Treasures From the Archives of American Art

The Archives' oral history collection is a treasure in itself. Begun in 1958 with funding from the Ford Foundation, the Archives now holds more than 2,000 interviews with artists, critics, curators, and collectors that chronicle the great diversity of the American art scene.

The best examples yield a richness of detail and a sense of character not available in written records. In the following edited excerpts we invite you to eavesdrop on eight significant conversations.

In 1959, John D. Morse interviewed painter Charles Burchfield at his studio in Gardenville, New York. In this excerpt, Burchfield reads his own written descriptions of his watercolors and comments on the future of art in America. He also talks about his aversion to teaching. If you listen closely you can hear the creak of Burchfield's rocking chair. The interview was funded by the Ford Foundation.

A. Hyatt Mayor had a distinguished career as an art historian, author, and curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his final years, he was also an active member of the Archives of American Art Advisory Committee, enlivening its twice yearly deliberations with his particular blend of enthusiasm and wit.

In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Paul Cummings in 1969, Mayor recalls how he "stumbled into" his job at the Metropolitan and describes working with print curator William Ivins and the early development of the museum's collection.

While painter Burgoyne Diller was one of the first American exponents of Mondrian, it could be argued that his greatest influence was not as a painter, but as head of the mural division in the New York City section of the Federal Art Project.

In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Harlan Phillips in 1964, Diller talks about the camaraderie among artists during the Depression. The interview was part of a special project funded by the Ford Foundation to document New Deal art programs. Later, Diller describes the beginnings of the WPA in New York and the chicken-and-egg problem of how to put artists to work on murals that were not yet commissioned.

Katharine Kuh was a curator, art critic, author, and leading dealer in modern art. In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Avis Berman in 1982 and 1983, Kuh talks about her gallery in Chicago, the Katharine Kuh Gallery, which she opened in the mid-1930s, and her unpleasant and humorous encounters with a reactionary group called Sanity in Art. She begins by mentioning an important member of the group, Eleanor Jewett, the art critic for the Chicago Tribune. The interview was funded by the Rothko Foundation.

Portrait painter Alice Neel considered herself a collector of souls. In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Karl E. Fortess in 1975, Neel talks about portraiture and becoming a painter.

This recording, one of 268 interviews of American artists conducted by Fortess for the School of Art at Boston University, was donated to the Archives between 1978 and 1985.

In the early 1960s, Tom Wesselmann's representational paintings infused common art historical subjects such as nudes and still lifes with new meaning.

In this excerpt from a 1984 interview with Irving Sandler, Wesselmann talks about the introduction of collage in his work and his approach to subject matter. The particular work he refers to in his studio is Portrait Collage #1 from 1959.

Curator Walter Hopps has written that Jay DeFeo's masterpiece The Rose is "one of the most powerful images conveyed by a creative artist in our time." The sheer size of the painting, as well as DeFeo's devotion to it, inspired wonderment.

DeFeo began The Rose in 1958 and worked on it in earnest for eight years. The 11- x 7 1/2-foot painting, with a thickness of eight inches at its highest relief, weighed 2,300 pounds. In its meandering metamorphosis, The Rose has become an icon of the Beat culture in San Francisco.

In this excerpt from an interview conducted by Paul Karlstrom in 1975 and 1976, DeFeo talks about the evolution of The Rose and how Walter Hopps moved it from her studio on Fillmore Street in San Francisco to the Pasadena Art Museum for its first public showing in 1969. The Wally that DeFeo mentions, is her husband painter Wally Hedrick.