintings in this little book and it was the same thing I did on Tenth Street. I go to East Tenth Street paintings and say "Now why did you do that?" I never could answer the questions very well, partly I think because the answers weren't there. Matisse had the answers but I had a hard time clearing them up. But I came up with answers. I would insist on finding out, like why did he make that hand so big? I had to come up with a reason. Even if it wasn't the right reason. I'd tear these paintings apart that way and trying to figure them out. Whenever I came up with an answer I'd resolve never to do it that way. That was just part of my process at the time -- I was denying it at the same time. But sometimes it got very silly, like the little things -- just because Matisse did it that way. So it got my goat when people would say to me, seeing my painting of a nude: "Aha! Matisse." I didn't like that because that was involved. Leon Polk Smith came to my show at the Tanager. I was quite pleased that he got my message. He said you're very involved with positive-negative shape. I like that because that's what I was doing, making oversimplified curves to make the negative shape break away more easily from the nude. Much stronger that way.

IS: One of the things that may be my own feeling about your work -- along with the erotic quality of the nude and of course the Pop element and we'll put that Pop in quotes, is . . . there is an American motif or attitude or feeling. For example, the background paper there -- one can almost point to it in nearly any one of your collages.

TW: You know, somebody at the Times called me and in effect said that, "Everything you do is so American." I remember at the time being somewhat defensive about that. And my answer was that that's what I had. The things that I got were from America; they were all American. "How come you don't use a bottle of Compari from a Sunday magazine section?" I said the paper's too bad. That was the truth, too. I wouldn't use it. But I believed that I was free of that particular prejudice because when I first did still life collage, I put some little European bottles in it because the paper happened to be good stock.

IS: I don't want to overplay it, but every now and then I am struck [by it].

TW: I speak English. But there's more to it than that as time goes on, obviously. Especially as time goes on and I feel more and more negative towards European art. I'm much more inclined to move toward American images. I feel that may have been occurring around 1964. I opened up more to the American identity.

IS: Were you still thinking of some relationship of existentialism to these early collages? I should really ask and I probably will at one point, are you still interested in that stance?

TW: No. Psychoanalysis took care of all that. It's perplexing question. I don't know how to deal with it; I can't get a bearing on it. I'd say no.

IS: Let's hold that and we'll put that in another context. End of Session 1 Session 2

IS: Tom, We pretty much last time got you out of Cooper Union and into the world, but one of the things that I wanted to get back to because we were talking around it and because it constitutes such an important moment in your life. You leave Cooper Union; your marriage breaks up; you decide to become an artist. You begin teaching, that you don't like; you go through a spiritual, or religious crisis -- all happening at once. And you also enter psychoanalysis. Now, we touched on some of that, but we didn't touch on the psychoanalysis at all. And I wondered if you just wanted to comment a little on that because you indicated that that process was very important to you.

TW: I guess the first thing for me to say is that when I began psychoanalysis it was out of desperation. It wasn't causal or curious. It was a severe need.

IS: These anxiety attacks?

TW: Anxiety attacks, yes, including while I was teaching. When that happened, I realized that was the last straw. I couldn't conduct a class that way. One day I can recall I had an anxiety attack in the morning -- and being an art teacher was somewhat easier because I could make up problems and kind of keep the kids busy. In fact, a lot of my career I was very creative and inventive as a teacher and part of the creativeness and inventiveness was designed to make things easy for me, but also fun for the kids. I mean they had a good time and I had it easier. And I would do that sort of thing. For example (this is way off the subject but I'll just wander around), I can recall one day I had an anxiety attack and out of that anxiety attack I believe I hatched a teaching technique that stood me in good stead for a long time. I just sat on my desk and told them a story, slowly, and they had to draw the story as it was taking place. And I did other things, too. I forced them to erase and all that because I would say, "There's a mountain." They'd all draw the mountain. "Gee, there's a tree on the mountain." They'd draw the tree. "There's a house on the mountain, and here comes a cloud." They'd all draw the cloud and I'd say, "Now the cloud is gone." They'd all groan and have to erase the cloud. We'd go on with a whole drawing lesson. It was quite an interesting thing, but it would get me through the day because I wouldn't have to do really anything except sit there and sort of tell those little stories. But I realized I couldn't survive too long this way so I went into analysis. I was very, very poor at the time so I could only afford one day a week, I believe, to begin with. But the analyst impressed upon me it was important that I see him as often as I could afford. So whenever I could afford it, I would increase my going to twice a week and so on. This is the period where I was very poor; I was desperately poor. I was surviving on some borrowed money.

IS: Were you in Freudian analysis?

TW: Yes. Well, I think so, but my analyst is too good to be pinned down to that kind of thing. When I said, "Are you a Freudian analyst?" He said, "Well, all analysis comes from Freud." That's as far as I could get, but I would say he's quite classical in his own way of dealing with it. At any rate, what soon made analysis so important to me aside from the fact that it produced dramatic, quick improvement in my condition although it was to be a long. long road, what impressed me so deeply about it was for the very first time in my life, I mean the very first time, I was forced to deal with myself on some very deep terms I'd never considered before. I'd gone through already this process of challenging my beliefs and that sort of stuff. This was the same kind of thing only at a much more primal level, much deeper. I had to look at, as one has to in analysis, my relationships with everybody -- my mother, my father, and analyze it and look at them in a kind of a way that I'd never looked at them before. And that was so important to me to learn how to deal with the truth. That was the truth. In other words, what I'd always been taking as the truth was what I thought I thought, or what I thought I felt. But to come to terms for the first time with what really was the way things really were, like in my family and the effect of certain things on me and the way I affected certain things, that was a profound experience for me. It was the beginning of my education. I mean I really felt that was the first day of my education. College was nothing. I didn't learn anything in college. I learned a hell of a lot in analysis about people through myself. I don't have a whole lot more to say about it than that except that I can remember little things such as being afraid at one point it would ruin me as an artist, afraid if I got healthy or got well, I would no longer need to paint -- viewing the need to paint as somewhat neurotic. My analyst contended, of course, that wasn't the case. I wasn't completely convinced, but I do feel that a little neurosis goes a long way. You get too much and you really get crippled in a bad way. Maybe if you get too healthy, you're crippled another way. I don't know.

IS: Did your work change as a result?

TW: I don't think that at any point in my analysis I noticed any relationship whatsoever between the analysis and the work, the analysis and the quality of the work, because from the beginning I started doing these little collages. Right from the start he asked me to bring some in. I brought in three of them to show him.

IS: Then when you were doing the Great American Nude, there was already an erotic content in your work when you brought it in to him?

TW: I don't recall if I'd started that particular series yet. It may have been just portrait collages at that time, if my chronology is correct, I'm right. I hadn't started anything really erotic yet. Erotic paintings really began well into the fall when Claire came back from vacation and we began a relationship. This was after graduation. She'd gone off for the summer. My analysis began right around that same time, I believe.

IS: That was the fall of what . . . ?

TW: '59. At any rate, the only thing I can say for sure is that the portrait collages were underway. I took them in to the analyst just to show him what kind of things I was doing.

IS: What did he say?

TW: No comment at all. It was the kind of thing that I think he would not comment on. He just wanted to get a better handle on me.

IS: Then you would say he kept that part of your being away from . . . ?

TW: No. He was willing to deal with it or whatever, but I didn't have that much occasion to make it central to the work there; it was only peripheral because these things are, after all, current, relatively minor matters as far as analysis is concerned, because we were after more important, deeper, older things. Also, his approach was very heavily on dreams which have a foot in the past and a foot in the present, but the foot in the past is far more important. So I learned how to dream and how to write down my dreams and remember my dreams, analyze my dreams. That became the central tool, and there seemed to be not much room left for trivial matters like my paintings. I could deal with them in analysis, but usually they were not as important as other things. But at no point, though, as I said, did I feel that it had any effect on them except that, as I felt I got better and better every year emotionally, I also felt I got better and better as a painter -- but I would assume that I would have done that in any event unless I would have been really unhealthy I might just have fallen apart. I was not too far from a nervous breakdown I would say at that point.

IS: How long did you remain in analysis?

TW: I had three children. The birth of my sister was the crucial event in my life, I've come to learn. As a matter of fact, I avoided children. In my first marriage I deliberately went way out of my way to not have children. I did not want to have children at least not until some very far point down the road. The second marriage came about with analysis. In fact, I wasn't sure when to get married again. My analyst forced me to realize I wanted to get married. Then he forced me to realize that I wanted to have children really, Rather than avoid having children, I really wanted to have children. I suppose he was right about that. So the important thing was to have some analysis going on whenever I had a child. We had three children. So I would quit analysis at one point but go back in to work through another birth. Then quit; then go back in to work through another birth. So that kept me on much longer than just some sort of ordinary thing. I would say I didn't really quit until two or three years ago, but I took hiatuses.

IS: Yes.

TW: I consider myself done now. I feel like a graduate. It's over. But it's never over. Have you been in analysis?

IS: No.

TW: It's never over, but mine's over as far as I'm concerned.

IS: Were there things that you could carry from your analysis into your art or do you think that you naturally carried in, say, this occupation of dreams? Or does that remain more or less removed or unconscious?

TW: Very removed or unconscious, I don't know. No conscious application whatsoever, not even the most remote. Nothing, that's all.

IS: The art activity, except, of course, for things like the erotic content that one can certainly track somehow into your psyche, even that wouldn't have any conscious connection to . . . ?

TW: No. I could explain a lot of my erotic involvement in terms of analysis, but I couldn't explain the analysis in terms of the erotic [paintings].

TW: I can look at the paintings and understand them because of what I know now about myself. But what I know about myself doesn't determine what I paint or anything. That's the conditions given in my situation. Analysis just helped me to understand better. I never deal with it. Like when I wrote in my book, I deliberately didn't go into it because it's too personal and nobody's business to go into those kinds of things. They're not that important to . . . .

IS: Yes. I'm not interested in it necessarily from a personal point of view except as it might connect with your work or your attitudes to your art. Now, you get out of school in '59 and you continue working. At one point you break the, I guess taboo, the curse that Nick Marsicano put on you. You got back to physical materials which truly are at least the physicality of the and that now takes you into about 1960?

TW: That really takes me into '62.

IS: '62. When is the show at the Tanager Gallery?

TW: The Tanager was '61, December. The very end of '61.

IS: So how long would you have been working on the collages; that would have been about a year and a half?

TW: The summer of '59, the summer of '60, the summer of '61. Two and a half years, almost.

IS: Two and half years. Well, let's possibly use that as a focal point, the show at the Tanager Gallery. How does that happen? How do you get introduced into the Tanager group? There's a period of time when you're also voted in as a member of the Tanager.

TW: Well, what happened to me was I decided . . . there was very little art gallery activity then, unlike now. There was not very much of "I'll take my slides around to galleries," but it was being done. There was something about that that was so distasteful to me I vowed I was going to wait until the world found me. [Laughter] I was going to let them find me. I figured that if I was good enough they would find me. And I was just lucky; they found me. They found me because I was willing to be at Oldenburg's happenings as I told you last time, I think. He was desperate for bit players here and there, and I would be in the things as long as I didn't have to attend rehearsal. I did one with Henry Geldzahler. And I'd never known him before. He asked me what I did. I said, "I'm a painter." He said, "Can I come and see you work?" I said, "Yes." And he came. He saw them and he told Alex Katz. Alex Katz came and offered me a show.

IS: You had already known Alex from . . . ?

TW: No.

IS: Green?

TW: Oh, that's right. I had known Alex, but it was cursory that I didn't really know him. But that's right. I'd known him. And when he came down to my little, tiny, apartment on Bleecker Street in the Village I had just finished the first few big Great American Nudes, the four by four foot ones, number one and number two and so on. He offered me a show on the strength of those. What with the Tanager just about the time that things were beginning to break generally, Henry Geldzahler was on the scene now. So was Ivan Karp. So was Dick Bellamy -- all at the same time, all three communicating with each other and going around to see artists in common. I committed myself to a show at the Tanager. Dick Bellamy in the meantime came down and was interested in having me at the Green Gallery but wasn't too sure about me yet. He took some things I had in the back room to hang onto for a while. At one point I had to make a decision whether to at the last minute drop the show at the Tanager and have a show at the Green instead which would have been better for me I suppose, but I felt it was not fair. Anyway, I went through with the commitment with the Tanager.

IS: I'm not sure it would have been better.

TW: Well, it delayed my entry, anyway.

IS: It did, but it also made you independent of that particular constellation to a degree.

TW: Maybe, I don't know, because at the same time also there was the Sidney Janis New Realist Show coming along. I remember, in fact I sat one day at the Tanager Gallery during my show -- I think it was during my show. I may be a little off on my chronology here, but I had to make a decision -- I'm getting a little ahead of your plan here . . . .

IS: No, we'll go back.

TW: Sidney Janis had come down now to select works for a show, and I was quite impressed. Here was Sidney Janis. This is the guy I used to peek at in his office when he had deKooning and Kline shows. So here he was in my studio and responding favorably to the work. This meant for me a way out of teaching maybe. At the same time I feared being lumped with all these other guys, and I really didn't know what to do. I spent some time deciding whether I wanted to be in Sidney Janis' show or just decline gracefully. I recall being at the Tanager Gallery when Ivan Karp was telling me about Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. They hadn't shown yet, but he was telling me about their work and that I should see it because we really had something in common. I got uneasy feelings. I didn't want to have anything in common with anybody at that point. I mean, my grip on whatever it was was fragile enough that I felt it had to be really something uniquely my own or maybe I wouldn't have any grip on it. I don't know. I wasn't too comfortable, I suppose, at the time. Well, maybe it was a mixture. I guess I was in conflict about that; on one hand I was very confident and on the other hand I was quite insecure. But when I finally did see Rosenquist and Lichtenstein, I was quite relieved to see that, indeed, in every effect, we didn't have very much in common. Other people didn't agree with that assessment, maybe, but I felt quite a lot of relief. I liked their work very much, though. I remember Warhol's work was just surfacing then, too, and I felt sorry for Warhol because he was such an underdog. He was having such a hard time. There was a lot of scorn that immediately came on Warhol. His comic strip things he was doing a little bit but not as well as Lichtenstein. He was starting one of these Campbell soup cans or whatever it was.

IS: It was the Campbell soup cans.

TW: There was a lot of scorn for it. I was very taken by the blatantness, I guess, blatant simplicity of the thing. So I was a defender of Warhol. But again felt there was no relationship at all. I was quite relaxed about it. There was nothing between he and I at all. Sidney Janis imposed that first threat of lumping us all together in some kind of entity, and I decided, "Oh, the hell with it. I'll let fate take care of itself." I wanted to be out of teaching school. I wanted to make some money so I could paint. I was actually about to quit teaching school for six months, all on account of a bluff. I was going to bluff fate until I could make it, until I had saved up enough money so I could quit and then I was going to paint for a year. Luckily I never had to go through with that.

IS: Most any other job you might have managed to get yourself fired and gone on unemployment. [Laughs]

TW: You know, I was very lucky because I started off teaching junior high school in a very tough school in Brooklyn. I had some rough times out there and some good times. But basically a pretty rough two years. I just managed somehow to take these little collages to the High School of Art and Design to a most sympathetic man. I heard there was an opening in the school and I went there and he hired me immediately, a man named Ben Clements. He was very sympathetic, and a really good man. He hired me and left me completely alone. And he had enough confidence that he didn't check up on me; he didn't anything. I could do whatever I damned well wanted. It was like teaching in college without the challenge, without the intellectual rigor of it. It was so nice. It was kind of a proper introduction for me into the real world from being out in Brooklyn at a tough junior high school for two years to get back into this thing. And then the Sidney Janis show. It was kind of a nice transition.

IS: Let's go back to the Tanager. Did you get to know the members of the Tanager group at all? I mean, it couldn't have only been Alex who offered you the show.

TW: I got to know them all on a social, cursory level because I didn't mix very much. I still don't. I work and I haven't got much time for anything but work. It was that way even more so because I was teaching school in the days and I was doing my work at night and on weekends. So I met them all; it was social and, just as always with me, I didn't talk much about art with any of them. But I met them all, Raymond Rocklin even; Sal . . . .

IS: Sally Hazelet?

TW: Sal Sirugo.

IS: Loid Dodd?

IS: Alex and Philip Pearlstein . . . ?

TW: Pearlstein, of course. He was doing cliffs at that time.

IS: Cajori?

TW: Cajori. I don't remember.

IS: Was Marcicano still a member?

TW: I don't think so.

IS: Pearl Fine?

TW: Possibly.

IS: They may have left by '60.

TW: I have a feeling that they weren't there. There was somebody else. David Lund, I think, might have been or was it . . . ?

IS: IT was Angelo Aphol? Angelo was really the key pin there.

TW: You see, when I came, I don't even know if I met him. He was either out or wasn't involved.

IS: He would have been in Rome. He'd already have gone on a Fullbright . . . .

TW: The only thing that I remember about the time there was that I had to sit like once a week.

IS: That's right.

TW: I sat there. Actually I bought a nice little Marisol sculpture there, too.

IS: "Coca-Cola?"

TW: Yes.

IS: Oh, damn. I wanted to buy that. [Laughter] Do you remember what it sold for?

TW: Something awful.

IS: Fifty dollars.

TW: Fifty or seventy-five. It's one of those two.

IS: Yes. So you own that. I wanted to buy it, but it was gone.

TW: that was a great buy. I snapped that one up immediately, but I gave it to the Modern eventually. I can't think of the woman who used to work there.

IS: Enid. Was she English?

TW: My only memory is sitting there for an Alex Katz show anyway where he has his cut-out figures around the room. I was sitting there and suddenly got the feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, and of course, it was this roomful of figures.

IS: What was the public response to the show as you remember?

TW: I seem to remember only one occasion where a man came into the gallery -- no, two guys came in. One guy was like an anarchist; he was very angry, very upset. He wanted to destroy the whole show. Another guy came in who I somehow felt might have been John Canaday. I think this was even before John Canaday's time, but somehow when John Canaday came along, I thought, "God, that sounds like it must have been John Canaday."

IS: It would have been. He would have been there.

TW: I don't know if it was him. I really don't know. I don't know why I formed that association, but this man thought the paintings were interesting, but thought I should get serious, quit clowning around. That's really all I remember about response. I have no other memory except that we had sold one of the paintings beforehand that was in the show -- we sold two of the paintings, I guess, to the Tremaines. And we didn't sell any from the show except a big drawing to Reggie and Mira Cabrall of Provincetown. So I was a bit disappointed because I was primed for this success that suddenly didn't come. Nobody bought anything.

IS: I didn't realize the Cabralls were collectors. They own the Moore's.

TW: I don't know, but they were active in a way for a very brief time. I think they separated not long after that -- maybe it was long after that I remember I went up there once. The whole Atlantic house was full of all kinds of art. I don't remember now what it was. They were pretty active. But there is not much more I can say about it because my memory about such things tends to become one big blur and all I remember is those few little things.

IS: But it's interesting because I remember the show. There was a great deal of ambiguity about it. If I remember correctly, the show did have some of the nudes in it, and the nudes. . . [TELEPHONE INTERRUPTION] . . . looked like advertisements, either Matisse or advertisements, and I think the Tanager people tended to want to look more at the Matisse side. They sort of found the advertisement side as sort of an enhancement or an enlivement of the Matisse aspect or, say, the Cubist composition or the compositional aspect in the work. Do you remember any of that? The reason I'm asking is you find yourself in a rather curious position because, obviously, this group which would have had no -- in fact it did have no sympathy toward Pop Art, you know -- had accepted your show. I remember your show was problematic and shocking to these people I knew on Tenth Street.

TW: You have to bear in mind my show came before any of the other Pop shows.

IS: Yes, it did.

TW: So there wasn't that kind of thing established yet. I don't think I got a review so I don't have any responses that way and nobody from the Tanager voiced any opinions to me. So I'm operating in the dark on terms of that.

IS: It's interesting that you weren't a member until after the show.

TW: Gee, I don't even remember that. I don't remember when or how.

IS: If I'm not mistaken, it was a guest show and then you were brought into membership.

TW: That could be. The relationship meant so little to me from that point of view that my memory is that I assumed that when I had the show I was a member.

IS: It may have been.

TW: That's just my assumption in looking back because at no point do I have any reason to remember one way or the other because it didn't mean anything to me to be a member. It meant something to me to have a show there and to be a part of the gallery than to be a member.

IS: Do you remember anything about Alex's response when he saw the work?

TW: Nothing particular. Wait just a moment. You raised something that I don't want to let get by. I want to get back to the Tanager show because I was aware -- first of all I was all over the place then about what I wanted to do, so there was a great deal of variation in approach with the nudes and even more the year before that, the little ones. I mean I could be Bonnard one day, Soutine the next, or worse. So that whole period to me was a sorting out for myself. I would start my paintings with no preconceived notions either. I would start with a shape like a four-by-four foot piece and a drawing, and I'd put the drawing on and make up a painting. So there was no stylistic foundation within me yet to make things very consistent nor did I care to be. So I'm just commenting about what you noticed in the show. Yes, I noticed it too, and even at the time I was aware, I realized I wasn't established within myself yet. I didn't know what I wanted to do or at least which direction to take. After the show I began to make very concrete decisions about that -- about style, in a bigger sense.

IS: You say that even before the Tanager Show, of course you had met Geldzahler because he had introduced you to Katz, and then I guess it must have been Geldzahler who told Bellamy and Karp about your work, and they came down. Can you talk a little bit about Bellamy and Bellamy's response? When did he incidentally give you the first show at the Green?

TW: That first show at the Green was '62, and I forget what the month was, but I seem to remember it being November.

IS: Would that have been before or after the Janis New Realism?

TW: It was so close as to be almost simultaneous.

IS: I see. What was Bellamy like?

TW: First of all, let me start with Geldzahler because I have a lot of rancor towards Henry professionally since he excluded me from that big show he had at the Met years ago. That was really . . . .

IS: The show in 1970?

TW: I suppose, but he stuck it to me. But I have such fond feelings for Henry because he's the guy that found me and got me found and I'll always kind of have a grateful feeling for him. First of all, he stood out more than the others because Henry was so funny, so amusing and so interested in what was going on, and my memory is he brought down Bellamy. The two of them came together. I can recall we were looking at "Great American Nude Number One" which is a big version of that little one up on the top up there. I remember Henry saying about that blue sheet, something about it was just like a piece of stretched something -- I forget what. But they were both there together. Now, like almost everything else, all my memories are a blur I can't sort out. What I can remember is me and my paintings and the problems I had at the time and all that. All the other things that happened just go by in kind of a blur. So my memories of Bellamy: first of all. he's from Cincinnati which I knew.

IS: No, I didn't know that.

TW: Oh, yes. I didn't know him there, but I knew he was from Cincinnati. There's a lot of us from Cincinnati.

IS: There were a lot of Cincinnati persons. There was yourself, Dine, and Bellamy. We almost got a Mafia.

TW: There's somebody else I ran across recently, or maybe it was just the model I had here Saturday. Anyway, and I knew that Bellamy was a failed poet. So he came to me, and I knew that this was a man of some sensitivity and he was from my own hometown. He seemed like a nice guy, very, very soft-spoken and very gentle, and certainly interested in what was happening. He would have a tendency -- not the first visit, but when he would come for a visit, Bellamy wouldn't so much enter the room as he would suddenly be in it. I mean you don't remember his coming in, but, before you knew it, he'd be there lying on the floor and he'd just sort of meld into whatever the scene was.

IS: Or go to sleep.

TW: Yes, whatever. He'd lie there. Other times he would get used to the situation; he'd get used to the environment. He'd look all over somehow and he'd comment on things before he'd even look at the paintings or he'd look at the paintings and he'd look at everything else and he wouldn't say anything for maybe half an hour about the paintings. He sort of wanted to let them soak into him a little bit. He didn't seem to go too much with first responses. I recall more than once getting him a pillow to lie on, to put under his head on the floor The only thing that bothered me about Dick in the beginning was that he was very unsure about whether to offer me a show. In fact, I had to be a little bit aggressive and phone him once or twice and say, "What are you going to do? I've got to know." Finally he decided.

IS: Now, Ivan then would have been working for Castelli.

TW: Yes. Ivan was interesting because he was a -- Bellamy was so soft, so gentle, and had a gallery. He was sort of looking about for the gallery. Ivan was involved with collectors. Ivan brought the Tremaines down. Whether he brought anybody else down I tend to forget. But anyway, Ivan . . . .

IS: The big collectors would have been the Sculls, the Kraushaars . . . ?

TW: I forget who and how the particular people came down because by that time it's a little bit confusing -- probably Bellamy because everything went through the Green Gallery except the first Tremaine sale.