Oral history interview with Ellen Lanyon, 1975 Dec. 5-1976 Jan. 18

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Ellen Lanyon on December 5, 6, and 7, 1975, and January 15, 16, and 18, 1976. The interview took place in Chicago, Illinois, and was conducted by James Crawford for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

The original transcript was edited. In 2024 the Archives retranscribed the original audio and attempted to create a verbatim transcript. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Additional information from the original transcript has been added in brackets and given an –Ed. attribution.

Interview

[00:00:03.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Oral Interviewee: Ellen Lanyon, painter and printmaker of Chicago. Oral interviewer, Jim Crawford, Detroit.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:00:21.41]

Our interview today, December 5, 1975, is in Ellen Lanyon's studio on [412 –Ed.] North Clark Street in Chicago. The studio is also her home where she lives with Roland Ginzel, painter, of Chicago. The studio itself is located in a Victorian building that she and her husband have renovated and in which they live now.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:00:59.06]

Ellen, in your family, there's been a tradition of artists for several generations. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that?

[00:01:10.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Okay. Now, on my father's side of the family, his father was one of seven brothers who came to this country from Cornwall, [England –Ed.] prior to 1893, and settled in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, because they had come from tin mining country and they went naturally to that same area in this country. And among them—among the seven, there were several who were artistically inclined, but they never applied it to fine arts.

[00:01:50.56]

When they left Mineral Point—several of them left and came down to Chicago. One started an opera house, the other one started a livery stable, sign painting, and buggy striping situation. And my own grandfather was involved in the buggy striping end of it, and did a lot of sign painting—very, very fanciful kinds of things. However, he never really became a painter. But he became a great collector of objects—antiques and oddities—which I think I have inherited quite a bit of that feeling, because I lived for a while in the Lanyon house in Englewood, which was—by the time I was there—a part of Chicago. But in early days, it was a village that was then incorporated. And I lived in that house amidst all these things that he'd collected. And I still have a lot of things.

[00:02:53.83]

The third business that was started was the undertaking parlor, and that, of all the businesses begun in those days, was the one that lasted almost up until the present—successful. [Laughs.] Then my maternal grandfather came from Bradford, Yorkshire in order to work on the then scheduled 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But the fair was postponed a year, so he spent that year around the United States—saw Florida, went all over. And finally came back up and began working on the Fair, and did, I guess from what I can gather, a great amount of mural work, et cetera. He was—I have sketchbooks and a lot of his material. And he was really quite skilled at the Baroque decorative—in the Baroque decorative manner. That is to say, putti, garlands, roses, encrustations of various—

[00:04:09.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was that architectural detail, or—

[00:04:11.95]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that's probably what he worked at a great deal in the Fair. Of course, in those days and from his sketchbooks, you can tell that he was a student of architectural—decorative, the history of architectural decoration, and that he took many of his motifs out of books. I still have some of the books that he left on French and Italian interior decoration, et cetera.

[00:04:36.28]

And—well, several things. I remember that. I also remember later going to the '33 World's Fair. But we'll put that off for a moment. I understood that after working at the 1893 Fair, he became involved in redecorating the Potter Palmer mansion. Now, by the time the Potter Palmer mansion would have been accessible to me, it was already torn down and gone, so that I never did get inside of it, nor would I know anything about this, for sure. And I don't have any documentation, but this was the story in the family.

[00:05:16.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. Well, was it—I think it was torn down in the end of the '30s. I think it was still standing in the '30s.

[00:05:23.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, even into the '40s it was there.

[00:05:24.98]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was still there.

[00:05:25.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I have a date somewhere here and I should know. But it was certainly just about the time World War II started, because the building that replaced it was one of the very first modern apartment buildings in Chicago, so-called. Now, I do recall that we lived in an apartment building. Well, first of all, the grandfather, whose name was Aspinwall— my mother's father, Fred Aspinwall. When he came to the '93 Fair, which was on the South Side of Chicago on the Midway— which is now the Midway and the University of Chicago, that whole area— he bought a house on a piece of property on University Avenue at 63rd Street. And it was a frame house. That house was torn down, and an apartment building was built the year that I was born, '26. And we lived there. We lived between there and my father's house—homestead—in Englewood, it seemed. And—because soon upon us came the Depression, and people lived together in those days. They didn't all live by themselves independently, because there wasn't really enough to go around.

[00:06:41.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, now, going back to his initial reason for coming, your grandfather was hired as—hired and brought here?

[00:06:52.10]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, he came here because—

[00:06:53.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  On his own. He knew it was going to happen.

[00:06:54.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  He came here on his own because he knew the Fair was going to take place, and he felt that he had trained as an artist, and he felt that he would be able to find employment, which he did. And he was evidently quite successful in doing this. And my grandmother, maternal grandmother, was a woman of Italian-German parentage. And she worked in the French china Pavilion. Now, she was not in any way skilled or talented, but she did have a flair, also, for a kind of a decorative style, you might say, herself—

[00:07:33.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  They met there—they met there?

[00:07:35.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  —in her dress and manner. Yeah. They met at the Fair and they got married, and they bought the property, and grandfather decided to become a citizen. And—

[00:07:44.56]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Had your grandmother come—

[00:07:46.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, she—

[00:07:47.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —or she was—her family was—

[00:07:48.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, she was a Chicagoan already. She came from a family, however—this is my mother's mother—of people who were—they were all musicians. And their father was an Italian named Alberti. And he had a lecture that he would give around the country, supposedly, about his political escapades in Europe. It was perhaps all fictitious. No one's ever really wanted to think about it. [They laugh.]

[00:08:18.94]

But each of his children were trained in music, and they played the piano, the violin, the trumpet, et cetera. And they accompanied him as an orchestra. And he went around the country with his children, the Albertis, and did this. Now, all of those children—from all of the children after they grew up, a couple of them stayed in the music profession. One was a trumpet player in Al Jolson's band later in life, and toured around. Another one led the Palmer House Dinner Orchestra.

[00:09:00.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Supper, dinner.

[00:09:01.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  Had a supper club orchestra for years at the Palmer House. Another one still lives in the Ansonia Hotel in New York, and spent his entire life as a voice coach, and did a lot of coaching for the Met, and for various—worked with the Park Avenue Church with their choir and their organist for years. And so many of them stayed in the profession. But they were all in music. There were no visual people in that family, but they were involved in that.

[00:09:35.15]

My father's mother was a Canadian woman who was just a fantastically devoted Victorian wife and mother, you know. And the grandfather, who we just—I'll finish this up by saying my father's father, who had really prospered as a buggy striper, then decided that there was money in brick-making, and went off to Indiana and had a brick factory. But I think that he continued all his lifetime to display this love of collecting and appreciation for, sometimes, rather eccentric things.

[00:10:17.48]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, then, your parents, they were not directly involved in the arts, or were they?

[00:10:25.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, Mother nor Father involved themselves in the visual arts at all. My mother always claimed that she was a frustrated opera singer, but I couldn't really always believe. I'm not sure about that. And my father was a great self-educated engineer, and was skilled in that area. He worked in the steel foundries and in building—he was always employed by companies that would build casting equipment and stuff for foundry work. That was his field.

[00:11:06.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, then, the first memories of your living in Chicago were on the South Side in this apartment, which was originally on the property that your grandfather had bought after the Columbian Exposition.

[00:11:20.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Or in the Englewood house which, incidentally, was right next to the Elevated, which had a lot to do with my imagery, beginning imagery when I started painting.

[00:11:33.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. What other sort of environmental impressions from childhood?

[00:11:40.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think for one thing, you have to know that I never went to the country. I was really a city child. I remember the Elevated. I remember playing under the Elevated. I remember being around 63rd Street, which in that time was a bustling commercial area. And I recall the Midway, which I think a lot of people will know if they know the Chicago area, as being a very long, narrow series of parkways running along the University of Chicago and where every block long area is depressed. In other words, you would run down—they were the lagoons of the Columbian Exposition. And after the Fair was over and they reconstituted that area, they planted grass, rather than to fill them, so that you would run downhill into these wonderful, huge flattened, almost like meadows, or all grass. In the wintertime, they flooded them, and we would ice skate, and it was the great ice-skating place.

[00:12:50.62]

And in the summertime, it was just—everyone spent their summers in the park in Chicago. You would—you'd meet your whole family. I know that there's a place called The Point at 59th and the lake there. And there was—when I was a child, there was a huge, beautiful old wooden pavilion that was left over from the Fair, or some former time—very Victorian, very beautiful. And my mother's people would gather every Sunday afternoon near that pavilion, and that's where you went. And families would do that in those days. You just get—you'd meet everybody in the park, and then you'd play ball, or picnic, or whatever. And in the wintertime, we would dig houses into the drifts under the Elevated. I mean, that was my life. Or we would construct, you know, what do you call it, covered wagons in the backyard, and go pioneering. [They laugh.]

[00:13:55.13]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, did you have any close association with either of the sets of grandparents, and in a way that the association might have influenced you artistically? I know we set the groundwork that there was that involvement. But were you close friends of any of these specific people?

[00:14:16.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Yeah. I think several things would happen. Both the parents—both the grandfathers died when I was quite young. But I do remember that my maternal grandfather Aspinwall would draw for me. And there was always this business of "Ellen can draw, Ellen can draw. Ellen is talented. Ellen could do it." And it was bred into me in a little bit that this was my task in life, was to carry on the artistic thread.

[00:14:46.64]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And this was your grandfather saying it to you.

[00:14:48.62]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no, it was implied from my parents—

[00:14:51.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Parents, as well.

[00:14:51.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  —who I think in a way felt that since they, too, themselves, did not really have that talent, and they admired it so much, that when they saw it—even the tiniest spark, in one of their children, it became almost a compulsion to see that that was continued. And part of, I think, that—well, several things happened. I think this was felt on my father's side, also, in that he had several sisters and brothers out of a family of ten children. Only a couple of them married, and only a couple of them had children. In fact, my brother is the last Lanyon left, you might say, except for his two [children –Ed.]. In that family, several of the women did not marry, and they went into business, and they were executives. And they had—

[00:15:50.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This was in the '20s?

[00:15:51.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah. And they seemed to—they inherited their father's love for collecting beautiful objects, and antiques. And—

[00:16:02.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was it memorabilia at all, or was it antiques, like precious objects?

[00:16:05.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, it was antiques and precious objects. But I mean—but I think that has something to do with the backdrop of a person's life, the kind of thing that they learned to look at, and feel, and textures. And it wasn't—it was something about it.

[00:16:25.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So it was actually in the homes of your aunts and your uncles.

[00:16:30.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they all lived in the Englewood house.

[00:16:31.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  They all did?

[00:16:31.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  They all lived at home.

[00:16:33.17]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  During the Depression, during—

[00:16:34.34]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, even if there hadn't been a Depression, I think it was traditional that in those days, it was a big family and a big house. And the children who didn't marry and go off, rarely—they didn't leave. They stayed at home. They all had their bedrooms, which were all furnished. And that little chair you just sat back—that was in Detroit, that belonged to one of the aunts. She'd have little chairs like that around, and she'd—you'd go in and sit, and you could visit her in her bedroom. And her bedroom had oriental rugs. And these are not wealthy people at all. These were hard-working people who wanted to make a certain kind of life for themselves, which had a kind of visual elegance about it. Okay, and one brother from that family went off to New York, and was a musicologist. And he was the professional member of the group.

[00:17:18.66]

Now, from both sides, I was encouraged, though— more than encouraged— to go into visual arts. My Aunt Frances, my father's sister, who was an executive here in a stock and bond company— one of the first women, I'm sure, that did that sort of thing here—started me going off to the Art Institute when I was still quite young, and paved the way for my sister and I to go to classes there in the so-called Saturday School of the Art Institute. My sister didn't last as long because she was not as interested. But we were put—we were given our nickels and dimes, and sent off on the Elevated on Saturday morning to go to the Art Institute. And so from the time I was about eight years old, or nine years old on, I attended classes, which were furnished by my aunt, who had the funds to do it.

[00:18:13.99]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, those classes, they weren't classes that were for special students that came out of the public school system there.

[00:18:20.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, that came later. I went to a class like that later.

[00:18:22.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But originally, the Institute did offer classes where you paid a private tuition that you could—

[00:18:28.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  They still do. They have a huge junior school program, Saturday program.

[00:18:32.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. I think what's happened, I think, in some cities, is that the ones that were—the programs that were instituted through the public schools dried up—the funds to support those programs. But you were then encouraged by—because you were living in the environment, or the community of your family, by aunts and uncles, as well as your parents.

[00:18:52.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah—

[00:18:52.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was that whole—

[00:18:53.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  —there was always an onus. I mean, I became—I had the—I guess I didn't think about it until years later when I started to try to put things together for myself a little bit, and people would ask me questions. But I do believe that as sometimes a family will choose one to go into the church, or they'll choose one to go into the father's business. [Telephone rings.] I became the one who was chosen to be—

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:19:20.72]

Yeah. Anyway, I was saying that I felt that I was almost the selected one, and I was made to—not to understand, there was—no one ever said it to me; it was just a feeling that I had. But going along with this was the fact that I did draw all the time. I did read all the time. It was something that I was, obviously—I had a sister and a brother, and there are no cousins around. My mother had one sister, and those children were in California. They all moved to California. In my father's family, he was really the only one who had children my age around. So that in a way—and my brother is ten years my junior. My sister had skills, but for—but it was, I suppose, evident that I was a person who was interested in scholarly pursuits, and drawing, and that, et cetera. And that's what happened. Now, I think what's really interesting, a couple of things. In 1933 at the Chicago World's Fair, my grandfather Aspinwall, again, worked on that Fair.

[00:20:27.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  He was still alive.

[00:20:27.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  He was still alive. He died shortly after, but he was still alive. And there were many a day when I was taken down to that Fair with him while he was working on it. And one experience that—I don't know how important it is. But I do think that many things that occurred in my lifetime—you know, things do occur that lead to one's interest in a certain kind of imagery, or it does affect the way you look at things, or the way you deal with things, whether you're a writer, or a visual person, or whatever. There was something called a Midget Village, and many of the midgets came from Yorkshire. And my grandfather was a Yorkshireman, and he was very proud of it. He loved it. He was a great extrovert and happy person.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:21:18.24]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There we go.

[00:21:19.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  So it would happen that being taken down to the Fair, and being left while he was working, he'd leave me—and sometimes my sister would go along. But I can remember going, too, by myself. He'd leave me in the Midget Village. And I, being about that size—let's see, I was about eight years old then, or seven, or eight, would spend part of my day with people of my own scale, even though they were—and the Midget Village was built all to scale. I would go in and sit in the barber shop, in the barber's chair. And it was just perfectly—I was an adult, in other words, for a period of time. I was a grown-up person, which is really weird when you think about moving back and forth from—and being inside a doll house. It's all scaled to you. Terrific.

[00:22:18.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did the midgets—

[00:22:19.33]

ELLEN LANYON:  And my interest in houses and dollhouses has always existed, because that same grandfather, about that time, hand built a dollhouse for my sister and I that was magnificent. It was a huge house with—the top slid up and down. And we were given that for Christmas. And then many things were handmade by he or my mother, or my father, and they'd all make little things to go in that dollhouse. And the whole front of the thing, which was painted like an English brownstone, incidentally—it was not American at all—would slide up. This whole panel would kind of slide up, and there you'd have this whole house. And he had painted in the windows of the house—my sister and I were sitting in the windows waving, et cetera. And that was—we had very few toys. I know we each had a Shirley Temple doll, and we each had a little buggy, and we had this doll house. And we didn't really have other toys to play with, because—especially, then during the Depression, there weren't things to go around. However, it was also not the habit of people to give their children a lot of things. I mean, it was just—nowadays, it's outrageous, the kind of stuff kids get. But—

[00:23:37.95]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you didn't get the hand-me-downs because you didn't have cousins, and so forth.

[00:23:41.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, we didn't have hand-me-downs at all. We had things, and we built a lot. I mean, this gets into all kinds of—well, I'll just keep—I'll ramble, because I do remember that a lot of time was spent with my father, who was a great woodworker and craftsman, and could do anything with tools and machinery. We would spend a lot of time down in the basement, so to speak, with dad, building things, or trying to. And I remember being so frustrated; I wanted to build a boat that would float in the bathtub. And it was always top heavy. [Laughs.] Learning the principles of weight and proportion and engineering. And so we did have—you know, it was a very rich childhood, even though it might seem lesser, it was really more.

[00:24:31.99]

And I wanted to—I just also remember the '33 World's Fair a lot because there was this great thing called Treasure Island, which was—which preceded any Disneyland, and which was a great fanciful place full of the usual sorts of castles, et cetera, that you would find in a place of—nowadays, that you might find in Disneyland. But it was all strictly 1930s, and very colorful, and very decorative, and very wonderful.

And the same Aunt Frances, who was very, very instrumental in my early years— And I think nowadays when they talk about the feminists and they always ask you, "Did you have any strong role models as a child?" Yes, I certainly had Aunt Frances. My mother was a marvelous woman, but she was devoted to her home, et cetera, and not to a profession. But Aunt Frances, who was the executive in the bond house, and Aunt Bess was an editor for a restaurant magazine, gourmet magazine. No, it wasn't gourmet; it was a restaurant trade journal. And another, Aunt Maude—these are all my father's sisters. And they come in very strongly into later when I work with the photographic paintings. It's all about those people. She sold Encyclopedia Britannicas in San Francisco when I'm sure no other lady did such a thing. [Laughs]. And she was married to a newspaper man. None of those people had children, though— they were all career women.

[00:26:18.24]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, during the '30s—

[00:26:19.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's the '20s and '30s.

[00:26:21.81]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. During the '30s, because of the Depression, was there also not only the sense of that—you would work and make your own toys, and do things in such an order, but did you go to films and see any of the great fantasy films of that era or—

[00:26:41.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, well, we went to very few films. Because for one thing, we were not allowed to go to movies. We certainly didn't go by ourselves, as some kids did, every Saturday, to see the serials. Because movies weren't considered the best place to go, and my father was rather strict with us. He was not puritanical; we were not denied pleasures of life, et cetera. But he was very protective of his girls. And movies, and places of public interest like that were sort of off limits to us.

But what we did do was, we were taken to family night, bingo night. At the local theater was the family night, and that was the entertainment of the neighborhood. I mean, I remember that Wednesday or Thursday, or whatever it was, was bingo, or game night, or dish night, whatever. And there was always—the movie would stop, and a child from the audience was selected. I never got to do it. Well, maybe I did. I sort of blanked on that. I know my sister was up there one night. And you choose the numbers out of the fishbowl, and then everyone would be all excited. And there'd be some premium given away, and it was in this way that I saw early films. And I saw—I recollect seeing and being terribly impressed with Mary Pickford, I think, in the earliest Wizard of Oz, and seeing Babes In Toyland, which I just could not—I mean, I just loved those movies. Still now I watch if I—they don't do the early Wizard of Oz anymore. It's too bad, because it was fantastic fun.

[00:28:31.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you see any of Busby Berkeley or any—

[00:28:34.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. See, that came later. I—that came later.

[00:28:39.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you were a teen.

[00:28:39.42]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Or if I saw them, I got—yeah, I got into seeing the Berkeleys, or the Astaire—the early Astaires, and that, which I loved a lot. But that came a little later, it seems.

[00:28:52.56]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did your family— or it sounds almost like a community here— have outside friends that were writers or painters or patrons of the arts?

[00:29:05.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, nothing. We had a very—my own family, my mother and father, were hardworking people who really had to pull pretty hard to get us all through. And they had a great involvement with the PTA, and they had a great involvement with their community, and with the Boy Scouts when my brother came along. And they were interested in those sorts of things. My parents became campers and that when they got older. They would buy camping equipment and go off camping and stuff. They liked to do that sort of thing, and they liked community work a lot, and they were very active.

[00:29:46.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, during this time, were you—did you go between places, between the South Side, or were you more permanently located there, or had you—

[00:29:55.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, we're all in the South Side now. Woodlawn and Englewood are both on the South Side.

[00:29:58.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  South Side.

[00:29:59.23]

ELLEN LANYON:  And the reason that we would move back and forth was purely economic. We would—my father, who had been working with—in the industry in steel, or worked for a grinding wheel company, I think, the last— was laid off like everybody was, and didn't have a job. Nobody had a job. We existed because we lived in the building in Woodlawn which Grandfather Aspinwall had built. We lived there with my grandmother. He died, and we lived there with her. So there were five people living in a four room apartment, I do know— I mean, that's another thing I haven't even gotten into yet was that place. I ought to really divide the two places so that it—

[00:30:44.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, it's a little hard to distinguish.

[00:30:46.29]

ELLEN LANYON:  It's getting confusing, isn't it?

[00:30:48.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, no, it's just that—

[00:30:51.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  We could—

[00:30:51.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —during the Depression, obviously, the pressures, economic pressures determined these kinds of moves. You would move out and go to live with the family when your father was out of work. And then would you move back?

[00:31:07.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, let's say this. Now, let me clear it all up.

[00:31:09.91]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay.

[00:31:11.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  The house in Englewood was the Lanyon house, and the family lived there. The apartment building, which was built in '26 in Woodlawn, was where Fred Aspinwall and his wife, my grandmother, lived. He died in 1934. We had been living in an apartment up until that time, but my father was out of a job, and so we moved in with Grandmother. Therefore, we were five people living in a four-room apartment. My grandmother slept on an indoor bed in the living room. And my sister and I slept in the dining room, and my parents had the bedroom, and that was it. My brother was not born yet.

We lived there until there was some kind of—there were always in the family—I mean, as wonderful and as solid as they all were, there were always arguments and unfortunate happenings. And I think, understandably so. People were out of work; people were desperate, people were living too closely together and living with parents and in-laws. And there was one time where there was a problem, and we left Woodlawn and went to live in Englewood with my father's family, because my father probably had a fight with my grandmother. All right. Then we get over to Englewood and my mother couldn't get along with my father's sisters. [Laughs.] So I like to think of the whole thing in the best of light. However, there was many a miserable day. [Laughs.]

[00:32:41.74]

Now, in the meantime, we're—this is early, this was quite early, because we still weren't being shuffled in school that much. I went to first grade in Englewood, and the rest of my schooling was in Woodlawn. And so that—we pretty much settled down there in Woodlawn. My grandmother died, and she—my sister and I inherited the "in-a-door" bed. And my brother was born. And that all took place in Woodlawn in the apartment building where we lived, and I lived, until I was in my second year of high school. So that I was—

[00:33:19.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But your father's sister, even at that time, would give you the money to go to the art classes.

[00:33:24.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yes, yes. My father's sister was very interested in our welfare. She provided us our clothing. She provided us—you know, good things—

[00:33:38.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So not only did you have the encouragement—

[00:33:39.77]

ELLEN LANYON:  —that we couldn't have otherwise. Yeah. I mean, I was fortunate that I had that. Anyway, she was one of the people that was working, and able to do that in the family.

[00:33:47.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Before we get beyond this, before your grandfather did die, do you remember him actually giving you any instruction, or teaching you anything about different media other than just drawing?

[00:34:04.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, just drawing.

[00:34:04.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Just drawing.

[00:34:04.88]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Because remember, I'm only eight or nine years old—

[00:34:07.04]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:34:07.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  —thereabouts. And I didn't really start painting 'til I was about twelve. And I must tell you a story about that, too. Now, I wanted to say a couple other things, though, about the early times in Woodlawn in the apartment building. At the time that the old frame house existed, my grandfather moved another frame house behind that one with a yard in between. It was an ample piece of property. And that second house was used as his shop. He had a very ongoing—by this time, he built up a very good— This was in the '30s, mind you, sign painting and decorating business, because it was no longer the vogue to have cupids and garlands painted on your walls, or murals in the dining room, or whatever. But it was—but decorating and wallpaper, et cetera—you'd paint all your woodwork white. I mean, people were starting to modernize, so to speak.

And so he had a pretty good business going, and this was his shop. And we spent a lot of time in that back yard and in that shop. And it was always a place that was full of art materials and something going on, always. This is a real heavy memory with me. There was a short time after my grandfather died when we would be in the backyard, wondering what the funny noises were coming out of the back barn. And finally, it was—I mean, we realized that my parents, in kind of a desperate move for money, had rented it out to a bookie. [Laughs.] And it was a big operation going on. And we were, of course told, "Oh, don't pay any attention; pretend you didn't hear anything."

[00:36:05.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, there was in Chicago a lot of crime all through its history there, sort of general, almost common—

[00:36:13.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  It isn't—yeah. I was reading Saul Bellow the other day and I realized it's—I mean, he sort of hit it on the head, talking about how we here in Chicago became accustomed to accepting something like a bookie operation as a—well, it exists, so to speak. And it was tolerated. My parents were never, never involved, as far as I could tell, in anything underhanded.

[00:36:43.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it was something very familiar in the environment.

[00:36:46.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yes. And I'll tell you the other thing. Our property backed up on the back of stores on 63rd Street. And although we had this very nice backyard, because my grandfather loved to plant and fix it all up, and it was very green, and there were lots of trees, and there were lots of flowers, right across the cyclone fence was the backyards of a Chinese laundry, people who kept a parrot—and by the way, I keep thinking about that parrot these days a lot—who talked all the time. And there were some interesting people around the neighborhood, and the grocers were all—I mean, the tradespeople around there were all kind of interesting. And I don't know, I always had a very warm feeling about the whole ambience. And at that time, the hobo was not a bum and not a wino, but really, a person who's made a choice to hit the road. The hobos lived back there behind the stores, and they built their shacks and shanties, and there was a little hobo community. And we kids used to go out and we'd talk to the hobos and have games. We'd play games. We'd line up bottles on a roof and throw rocks.

[00:38:01.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And was that when you were eight, nine?

[00:38:04.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it had to be about that time. So let's say first grade is six years old—so from seven on, I was living there in Woodlawn, and this would have taken place seven, eight, nine years old, sure. Backyard games and all that, that was big life, and "kick the can." And the whole neighborhood street games.

[00:38:24.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were there any neighborhood cliques, or gangs or—

[00:38:28.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, nothing like that. It was just street games, though. Every night you'd be outdoors when you got old enough.

[00:38:35.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In the summer. And you didn't go—

[00:38:37.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah. In the summer, you went out in the street, and you played those sorts of games. In the winter, you—

[00:38:42.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Skating.

[00:38:42.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  —you'd be down skating or something.

[00:38:45.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But you mentioned earlier that you've lived most of your life in the city. And that means pretty much that you hadn't had summer experiences out in the country.

[00:38:56.12]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. Well, one time someone who lived in our building—we lived—apartment building living is interesting, because—I don't do it anymore. But I remember always being told, "Be quiet because of the tenants," et cetera. There was one other child in the building. And one summer, his grandfather took my sister and I and he off to a cottage. And it was the first time I went really swimming. And I must have been nine or ten years old. And it was just—I just had to learn to swim. Nobody ever taught me how. There was a pier and a dock, and everybody was jumping in. I jumped in and you did it. I've never—I'm finally learning how to swim now, to really swim.

[00:39:42.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But this is about this time that the WPA came, and do you—I know you were awfully young. Maybe you have some recollections of that from later years. But is there anything from that period that you can either—

[00:39:57.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, because my grandfather, who would have been the one that would have been involved in it, died in '34. And the WPA really—no, no.

[00:40:10.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And is he the one that gave you all of his painting materials when he died, or—

[00:40:14.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Well, now, that's the story I was kind of leading up to. But there was something else I wanted to talk about, too. We had at the corner—because when I talk about certain kinds of images that keep reappearing and reappearing in my work—and it's quite interesting to me sometimes when I really realized what I've been doing. And it's always after the fact, but it's interesting.

[00:40:48.55]

We had at the corner of 63rd and University a Greek named Laris, who was a candymaker—"Uncle John," we called him. And he hand-made chocolates, you know, do the chocolate making. And he'd pour out the huge slab of hard candy, and score it, and break it up, and store it in jars. And a really good old time candy store. And then in the back room, he had a bridge club, or whatever the cards are. The Greek men would come and sit around and drink, and eat cheese and play cards. My sister and I would spend a lot of time in the stores that the other neighborhood kids did.

And then when we were really small, at Christmas time and that, we'd be hired, so to speak, to help break up the candies and fill the jars, and help with doing the candy. And one of my really—I mean, just clear, strong memories, is watching his helper, a woman, make the chocolate bonbons and take the soft center and dip it in the chocolate and put it on the tray, and then make this, whatever the small configuration was that denoted whether it was a cherry, or chocolate, or strawberry, or whatever. Because there was a sign language—I mean, not sign, but there was a symbolic language that went on with chocolates. And a few years ago, I did a whole series of—I did a whole show, as a matter of fact, that dealt with candies and sweets and—

[00:42:26.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think it goes back, then, to re-delving into these early—

[00:42:31.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. It's not just surface things, either.

[00:42:33.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I don't really mean surface—

[00:42:34.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, that whole—

[00:42:34.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —subconscious.

[00:42:35.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, but that—

[00:42:36.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is it subconscious, or—

[00:42:37.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I didn't think about Uncle John until a long time after I'd done this show, and began to talk to myself about the candy, the sweet, the implications of what it is all about. The sweet as danger, the sweet as a reward, the sweet as something that's good and comfortable and—

[00:43:02.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But right here now when you think like that now, if you go ahead and do more with this imagery—

[00:43:10.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:43:11.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —the thoughts of this, obviously, would be— [cross talk].

[00:43:14.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. But I don't think, you see. I don't tend to work that way. I generally, once it's clear to me, I don't go back.

[00:43:20.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay.

[00:43:21.47]

ELLEN LANYON:  I mean, this has to do with a certain kind of—I think it's a personal exorcism, and when it's done, and I realize some of the implications of where it has come from, it has been done, and I don't go back.

[00:43:34.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  After it's done. Right. Well, it's the same thing then with the parrot. Now, this kind of imagery of the bird, and images of exotic birds, and this early experience that you might have had. Now, when you reflect about that, that is reflecting after you've done the work, but then of an early association that you had. But it's always after you've done the work that the association comes back, and not that it is the initiative of the way you work.

[00:44:00.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, that's right, that's right.

[00:44:03.75]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay. Can we talk a little bit about those early classes that your aunt helped you go to? Because then—

[00:44:09.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  Sure. Because this ties in with the same period of time.

[00:44:12.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay.

[00:44:12.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Those classes are a little vague, if you really want to know. I remember more riding on the Elevated to and from class, and going into the Museum, and seeing paintings, and having that feeling of astonishment and excitement at the grandeur of a place like the Art Institute.

[00:44:38.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was more the place than specific paintings at that point. It's the impression of the whole ritual going there, taking the—

[00:44:47.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. I must say that we went into the class ,and we would do things that one is given to do. It's nothing in that area of my early life stands out all that much. I mean, I've tried, but I don't have very good recall in that particular area.

[00:45:07.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you remember working from works of art, or do you remember that, as one example, or do you remember that your instructors were professional artists or teachers, or—

[00:45:18.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  People who teach in the junior school are professional people. But it seems to me that we did rather rote things. And that's why I don't—nothing really stands out that much. In other words—

[00:45:32.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There were exercises and stuff.

[00:45:33.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  I do think so. I think that we drew and we painted, and we would do many things. But see, until I'm twelve years old, I don't really recollect all that much about what I did as far as art goes, or do I have a very good record of it. But—so the classes weren't that meaningful. And as a matter of fact, the Museum existed as one general large impression.

[00:46:10.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you have other impressions, like, did you go to the Field Museum, or the Science and Technology Museum? Were there are other places?

[00:46:17.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no. I'll tell you, first of all, the Field Museum, we would go—the class would be taken over there to draw once in a while. I do remember that. I don't think that my work was very meaningful at that point. There was this great—well, there's a couple of things. I think a couple of things that I would—if you were to ask me about remembering works of art, there was a Renoir and a Manet reproduction in my Aunt Frances's bedroom that I—

[00:46:44.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Have more recall.

[00:46:45.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  —have absolute early, early impression and importance to me. And also, a large Audubon bird reproduction. And those things, I thought, were always part of my life. I mean, they're just there.

[00:47:00.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It's funny. I had in my own life the same experience. My mother had bought a reproduction of "Aunt Jane," by Bellows, which was in the living room all my life as a childhood.

[00:47:09.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:47:10.23]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And I had the same class experiences, but it's that reproduction that's in your living room.

[00:47:16.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  Sure. And there was a couple of 19th century kind of, as you just mentioned a little while ago, northern Romantic landscape paintings in the living room, kind of brown and dark and murky because they were dirty. I mean, nobody—they needed a good cleaning. But they were mysterious and wonderful. And they hung over the music cabinet with all the porcelain elephants. And it's the kind of thing—I remember all these things.

[00:47:47.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was no reverence, or sense of severe respect for art— that it was the thing that was around you always, and a comfortable thing with other collectibles, antiques and—

[00:48:01.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And I'll tell you something, I never remember being taken into a museum and talked to about the works. I don't ever remember that.

[00:48:12.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Until later, we wouldn't—

[00:48:14.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Grandfather Aspinwall, had he lived, probably would have done that. But no one else had the time or wanted to, or had that much passion for it. Frances Lanyon, actually, was a—she was the one who would have carried on any involvement of that sort, and as a matter of fact, always was the one that introduced me to whatever I did know early in my days about things.

[00:48:45.55]

But let me say that my grandfather left a lot of equipment behind as I—Aspinwall. And when I was twelve, my sister and I were then sleeping on the "in-a-door" bed. And if you know, the "in-a-door" is a thing that it folds up like a Murphy, but it's on this huge rolling platform. And you roll it into a long narrow closet. Have you ever seen one of those?

[00:49:10.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yes.

[00:49:10.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  It's not one where you open the doors, and the thing falls down like in the Marx Brothers movies. So this morning, my parents said to me, "Before you put the bed away, you might check the closet." And I looked in the closet and they had spent hours and hours of time; they had taken all the brushes and cleaned them. They had taken all the agate burnishers and all the gold leaf equipment and all that he used for doing all his work. And they had taken all of the palettes, and cleaned them, and an easel, et cetera. And there was a closet full, and then they had added to it—new canvases and all sorts of things, including a box full of his sketchbooks and paintings and all this. They gave it to me. It was mine. It was my inheritance.

[00:50:02.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This was when you were twelve.

[00:50:02.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  And a new paint box—hmm?

[00:50:04.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This was when you were twelve?

[00:50:05.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. So I started painting. I did a self-portrait.

[00:50:09.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did it mark an occasion? Was it your birthday?

[00:50:12.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yes, it was my birthday, my twelfth birthday. So it was as if all those years of hoping and sort of preparing me for this day. [Laughs.] There it was. And I was ready for it, too. I loved it.

[00:50:34.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, this—you mentioned this gold leaf, this metal. That must have something to do with the later work when you were using egg tempera and—

[00:50:42.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that, and also the class that I worked with at the Art Institute. It was just a natural that I would have fallen into that class, which is another whole story in itself, and should come a little later.

[00:50:52.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:50:52.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:50:52.79]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, we'll get to that.

[00:50:55.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  Now, I wanted to say another word here, though, along with this, because I think we get—we come up to a point where many things can be explained. For instance, if you see this ceramic frog over here, that was grandfather's tobacco jar. You see that?

[00:51:12.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yes.

[00:51:13.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  And that—I mean, these are things that I just lived with all the time.

[00:51:17.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That and a thousand other memorable objects here on the drafting table.

[00:51:21.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Now, I think in really—in a rather important issue is, why did I, when I began to work seriously with the figure, in about 1960—why did I get myself involved so deeply with reproducing the Lanyon family photographs, which were early, early 20th century photographs, or tintypes, or whatever— of the Lanyon's posing, or on vacation, or whatever. Because many of the paintings that came out of that series were the sisters, the Lanyon sisters, my father's sisters.

[00:52:09.81]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Frances and Maude.

[00:52:11.49]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. And Maude is the big portrait downstairs and all. And I think that at the time in my usual fashion, I was not thinking about why I was doing it. I know how it all came about, and we can talk about that later. But I think that so much of it had to do with the same kind of implied inheritance of mine, not only to be creative, and not only to somehow or other make everyone proud of my achievements. So I was heavily endowed, you might say, with the sense of achievement from the time I was very small.

But also, the Lanyon family had a history in Cornwall that whether they had come to this country as humble tin miners or not, they remembered, and it was their sustaining strength. They had been at one time knighted by a queen, and given property in Cornwall. They were people who came from Brittany. They were originally French. And they had a castle, and they had a family. They still have their family crest. And it's all documented. The genealogy is all there at the Newberry Library. And the family crest always was much in evidence, hanging right inside the front door of every Lanyon's house. There was one family, and only one family. And if you meet a Lanyon, it's related to me, or they, or we're all related.

[00:54:02.13]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But there was a lot of integrity about that family tradition.

[00:54:06.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it had to be honored, respected, and kept. And it was the fact that the castle was in ruins. But the pride and the essence of that family existed forever.

[00:54:21.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you use your maiden name because of that, in any sense, or just out of professional integrity for yourself?

[00:54:28.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I was a Lanyon—I mean, I exhibited as Lanyon.

[00:54:34.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Pretty much—

[00:54:34.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  I had started my career before I got married, so I just never even thought about it.

[00:54:38.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it had nothing to do that, with this strong—

[00:54:40.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know how much anything has to do with anything else. I mean, I do think, however, that I had to be a Lanyon. There was no question about it. The Lanyons are, almost to a letter, very much involved. They were—

[00:54:53.79]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The sense of self is strong.

[00:54:55.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Just about everyone is gone now.

[00:54:57.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Oh.

[00:54:58.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  In fact, they are. But, yeah, the sense of family and inheritance is very strong. And that was something that was—

[00:55:08.15]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  We're sort of creeping up on the time of World War II. Do you have any impressions? You were—World War II was happening as you started to take the classes later through the public school system at the Institute.

[00:55:28.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. Well, no, actually; I did that more in high school. Grade school area time—actually, I stopped going to those Saturday classes when I was in my upper years in grammar school.

[00:55:43.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:55:44.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  I did not go as much then. But I was very active in school, always. And about the time that I was twelve or so, Walt Disney had come into being, and in a big way. And I remember that in school, in grammar school, I must have been seventh or eighth grade, we did a mural of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, and that was big stuff. And anyone in those days who was you know, it's that old, "can you draw," business. Kids were encouraged to copy from the comics—

[00:56:26.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:56:27.05]

ELLEN LANYON:  —which would illustrate to one and all their skills as an artist. And they were not necessarily encouraged to do their own creative things. Although, you see—

[00:56:37.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I think they were encouraged by their peer groups, not so much older people, or maybe it's because it was such a—

[00:56:42.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  No; older people, older people. I many times was presented with a comic strip and said, "Here—

[00:56:49.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  "Can you do it?"

[00:56:49.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  "—can you draw this?" See, I mean, that's a strange tradition in this country that—

[00:56:55.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you still see it.

[00:56:56.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  —had something to do—

[00:56:57.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It goes on and on.

[00:56:58.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah.

[00:56:58.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Young people in their early teens, and classes of any sort do the comic imagery. But I—and I think it's—in some cases, it's motivated by a peer group, or the self, because kids have them so readily available. But in your case this time, it was older people testing your skill. And out of that, this mural [inaudible], was it a collective mural, or did you do the drawing and—

[00:57:25.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, it was a collective. There were three of us worked on it. And that was big. That was a high point of grammar school art, you might say. Grammar school art was pretty much limited to that sort of thing, or making posters, or whatever, as were the early days in high school. But high school is another subject that I want to talk about as a separate thing, in a way. I'd like to stay with that other for a few minutes and just finish it off as much as I can.

[00:57:57.12]

Remembering, I just thought of something I wanted to mention. Forgotten it again. Oh, I was thinking that one of the things about people of my generation, or age, is that we did not have television. Television didn't come until the later years of World War II, and then after that. And not having television, I just so distinctly remember radio programs. Now, maybe people, younger people, will look back upon television in the same way.

[00:58:31.85]

But I do think there's something about hearing and having to imagine what people looked like, what the exchange of activity looked like. And you could sit for hours in the evening, and paint, or draw, and listen to the radio, and not—I mean, it's something that I can't possibly do with television, and never have been able to. And yet, listening to the radio was the big—the entertainment, and going to films was really not that available to me, anyway. I just didn't go to movies.

[00:59:08.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Chicago originated, I believe, "Amos and Andy". It was quite—

[00:59:12.65]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they had a lot of soap operas here, too.

[00:59:14.99]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And these—

[00:59:15.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  Studs Terkel originally was a soap opera actor, you know, and that. And those people worked in the radio here.

[00:59:22.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, I've even heard that you could walk down the street in Chicago in those days and hear the same radio shows coming out of twelve different houses, and just continue hearing the story from block to block. [They laugh.]

[00:59:34.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  Sure, everybody listened. My dinners were spent with Kaltenborn, who was a news forecaster. My father had that on every evening at dinner. And then we would have Little Orphan Annie, and what's his name, Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, I Love a Mystery, One Man's Family. I mean, those were things that we grew up with. And I still have a vision of what San Francisco must be like because of One Man's Family, [laughs] never having lived there. I mean, it's really weird how you get these ideas. And In the jungles of South America with I Love a Mystery. It's interesting what you can recall.

[01:00:13.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think that that program, too, encouraged your sense of imagination, too? Television gives it all to you, and it's cool and cold.

[01:00:21.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think so. I think so. Sure.

[01:00:24.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But radio is, obviously, a much hotter medium. What other things as a child that stimulated your imagination?

[01:00:34.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, we were a part, too, of—my sister and I, because we were 18 months apart, and there was another thing that I think occurred in those days, which is all part of— we talked about Bugsby Berkeley. Well, we get that through that. But if you think about Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell and that whole era, and the whole business of people in their kind of much more simple and less sophisticated fashion, wanting— wanting things, success, however you cut it, whether it's Ruby Keeler getting the leading role, or whether it's this or that, there was a kind of a naive and more simplistic way of looking at life, and what was successful in life, and you know, good old days.

[01:01:24.16]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What was that part of the fact that during the Depression, all through the '30s, people were trying to escape, or trying to use their imaginations to get out of it or—

[01:01:35.62]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, sure, I think so. And people's lives were reduced to a point where little victories were tremendous things. I mean, they made tremendous difference in a person's life if they could realize just a little feeling of success, or achievement because it was so hard to scrape that out.

[01:01:53.23]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, did you—

[01:01:53.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  You know what I mean?

[01:01:54.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. But did you act those sort of—were they actual achievements, or did you sort of act them out in fantasies?

[01:02:00.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, what I was going to say was, my mother loved to think of my sister and I in relationship to the princesses of Great Britain. [They laugh.] Like, I think a lot of mothers did it then. And a lot of people named their children after movie stars in those days. I mean, it was a great thing to be Gloria, right, or whatever, because there was—or Billie Jean, or whatever it was that people were named after movie stars. And worshiping the royal family. Of course, my mother, who was crazy about her father, who was an Englishman, there was a whole connection of things.

Well, my sister and I were dressed as twins for a long time. There was another important thing comes up later. And we were kept as twins. And people would even say, "Oh, my, twins." And there's a difference. And so we went—we sort of existed that way for a long time, neck and neck. And we were sent to tap-dancing school. And the tap-dancing school would put on recitals. And so Bugsby Berkeley was part of my life. Yes, it was. I did a nautical number in a white—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9958_m]

[00:00:08.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  The nautical number that I mentioned, we were dressed in white sailor's caps, and blue shorts, and we had the usual tap shoes and the rest on, and T-shirts. And I remember, we were all lined up in a long line, doing the "Shuffle Off to Buffalo," or whatever, on the steps of the grammar school. And it was the first time that I ever realized that I should be wearing a bra. [Laughs.] And life sort of began, you know, from that time on. Knowledge of body, et cetera, started to become more and more evident. But the next and really grand situation—

[00:00:52.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How old were you then, before you—

[00:00:53.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, this had to be ten or eleven—somewhere—you know, twelve— grammar school, whatever.

[00:01:02.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:01:04.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  I haven't figured out exactly how old I was when I graduated [grammar school –Ed.]. But the same dance group participated in a huge event that used to happen in Soldiers' Field every springtime when all the dance schools from around the city, and whoever, would get together and put on this enormous Chicago Spring Festival. And we would do large dance ensemble presentations. I don't know what else you could call them. And they were certainly Busby Berkeley, because they were all based on whatever you could work out in a symmetrical geometry that would create an effect from the bleachers of this group of human beings acting out—

[00:01:53.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Organically moving.

[00:01:53.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, organically moving in the field. And we were daisies, and we all had umbrellas that were decorated like huge daisies. And we were dressed in—I've gotten pictures—daisy costumes with our umbrellas. And then we would dance, and move, and then sit down and twirl the umbrellas. And there'd be a field of daisies. It so happened, though, that the field was about 3 inches in mud. [They laugh.] And I will never forget the day. I just never will. And we did gypsy dances, et cetera. So we spent a lot of time in the—

[00:02:28.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did that happen—

[00:02:29.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  —dance school. Hmm?

[00:02:30.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Oh, you did. Did you spend several years dancing?

[00:02:32.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, several years, at least. But I was never involved in ballet, or whatever. And there were some desperate attempts to teach piano that failed miserably. I was absolutely unsuccessful in that area. And I was also, and still am very unmusical. I can't sing, and it was always a great distress to the Albertis, you see. And there was much made of it—[they laugh].

[00:03:03.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In joke?

[00:03:04.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  —that I had—well, I don't know about joking. After the summer times, and after time went by, the Sundays—and after they tore down the pavilion in the park, Sundays moved from the park gatherings to the apartment of my Aunt Tootsie, who lived in the Plaisance Hotel, and who took over the matriarchship of that side of the family, my mother's maternal side. And on Sundays, we would go there, where there would be always lots of good food, and lots of bridge-playing, and lots of remarks made about who could sing, dance, play the piano, or whatever. And from that side of the family, I was disgraced.

[00:03:50.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But was there much serious talk? I'm trying to get a sense of difference between these two families.

[00:03:57.65]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no; never. No. Not serious.

[00:03:59.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Never; that's what I—

[00:04:00.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, it was never a matter of sophistication or an intellectual problem.

[00:04:05.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Your father's family was more of that.

[00:04:08.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't think any of them, really. No one sat around and discussed in an intellectual way anything that had to do with the arts. They participated, and, perhaps, went away from the family circle, and within their own circle of friends or colleagues, they would—certainly, the uncle that lives—still lives and lives at the Ansonia—was involved in that. He was one of the few. And the other uncle, who was the musicologist from the Lanyon side of the family and who moved to New York, also, those people, I am sure, involved themselves in a truly professional—

[00:04:50.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Level.

[00:04:50.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  —situation. Yeah. But the rest— no, it was a light—

[00:04:56.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Two things I want to get back to, particularly, since we've gone by one of them already so long ago. One is, do you remember specifically the work that your grandfather did do for the Century of Progress, the World's Fair in 1933?

[00:05:08.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  No.

[00:05:08.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You don't.

[00:05:08.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  I'm sorry to say I don't, and I have no record of it.

[00:05:11.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You just—basically, it's the impression of that experience.

[00:05:15.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  I was quite young, and it was the impression, yes, of the whole—

[00:05:18.67]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Also, you must have—

[00:05:19.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  —great magical city. It's also the days of Oz. I was a great reader of the Oz books. The whole world was Oz to me, especially, going down to the World's Fair. It was certainly a living experience.

[00:05:32.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was there some talk of the remembrances of the Columbian Exposition because of your grandfather's—

[00:05:39.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. And I'll tell you, you asked before about the Museum of Science and Industry. Now, that was closed, and it became—it was a wreck. It was falling apart. And only later when I was in high school was the renovation begun. And it became the Rosenwald Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. The lagoon was dried up. We used to go over there and run around and climb trees in that area when I was much younger. And it was a disaster. It was nothing. We had no museum there.

[00:06:13.73]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Before we pass on that, I want to get just one more thing, and that is, how do you remember as a child expressing this imagination and creation? Did you fantasize that you were the Queen of England's daughter, and build a throne in the apartment corner or—

[00:06:34.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  No.

[00:06:34.73]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did—how were your fantasies—

[00:06:36.05]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. I tell you, I don't think that—I do—I did have some, but they did not involve being a regal figure. I think that in truth, and I have always said that if I had been another—had a chance to be another person, I would have been a musical comedy star. Now, I don't know why. Certainly, I did enjoy the dancing. I always felt that it was too bad that I couldn't sing. But that if I did sing, I would certainly be Ethel Merman. I would not be Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. [James laughs.]

[00:07:10.12]

Although, I love classical music. I love Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. And I would give my eyeteeth to be able to do something that was truly musical. But I have never been able to. I think it had more to do with a sense of—if I were to be in entertainment at all, it would be with a sense of humor. It would be with a kind of a flair. It would not, certainly—I would certainly not be Princess Margaret, or Elizabeth. And it would not be my role.

[00:07:45.94]

And the things that I do remember in school, I did not get involved with theatrics and that. The only time I ever really was anything, I was the Statue of Liberty in a pageant one time. But at home, my brother and I indulged in a lot of hijinks and just comical language, chit-chat, and carrying on. And—

[00:08:21.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Him being your—ten years younger.

[00:08:23.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  He was younger, yeah. But I can remember being reprimanded because we'd get just boisterous. But it was always a kind of acting out comedy roles, and doing things. The other thing was that one of the things I always do remember about the Woodlawn backyard was that we did build a covered wagon out of an old swing that was out there. And that consumed a year or two's worth of summer activity. It was really acting out the roles of adventurers, and pioneers, and—

[00:08:58.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Frontier.

[00:08:59.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  —frontier life. And I suppose that isn't unusual for children, because that's all the kind of play that people go through.

[00:09:07.03]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  They weren't more exotic kinds of experiences as being in the Orient, or Africa. They were on the American frontier—

[00:09:15.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  American Plains.

[00:09:16.33]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The American West, the American Prairie, and so forth. Then you really feel that this awareness of yourself as a serious artist has a lot to do with this event when you were twelve, and received these things from these materials from your father, or from your aunts of your grandfather's.

[00:09:39.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  They came from my mother and father.

[00:09:41.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  From your mother and father.

[00:09:42.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  And they belonged to my mother's father.

[00:09:44.48]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:09:45.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  And—well, sure, because I think that what I had been doing and wanted to do, was finally available to me. I had the materials to work with. And I started right into work. I painted, and—I painted elevated structures and 63rd Street scapes. I did a self-portrait. It was one of the very first oils I ever did. Painting in the dining room, I remember standing there painting, exactly where I was when I did it. I was taken—see, the summer before World War II started, I was 14. I graduated from grammar school. And my father had a job, and we got a new car. And my mother drove to California to see her sister, who she hadn't seen for a long time. And she took the three of us—my sister and little brother—along. And I painted all the way out there. I painted Yosemite; I painted San Diego, I painted, like—

[00:11:03.95]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you draw—

[00:11:04.67]

ELLEN LANYON:  —I painted all these landscapes. I mean, they're just—I have some of them now. But in those days, the relatives were admiring, and they loved— "oh, fantastic." So they were given away by—my mother gave them to all the relatives as an example of my skills.

[00:11:23.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, is that when your second experiences begin at the classes at the Institute while you were in high school?

[00:11:28.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:11:28.91]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did that all begin? I mean, you're in high school.

[00:11:32.48]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, for two years in high school, I was still on the South Side, okay? I'm at Hyde Park High. I immediately became interested and involved with the people that put out the yearbook, because I, by this time, was doing a lot of drawing, and was recognized for what I could do. And I certainly used that as support for my ego and myself. I was a rather awkward girl. When I graduated from grammar school, I was the same scale that I am now, if not a little heavier, which—and I happened to be one of the tallest people in the class. Very early, I grew quickly. Now, I'm only five-feet-four-and-a-half, or something, which makes me not a large person today. And yet at that particular time in my life, I was enormous.

[00:12:30.56]

And because of the Depression, my mother made us all our clothes. And she always made us things we could grow into, in a good old saving fashion. And I had these sort of loose garments that I concealed anything I might have had, anyway. And I had a very poor image of myself. I was very—my nearsightedness was very bad early in life. It was only detected, as a matter of fact, perhaps, when I was about third grade or fourth grade, and having a terrible time learning. And a mobile unit came around to the school during the Depression and tested everybody. And a note was sent home that said—oh, I just thought of something else, too—"You will either get your child glasses immediately, or she will be sent to a sight saving school."

[00:13:23.55]

And so my parents, who had never thought to check that out, were astonished, and I got glasses. So here I was with glasses, and rather large, and not terribly attractive. And I think that—and having been given this torch to carry through life, which certainly wasn't—it was an enjoyable burden. It was something I didn't fight for a minute. I wanted it. I probably needed it. It was something that gave me all the love, affection, and attention that I seemed to need, for one reason or another. So it all worked out, as they say. Thank God [laughs] I had the skills to carry it on, too, and really enjoy it and work on it.

[00:14:11.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So it built your sense of self-respect and esteem.

[00:14:14.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, it certainly did. And it gave me a feeling of positiveness about myself and what I was doing. It was never a question in my mind that I would not be an artist, that I could not do anything I wanted to do. Now, there's a couple very important things that come to mind that I haven't talked about. One of them—I'll mention this first and then I have to go into a very important issue. Remind me in case I forget about my religion.

[00:14:45.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay.

[00:14:46.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  When I was in school, after I got my glasses, I was in about the seventh or eighth grade—seventh grade, maybe. And you must understand that in those days because—and I hate to keep bringing up the Depression, but things were not easy. And a nickel made a lot of difference. And we ate during the Depression. There were times when my family would eat oatmeal three times a day, and my mother would put raisins in it for lunch, and maybe bits of bacon or something in it for dinner. And there was no dessert, and there was no candy, and there was no nothing. It was hard times.

[00:15:22.71]

So a job came available at school. We had a sight saving room in the school at Wadsworth where I went. And there were children who were blind, or partially blind, and they came from all over the South Side. And when you were in seventh or eighth—it was probably my eighth grade job. I think I did that in my whole eighth grade year, as a matter of fact. You could get a job where you were paid, I don't know, what, but a pittance.

[00:15:50.79]

You were given your car fare by the family of the blind child. And you would leave your home at something like seven or seven-thirty in the morning, and take the streetcar. And we did have streetcars then. And you would go to the child's home. I know I traveled maybe a half an hour or 40 minutes to get to the girl's home. And I would go and I would pick her up and take her to school. And at the end of school, I would take her home. This made a very long day for me, because I was up and on that streetcar in order to go from nine [a.m] to three [p.m.]. It was a long day. And probably I made a couple dollars a week that way. But that was a lot of money.

[00:16:33.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A lot of money, yes.

[00:16:33.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  And car fare. Lots of money. And so I learned—

[00:16:38.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And responsibility.

[00:16:38.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  —and I learned—well, there's other things we can talk about, and I think maybe you'd better just—we better take the time before we get out of grammar school and do it. When my brother was born, I was ten years old. And my mother—everyone was happy enough about it, because there were two girls in the family and this was the boy, of course. And in some ways up until that time, I think I was the "son," and heir of the family. Not only was it involved with the art business, but it was also a certain kind of responsibility because I was the "boy." I was the one, you might say, who would carry on whatever it was given.

[00:17:18.06]

Okay. When my brother was born, my mother was happy enough about it, but it was a burden to her. She didn't really—later children like that, I don't think, were ever really wanted; they just happened. And, of course, people loved them. They weren't rejected. But there was a problem there. And my mother sort of said to me, "Ellen, we have a new doll for you." Now, having only had a Shirley Temple doll, mind you, this was a real—

[00:17:49.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  At ten.

[00:17:49.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  And I loved it. I mean, it was terrific. I remember that I became that baby's mama, sort of, so to speak. In other words, the sisters would take care of the baby. But it was a pleasure. And my sister and I, being 18 months apart, were not always the best of friends. But I most certainly have always adored my brother, and likewise. We've had a very close relationship, and are fond of each other.

[00:18:19.14]

And I thought that it was just kind of interesting, those several things that very early in life placed maybe an over amount of responsibility, sense of responsibility, on me, which—and my mother would give us, also, the chore of doing the grocery shopping. My mother was in no way a lazy woman. She worked very hard. But she did believe in letting people do things early and learn to do things. The one thing she would not allow us to do, however, was to cook and sew, although, she did it herself a lot. And I taught myself those things later after I got married. But just the idea that one had someone else that you must be responsible for was early lesson in life.

Now, the other thing that I think is really important is to talk about the religion, which I didn't get into at all, and probably because it's a big subject. We were all baptized Episcopalian because father and mother were both—basically being British, et cetera—Episcopalian. The Alberti family was very mixed. I could never quite figure out why they weren't Catholics, because there was always a question there. But they weren't. There was no Catholicism in the family. Aunt Frances, however, had joined the Pres—no, she had left Pres—she left the Episcopal Church and joined the Presbyterian Church. And she wanted us to be Presbyterians.

[00:20:01.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The children, or your parents, as well?

[00:20:03.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no— the children, because she took this rather sometimes heavy-handed interest in our welfare, like, dressing us, and sending us to art school, or seeing to it that we had the "better things in life," in quotes. She was never married, and she never had children, and she really wanted us to have benefits of things. And she was not mean about it. She realized that my parents were unable to do it, and she took that position. However, she demanded a little something in return. And one of those things was that we go to Presbyterian Sunday School, so we tried it out.

[00:20:41.69]

I remember distinctly going to Bible class, and all the little pictures of Jesus, and all of them. But the dichotomy exists because we had already been introduced, via my mother, to the Christian Science religion. And she had been a Christian Scientist since she was a girl. Not a terribly good one, but it had sort of been there, lingering in her background. And as a young matron, she became a rather devout Christian Scientist, and we had started out in Sunday School. Now, the Christian Scientists go through Sunday School until they're 20 years old. And as they—in classes— they sit in classes as they get older, which become more and more involved with the philosophical background of the religion.

[00:21:35.57]

And naturally, a lot of young people, as they get into high school, or even into college, at that age, begin to question the basic premise of the religion and many of the things that they preach. And so, except for that brief little flash of Presbyterianism, which didn't last long, I was brought up in the Christian Science church, and I went every Sunday, and on Thanksgiving.

[00:22:08.66]

And I think a lot of the sense of, let's say, direction or accomplishment, and overriding, let's say, obstacles, as such, that maybe have come along— that I just set them aside, ignore them, whatever—just, straight line, go on your way—comes from that basic training where one got a very great sense, also, of being in control of one's destiny. That, obviously, if the body didn't exist, it was a material thing, you know.

[00:22:52.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The soul did—

[00:22:53.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  And the—well, the soul exists, and you have control over that soul, because no matter what happens to the body, you still exist. And you still are able to continue with a basic premise and substance. And that we—and that you have more, that you are involved with more in your existence than just the materialistic world around you. That there is a soul, and there is a real being there that is paramount.

[00:23:31.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And then do you think that this later gave you a tremendous strength in your artistic direction?

[00:23:38.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know about artistic, so much as just life direction—

[00:23:41.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Just going on—

[00:23:42.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  —and making—yes, because I determined to be an artist.

[00:23:46.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:23:46.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  And part of this training—either through my mother or through the training in the church, it was: you can do anything you want to do. You simply map it out and do it. Why question the fact that you cannot do it? It's a sense of control that I think the Scientists build into their philosophy.

[00:24:08.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, was there a point at which that all fell away, any concern with religion?

[00:24:12.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the religion fell away because I had already decided by the time I'm about 17 that the religion itself was full of holes, and that I had to leave it. There was no question about that in my mind. I had started smoking cigarettes; I danced, I drank beer, I thought about boys. I mean, I thought about my body. I thought about all these things that—and I had begun, also, of course, to—I mean, there was the study of science and procreation, et cetera, all these things. And, I mean, medicine, all these things were rather contrary to what I'd been taught.

[00:24:52.71]

And I had a couple of experiences in the Art Institute later on—but mind you, I lasted through 'til I was 20 years old. I did it for my mother. I decided that that woman had done all those years for me. And the thing that really would make her feel good about me and my accomplishments would be if I could satisfy that wish, that I finish my Sunday school training. So I did. I finished. My brother and sister not only finished, but continued in the religion. And I became the black sheep, so to speak, of that time, because—

[00:25:36.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You didn't become an atheist?

[00:25:39.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no, I became nothing. I just simply dropped out, dropped back. I did not declare anything. I just simply said that I gradually became aware that I was not going to continue with my religion. And my family didn't like that at all. And for a long time, I was heavily criticized because of it. But by that time, it didn't matter.

[00:26:01.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Can we go into these classes that you took at the Institute with Watson— Dudley Watson?

[00:26:10.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Well, now, that comes in high school, so we can get a—

[00:26:12.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. We're kind of branching in there now.

[00:26:15.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. I—

[00:26:16.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  We're ready to go?

[00:26:16.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I think so. When I left Hyde Park, where I did art projects and all the rest, I cannot really recall whether I started the work when I was still on the South Side or not. But you see, the Art Institute of Chicago ran public classes for the public school—I mean, classes of public school. You had to be sent by your art teacher in school down to these classes. And in a way, it was kind of a scholarship. And you went one day a week, and you were given assignments. There was another class that you could get into if you were accepted, and that was a life drawing class. And they'd have a model, and you'd sit in Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute and draw. And then you turn your drawings in, and they would be graded. And the next week, you'd get them back, and they'd have grading, and they'd have symbols on them, which would indicate where the teacher thought you were either weak or strong, or should correct or whatever.

[00:27:24.33]

And the other class was one where you were given an assignment. And you took on the assignment over the week and then you'd take it in the next week, and the same thing would happen. You'd get an honorable mention, or you would get some kind of symbolic criticism. And I do think I started when I was still on the South Side. I had a woman teacher at Hyde Park who was very, very influential in getting me going as an artist—I mean, an adult artist—who was very encouraging, and taught me a lot about watercolor and painting, and was the first person, I do believe, I ever had who talked to me in a serious way about painting, the problems of painting, media, and got me looking at works of art. And she—

[00:28:14.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  She was a high school teacher.

[00:28:15.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  A high school teacher.

[00:28:16.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And she's the one that—

[00:28:17.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  Her name was Wilson. And she started me going to the Art Institute.

[00:28:24.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  She did. She initiated that.

[00:28:25.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:28:26.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, those courses, they were during the week, the school—

[00:28:29.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  And a woman named Brandenburg. There was another—there were two of them out there.

[00:28:32.52]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Two art teachers.

[00:28:32.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  But Wilson was more distinct, I remember. Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:28:36.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. But those classes were structured through the school week and not on a Saturday.

[00:28:42.12]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, no, these were in the afternoon. You'd come down after school on the evening. And then when my family moved to the North Side, and I had to leave Hyde Park and go to Roosevelt High School, I continued with that work. I continued it right through to the end of high school when I won a scholarship to the Art Institute.

[00:28:59.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, who were the teachers in those classes at the Institute that you can remember?

[00:29:05.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  George Beuhr.

[00:29:06.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  George Beuhr.

[00:29:07.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  George Beuhr exists today in Chicago as a known artist and great watercolorist, and a great sort of performer. He's a—his enthusiasm and stage presence was always very inspirational. I mean, along with when he would pose a problem, I'd say, for the class, we would have chalk talks, we would have slides, we would have a buildup of enthusiasm for whatever this project was we were going to turn out during the week. And it was all put on a level of encouraging and inspiring people to use their imaginations. He was very imaginative.

He had an assistant named Margaret Meyers, who was a very gentle and wonderful woman, and who, I don't know, was kind of—if you think about it, she was the one that maybe the women in the class, the young women, felt good about, and she related very well to everyone. But she was especially warm and motherly in her approach to making everyone feel good about who they were, and what they were doing, and "do more," and encouraging.

[00:30:29.21]

And Dudley Crafts Watson was really the big leader of that class. But by the time I was in my last years of high school, he had started taking tours to Europe and all, and had retired from that, and George Beuhr had taken over. And there was another guy there named—who I didn't really ever know, came on a little later—whose name I've forgotten.

But George, you see, was a very important person, also, in my art life. He was married to Margo Hoff, and they were one of the great art couples of Chicago. And they had a daughter, Mia. And when I was still in high school, they would ask me—I babysat a little bit for Mia the last year. And then I graduated from high school and began on my scholarship there, the next year. I'm trying to tie this all together. George said to me, would you like—what are you going to do this summer? And it was the summer of 1941—wait a minute, '44. And I went to Ox-Bow [Summer School of Painting at Saugatuck, Michigan –Ed.] with him for the first—I became a scholarship student at Ox-Bow. That was my first year up there. So 1944 is when I graduated from high school.

[00:31:56.24]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  '44, it was the summer. And you had been acquainted, actually, at that point from the babysitting and the classes, and with he and his wife, and were on—and he sponsored you as a scholarship student that first year.

[00:32:09.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Well, the class did—they gave out scholarships. You competed on your merits, either on your accrued merit from the years you'd been in the class, or on new work that you handed in. You had to hand in a big portfolio. They awarded a full-time scholarship. And I got it that year, to the school.

[00:32:27.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you continue for years in association with him as a good friend?

[00:32:32.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah. Well, George is just always remained my friend, as has Margo. They've very—they're kind of my parents in the art world, in a way—they and Max Kahn and Eleanor Coen, all these people—and Francis Chapin—who I met at Ox-Bow that first summer. Now, remember that there's something rather interesting here. Ox—well, there's so much that went on in high school that I would like to go back to if there's time.

[00:32:58.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, let's do that. And let's do—finish—

[00:33:01.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  I'd like to wait on the Ox-Bow thing.

[00:33:02.91]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yes, let's finish high school, and then—

[00:33:05.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Because there's other things that occurred at that time.

[00:33:07.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. Let's do those thoroughly, and do Ox-Bow a little later. It seems to me that maybe there were other students at the time that had sort of grown up in the Chicago School. Were there other students while you were taking those classes in high school that are around yet, or that you remember that influenced you?

[00:33:29.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, not really. I had a very dear friend in the class who was a good artist, a girl named Elaine Pappas [ph], who died a couple of years ago. But she was sort of—she became my sort of sister, in a way. And we would go to the classes together, and she lived over in the West Side, and came from an Italian-Greek family background. And she introduced me to a whole way of life that I had never had any connection with coming from my family.

[00:34:02.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You mean, another ethnic—

[00:34:03.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  Another ethnic—

[00:34:05.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Ethnic group, right.

[00:34:05.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  —situation, because although the Albertis existed in my family, they were definitely not a pasta-eating people.

[00:34:12.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. They'd been Anglicized by then.

[00:34:14.88]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. But I would go over in the West Side, I would go to Greek Easter, and we would have lamb dinners, and then I would go over and we would have big Italian meals. And Elaine was very, very important in introducing something kind of like—something kind of crazy. She was—she had a great love of Mexico. And she went to Mexico after she got—she went to the Art Institute with me, too. And we would—she would take me to Maxwell Street. I'd never been to Maxwell Street before, and I'd never been anywhere that was not maybe kind of Protestant, middle-class, let's say that, rather—

[00:35:00.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It wasn't because she was older, it was just that she was—

[00:35:03.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, she—

[00:35:04.19]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —these were familiar areas to her.

[00:35:05.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  She lived—That was her life. That's where she came from. She introduced me to things that I would never have thought of, like, putting orange and pink together. I mean, in other words, my color sense was beginning to come about. Now, we haven't talked, really, about painting that much yet. The paintings that came out of the earliest oil paintings were just color. Like if the sky is blue, you put blue. And if the mountain is gray, you put gray, and white for snow. And, you know, the brick red is brick red, et cetera. But color began to become a factor. Because in my last year of high school, I got to be friendly, not only with Elaine in the classes at the Art Institute—who I would only see in those classes, however. We became much better friends a little later, when we were in professional school together. But there was a girl in high school with me whose name was Lorraine Henken.

[00:36:07.86]

Now, Lorraine Henken [ph], although she was my age, was a very mature young lady, and worldly, which I was not. I was protected, and naïve, and kept within the bounds of the religion. And I was not—I was a dummy. But Lorraine was worldly, and she was going to the Art Institute at night. And she had gotten into a class with a man named Pougialis, who was a great life class and painting teacher down there. And although we were not supposed to be in the class—we were younger—I think we were 17, maybe, or whatever. We would go down to the Art Institute. And at six-thirty in the evening, we would sneak in the back door. We got some—I guess she went to Saturday School and painted, and so she had some sort of a card. And we would manage to sneak in and go into life drawing classes, and draw.

[00:37:05.08]

And I started when I was in my last year of high school to give up any connections and friendships that I'd really made as a high school person—social connections. And I became almost totally involved with this life that I was getting into with—the afternoon classes with Beuhr, and then going at night with Lorraine, and drawing from the figure. And there seemed to be no question that the most important thing in the world was to get that scholarship and get the school. And I was through with high school. It was already a past issue. I didn't do—I mean, I think I did well enough scholastically. But I do recall that when I graduated from high school, my honors came because I was an artist. And I got the scholarship to the Art Institute, and I worked on whatever we had—the schoolbook, the yearbook—

[00:38:11.81]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yearbook, right.

[00:38:14.00]

ELLEN LANYON:  —et cetera.

[00:38:15.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is there anything else about those classes, or the last year in high school that you think might be important to mention?

[00:38:25.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, only, though, that at that time is when I really, I think, became much, much more aware of the Art Institute and the paintings in it.

[00:38:33.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Themselves.

[00:38:34.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. I began to look at painting. I began to think Bonnard; I began to think a lot of things that later on really influenced painting. Because I did a kind of—I did a beginning with a certain kind of expressionist painting, let's say, that last year of high school, and color, et cetera. And then I did a kind of a reversal when I was in school. Because at that particular time, Ben Shahn was very important in American art. And a kind of hard-edge jazz, Stuart Davis—

[00:39:15.41]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Stuart Davis, right.

[00:39:17.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  —et cetera, came into focus. And those things took away, for a while anyway, from my deep love of Bonnard and his color and the way he put things together. But I know that the last year—

[00:39:32.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So you left the more expressionist type of thing and went to the more delineated form.

[00:39:39.47]

ELLEN LANYON:  Uh-huh [affirmative].

[00:39:39.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you carry that through, then, into your scholarship years at the Art Institute school?

[00:39:47.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. That's when the—that's when the hard-edged stuff became more, I think—I mean, those early cityscapes.

[00:39:54.71]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. That—you carried that then for ten years, actually, to a certain degree.

[00:39:59.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, more than that, by the time I discontinued using the egg tempera and the whole thing.

[00:40:03.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it was these people, like, Shahn, and Davis, and some of the—

[00:40:09.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's true. '44 to '54, that's just about how long it lasted.

[00:40:13.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. But it was those experiences of American artists that had drawn you in—

[00:40:20.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:40:20.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —in that direction.

[00:40:21.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  And they led me right back into Italian painting of the 12th, 13th centuries.

[00:40:32.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Technique-wise.

[00:40:33.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Because that's another story that comes in later. I mean, that whole business begins later on in art school. I just thought I'd finish off anything earlier, and I don't really—no, I was trying to recall exactly what I was doing about that time when I graduated from high school, kind of painting I would have been doing.

[00:40:56.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did your babysitting bring you into—it, obviously, brought you into the home of artists and that whole impression.

[00:41:02.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, sure.

[00:41:03.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What were your impressions of that kind of life? You expressed yourself as being naïve to a worldly world at that point? Was it a breakthrough at that point?

[00:41:17.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that Ox-Bow started all that, because it showed me a different kind of life. As I say, my parents were very protective. And they were not puritanical, but very shy. I mean, my mother didn't tell her children anything about sex, or talk about things. I mean, it was all kind of hush-hush. I remember in high school just being the dummy, the real dummy, and being laughed at for being so naïve about male and female, you know, about intercourse, or anything else. I just did not—I just didn't understand all that.

[00:41:56.76]

And as a matter of fact—oh, I know. In high school, my father came home when I was 15 years old with a permit, work permit, and said, "I have a job for you, and you'll start Saturday. And then you can work after school, and you can work all summer." And I began working for the Beardsley & Piper Company, which he was employed by. And they were builders of foundry equipment—big, great big pieces of foundry equipment that facilitated sand mold making for casting, steel casting.

[00:42:33.83]

And my job—and I got very skilled at it—was in the drafting department. And I learned in short order to do explosive machine part drawings. You know what I mean, when you start with the beginning object, and all the parts are illustrated in a kind of explosive fashion, and they're all numbered. And then over here, there's a little description so that you can tell which part you need to replace or repair.

[00:43:01.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  [Inaudible] drafting skills [inaudible] that sort of thing.

[00:43:04.77]

ELLEN LANYON:  So I became very, very—yeah. I learned to use ruling pens and do very fine pen and pencil work.

[00:43:10.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This was at 15.

[00:43:11.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  Hard-edge, yeah. And in those drafting rooms is when I learned about sex [they laugh] because, I mean, it is the truth. These guys, these draftsmen, would tell jokes. And one day the lightbulb went on. I said, "oh," to myself, which is not exactly the best way for people to learn things. But remember, there's no sex education in schools. If your peer group wouldn't tell you, and I obviously didn't have very sophisticated peer group friends, and your parents deny you the knowledge, how are you going to find out? So it was in the drafting room. And—

[00:43:56.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did one of these fellows play uncle to you or—

[00:43:58.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no. Nobody ever said anything directly to me. It was just through—

[00:44:03.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Inference.

[00:44:03.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  They would all be telling great stories and jokes and great descriptive passages about experiences they'd had. [They laugh.] So here's this little girl sitting there working away. Anyway—

[00:44:22.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were there any more—at this point, obviously, you were in downtown Chicago, and amongst the high rises, and these impressions, the business world of Chicago—

[00:44:37.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Sure.

[00:44:38.48]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  All of this, it almost seems like a natural that might have been at the point where these influences began to bear on you—the architecture in the city, the university life. Or what else of that?

[00:44:55.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, for instance, Frances Lanyon worked in the Rookery Building.

[00:45:02.04]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Did she take you there as a child?

[00:45:03.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah, every Saturday we'd go down and—this is when I'm a little older—maybe ten, twelve, thirteen. Well, I don't know, in the earlier days, too, we would go and spend Saturday at the Rookery, or Saturday morning, and then we would go shopping with Aunt Frances. And it wasn't every Saturday, but it was—she'd take us down fairly regularly. Now, a couple of things occur to me. One thing was, we would travel from Englewood to the Loop on a train—not an Elevated. We could have. But we would go over and we would take the Illinois Central, or—it wouldn't be the Illinois Central. It was some commuter train that would come through Englewood Station with a big steam locomotive. And so—

[00:45:51.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Took you into the yards.

[00:45:52.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  And we would come into the station when we had many more stations here in town. I think we would come into the old La Salle Street or Grand Cen—I don't know. But we'd come into town on this locomotive. It was a grand experience to wait for the big steamer to come into the station and hop aboard. And I have loved railroads, and I travel trains as much as I can, ever since. And we would go down and spend the morning at the Rookery Building. And the stenographers who were all in the employ of my aunt, or under her guidance, anyway, would teach us how to make images with a typewriter. You do so many of this, and then you do so many of that and you make soldiers, lines of little soldiers, and they make little things with the typewriter.

And we would run around the Rookery. I loved the Rookery, always have. In those days, the second story there was all glass, because that's where the Stock and Bond Company was. It was on the second floor of the Rookery. And it was all huge plate glass windows that you could look in and see all these women sitting at their desks all lined up. I mean, it was a grand—just grand. Before that, she'd been in the Monadnock Building, or they moved to—I can't remember which way. But, yes, we spent a lot of time around La Salle Street and in the great old Sullivan buildings.

[00:47:19.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So there was an impression of that whole architectural setting.

[00:47:26.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And you see, Englewood also had buildings like this. Let's say, houses, Victorian, two- and three-story houses or buildings with cornices and curved top windows, and that were maybe built in the 1860s to '70s, just prior to the fire, after the fire. And I know a lot of early work was done, paintings of streets, architectural. In fact, I did an awful lot of building cityscapes. My first paintings were all cityscapes. And many times, people-less situations because I was interested—

[00:48:12.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In the architecture.

[00:48:13.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. I was, obviously, involved and I lived next to the El. And, I mean, the Elevated had a lot to do with my life and—

[00:48:20.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you not put figures in that work because you intended not to put them in, or—

[00:48:27.03]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know. I have a sort of an interest in why figures have appeared—not appeared and appeared, disappeared and reappeared, in my work throughout the years. And it is a kind of interesting subject, because once left out, is adamantly left out for a while. And then once begun, they become almost the total subject. And it's either here or not. Now, there are little figures in some of these early things, but they were thrown in almost as incidentals.

[00:49:02.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Casually.

[00:49:03.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Casually, or with a sense of art history where you were—you had some feeling about early painting, and the way the figure was used to establish certain foreground, or middle ground relationships.

[00:49:19.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You know, we breezed over World War II.

[00:49:25.00]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:49:26.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That didn't have a—or did it have any dramatic effect?

[00:49:32.05]

ELLEN LANYON:  Not—no, not a lot.

[00:49:33.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Not like the Depression, which you seem to have lived with for a long time.

[00:49:35.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no, the Depression was very, very important in feelings and development. But World War II, you see, there were no uncles in the war. There were no—there was not a father in the war. There were no brothers in the war. No one in my family went to war or was killed. I had only a couple of classmates who went. I had a couple of high school boyfriends who went into the service, but did not see action enough to cause any alarm or distress. I corresponded with a couple of boyfriends who were in the Navy and that in the South Pacific a lot.

[00:50:19.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And the end of the war was no dramatic—

[00:50:22.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I tell you—well, that's Ox-Bow, and that's when we're going to get to Ox-Bow. The end of the war came at Ox-Bow, and it was very—I remember it distinctly, the whole situation. The beginning of the war, I do remember because one of the things that—of course, a lot of people of my age will recall, and my parents' age—is that in 1941, in the summer, when we went to California and had really a wonderful trip out there. And I must say, I didn't say enough maybe about my impressions, because my impulse to paint the landscape—I was so impressed by mountains. I will never forget seeing my first mountain. You must remember, I had never been in the country.

[00:51:07.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You had not spent—yes.

[00:51:08.65]

ELLEN LANYON:  I hadn't gone to Ox-Bow yet. Ox-Bow was my first summer in the country ever. And so to go out and see a mountain, or see a desert, or see a forest, to go to Sequoia—

[00:51:20.17]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Unreal, almost.

[00:51:20.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  —to see Yosemite. They were Fantasia. As a matter of fact, I went to Grauman's Chinese Theater and saw the debut—I mean, not the opening night, but that is when Fantasia opened at Grauman's, and we had the stereophonic sound—the first time that they had ever experimented with sound that would come from all over the theater and envelop you with music and visuals all at the same time. And Hollywood and the facades, I mean, everything to me was like a huge stage set. It was all—

[00:51:59.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you visit 20th Century Fox, or any of those studios?

[00:52:03.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think we went to a studio, but I remember that my aunt would drive us around Los Angeles. And there were just movie stars all over, and everybody was in a convertible, and everybody had a fox fur, and everybody had a—and I was impressed by all that, the theatrics of it. And so I came back to Chicago. And the summer was over, and I went into high school. I mean, this big new experience, high school. And we get to December the 7th, and my parents, and my sister and I, and brother were all in an automobile on Lake Shore Drive. Because in Chicago—oh, that's something I want to remind you. In Chicago, the big thing to do is get in the car and take a ride on Sunday.

[00:52:54.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Taking a drive on Sunday.

[00:52:55.65]

ELLEN LANYON:  Take a drive on Sunday. There was a large part of our lives. And the radio was on in the car, and this is our brand-new car. And we have just pulled out of the Depression, and we were given—we could eat ice cream again, and we could go places and do things. And Pearl Harbor was announced on the radio. Well, my parents, I can't imagine how they must have felt, but it must have been pretty bad. And millions of people along with them who had barely taken a deep breath, and they were into it again. And next day in school in the auditorium, we all sat there and listened to the President declare war. And it was just—it was a very, very heavy experience. One kid I knew from high school was killed, and it was not anybody close to me. So I sort of skimmed over it. You see, by the time I was in the Art Institute, I went in during wartime.

[00:53:55.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:53:57.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  And then by—

[00:53:58.91]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were there mostly women in the classes at the Institute at that time—

[00:54:03.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:54:04.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —because the men, young men, were at war?

[00:54:07.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:54:07.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did that set a flavor, or a tone of the environment in the school?

[00:54:16.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  Perhaps it did. Perhaps. But you know—yes, I suppose so. But you see, by my third year, and even by my second year, the men were starting to come back. Because my second year at Ox-Bow is when, I guess, we had V-J Day.

[00:54:36.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. Well, we're pretty much to a point now where we could really talk in depth about your years at the Art Institute school.

[00:54:45.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  Okay. Can I add one thing that I remember—

[00:54:47.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:54:47.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  —that is very important later on, in imagery.

[00:54:51.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay, good.

[00:54:52.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  The house—because later on when we get down to talking about images and things that I think are rather important in my work, that you will find that there are subjects that appear and reappear and reappear. And then you can go back and you can almost find a core, a reason, a beginning for each one of these things—a source, resource. Now, when we were kids, if we were not out in the car with our mother and father on a Sunday afternoon, my Aunt Frances had a friend named Mabel Turner. And we called her Aunt Mabel. She was also a spinster, and a woman who worked for the Scranton Lace Company in a building that was also an architectural beauty downtown—it was torn down—that I used to spend a lot of time in, and was very impressed with the whole presence and—

[00:55:51.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Setting.

[00:55:51.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. And the lace, and all this kind of texture and fabric that she worked with. On Sunday afternoons, she had an old Ford—or a new Ford. And they would take us for a ride north on Sheridan Road out of Chicago. If you go on Sheridan Road far enough, you come to Ravinia, or Highland Park, or Lake Bluff. But you can travel the whole way. You went the whole way, and all along the way there are houses. First, there were great big, old wonderful brick Midwestern semi-bungalow mansions along Sheridan Road in Chicago, which are now mostly gone and replaced by high-rises. And then as you get up in the suburbs, you would go through all the various areas where new and old houses were built. And our sport was to study and look at the houses, and then wait for dusk to come to drive back. We'd have a chocolate soda.

[00:56:53.47]

And then we would drive back, and we would look in all the windows. And look—and hope that everybody's lights were on so we could see how people lived. And it was an innocent—there was a curiosity. It was kind of an innocent curiosity just because we liked—it was continually looking through House and Garden, or I don't know, to see how different people lived, and how they decorated and what they did with things. And I know the conversation was always very lively. And it had to do not only with—it wasn't just a housewives' view, either. Because remember, we were dealing with two women that were in business and had a very good eye, and went off on trips to Europe, and did all these wonderful things. And this was like a little expedition that you'd go on. It was maybe like as important to them as if they'd take a tour and go to Venice, and look at the palaces in Venice.

[00:57:53.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it was looking at the way the upper-class lived.

[00:57:58.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes.

[00:58:00.03]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was sort of like going down to—

[00:58:04.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  Or something you couldn't quite have, or—

[00:58:04.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —a yacht club and looking in or—

[00:58:06.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  —achieve, it was up there. But it was like a palace in Venice in a way, for that reason. Dream city.

[00:58:13.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. And that was part of what was Sunday excursions and to some extent, probably fulfilling dreams, or living part of a fantasy.

[00:58:32.12]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:58:32.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How does that relate to the imagery of the house, and windows, and things that do reappear and reappear in your painting?

[00:58:44.00]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think it has a lot to do with it. And it—for one thing, the houses along Sheridan Road were almost premeditatedly used in a certain point, because I found a book, portraits, of all these old houses, and who lived in them, and giving the address and all. And it was after a time when they were starting to be torn down and replaced by ugliness. And I started using those houses in various drawings, paintings, etchings, and whatever. And then—

[00:59:20.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But was it—but was it something about the house being a single entity, rather than an apartment building, which you had lived in for—

[00:59:29.81]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I think more than that. At least if—maybe I haven't thought it out thoroughly enough. It had to do with the time. It had to do with establishing some kind of ongoing life for these things that they had been denied. It had to do with—

[00:59:52.17]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I mean, their demolition denied them.

[00:59:53.94]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Well, yeah.

[00:59:55.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Something lost.

[00:59:56.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. Giving them—I can't think of the word, that's the trouble. I'm stumbling a little over words. But in other words, it's the same thing that we must get involved in when we talk about the family portraits later.

[01:00:12.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It's not reincarnating something.

[01:00:14.48]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, it's—

[01:00:17.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Giving a new life?

[01:00:18.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, it's not a new life. It's making sure that these things are recorded and documented so that they will always live somewhere, that they will not disappear. Because in a way—see, it's tied up with my bringing up as a Christian Scientist, and my involvement with the undertakers, and the family, which I didn't even get into. But I—

[01:00:42.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  We'll have to.

[01:00:43.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  We'll have to, because such deep impressions, almost a dichotomy in my youth, between the people that were undertakers and that whole practice, and profession. And then my religious bringing up of the essence of the Christian Science is that you do not live, die, et cetera, because you don't exist as a materialistic thing.

[01:01:09.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[01:01:09.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  You are a presence, or a soul, but—you don't—And these buildings, which were certainly materialistic, but they had a presence. They had a soul that didn't just die and disappear because they were torn down and replaced. And some—I felt some kind of responsibility to memorialize these things, or to give them some kind of ongoing existence that would live in my work, through my work.

[01:01:46.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So they're not necessarily like memories. They're really are like recreating them, the image of a monument, or the image of something that was very important to you.

[01:01:57.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And it wasn't the house that it was a block off Sheridan Road; it was the ones that I actually looked at. I mean, it wasn't a matter of recording history, architectural history in the Midwest, or something. I'm not interested in that.

[01:02:10.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  No.

[01:02:10.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  It had to be things that—

[01:02:11.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That's why—

[01:02:12.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  —I was really involved with.

[01:02:13.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Embraced with memory, your memory of those experiences—

[01:02:17.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  Sure.

[01:02:18.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —from those drives. But they weren't the houses, although, you do paint specific houses from your own family. They weren't the houses of your own neighborhood.

[01:02:31.62]

ELLEN LANYON:  No.

[01:02:32.79]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So it's part of the—to a certain degree, it's part of the—

[01:02:35.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  The fantasy.

[01:02:35.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —fantasy.

[01:02:36.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[01:02:39.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you were introduced by these two women, your aunt, and a friend of hers.

[01:02:43.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[01:02:45.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did that go on for several years, those Sunday drives of that—

[01:02:49.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, for a long time. We did that for a long, long, long time. It brings to mind another thing, too, that I should probably say, was I was a great reader. I read through the Woodlawn Public Library. I literally read every book in the juvenile section until there just were no more new books to read. And my—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9959_m]

[00:00:02.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  Most of those books dealt with adventure stories. Usually it was a heroine who was living in a Middle Eastern or Eastern country, who was involved in some kind of escapade. And there was always a lot of descriptive language about that country, and about the ways of the people, and their costume, and their dress, and their rituals. And I know that I remember being totally immersed and fascinated by all the things in the world that I didn't know, and wanted to find out about. And partly due, perhaps, to having had some relatives who gave me a sense that there was something beyond the limitations of the city that I was in, or the kind of education I'd had.

[00:00:58.74]

I was public-school educated, which means that it was rather minimal. We did not do that much reading in school. I did have one English teacher, though, who was not very much interested in teaching grammar. And therefore, she taught literature. And that resulted in two things: one, that I am at a loss when it comes to basic grammatical technique, and always had difficulty learning languages because of that, but that she did instill this great love of reading and investigation.

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was this when you were a junior in high school?

[00:01:36.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, this was still grammar school. Now watch. We're getting—and this is still grammar school. And then in high school, it went on by trying to be involved in classes where a good deal of reading would take place, and starting to read the Great Books and all. But there came an end to it, because I had to take certain other courses in high school. And I was becoming ever and ever more involved in the visual fantasies, or the visual wonder world that I could create. And I was working a lot. And I had a lot of homework. And I had a heavy social life for a few years there, in high school. So reading really was sort of abandoned for a while. And it was strange, because I had been such a totally involved reader. It was almost an escape from the world that I was living in, which was full of a certain kind of difficulty at that particular time. I don't go into all the problems that the families were having, but I indicated before, a little bit. And there was quite a bit of inter-family—

[00:02:43.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Feuding?

[00:02:43.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Feuding. Real feuding. And people didn't talk to each other for a while. And I remember that there was—in one case, there was a diamond stickpin that became the issue, where sisters would not speak to each other for a year, and cousins would not speak to each other for a year. And I don't know who ever got the diamond stickpin—

[00:03:02.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This was your mother's family?

[00:03:03.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  This was in the Alberti clan. But then the Lanyons would pick their fights. And there were always problems. And there was one Lanyon sister, my father's sister, Esther, who was not well, and who eventually had to be put into a mental institution. And there was a lot of controversy about keeping her at home and taking care of her. So all of these things were kind of a way for a young person to escape into a wonderland. Then I get into the Art Institute and I must say—or high school, and then the Art Institute—and I think I was able to create my own new life. I think at this point, we're really ready to move into the Art Institute situation. Don't you think so?

[00:03:50.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well—

[00:03:50.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think we've covered the later years, in the high school.

[00:03:54.19]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, I just want to go back and—did your father read to you? Was there any escape in the type of reading that he did to you, or your parents, when you were young? Or was reading just something that you came to in grammar school, and then later in high school, sort of fulfilled at a point when you needed to escape from family problems—and a fantasy, or an escape element?

[00:04:19.54]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that probably—we were read to quite a bit, because I had books, and these—oh, yes, important. There are books in my early childhood that I think had a very great formal influence on later works. We had [Robert Louis –Ed] Stevenson poetry, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. And Maxfield Parrish became my very favorite Illustrator, years and years and years ago, when I was a little kid. I read almost all the Oz books. And the Oz books were given to us every year for Christmas. If we didn't have dolls, and we didn't have other kinds of toys, we always had books. And there were lots of books in the family that—you know, on the shelf, that were available to us. Even though we were young, we had that sense of there being—

[00:05:11.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —in the environment—

[00:05:12.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  —a written word around. Yeah. And I remember especially—my sister and I had scarlet fever—oh, when I was perhaps in first grade or second grade, somewhere early in the game. And we were read all the many volumes that exist of Elsie Dinsmore. And Elsie Dinsmore was just a very good girl. And she—somehow, I think her mother was gone somewhere. And her father was there as the hero. And it was—oh, it was a great and wonderful story of this good, good girl, who had all these adventures. And no matter what happened to her, she was just good. And—

[00:05:55.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You were read—

[00:05:55.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  —at the same time, of course, everybody was involved with Little Orphan Annie and the—

[00:06:00.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Winnie the Pooh?

[00:06:01.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Winnie the Pooh never came into my life. But I'll tell you, Wind in the Willows was a big issue. And I think Wind in the Willows, a lot of my magic paintings in the '70s, would certainly—early, around 1970—were kind of silently dedicated to Wind in the Willows. That was a very important story, as was Oz.

[00:06:29.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you did go into the Art School at the Institute, you sort of left reading for a while and gave yourself to this new visual area?

[00:06:42.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  I didn't do—yeah, I didn't have time to read. I had to go to day school and then go to night school. You had to take your studio classes all day. And then I went to the Art Institute in the evenings, downtown division—and I mean University of Chicago—I'm sorry—in the evenings, downtown division, and did my academic work. And this went on for a couple of years until I took a break. And then I had to clear up all my academics at the end in a hurry, and it was—But I took several courses in Great Books during that time. But I did have other required classes that I had to take. And I read a lot of art history. You know, it sort of had to be replaced. I just simply didn't have the time.

[00:07:23.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, then when you were in school, your first contact and influences there, amongst students and instructors, preferably instructors, first—what were their influences or impressions?

[00:07:41.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I started out going to the Art Institute by first having a summer at Ox-Bow. And I'll talk about it a little bit here, only because it leads into school there. Max Kahn taught at Ox-Bow, and he taught lithography at the Art Institute. George Buehr did not teach in the day school at the Art Institute, but there were people around Ox-Bow that summer who did. So it was a way of moving into art school. And they, of course, had a foundations program that I immediately became a part of, which amounted to life drawing and a kind of beginning still-life painting.

And I had a very important instructor, Edgar Rupprecht, at that time. And then we had a little design and a little art history, beginning of the survey. Edgar Rupprecht was very important because he introduced a new concept. Heretofore, I had dealt with my world as best I could, spatially, and not really thinking about any of the formal problems or even the practical problems of placement, and space, and movement of objects in the picture plane space, et cetera. But Rupprecht had a system of dealing with still life whereby he would make us make a floor plan of the still life and understand where these objects sat in relationship to each other. And therefore, when we would paint the still life, it was imposed on us that we put these things in their proper place, and that they moved around and behind and next to and then—it was almost a layered situation.

[00:09:41.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was this easier for you than other students because of the drafting—

[00:09:45.00]

ELLEN LANYON:  Maybe.

[00:09:45.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —or ability to articulate—

[00:09:47.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Maybe. I know that I found it fascinating and quite easy. And I did very well.

[00:09:50.85]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was there involved in that course, or was it might have been other courses, where you dealt with perspective, which was—

[00:09:57.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, we went out and drew. Actually, in those days, perspective was taught by taking the class out in the hall and—the Art Institute had this enormous central hall, called Blackstone Hall, that was full of plaster reproductions of Renaissance architectural—

[00:10:16.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  Classical Greek?

[00:10:17.04]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, mostly European Renaissance architecture, massive cathedral doorways, the "Gattamelata," and the "Colleoni" in plaster, for instance, in life size. Not so much classical, but a lot of Gothic. And of course, the whole place was immense. And the Institute itself had its architectural, you know—

[00:10:44.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Division.

[00:10:44.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  —almost unlimited spatial situations. So we would go out and draw these and practice our knowledge of perspective.

[00:10:57.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was the—the class taught from—with an academic tradition, the academy tradition, at that point?

[00:11:06.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Not really, because you see, Rupprecht had actually been a student in Germany, and had studied with Hans Hofmann, and involved himself in a kind of Synthetic Cubist, Americanized, abstract painting— semi-abstract painting. And he was—but he was a great advocate of casein, which I had also been introduced to at Ox-Bow. Because at Ox-Bow, remember, we dealt with traditional landscape painting, watercolor, lithography, and outdoor casein or oil painting, and dealt with nature and the human figure.

[00:11:49.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But still within a certain tradition of these—

[00:11:52.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  But Fauve; more or less within the Fauve tradition, which was very strong in Chicago at that time, amongst most of these people. I'd say Buehr was an American Fauve, Chapin, all those people. And color wise, I suppose—well, color varied considerably. Max Kahn, on the other hand, was a heavier-handed expressionist, grayer color—blues, grays, browns. So I think that in a way, I had many, many new and exciting kinds of sources to draw from. It was just a matter of how I was going to put this all together for myself.

[00:12:27.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So different instructors had different approaches?

[00:12:29.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:12:30.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And so much was coming to you all at once.

[00:12:32.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:12:33.33]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now was Ox-Bow the point at which you were first introduced to printmaking?

[00:12:36.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Lithography.

[00:12:38.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you pick that up when you went back to take your first courses at the Institute?

[00:12:43.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think I waited a bit to do litho. I think maybe into my second year. I don't think I was allowed, my first year, to take printmaking, as a matter of fact. Now the other thing, though, I remember, was we had to take design. And design, in my first year and subsequent years, dealt with two-dimensional problems in basic design. And a few years later, in that class, I got into designing and working with children's books.

[00:13:13.15]

But I think one of the things that I have to think about, in relationship to the Art Institute, was why it was I moved from this beginning landscape figure-painting at Ox-Bow into my first-year studies, where Rupprecht really was a fine teacher and made an impression on me—and we dealt with space, and objects in space—and where I moved very quickly, in my second and third year, into a two-dimensional, flat concept—

[00:13:50.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Ben Shahn, and [Stuart –Ed.] Davis.

[00:13:51.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  —that was developed into the egg-tempera paintings that I did, and exhibited, and won prizes with and continued to paint for about ten years.

[00:13:59.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you see exhibitions at that time, of any artists that had impact?

[00:14:04.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, you see, Margo Hoff, George Buehr's wife, was involved with a two-dimensional—not completely, but the same kind of stylistic thing that Shahn was working with, taking anything— the human figure, architectural forms, anything— and making a flat, patterned, colorful—

[00:14:27.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So she was an influence?

[00:14:29.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  And Shahn was always remarkable, because Shahn took photographs. And from his photographs, he did his paintings. But they were absolutely non-photographic. It was always that almost total translation. Margo did all kinds of figurative things. And she traveled a lot, and did very—oh, lots of exotic and colorful works, at that time, based a lot on figures and interiors, et cetera. And another person that influenced me at that time but was not involved with the art school—although you see in Chicago, there were a whole group of artists—and Franz Schulze, when he talks about me in the fantasy book, a fantastic, realist, image—Fantastic—

[00:15:13.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Fantastic Images—

[00:15:14.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  —book—relates me to Kahn and Chapin and those early people. And it is because even when I was 18 years old, I was already involved in some strange way of being a professional. I mean, I was taken into their group and treated like an equal, and encouraged. There's a woman in this town named Gertrude Abercrombie, who—people rarely see her—or her work, or even know of her anymore. But she did very, very strange and surreal small landscapes—I mean, pardon me, interiors—but always a window with a little landscape or furniture, and a cat, or sometimes a self-portrait or a mirrored image or something. Very strange, little, simplistic—

[00:16:00.95]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, did you see her painting at this time?

[00:16:02.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah.

[00:16:03.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Or did you know her?

[00:16:04.06]

ELLEN LANYON:  I didn't know her. But I certainly saw her works. And I was always very, very taken with them. Now, I did not know Magritte at the time. She was my Magritte, you might say, at that period. And I think what happened was, that the second summer after the first year of school—and in that year of school, I had many—I made lots of friends. But remember the war was still on. And the few young men that were around were people who were either somehow visiting, or they had been wounded and released, or they were conscientious—well, we didn't really have conscientious objectors—or they were medical—for one medical reason or another, they were not in the service. And I became friendly with a very interesting and hard-working group, who in our second year, got into a class where we started to experiment with techniques.

Now, the second summer at Ox-Bow was not too much different from the first. It just more or less strengthened my attitude about being an artist. It strengthened my attitudes about freeing myself from a lot of the—not that there was a tremendous change or anything. But I became a freer person, and more open, and more able to accept all kinds of ideas and move within the artistic milieu, you might say.

[00:17:44.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Who taught that class of techniques? Was it Miss Van?

[00:17:47.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  Miss Van Pappelendam. Right. And a small group of us—

[00:17:52.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Pap—well, how do you pronounce her name?

[00:17:54.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Pappelendam. Pappelendam. She taught the second-year painting class—or beginning painting. And a group of us who were in there, including names like John Davis, who's now in South America, or John Tulour [ph], who's a printmaker in Kansas, or—I think Whitney was in that class for a while, Whitney Halstead—a few other people were registered for Still Life Painting.

[00:18:27.16]

However, somehow we got interested in the processes and the techniques described by Cennino Cennini in his treatises. He was a 13th century artist of sorts, but really more than that, a documenter of the techniques of the period. And we got his books, and we performed all the experiments. We made the formulas, and we made the paint, and we made the grounds. We made the gesso, we ground the pigments, we broke the eggs. We made egg-tempera paintings, et cetera. Ms. Van had petitioned to the school to allow her to start this class, and they had refused. The school didn't feel that a class of techniques was really all that necessary. She wanted to work with egg tempera, leaf laying, encaustic, silverpoint drawings, et cetera.

[00:19:24.28]

Well, the first year went by. And the way we got around it was, she found a room that wasn't being used at certain times, and she would almost as much as lock us in the room. And we would carry on our work, making up our potions, and cooking away, and doing all this—a small group of us. And no one really knew the difference. And then at the end of that year, we entered the Chicago show with some of the paintings. And I won my first prize. That was the "Utopia" painting.

[00:19:56.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That was in 1946?

[00:19:58.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. And several other of the people exhibited. And a man came from New York City, who was renowned as a Primitive arts dealer, Julius Carlebach, and discovered us, and wanted to give us a show in New York. And the Dean of the School at that time was Hubert Ropp. And he absolutely flipped over three times, and opened the class [laughs] the next year. It became a substantial class.

[00:20:26.35]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This is probably some of the initial controversy that evolved, that led to Momentum between the student and the faculty?

[00:20:35.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no, no. No, that had nothing to do with Momentum.

[00:20:37.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It didn't?

[00:20:38.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  No.

[00:20:38.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That happened later?

[00:20:39.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, that was the museum and the students. This was strictly inner school. And this was strictly convincing the administration that the student really had a need for certain kinds of things. And we demonstrated it. And we were successful. Luckily, we were successful.

[00:21:01.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But the fact that you had won awards in the show—and didn't this at all disturb some of the established artists at the time?

[00:21:11.95]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that might have started it. But it was really the next year that it started.

[00:21:15.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Really?

[00:21:15.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. At that point—

[00:21:17.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I can imagine it to be, some of the initial—

[00:21:19.42]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it was just the beginnings of that rumble. But that got better.

[00:21:23.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That was '46?

[00:21:24.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Momentum wasn't a couple of years later, yeah.

[00:21:26.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  '46 and then '48. It's not too far off until the—so you actually gravitated to egg tempera and the use of metal leaf out of these technique classes. Did any of the other students in those classes carry them as far as you did, or work with them for as long? You've worked at that time for almost ten years.

[00:21:50.47]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think they did. Philip Dedrick, who teaches at Rockford College, was one of the group. And he still works in egg tempera. I don't know that he's ever—well, he works in a kind of oil egg. He'd work in emulsions. He was a great one for experimenting with things like [inaudible] and that, really obsolete methods. But most of the other people, I'd have to say no. Vera Berdich was part of that class—or at least part of our group. And she has become very well-known etcher, dedicated to that technique. And so she doesn't really paint that much. She does a few things now and then. But I guess I was the one who continued with egg tempera the longest. Roland Ginzel—my husband—also worked at it, because I met him in that class, actually, at the Art Institute, in '47. But—

[00:22:49.03]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That was the formalized class that happened the next year.

[00:22:51.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Then we were given a space on the up—the Art Institute has this fourth floor that no one really knows about. It used to be—and I'm not sure if it still exists—if you would walk around the galleries there, on the second floor, there would be a stairway leading up to nowhere. But actually, it led to a second floor. It was a long room that ran around a clerestory. And then there was still another floor above that, the attic, you might say, of the Art Institute. And we were given a space up there, where we carried on our experiments.

[00:23:31.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did a show come out of that work after you'd won those prizes?

[00:23:34.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well in this town, we had a show at the Esquire Theater, which in those days, was a place to show. A lot of people had exhibitions there. But then Julius Carlebach did give us a show in New York. And after that time, the group didn't—well, we had a few little shows here and there. But it wasn't anything—no, we'd never had a show in the Art Institute, though.

[00:23:59.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What about the subject matter—your subject matter, and the painting at that time? It was the cityscape, still?

[00:24:05.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well now, the other thing that you must know is that at the same time, Kathleen Blackshear is introducing me to Romanesque Gothic painting. She's introducing me to 12th- and 13th-century Italian painting, the Sienese School and the Tuscan School—

[00:24:28.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In your art history?

[00:24:29.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  In art history. And being in a school in a museum makes a huge difference. Lunch hours were spent in the galleries. I can't think of a day that I didn't visit the galleries upstairs when I was at school. And I would spend a lot of time in the rooms that were devoted to the early masters. And so I picked up—and then my grandfather, remember, had all this gilding equipment. And my mother had actually helped him to gild, and had done it herself. And by reading instructions and using the equipment that he left me, I got into gilding and doing egg temperas, and taught that, in turn, to my colleagues. [Dog barking.] But I'm just going to talk about the subject matter.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:25:29.23]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, in talking about your subject matter, how does the painting, "Utopia," for example, relate to it?

[00:25:39.06]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I've been trying to recall whether or not Utopia would have been the very first example—and I do believe it was the first complete example—of a new kind of expression style that had developed out of, probably—not—I mean, probably—looking at paintings in the museum, and being involved with the egg-tempera technique and the traditions, et cetera. And one thing seemed to influence the other. It was as if the medium almost dictated a kind of imagery to me so that I was totally involved in an interpretation of that sort of thing. And as soon as—in a way, after "Utopia" had won a prize, and I had done more than one of these things—I mean, more than one painting in this manner— I began to really evolve all kinds of ideas, and work with a kind of turned-up perspective, distortion, and a kind of Primitivism.

[00:26:51.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, did it push you in the direction of a specific style?

[00:26:54.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I think I established a very distinctive self style that was unique to myself. And it certainly had a lot to do with small, prismatic color that you can achieve with egg tempera, and beautiful transparencies, and brilliance, and metal-leaf laying, and embossing on the panel. All these things emulated the early Christian work.

[00:27:19.98]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You called it, that work, didn't you, "sophisticated primitivism." What did you—

[00:27:25.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, somebody else called it that. But actually, it was picked up because the implication was that based on the primitive concepts of the early Italians, myself being sophisticated and having exhibited—

[00:27:44.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Giotto? Or these are the kinds, right?

[00:27:46.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Of course. And I had demonstrated an ability, of course, to draw and paint before that time. Certainly in my first year in at Ox-Bow and all, I could handle figure drawing and landscape, et cetera—and then suddenly to turn and make a very stylized interpretation, was establishing myself in a style. Now in the '40s, I think that it was very current and important in contemporary American painting that one develop an individual style. And it became your trademark.

[00:28:23.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was this where Shahn and Stuart Davis affected the influence or—

[00:28:31.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, and the Synthetic Cubism—which we were very much involved in—certain kinds of primitive imagery that came out of working a lot at the Field Museum. You know, Ms. Kathleen Blackshear taught art through the—taught with the Art Through the Ages textbook that she had re-edited for Helen Gardner. And part of the system of teaching art history at the Art Institute, for artists, designed for artists, was that we were detailed to go up into the galleries and take a painting and then work it out, study it, and interpret it in various ways. We would have to diagram the linear quality. We would have to work with the texture, composition, curvilinear composition, and geometric composition, color, space, et cetera.

[00:29:34.80]

And through these exercises, I think it—it led me, anyway, into developing a certain kind of style. I latched on to things that I was more interested in, and things that I felt a certain ambience with, and where I could develop my environment, which was the city, and the Elevated, and the street, et cetera, into something that would have—at least into a meaningful way of working that also went along with the medium.

[00:30:07.29]

And another part of the art history projects, in a class that Blackshear also ran, was called Composition Criticism, in which she would give us problems to work out. And the problems were always challenges. In a way, it followed a very surreal—or Dada line, where one would have to work with certain kinds of imagery, or juxtaposition, or collage, or fantasy imagery. We were encouraged that way. And there was a heavy influence, I think, on the use of Surrealist ideas, Dada ideas.

[00:31:01.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Can you give us a specific example of that kind of encouragement in a work project? Can you remember specifically, an assignment that—

[00:31:14.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I'll tell you. I had a lot of different things that I did. And no, I can't, because I could remember many, but it's all a little hazy, to tell you the truth. But I do remember one thing that was very important to me, somehow. And I'm not sure why, because I didn't use any of the elements of this 'til much, much later. I know I did many collages. I know that I struggled in that class because I found it difficult, at that time, anyway, to intellectualize all of the different projects. To pull myself, somehow, out of art history, and create something that was an individual expression, was a great problem for me.

[00:32:05.04]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it was great—

[00:32:05.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  But I worked with it. Yeah.

[00:32:07.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it was a great pride for you then, to come to this style. And then getting the Armstrong Award in the Chicago and Vicinity Show in '46 reinforced it.

[00:32:18.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And I think what really happened was the fantasy that came about in these new cityscapes evolved out of this challenge and struggle to cope with the problem of creating a private world for myself. And that it did become. And for the next ten years, it was a very private world that I dealt with, seeing things in a certain way, distorted, based on certain forms that I had found in history that delighted me. And I used it in my own work, you see. And the encouragement that came from the Comp Crit class was what I think soundly established this one.

[00:33:07.72]

In other words, if I had been—at that time, in most art schools, the line was very academic. People were painting a figure—I mean, in regular classes that I had. Mind you, Kathleen Blackshear and Van Pappelendam were the only ones, both of them being women, who encouraged this kind of experimentation in fantasy investigation, in Surreal and Dada investigation. Whereas, in all the other classes I had, there was a very heavy-handedness that came with the teaching of figure drawing, figure painting in oils, Dada, expressionism, impasto, paint quality, surface, et cetera, which was something that I rejected and worked away from, and turned my back on at that time. Later on, in 1960, we'll talk about how I had to return and reteach myself all these things that I absolutely rejected when I was in school.

[00:34:09.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But in that way, and in that specific manner, when you look back at this period, do you think that you would consider it counterproductive to have gone so specifically in the direction of this style, and this—

[00:34:24.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I don't, because I think that what it really did was, it allowed me to establish a very sound territory. I roped off a territory for myself, that I had worked to achieve cerebrally, and that I had an investment in, and that I believed in. And it became the lifelong strain of my work.

[00:34:53.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it was well-received too.

[00:34:55.48]

ELLEN LANYON:  And it was well received, right. Publicly and privately both. And so the other thing that I was going to say was that one other project that we would have in art history would be to do a contemporary work in the manner of the Egyptian muralists, or do a contemporary work in the manner of the Babylonian relief workers, or do—and we would have all these little projects. And in Comp Crit, the one thing that I was going to recall before was a three-dimensional project. And I got to pouring concrete and making sculptural, three-dimensional forms, little stage sets and that, and found that not only did I do something that was completely new for me, but I did discover that I could do it, and that it released another whole area of investigation for me in three dimensions. But then I did not work with it for a long time, haven't for years. I stuck pretty much to the two-dimensional thing. The painting was very two-dimensional. The drawing was conceived two-dimensional.

[00:36:11.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, this was your third year in school. What outside jobs did you have? Were you teaching at that time?

[00:36:23.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yeah, before that, I had worked with the Mother Cabrini Settlement house, doing work with groups of children after school or on weekends. That was teaching. And then by the third year, I got a job after school. That year I did not take the academic classes after school, because I needed a lot of money, and I was self-supporting by this time. My full scholarship had run out. I was on partial scholarship. But I had to make money to keep going in school. And I was living at home. All this time, I lived at home and took the El to school every day because the Art Institute never did have a campus. There was nothing that was equal to any kind of campus life or activity. So we all lived in our own places or at home.

[00:37:18.30]

But I needed money, so I got a job with a woman named Mary Gehr, who at that time was an artist—still now, exhibiting today. But at that time, she was doing a lot of children's books, and little stories with kittens and dogs and children. But I worked with her. And my chore after school was to do color separations and overlays and do all the processing after she had done the illustration, before it would go to the printer. And so I learned a lot about the process of illustrating, page layout, color separation, et cetera. I learned a lot of skills through Mary Gehr.

[00:38:08.37]

That was the second year. And then while I was still—and I can't say that—I've tried to get a notion of what it would have been in my life that created more than just the historical influence or whatever, of putting together the cityscape. I can only say that I think, like a lot of other artists' work, they find something that is satisfying, that they do well, that is received well, and then they try to explore it as much as they can before they move on to the next thing, which comes more or less naturally. I would say through my lifetime—and I think you'll see it as we go on through the interview—that each episode of stylistic change comes with a kind of—not accidental, but sudden, surprising, first work, which is like a "Eureka." You find another little door opens.

[00:39:18.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A breakthrough.

[00:39:19.27]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, well, a breakthrough is the word. But I like to think of it as passing through passageways. And suddenly, another portion opens up. And then you're there and you're involved, and all that's going on. And it's not really that you ever leave off with what's before. It may not be recognizable to you or the observer. It's there in the work, but obviously, you've moved on into another area and left something behind and it—moves along that way. Anyway, um—

[00:39:55.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, how did you tackle a painting when you would make a breakthrough? It would obviously come after you completed the work and stood back and looked at it, so that you weren't painting with a preconceived—

[00:40:15.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, but you identify it by—at least in my case, I've always found that the first painting in any series that takes hold, and that I work at for a long period of time is a thrilling experience. It's as if you had been trying to exercise a change, and thinking about it and working towards it, but not quite realizing it. And then all of a sudden, one day, an idea occurs, and you start to work. And it's feverishly realized, and wonderful. And you realize all of a sudden, that that's what you have been working towards. And that is it. You have accomplished it, and it's very exciting. And then you do a body of work. And it's almost as if you work downhill from there on. I mean, you accomplish a lot. But there's never that same peak of enthusiasm.

[00:41:12.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But at the same time, while you're working in that vein, you leave behind—

[00:41:20.48]

ELLEN LANYON:  A body of work. [Siren sounds.]

[00:41:21.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, another body of work, a distinctly different body of work.

[00:41:25.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  It's not all that—as I say, things, they overlap. But there's always a distinct change when you get this first of a new series. One time, much later on—and I can talk about that too—I did this almost—I searched for a new thing by trying out and abandoning. I made a list of about six ideas that I had had. And I tried out each idea. And one of those was successful. It worked. It was the answer, so to speak, for the next group of things. I did that only once. And it was really contrived.

[00:42:06.13]

But to go back, when I was in my third year, then, of school—or rather fourth year—The third year was spent with Mary Gehr. And by the fourth year, I had won two prizes, the second prize in my third year of school, and the second—these were always in the Chicago and Vicinity Annuals. I entered a painting entitled "Elevated Night." And it was a portrait, you might say, of the Elevated as it turned near—and there was a station near my house, a block away from my house in Englewood, where I lived with my father's family for the second time.

[00:42:48.77]

When I was in the Art Institute, my father and mother moved back to Englewood due to financial difficulties, et cetera. And we moved back in with the sisters, my father's sisters, in the house in Englewood. And my sister and I—mind you, I was then in college and she was in high school—had been given the attic, which was a huge, beautiful, unfin—well, it was finished, it was—as in Victorian houses of that time, there was a tongue-and-groove woods—

[00:43:29.75]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Construction.

[00:43:30.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  You know the siding, kind of narrow tongue-and-groove paneling that was used in many of the old Victorian attics? Well, in any case.

[00:43:41.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I don't know what it's called.

[00:43:42.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, well it would be like flooring, except it was on the walls and it was on the ceiling. We had a pitched ceiling. And so my sister and I, whose name is Harriet, fixed it all up. And that was our room, and I had my studio up there. And we had a wonderful, large, spacious place. And at the back, where the stairs went down to the second floor of the house, there was a round window, like a nice porthole. And out that window, I could see the Elevated as it went off and turned and went into the station a block away. And so "Elevated Night" was a portrait of that little vignette. It was not a round painting; it was a rectangular painting. But nevertheless, it was a portrait of that. And I won a prize the second year with that. And the Art Institute acquired the painting. They bought it.

[00:44:33.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were these paintings something that you worked a long time on? Did you—

[00:44:36.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  Quite a while. Yes.

[00:44:38.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You'd work a week or—

[00:44:39.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. And they were all done—they were small in the first place. But they were done in egg tempera. And they were done with double-ought, ought, or number-one brushes. Everything was done in minute scale. And you see the nature of egg tempera, at least as I used it then—because I changed later—followed pretty much the prescribed historical fashion of little brushstrokes in one color, and then another overlay of color, building up, as the Italians did, with a green underpainting, and then perhaps flesh over it, or the red over it, and a continual layering of color to create a final illusion of colors—and many transparencies. So they were tediously worked.

[00:45:31.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  From start to finish, you might work over a week on them or—

[00:45:36.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah, and there was another thing too, that contrary to any kind of teaching at that time, I discovered that if I started in one corner and worked through the painting, I had no problem with composition. I did not pre-compose. I had it all in my head. And I sort of had a very vague sketch. But I did not draw it or pre-compose it. I started in the corner and worked it out.

[00:46:02.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So the sketch was in your mind, actually.

[00:46:04.16]

ELLEN LANYON:  It was in my mind. And I had an idea of what it would look like when it was finished. And it generally came out looking precisely as I had preconceived it. And there was no concern whatsoever with space, color, composition, et cetera. That was not part of this kind of work that I was doing. It had something to do with absolute private, wandering investigation, a development of a fantasy that was unfolding as it went along. And each color, as the colors were put down, were put down because either they realistically related to what the color should be—it was a yellow brick house—or because I liked the way the color looked next to the color that I had just put down. And that's all there was to it. It just worked out.

[00:46:55.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, it was close to this time that you were working in the Print and Drawing Department at the Institute—

[00:47:03.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  True.

[00:47:03.41]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —as a part-time job while you were at school. How does it fit into that, this timing? And what did you do in the printing part?

[00:47:10.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  I would go in when asked to come in to work on special hanging jobs. I was an installation assistant. And Carl Schniewind was the Curator of Prints then. And we were great friends. And we would talk a lot about prints and drawings. But I can't say that in any way was I involved in any kind of traditional academy-style drawing. I could not draw. As a matter of fact, my early sketchbooks are very crude and awkward and unskilled. Now that's my opinion.

[00:47:48.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But in the Print Department there you were able to touch and feel things from the collection and look, and examine, and install, and—

[00:47:56.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. And look. Yeah. And I had a great interest, especially in the drawings and the engravings, I loved. But I had never done any—I didn't do any etching at the Art Institute at all.

[00:48:04.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think—

[00:48:04.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  There was always lithography.

[00:48:05.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think that had any profound influence on—

[00:48:10.35]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know. I can't say one way or the other. I know I learned a lot about installing exhibitions.

[00:48:15.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What about prints? Any respect for that medium—

[00:48:18.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I certainly had respect for it. I did a lot of silverpoint drawing. And I loved that. And I think that in some strange way, although it was very contemporary in concept, it had—anyone who works in silverpoint has this feeling that they belong to history, somehow. It's such a rare and special way to work. And about the same time, a couple of us were invited to exhibit with the Benjamin Gallery here in Chicago. Well, there's a couple of things happened that last year. Many, many things happened the last year of my school that were—

[00:49:00.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well—

[00:49:00.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  One thing just piled on another that gave all kinds of different experiences. But I do remember, when you asked me this, that I became familiar with the etchings of Suzanne Valadon, who was Utrillo's mother, and who did a beautiful line, heavy line, and slightly, in her own way, Primitive—we would say now more naïve than Primitive—drawing with the graver. And I loved those prints. I remember being especially interested in her figure etchings.

[00:49:40.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Of course, at this time, a lot of the men that were in this Second World War had come back to Chicago, and were enrolled. And all this environment of men and women in school, in this social context of the life that revolved around the school, can we go into that in some depth and—

[00:50:06.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, all right, because school—[clears throat]—pardon me—was socially, I'd say, was split in two different groups. Along about the last of my second year, men began to filter back from the war, and the social life expanded a bit. Prior to that time, I really was working with the group in egg tempera. And that did include a few men who had not been drafted, et cetera. But suddenly, there was all this activity at school.

[00:50:44.91]

Now, there was a house called Ray House on Superior Street. It had been given to the School of the Art Institute by a Dr. Ray. It was a Victorian mansion, and it was a dormitory for boys only. But a kind of social club started there, with boys and girls who went to the Art Institute. And we'd gather in the evening. After school, we'd eat or something, and then we'd go there. And there was a very large table in the large, wood-paneled, ornate dining room, what was left of it. And we would sit around that table and to do our work. And we would talk, and have music, and discuss issues of the day. But we would be working.

[00:51:36.60]

And it was a great platonic kind of situation with a group of people that became very close friends, and who all were working. If they weren't working in egg tempera, at least, or in the experimental class, we were all working on art history projects, or whatever together. And amongst this entire group, Roland Ginzel— who came back in the third year, from the service— and I were the only people who got married out of that group. Otherwise, everyone else was just—we were all friends. And eventually—as a matter of fact, very few of them married. Most of them stayed single after that. It was an interesting bunch. And we had a great interest in the days of the development of Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, and what had occurred in France, and the Surrealists, and Dadaists. And we got deeper and deeper into the investigation of these areas of thought.

[00:52:46.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you did them communally.

[00:52:47.06]

ELLEN LANYON:  And we did our own. And we did them communally. Yeah, it was—and we would have holidays together. We would cook great meals and eat together. Now mind you, most of us, except for the boys who lived in the house and came from elsewhere, most of us came from families in Chicago. But this was sort of our after-school clubhouse.

[00:53:06.56]

Now, Vera Berdich comes into it because she's a very important figure in my early days. Vera grew up in Chicago, is ten years my senior, or more. Now she's in her 60s. And she's about twelve years older than I. She became my big sister. She had an apartment. And it was just fantastic, because my parents would always let me—I was still being protected—would let me stay with Vera without question. And this meant that it opened up my life. I could stay downtown at night. And I could engage in going to films and conversations, and going to hear music and plays that I hadn't ever—this had never been a part of my life.

And Vera was a wonderful person, and as she still is today much, much involved in very private fantasy. And now she's quite a well-known etcher. And all of her prints are fantastic, surreal. And so you can see that it's really strange, like Dedrick, who I mentioned— still works with egg tempera, even to this day, works certainly in the Surrealist manner. It was all there. And a lot of it had to do, I think, with the early beginnings and the influence of the Arts Club, and the influence of Kathleen Blackshear, and the Field Museum, and this whole ambiance that began in Chicago then and before that time, with an interest in that area of European art.

[00:54:50.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now the Arts Club at that time, what people were they bringing in that you might have heard speak, that—

[00:54:59.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, we never heard people speak there. But we did see shows. And there would be exhibitions of—oh, all sorts of Europeans that you would not see at the Art Institute. You might see one or two examples. But it was there that you would really get the flavor of the European schools. I remember seeing, for instance, a fantastic Kandinsky show, beautiful early and into late Kandinskys. I remember seeing Arp sculpture. And then they acquired their famous Arp. They would have exhibitions of surreal collage of Ernst, et cetera. They would have selections and collections in various shows like that. And I can't really be specific. Unfortunately, I can't pin it all down.

[00:55:55.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you know Katharine Kuh at that time?

[00:55:57.54]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Now, right. Now Katharine Kuh, at that time, was a Curator at the Art Institute and worked with the Gallery of Art Interpretation. And there again, she would install exhibitions which were educational, and where a thread of an idea would, through an exhibition, bring you into focus somehow on certain schools of thought, and how they had developed and what contributed to them, and the whole thing. And so we had a rich, rich pastiche of schooling and influence, I think.

[00:56:38.91]

And for one reason or another, probably one coincidental little thing led to another, we seem to all be much more involved in this. Now, it's not to say—because at the same time, remember, at the Art Institute, Joan Mitchell was coming up and along. And the GIs were coming back from service. And Abstract Expressionism was beginning to take hold in the East. And many of the guys that came back from the service got more and more involved in the Art Institute in, let's say, large painting, oil painting, et cetera. And they were not involved with our Ray House group.

[00:57:21.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, was there any involvement at all with the Institute of Design?

[00:57:26.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that came later. Not with our group that much, no. I never really went to the Institute of Design, to lectures or anything, until my last year in school, when the Ray House group began to diminish and decline. And as a matter of fact, a year later, the Ray House was closed. But in my last year of school I was doing several things. I had begun to show at the Benjamin Gallery here. There was a man who came from New York City as the first artist-in-residence teacher at the Art Institute, who was Joseph Hirsch, who was the Social Realist teacher—I mean, a painter. And he, in his way, began—not in my own work, but he began to pull people out of their private worlds and out into—in this advanced painting class that I was in my last year—and into a kind of realization that there was another world out there, of painting and painters.

[00:58:39.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In New York?

[00:58:39.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  In New York. And he came here and he said something to the effect of, "You're all being treated like students. You are old enough—" and this is all part of the Momentum thing too, and the fight against the Art Institute that comes next. And he probably, in his own way, had a lot to do with the beginnings of that, although no one ever talks about that either.

[00:59:02.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  As an instigator?

[00:59:03.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I—you see, he was political. And he felt that we were all much too contained and naïve—

[00:59:17.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And content?

[00:59:17.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  —and content. And he said, "You're not art students. You're artists. And you're about to emerge into the world. What are you going to do when you get out there? Here you are, sitting here, painting. And the model is very nice. And everything is very swell. But in another six months, what is it you're going to do with yourselves?"

[00:59:34.25]

And he made us all sort of wake up to the fact that, yes, indeed, we had to shake a leg. And he organized an exhibition for his painters—I was one—at the Associated American Galleries, here in Chicago, which no longer exists. But then it was one of the big-time galleries here. And we had our show. And we had an opening. And we were artists. We were not a student group. We were a group of young artists.

[01:00:04.70]

At the same time, however, my group of so-called—my so-called group from the Ray House, the egg-tempera people, had started to exhibit at—we had a show at the Esquire Theater. And the man, Carlebach, came from New York and chose us for an exhibition there. And so all of this—the outside world was coming in. Okay, the GIs were coming back. Many of them were involved in monumental painting, social-commentary painting. When I talk about Hirsch, did I say "Social Realist?"

[01:00:41.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Uh, you said a social painter.

[01:00:41.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's okay. In other words, suddenly a new element is introduced into all of us. It is no longer a utopia. It is beginning to become the real world. And things are beginning to seep and happen. And—

[01:00:56.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Before we go on now, this was exactly the time when you were going back, I think, and finishing up a lot of your academics at the university. When that whole involvement of doing that academic work, too, at the last—that must have also been explosive in your mind. And were there other things at the university that affected you, like what the Renaissance Society was doing there?

[01:01:23.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I didn't go out to the campus. They had a downtown branch.

[01:01:26.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  They did?

[01:01:26.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  And besides that, at that point, U of C—there was some reason why I switched over. I went to Roosevelt College my last year, for my academics. I finished up there. I took sociology, took education courses, et cetera, at Roosevelt, which was right across the street, and quite easy to get to. And I think it's because the Institute had opened it up, and you could go anywhere you wanted to. And I chose to go there. [Audio distorts.] [Roosevelt at that time –Ed.] was Roosevelt College. And there was also the great return of the GI. And a whole new kind of energy was being felt, both in the academic situation and in the studio situation.

[01:02:11.56]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You talk about this Surrealist, Dada thing and how it weaves in here. Was that what at this time, people were collecting—the people that were members of the Art Club and—who were those collectors? And what were their interests at that point?

[01:02:30.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, at that particular time in Chicago, I was not familiar with the collectors as much.

[01:02:39.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were they buying?

[01:02:40.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, through the Benjamin Gallery I began to meet people. And my works were sold—almost every single thing I ever did at that time. You see, I'd won a couple of prizes. And I was becoming known as a promising young artist, et cetera. And Ben Krohn, who was a dentist here in Chicago, an oral surgeon of some note, had a gallery in his home. His home was a gallery, as a matter of fact. He spent every spare moment out of his office being a dealer. And he handled Max Kahn, and Eleanor Coen, and Margo Hoff, and George Buehr, and Chapin, and all these people I've mentioned—and Abbott Pattison, and all the people who were—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9960_m]

[00:00:03.23]

ELLEN LANYON:  Roland Ginzel was handled by Benjamin Krohn also, but a little later, I think, after we got married. But he and I would have been the youngest members of that gallery group. And we were fortunate to have the Benjamin Gallery because they were very active and probably, except for maybe two public galleries in Chicago—Katharine Kuh had closed hers. There was the Associated American Artists, and there was a woman named Nelson who had a place. Otherwise, there was very little public art activity outside of the museum. And so we were fortunate in this.

As far as collectors go now, I would say that at that time, Joseph Shapiro was probably beginning to be the most important and outstanding collector. Morton Neumann had obviously worked at his collection. Muriel Neumann here in Chicago had—I didn't know her at that time, but she was already beginning to associate with the New York Abstract Expressionist painters, and collected them very early. She's renowned for her really fine collection of Abstract Expressionism that she bought when these people were just developing in New York right after the War. [Audio distortion.]

[00:01:28.83]

Collectors—I don't really know the history of the Bergman [ph] collection. But I do know that Joseph Shapiro came to Ox-Bow along about 1946, met Francis Chapin and Max Kahn, made friends with them, and began, through their influence and the influence of Carl Schniewind, went to collect prints and drawings. And then he built that into this fantastic collection that he has today with paintings and sculpture and prints and that.

[00:01:58.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you meet him that first—your first summer—

[00:02:00.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  I met him in Ox-Bow. I remember Joe Shapiro from the day he came in on a tandem bicycle with his wife, Jory, just to investigate to see what was going on at the end of the road.

[00:02:13.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And that was your first year at Ox-Bow too.

[00:02:15.33]

ELLEN LANYON:  Second year.

[00:02:16.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The second year.

[00:02:16.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:02:18.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  '47.

[00:02:19.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. And he had a lot to do then with the Benjamin Gallery in that he would come there. We would have openings and gatherings. And of course, he was friends with Kahn, and Chapin, and Margo Hoff, and Buehr—people who had also been part of the Ox-Bow scene. And it continued so that I knew him at that time. And then because I sort of leave off at that point in my intense activity, you might say, I lose track of that particular group of people. And I became very much involved in my last year in school with the so-called Momentum group, which was quite different from the Ray House friends.

[00:03:08.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Were they more political?

[00:03:09.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. You see, by this time, I had met Roland Ginzel in my third year of school. And we courted during the third summer after school—summer in between the third and the fourth year—and decided by the fall to get married. However, we also decided to wait a year, because he, having been gone into the service for six years, wanted to go downstate—he came from Lincoln, Illinois—wanted to go downstate and spend the year at home going to the local college there and getting what academics he needed to finish up his degree—he had finished his studio courses—and to spend some time at home with his mother who was a widow, and he felt that it would be a good idea to spend some time with her.

[00:03:57.36]

And I had a year to finish up at the Art Institute, of course. So we established that we would get married the following summer sometime. And then we had also decided—or pretty well decided that we would then go on to the University of Iowa for our master's degree. So my last year of school sort of changed in a way. I had made this decision to marry and go on to another school, and I was beginning to break away from some of the friends that had made up the Ray House group. In fact, some of them had left school already and moved on, in a way.

[00:04:38.54]

Ed Plunkett, who was very important in later years, had gone off to New York to do art history studies. I think he went to NYU. And Vera had graduated and gone on into teaching. And other people had left, so that I now began to work with a lot of the energy-sparked students who'd come back from the war, the GIs. And in this group—and it's really quite important to note that people like Cosmo Campoli, Leon Golub, who had been studying at the University of Chicago and then moved into studio classes at the Art Institute— Keenan, Franz Schulze, June Leaf, Roy Gussow from the ID [Institute of Design –Ed.]. And numerous people began to talk about artists being artists, being adults.

[00:05:54.41]

A whole different tone came into the subject of myself in relationship to them, and in relationship to profession. And I began to feel and establish myself as a professional. I had already been exhibiting, selling, winning prizes, but it was all done with a kind of a casual "this is what's happening" rather than taking stock of the fact that, yes, indeed, it was happening, and I was moving into another kind of life that was going to be self-sustaining, and would be truly a profession and not just something that was occurring because it was a school situation.

[00:06:41.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:06:42.15]

ELLEN LANYON:  It became a reality.

[00:06:43.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  These people not only had a lot of energy, but they were quite adult, the males in this group that had come back from the war—and also what was happening in New York also was being somewhat—not reflected in the art here, but in the thought, the political thought and so forth.

[00:07:00.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right.

[00:07:01.02]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And that had its repercussions. That kind of adult situation, how did it develop into Momentum itself?

[00:07:15.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  In the springtime of every season, the Art Institute would run its Chicago and Vicinity Annual. And as we talked about before, there had been some rumblings about students entering the show and winning prizes. And this had come from established artists in town. We had a very large and potent group of Artists Equity and WPA people here, regionalists, and they took exception to the fact that students were sort of stealing the show. And so in that last year of—spring of '48, the Art Institute came out with a prospectus for the exhibit which declared that no one who was a student could exhibit. You could not enter a work of art if you were a student.

[00:08:12.91]

And of course, for the guys that had been in the service and had spent five or six years—most of them were that much older, serving their country—and due to the fact that they were now back in school, only to finish up degrees that they had begun before they were drafted. This became a tremendous issue. And so we mobilized. And I had been only once before involved in any kind of political activity that had occurred, oh, several years before when the Hearst newspapers ran a series of scandalous articles condemning Modern Art and aligning it with the Communists, et cetera.

[00:09:01.44]

And when Art Institute students, led by Dick Bowman and Whitney Halsted, who were not in the service—and most of the picketers were girls. We picketed the Hearst newspapers and got mugged by the newspaper drivers. And we had gone to the newly-formed Civil Liberties people here in Chicago, and that was my first taste of any kind of political demonstrative action. But it quickly ended, because we were discouraged from pursuing any kind of legal action or whatever against the newspaper.

But in 1948, here were a very large and active group of activists, and they quickly gathered a number of us around them, ready for some kind of activity. And we called—I remember there was another man named John Waddell, and there was Seymour Rosofsky, and Joe Goto, the sculptor, was here. And they called a large student meeting in Fullerton Hall, and they challenged Dan Rich, who was then the Director of the Museum, to—took him to task for this.

[00:10:19.79]

Now mind you, the year before, I had won a prize, and been acquired by the Art Institute, and I was in the collection. So it behooved me to stand up and make criticism. And I think it was Leon Golub that actually read the declaration and demand, you might say, from the Museum that they open the show, and the Museum declined.

[00:10:42.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did he spearhead that group?

[00:10:44.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, Golub was one of the more important people, he and Keenan and Waddell.

[00:10:52.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But there was good grounds for common consensus about this. It was more or less in the air, that came out of the issue itself of not being allowed to show.

[00:11:02.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, and it was certainly a justified kind of rebellion. So the Museum said, absolutely not. They had made their decision, and it would stand. Well, we decided that, instead of—we had many meetings. This was suddenly the beginning of all kinds of—a new kind of social existence for me. I was practically every evening after school—and mind you, I was taking classes at night at Roosevelt. And it was my last year of school, and we were competing for the traveling fellowship, et cetera. It was just an enormous amount of activity. But almost every evening was spent in someone's home, apartment, wherever we could go, and we'd have meetings planning the next step. And a lot of that had to do with conversations that had to do with the politics of man, the importance of re-birth, and establishment of humanism as a concept in the arts. And you see, these people that I was working with at that time then went on to become what was later labeled the Monster School, which was the first group of—

[00:12:30.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  These key people. The key—

[00:12:32.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. Like June Leaf and Golub, and Rosovsky, and Campoli, in time, through an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, were labeled the Monster School. They were part of the "New Image of Man" group of painters in America, the New Humanists. And that was all sort of a political theory and philosophy that developed. And Momentum was the extension of this. It was the overt action. It was the demonstration of their ideas that took place. So we organized a show.

[00:13:08.52]

Now, Roosevelt College had a large second floor lounge area, and they said yes, we could use it for the show. I had worked with the Museum in hanging shows and stuff, so I was asked to be the exhibition chairman. Our idea was that we would invite—without being able to pay any money for an honorarium, or travel or anything else—we would invite important people in the arts to come and be a juror—jury. And we of course planned that this would happen every year from then on, and it did for quite a long time.

[00:13:44.02]

And that first year, I think it was all very meaningful to me that I suddenly became a part of an adult, an active group of people. I sort of came out of, you might say, the protective milieu of what I refer to as the Ray House group, and moved instead into Momentum, and activists, and grown-up, mature people who had experienced a lot about life and were intellectually much more provocative. And a new kind of situation began for me. So I worked very hard, and I helped them raise money. And we did indeed put on the first Momentum show.

[00:14:34.15]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did they organize formally? I mean, did they elect a head for themselves? [Inaudible]

[00:14:39.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, we had—yeah. I think—it's funny. I'd have to get out the catalog to tell you who exactly was the chairman that year. It was either Waddell or Keenan, one of those people. But in any case, everybody was very active, and I know I was exhibition chairman.

[00:14:57.43]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And people would be formally in the same group, would come back together again, night after night until the whole thing was gotten together like a package?

[00:15:05.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. We sent out a prospectus. It was an open show. We did not say "students only," and artists of any age could enter this exhibit. We were able to get Alfred—not Alfred Barr that year. Josef Albers came, and a man named Wolfe, from Brooklyn, and Robert Von Neumann, who was a teacher of many of us, and was a really fine figurative painter and draftsman from Wisconsin. So we had balanced a jury, and they came as we invited them. In later years, we had all kinds of people, like Sidney Janis, and Alfred Barr, and [Robert] Motherwell, and [Jack] Tworkov, and Franz Kline, and all sorts of people came. [Philip] Guston.

[00:15:55.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But the group that initiated this, did they come out of the Chicago Institute School?

[00:16:00.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Well, not all—

[00:16:02.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What is the relationship, now, then between that and the Institute of Design?

[00:16:07.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, we went to the Institute of Design, and those people were also interested. And there was an awful lot of rhetoric at the meetings and argument between those people who were dealing with the New Humanism at the Art Institute, and Expressionism, and those people who were designers, and you might say almost rectilinear craftsmen. They came out of the Bauhaus. And it was healthy. It was tremendous. It was exciting. It was really a vital time. But in the end, Roy Gussow, and Golub, and Keenan, and the Momentum—the Institute group got together despite philosophical differences. And we forged, you might say, a really solid group of people, and we made that show possible.

[00:17:09.08]

June Leaf was at the Institute—or at the ID at that time. And there was a woman here named Ruth Ross, a very good artist, and Ray Schauft [ph], and—oh, I could go down a long list of people. So that by June, when I graduated from the Art Institute, having lost the fellowship competition, which was another situation in itself, because there was a lot of politics in the school—

[00:17:37.19]

There was a painter here named Leon Golden, who'd come back from the service, who was one of the GIs; lived at Ray House for a while, but sort of bridged it. He and a man named Harold Lewis—who is now known as Philip Lewis—and is a Curator of Primitive Art at the Field Museum here, at the Museum of Natural History, were part of the earlier Ray House group and then also with me joined the Momentum group.

[00:18:05.06]

And then Leon went on to Iowa with Roland and I for a master's degree. Leon has become—stayed in the situation—was an abstract painter, as was my husband, Ginzel. And so I kind of left behind when I left the Art Institute and Momentum was over. And during that summer, we decided to get married in September, and then go to Iowa, so that in a way it was kind of a tremendous, meaningful experience, that whole last year and that spring of '48, and the show, and the working with that group of people. And then it was cut off and stopped. And as far as the work goes, the painting goes, the painting did not in any way seem to—

[00:18:59.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Be affected.

[00:18:59.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  —be affected. I was still doing what I did, and I was—

[00:19:04.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did the catalog come out of that show? I mean, in the Momentum catalogs, there's fine design and great integrity in that work. Were you involved at all in that aspect, other than being chairman of the installation? You were obviously involved with this presentation.

[00:19:24.39]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. Well, I was—no, I put the show together. I hung the show.

[00:19:28.85]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:19:29.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  I was involved in that end of it. The catalog design, for the most part, was left to the ID people. And I could get [inaudible]—

[00:19:40.73]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, everyone felt [inaudible]—

[00:19:44.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  But not entirely. Remember, this was a very—the intent of this group was—

[00:19:49.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Together.

[00:19:50.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  —democratic action, and solid, together front; yes. And we'd fight out the issues privately. And then when we presented something, it was a group—

[00:20:00.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Accepted, democratic—

[00:20:01.63]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. It was a group presentation, and everyone supported it. It was a very fine lesson in group activities, and how it should be done. And what had happened was that in our own way, silently, we made a tremendous impression. The Art Institute the next year opened up the show to everyone. Not only that, but there was a young man in our group named Raleigh Spinks, a designer, who came up with the Momentum system for jurying, which has been used ever since by ever so many different institutions, art fairs, art associations. Anywhere where there's a jury system going on, you will find the thread or the influence of the Spinks system.

[00:20:47.96]

And it was that each—and we tried it right from the beginning—a juror would come in and go through all the work and silently label that work. And it was put into the show with his name on it individually on it. And if it got his vote, it was in the show. One vote is all it took. But it was done silently, quietly, away from the other people. Either they—I mean, as I remember it, we separated them. They were all there at the same time, but we separated them, so they each had a chance. Then it was very interesting to see a work that was put in by one juror, or two jurors, or all three jurors, a unanimous choice. The unanimous choices, however, were not necessarily the prize winners. The prize winning—the prize jury would go on in another session.

[00:21:38.13]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So the jurors would collectively—

[00:21:40.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  They would look at everything together, and then they would say, oh yes, now you see, we did this, we did that. And then they would be very interested to see the things that all three had put in. But they didn't necessarily—

[00:21:50.33]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Give that the prize.

[00:21:51.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, that didn't necessarily conclude or preclude a prize. And it was a fine system, and people always use it.

[00:22:01.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What other adjuncts? Were there lectures by those jurors that came in?

[00:22:08.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, later on.

[00:22:09.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Or parties?

[00:22:10.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, we had our own parties and all, of course. And it was such—the idea of working together, like any group that does, you know, it becomes your life for a while. It's just a total experience.

[00:22:22.94]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How many months did it take to formulate that and really accomplish it?

[00:22:27.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, we worked all winter.

[00:22:30.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That first—

[00:22:31.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  It had been from the spring before, so that it really—it stewed and germinated and took that whole winter to come into being. And then there was, of course, this intensive amount of activity right along in the springtime.

[00:22:45.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right, to accomplish it.

[00:22:47.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:22:48.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But do you remember any involvement directly with the jurors, or—?

[00:22:55.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I remember—yes. I don't remember—I had been a student of Von Neumann, of course, so I knew him well. He was one of my very best teachers in the later two years at the Art Institute, because he truly taught me an awful lot about drawing. You see, I think Von Neumann was probably instrumental in introducing something into my primitivistic work that didn't show until later on. But it was the beginnings of a pulling away from that utopia. I like to label it that, because in a way, it was a very naïve, simplistic way of approaching the problems of design and color and narration of my environment.

But a course that I had with Von Neumann that was just dynamite—and I know I got class honors, stars, stars, stars, et cetera, for it, although it didn't influence me yet—was a landscape class. And I remember that Goldin was in that class, et cetera. And my last year, we would go off into the industrial neighborhoods of the city. Now mind you, I'd already painted all these things in my own way. But I would sit on the Chicago River bank, and I would do watercolors in the Ox-Bow manner, which was straightforward depictions—

[00:24:32.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Immediate response.

[00:24:32.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, immediate, realistic.

[00:24:37.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Out of the Impressionist tradition.

[00:24:38.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. Impressionism, Expressionism, color, et cetera. Absolutely no concocted design, no "style," in quotes, nothing. Just paint.

[00:24:51.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, at this time—

[00:24:51.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Interpret.

[00:24:52.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —a lot of people were graduating and going in different directions, New York and so forth. Why had you decided on Iowa?

[00:25:00.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, for a couple of reasons. One thing—as a matter of fact, there was a conflict in my life. Carlebach was encouraging me to come to New York and live in New York and be an artist. He said, "Don't go to school. Just come and paint." He had already given me a show apart from everyone else. In 1948, I had my first show in New York City. And one show that I had was joint with Roland Ginzel. And we had gone there that winter, that Christmas time of '47, '48, and had the exhibit. And Carlebach was very concerned that I was thinking of going on to school, and not going to immediately dive into a professional life in New York. But you see, Ginzel had the GI Bill, and I really did want to get married. And I felt—at that time, it was very important that people have degrees for teaching.

[00:26:02.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  For teaching reasons.

[00:26:04.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it was a big thing. And besides, the men all had the GI Bill, and it did enable them to go on to school. And I felt that there were certain things that I still hadn't achieved in school, because—and this is rather an important time. In my last year at the Art Institute, I went back into figure painting. And I discovered that indeed I could paint a figure and draw. And I could work in a very realistic way if I wanted to. And I did a couple of, I think, super figure paintings, drapery, realism, good color, good paint quality, et cetera. Oil paint on canvas. I competed in the fellowship. I did not win a fellowship because I had I think gained a reputation for being a rebel, for being a stylistic rebel. I had rejected, mind you, all figure painting classes.

[00:27:07.56]

There were two very strong painting teachers in that school. You were either a Ritman student or you were an Anisfeld student. And people like Joan Mitchell and Herbie Katzman, and the strong painterly people had come out of these classes. And I was not a part of it. I refused to align myself.

[00:27:33.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You had developed your own—

[00:27:35.16]

ELLEN LANYON:  In some ways, although I was very much a part of a political or social group, I never left being an individual, as far as my style-wise intent in the work went. That was something I really held onto as a precious object, and I refused to waver one way or the other, despite the pressures. So I lost out on the competition.

[00:28:03.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Just for a moment, do you think that has anything to do—I know much earlier we talked about when you were ten, and you were first getting so much of your own identity from your work, this kind of psychological reward. You felt, then, that you were plump, and all these other things. And so that kind of integrity about the work, do you think it psychologically was a matter of the fact that you were reinforcing your own sense of identity?

[00:28:39.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Probably. Probably had a lot to do with it, yeah. I did not at the time—

[00:28:43.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Insecurity.

[00:28:44.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  —ever have to, let's say, stand on any kind of ceremony about my work. It was there, and I stood by it. And people accepted it, and therefore I continued doing it. I did find, however, I could do this other thing. And part of the difficulty, you see, with a person that discovers that they have these various facilities, it's almost too traumatic to have to put yourself into a position of having to make a choice. So you stay with what is comfortable. This is a big thing.

I think my life has a lot—my whole pattern has to do with this. I find that I can do many things, or several things well, and they may take different tracks completely. And rather than make a choice, or go through that trauma sometimes, I will accept things as they are, up to a point of where I then say, "What is this? Why am I doing this? Why am I not shaking off certain things, so that you switch over to the next track and go on full speed?" In other words—

[00:30:01.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Evolve.

[00:30:01.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  It's the way careers oftentimes go.

[00:30:06.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, do you think at that point, when you do make that change—the reason why—

[00:30:10.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  Because you'll see my work changing now. You'll see every decade there's a big change.

[00:30:15.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, but in your making that change, do you think it's the fact that you can feel comfortable in exploring, like you did in your last years, these new areas, and in making that exploration, feel that you can accomplish or facilitate another area which eases you through a transition, not only in style, but in content too, so that actually the transitions are smoothed out by the fact that you can enjoy this matter of exploration of new ways to express yourself?

[00:30:50.63]

ELLEN LANYON:  Usually there's been rather a sharp cut off. No, there's been a sharp cut off.

[00:30:55.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A real emotional stop.

[00:30:56.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:30:57.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And then—

[00:30:58.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And it's happened—you see, I attempted it when I went to Iowa.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:31:05.99]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  At this time, there were obviously the two very distinct groups that you had been evolving in and out of—one, the Ray House group, and the other the Momentum group, the first being rather insular and contained, and the second being rather outgoing and explosive. Obviously, there was a lot going on personally with you at this point. Can you go into that?

[00:31:35.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. I think until—let's say during my third year at the Art Institute, when the Momentum group had returned, and they were beginning to take action against the Art Institute and I was beginning to get involved with them, meeting new people, and feeling new kinds of energies and pressures, and meeting Roland Ginzel and that summer in between '47 and '48, courting, deciding to get married, et cetera.

It was an interesting thing in that I had up until that time probably been quite content to associate with the so-called Ray House group, which included Roland, because these people were all as sexually immature and as inhibited and as private as I was. I guess I felt a great kind of sense of security—"sisters and brothers," and no one's stepping across a line or pressuring me to any kind of sexual activity that I wasn't prepared for. I was very, very slow to accept my role as a woman. I was this sort of asexual, plump creature who could achieve on an artistic level, and had not as yet tried, nor actually did not want to try any kind of achievement as a woman. The womanly thing was very much pushed back into the background. And even though—

[00:33:22.79]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And this the cerebral thing was something that could contain you, and contain everyone.

[00:33:27.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:33:28.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Everybody was happy in that group with it.

[00:33:29.33]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. And Roland Ginzel fitted the scheme. He came back from the service, and his whole manner and his whole involvement with his work—it was all part of it. And he and I, all through our courtship, all through the last year before we were married—we were both virgins when we got married. And he was 28 years old, and I was 21, which is something to be said for. I don't think that it would happen now, almost 30 years later. I mean, it just wouldn't be the same. But in that age, at that time, there was a whole different—

[00:34:09.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was the work like a spiritual expression, cerebral activity—doing your art was part of a puritanical spiritual dedication at that point?

[00:34:23.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, it was.

[00:34:24.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was an expression of that, and—

[00:34:25.47]

ELLEN LANYON:  It was a very idealistic—

[00:34:25.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —being a professional, or beginning to be a professional.

[00:34:28.29]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it was a very idealistic and almost a retreat, an almost religious kind of containment, a protection of oneself and one's being against worldliness, you might say. But by the third year, there were all these sort of innuendos—

[00:34:49.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Couldn't be sustained.

[00:34:50.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  —and overtones. And the GIs coming back, it was breaking it up a bit. And probably Ginzel, in my own way, I began a relationship with him because it was on a level that I could accommodate. And there were several other men at that time who I was interested in, but who would have forced another issue, a sexual issue that I couldn't really cope with. So that all through my fourth year, I was content in that I could be engaged to Ginzel, who was not here. A few weekends, one could control oneself. [Laughs.] And at the same time, I was an engaged woman, and I could go about my work at the Institute and associate with all these people without getting—

[00:35:36.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Being threatened.

[00:35:37.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  —emotionally involved, or threatened. Everybody was hands-off, and that was fine. And that's the way I wanted it. And so that I could say—philosophically, I could begin to make some kind of a personal, private changeover from the secluded, private situation into the explosive, energy-ridden situation in an overt fashion, on the surface. I could become a participant in something that I really wanted to participate in. I think I desperately wanted to be energized and sexually active. But I had to find out—I had to know about it. And at that time in the '40s, after all, there was a whole different attitude towards what women and men did. Premarital sex was not something that was accepted openly. And it was something perhaps—like men, as usual, could have their affairs, or their women, or their prostitutes, or whatever they needed, because that was something that was accepted. But women were very much ostracized for premarital affairs or living with men unmarried.

[00:36:59.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So a lot of sexual energy was a part of this explosive energy that was involved with Momentum in and of itself. Not only you—

[00:37:07.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  And I think a lot of the—no, but I think a lot of the people—

[00:37:08.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was a direction. Like almost a big orgasm.

[00:37:11.54]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. That's right. That's right.

[00:37:13.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I think—I have that feeling. It's part of that time, too. Were other people more or less involved at that time? You hadn't decided consciously not to be involved with other people. It just worked out that way. But other people's relationships—they were getting together and exploring their sexuality and—to some degree.

[00:37:36.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I know that there were several people in the group, yes, who were having affairs, who were marrying, getting divorced. I was very much involved, as a matter of fact, with several different couples where I knew about what was going on. And it was kind of a vicarious situation. I was even very much interested in someone who—and I felt unable—this was before Roland really came into the picture in my third year. I was unable to compete. I was absolutely unable to bring myself into a position where I could compete with another woman for a man. If she offered the man some kind of a sexual relationship, I had to fall back and, so to speak, lick the wounds, and settle for it because I knew that I was really not up to that kind of competition. And so I think it's all very interesting picture.

[00:38:35.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But it's subconsciou—this was not with any conscious intent at that kind of an age. It just worked out that this is the way [inaudible]—

[00:38:47.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I don't think it was conscious at all. I think I could only study it now, as if it were happening to another person. It's almost a clinical view—overview now of what kind of transition was taking place in my physical life, because another very interesting and rather important thing happened. Mind you, I am teaching at the Latin School. The Latin School was a private girls school on the North Side of Chicago. And there I was Vera Berdich's assistant several days a week. And I was learning about taking on a new kind of adult responsibility as a teacher, and learning to express my ideas, and be able to relate them to others and work with other people, drawing them out.

[00:39:38.45]

It was probably my first real teaching job, because the Cabrini Settlement work that I had done previously was more related to group leadership, and arts and crafts and that. And although that had been a lesson in a new kind of social situation where I had to deal with the threat of settlement, street life, street gangs, and how to cope with that kind of thing—And that had taught me a little bit about being the mature person in a group and being able to control a personality situation. Again, Latin School was something where now I was becoming a woman. I was a teacher. I was a role model for younger girls in the art department area. And I was learning a lot about having a presence and being able to—

[00:40:34.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Project it.

[00:40:34.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Project it, right. But however, at the same time, I was carrying a full load at the Art Institute in tutorial fashion, having arranged with my painting teachers that I would, yes, indeed, turn in an adequate amount of work, and be painting at home in my studio. By this time, my parents had moved into another house—I haven't even talked about that—up on the North Side, so that all through these times, there's many moves going on in my home—my place of residence.

[00:41:04.52]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And in yourself there, was there any sense of chaos? [Inaudible]

[00:41:07.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, there was a lot of chaos, but I finally had a studio that I was able to be in myself, so I painted a lot at home. That's really what was important. But I was carrying a full load, and I was going to night classes at Roosevelt, clearing up those things. I was working with Momentum, and I was competing for the fellowship, which had a certain amount of nervous tension and anticipation involved because of the competitive nature, and the fact that I knew that I was working against the grain as far as my work, stylistically, was being accepted in the school by the teachers who would indeed be giving out the fellowship. So all these things were creating a certain kind of tenseness, coupled with the fact that, of course, I am engaged to a man that I rarely see and am not having any sexual relationship with at all. It's all like the movies. It's all dreams. It's all Hollywood love and bowers of roses, and yet no real experience.

[00:42:14.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Except the kind of fantasy excitement. Or maybe it wasn't even fantasy. It's a hard life at that point.

[00:42:20.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no, but the excitement of seeing your boyfriend on the weekend is fantasized, et cetera, even though it is totally unreal. The whole situation was totally unreal. And living vicariously through the energy of the Momentum group. Well, one day I start out from the Art Institute and get on the subway to go home as usual, and not feeling well. Feeling very bad, as a matter of fact. And having had for some time experienced a lot of discomfort in the lower abdomen and deciding, in my own ignorance about medicine and my body and the functions of the body, seemed to me that it must be appendicitis.

So I got off the subway and went to Mary Gehr, who I had not worked with for a year, but who knew all the people who had come out of the Ox-Bow situation and who had been indeed my friend and who had talked a lot to me about womanly things, was one of the first people that I could relate to as a woman and discuss feminine problems, because my mother was totally incapable of doing this sort of thing, and inadequate.

[00:43:35.68]

And I went to her and I said, "There is something terribly wrong with me. It could be my appendix, but I know I'm very ill and you've got to help me." Now, through Ox-Bow and a woman named Alice Mason up there—she was married to a surgeon at Passavant Hospital, Mike Mason. They were very good friends of mine by this time, and interested in me as an artist. And Mary took me to Mike Mason, and Mike Mason put me in the hospital and operated. And it was my first medical experience. And you can imagine the trauma of that whole—

[00:44:16.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Thing.

[00:44:17.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Fear, and being lower abdomen, and being a virgin, and being curious—

[00:44:26.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A Christian Scientist.

[00:44:27.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  And a Christian Scientist. And my god, what else? And so the operation went forward. Now, when it was over with, I remember waking up, and my mother and father were there very briefly. They had come in very reluctantly because my mother doesn't go to hospitals, or at that time she wouldn't. And they were upset and angry, because this was all causing some, of course, upset for them. After all, it was a confrontation for them. And they didn't quite know how to handle it. And they came long enough to see that I was alive and safe, and that the insurance was taken care of, and they left.

[00:45:12.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And did they give permission for the operation?

[00:45:17.63]

ELLEN LANYON:  They must have had to give permission. But you see, I had turned—I don't know if I was 21. I can't even remember how old—I don't know whether there was permission given or what. But in any case, it happened. It was an emergency, and I don't suppose there was much anybody could do about it. At that time, no one told me—in fact, I didn't find out until years later when I had another similar kind of thing happen—that, indeed, it was not my appendix that were about to rupture, but it was ovarian cysts that were giving me all this discomfort and trouble, and indeed, should have been operated on. So it all worked out.

However, this caused a tremendous sort of disruption in my life, in that I had to spend weeks in the hospital recovering, et cetera. And a very kind of difficult time. But you see, we all somehow—and this is what analysis is all about, is digging out all these facts and making us face up to them. We all tend to cover over these things at the time and somehow see them as surface events, and write it off as some kind of "it happened, and so it happened." And so you get up and you go on, and you bury it. And the significance of it doesn't occur until many years later when you're trying to put together all these various things that have happened to you, and why they happened at a certain point and why a sudden eruption, explosiveness, a need to just absolutely break out of all those barriers that you've built around yourself happen.

[00:47:12.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think that this cyst was a manifestation of maybe all these things that were happening to you at the time, in fact?

[00:47:21.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  Perhaps, perhaps.

[00:47:24.16]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Where does it take you from there? Then you get back into Momentum. You complete all of this. But this happened in the winter, or close to the spring, when the whole exhibition had to be mounted, and that? How does it relate to that?

[00:47:37.39]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I managed to recover. See, it happened early in the spring, along around the end of—it happened in April, or something. It was still cooler. And so that by May, I was up and around, and by June I was hanging the show, et cetera. It also kind of interfered, too with the fellowship activity which was going on. Although I managed to complete the work that had to be turned in, it was at the time when we were beginning—the finalists were beginning their work for the fellowship competition. So it still was a very pressurized situation.

[00:48:11.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And that was leading to the summer in which you got married.

[00:48:15.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's right.

[00:48:16.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  To what degree did the artist community—were they involved with your wedding? And how does that fit into the picture at this point?

[00:48:24.94]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yes. In the fall—we were married—we'd graduated. There was a graduation that takes place every spring from the Art Institute in the Goodman Theater. And the day of graduation was also the day that several different couples from our graduating class were engaged. There was a certain amount of picture-taking and celebration and general merriment and—

[00:48:50.03]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Hoopla.

[00:48:50.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  Hoopla. And everybody's dressed up. It was that day that we formally became engaged, due to the decision on the part of my mother-in-law that people could not possibly get married if they were not engaged, and you couldn't be engaged if you didn't have an engagement ring. So we had tried to deny all the standard ritualistic embellishments of engagements and marriages. Although we didn't have any premarital sex, we still were not really interested in the pomp and circumstance that goes along with the union, and so we—

[00:49:35.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was a period of courtship after engagement then during that summer before you were married.

[00:49:39.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. Then there was the courtship. But mother took us over to—my mother-in-law, Mrs. Ginzel, took us over to Marshall Field's and stood [laughs] at the counter and said, "Pick out a ring, Ellen." [They laugh.] And you might say she got us properly engaged. [They laugh.]

[00:50:06.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it was just several months before you were married, then.

[00:50:08.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. We decided we'd get married on the 4th of December and then go off to the University of Iowa to school.

[00:50:17.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And during that period—

[00:50:18.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think both of us felt tremendously inhibited by our families, and by the fact that the families were clinging to us. And in a way, both families were resisting the whole idea of us getting married. They liked—my family liked Roland, and his mother I guess liked me enough. But they were not really sure that either one of us were good enough for each other. And there was this sense of resistance to the whole idea. I know my family felt that I was a fool to get married and not go on to New York and take up—

[00:50:51.52]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Your career?

[00:50:52.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  —a profession. They were very, very much in favor of me continuing in a profession, and they were very worried, because of their experiences, and the fact that it is traditional that you marry, and a year later you have a baby, and then you have another baby, and then you're into it. And I had to assure them that, indeed, I thought that I would be able to control my situation. However, it made me very nervous because, having had very little training in the birds and the bees, I didn't know a thing about birth control. And I had to quick, pull myself together, and demand that I be taken to—find a doctor, go to the doctor, and get going with advice, and all, so that—because I was really determined I was going to get a master's degree and continue my painting. And I didn't think the idea of having children was what I wanted to be involved in as yet, and it wasn't. As a matter of fact, I was successful in my determination.

[00:51:59.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So then it was just when 1949 was about to roll around that you left for Iowa.

[00:52:04.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:52:05.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What were those early experiences at Iowa like? You weren't going alone. You were with your husband and another artist, weren't you?

[00:52:14.12]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, Leon Goldin went out. And another friend of ours, who's now gone, dead, Milton Levy, went out, and several other people that we'd known. Iowa was a very active place, because, for one thing, it was enjoying the full benefits of the GI Bill, all the GIs that had returned from the service.

[00:52:49.58]

And by this time, some were married, some had children. And they had all settled in to developing their careers in a very mature, grown-up fashion, and rather determined to get back into the world of peacetime and productivity. So that there it was quite a different life because, together with Roland, we had a very large group of friends who were not as involved socially. The social life really centered around the art department in a work situation again. That is to say, there weren't very many parties as such. You just communicated with people all day long, in the evenings, while you worked. And it was very healthy and stimulating, and a time of invention on the part of many of the people, and a kind of an exchange of experiences and knowledge, et cetera.

[00:53:53.53]

Most of the people that I knew out there really did go out to work with Mauricio Lasansky, who was a renowned—or still is a renowned etcher, to become involved in what I suppose could have been called sort of the print Renaissance in this country, because he began to work here. He came from Argentina and went to work with Hayter in the atelier in New York, and then went out and took the job at Iowa, and was given by the state university there the means to set up a really fabulous printmaking, etching, however—intaglio department.

[00:54:39.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, had you intended to go out—you and Roland—to work with him specifically, or was it a much more casual—

[00:54:47.42]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. Roland and Goldin and Levy had their GI money, and they wanted their graduate degree, and they had determined to work with Lasansky in printmaking. That was something they were going to do. And when I attached myself to Ginzel, I decided that was probably the best thing to do anyway, was to get a master's degree when it was possible to do so. Because especially then, we were at the height of the era when a master's degree was very necessary in order to go on and teach and make a living, which had been more or less universally decided was the best way for an artist to make a living, was to be able to teach somewhere.

[00:55:37.82]

And in truth, the education network was really building strong then. There were lots of jobs. And people went through the graduate schools of many universities, and came out having fine teaching positions. Or even a few young people would get jobs where they would be in line to build a whole new department, because intaglio was a big thing, printmaking. Lasansky did not teach lithography, so we didn't have any litho. But we certainly had a lot of etching. Anyway, I did not go out there to take etching. I went out to still remain a painter. And so I entered into the graduate painting department, and I had Hal Lotterman and Stuart Edie as teachers.

[00:56:28.64]

And those people who were out there painting after the war were echoing the activity in New York City, which was definitely Abstract Expressionism. People were working on large canvases in an abstract or semi-abstract manner. Synthetic Cubism was having its heyday, in a way, and then gestural painting came along. And I decided that there was something dreadfully lacking in my development. Although I had done some figure painting in oil at the Art Institute, and I'd done very well, I hadn't painted in oil for several years. And I had been painting on very small structures with very tiny brushes and in a very, as I have described, particular in private fashion.

[00:57:24.46]

And I thought that this certainly was the opportunity for me, if I was ever going to do it, to switch over to a large scale, and paint in oil, which I started to do, with disastrous results. I absolutely could not turn out one presentable painting. And I was getting more and more frustrated. And being newly married, being in Iowa with a whole group of new friends, et cetera, the whole thing was very much of a tribulation.

But Hal Lotterman, who I had made my thesis chairman because he seemed to be the most interested in the work I was doing and most supportive of me, and interested in this conflict that I was going through, said to me, "Why don't you get yourself a table, put it in the corner of the mural studio?" Mind you, we had a painting studio out there that was truly gigantic, very high ceilings, and very large. "Put the table in the corner, sit down at the table facing the corner, and do your egg temperas, and forget about what's going on." Because he said, "That seems to be the conflict that you're having right now, is some kind of a superficial notion that you have to do something simply because it's what's being done. It's mainstream; true, but that doesn't mean that you have to be part of the mainstream."

[00:58:49.99]

And so I decided, well, okay, so I'll do that. And I did, and I wrote my thesis in egg tempera. I produced several paintings with metal leaf. And I reintroduced the figure at that point in painting. And it came out in a very stylized fashion in that Lasansky's methods for teaching drawing—although he did not really enforce it or intend it, I'm sure, people picked up on—his students easily picked up on his manner of drawing. And—

[00:59:29.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it was a mannered style.

[00:59:31.39]

ELLEN LANYON:  It was sort of mannered, and so that in my works of that period, you could kind of see that. Although he was a really fantastic teacher for drawing, and was adamant about the artist's ability to draw the eyes, let's say, and build the head around it—in other words, it wasn't a matter of just drawing an oval and sticking two eyes on it. It was beginning to find the form in one eye, and the lids, and the brow, and the cheekbone, et cetera, where the ears fit in. And then you gradually develop the head, rather than just drawing an oval egg shape and sticking two eyes, a nose, and a mouth on it and calling it, "this is a face." And so I did learn a tremendous amount about putting certain kinds of structures together. And of course, then I learned a lot of technique, too.

[01:00:27.64]

And I did experimental work with Lasansky. I also etched, though. I took classes in etching. I turned out a print that had a gold leaf background, a color intaglio with gold leaf, which he claimed was very experimental, and maybe one of the most experimental things anybody had done, which was neither here nor there. But at least it gave—he was very supportive of me also.

[01:00:54.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, that was the print—the intaglio that was purchased by the Library of Congress and the Denver Art Museum later.

[01:01:02.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right, "The Duet." Well, it was probably my best print at Iowa. I started another one shortly after that, but I never really got around to finishing it. I took it off to London, which I can tell you about later, but I never really got to finish anything.

[01:01:17.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Duet was 19-by-23. That was a rather large print too, wasn't it?

[01:01:24.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, large enough, I suppose. Those were copper plate prints too. We were doing large copper plate intaglio because copper didn't cost anywhere near what it costs now.

[01:01:34.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So at the same time that there was a certain kind of excitement out of Iowa, there was something very stifling about the university art department, that it was a stifling thing, and that they were doing works on a scale and so forth that caused you some internal anxiety, which you worked out.

[01:01:53.41]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[01:01:54.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But were there other things about working within a university structure like that?

[01:02:00.55]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't know. You see, for the first time, I was on campus. Remember, I grew up in the city, went to school in the city, lived at home. And even though I was now in so-called married housing—which we really didn't—we lived in a apartment in town. But it was the whole idea of being part of a large campus situation. We had to take a few academics, but actually, I took mine in the summer, between the two years that I was there, and took one intensive course and got it over with, so I could concentrate in the art department. And I really wasn't terribly involved with, or aware of the rest of the university. I went to some performances, some music, et cetera, but I didn't have much to do with the university.

[01:02:51.40]

At Iowa, there's a river that flows through the town. And the art building and theater building, et cetera, are on one side of the river, and the real campus and liberal arts school is on the other side, so that we stayed pretty much, as you might say, on our side of the river, and had our own little community. But I did begin to be very much involved with art history, and art history that I had never experienced before. For instance, Blackshear, as I have described—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9961_m]

[00:00:03.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  At the Art Institute in Chicago, I described the kind of art history we had, which was invaluable, and designed, really, for the visual artist. But in Iowa, for the first time, I was subjected to classical art history training. And the first semester, I did very badly. I don't think that I really ever learned how to study on a college level, since everything I had done was pretty much studio class, and very few liberal arts courses, and some of those being things like Great Books, or education, or something that I was interested in and didn't really study in the same way that I might have.

[00:00:53.24]

But in Iowa, the art history was intense, and it was focused. And it was very specific, and I spent hours slide looking. We had all these flash cards. You'd have to go into the slide room, and study, cram for exams. And you, by God, learn schools of painting, dates, and artists. But I also had several really fine teachers. One was William Sebastian Hecksher, and the other one was Claude Marks. And they really brought the Renaissance and the Baroque periods alive for me, something I had not really had anything to do with that much before, except in the galleries of the Art Institute to see it. But they really kind of made it living.

[00:01:42.18]

And I reinstigated, I guess, my interest in figure painting. And so the paintings that were done at Iowa for the thesis all have figures. And by the way, they are still within the stylized vein, and they're all painted the way that I had been doing the egg temperas before, on a small scale with small brush and all—with egg tempera; everything is handcrafted. The pigments have to be ground, et cetera. So that was all part of the process, and I decided to write my thesis on this.

Now, between art history and printmaking and painting, I was very busy. But the second year I was there, I got an assistantship, which was just what we needed. We needed the money. My Aunt Frances, my father's sister, had given me as a wedding gift enough money for the first year of college. And the second year, I got—I mean, I saw to it somehow or other. I got this assistantship so I could finish. And doing that, I became the Curator of the Print Group at Iowa, which meant that I worked with all the prints that anyone had ever done there at Iowa, cataloging them, and keeping them, and then writing letters for Lasansky sort of his secretary.

[00:03:08.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were you a technical assistant at all, besides these other duties?

[00:03:10.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's like a technical assistant. I mean, being a secretary and curator and all that.

[00:03:16.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Ordering paper and—

[00:03:17.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, that was somebody else's job.

[00:03:20.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay.

[00:03:20.41]

ELLEN LANYON:  And then after the first semester in art history, I caught on, and I began to love it. And I began to get very good grades, and do very good work, and write good papers. And Hecksher tried to get me at that point to switch over and become a historian and a restorer, because he said the world really needed that sort of thing. And he felt I had a capacity for it. And I did. I liked it. I could have done it quite easily. But again, I thought that wasn't what I really wanted to do. I really wanted to be a painter. So I pursued the egg tempera. I did the thesis paintings. I wrote a thesis—rather not scholarly, but at least a complete description, and some history, and technical explanation of how the medium has worked. And that was my thesis.

[00:04:19.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Those were the early years of your married life. What were they like? Was there any confusion in that, as well as some of the other—

[00:04:27.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think when I went to Iowa—I think it was because I was 21 at that point, and naïve, and just getting into a whole new thing, new friends, I was having the conflict with the painting, for one thing. I think that had a lot to do with it. The first Christmas that I was away from home—and this is the first time I'm away from home, too. I lived at home all through the Art Institute in my father's house, and then simply moved into my husband's house without any real experience on my own, having my own place to live, or being, let's say, unprotected, or whatever.

[00:05:11.24]

By Christmas time, the trauma of the painting and the whole business of adjusting to this new life—I went home and had what later was considered to be a minor breakdown. I was kept home in bed because my mother's—well, there's physicians that are attached to the people who deal in Christian Science because of things like childbirth and that. They'll have certain people that will be available to them for signing papers and stuff. And she called this person up who said that there was nothing wrong with me. But I was almost on the verge of, let's say, pernicious anemia, which I really wasn't. I was just having a good old nervous breakdown. [Laughs.]

[00:06:01.66]

So I went back to Iowa and mentioned—oh, I was told to go to student health and tell them that I was anemic and tell them to do something about it. And they said, "Young woman, you're not anemic. What you need is a therapist." [Laughs.] And so for about that spring, I spent time unraveling a lot of confusion in my mind about a lot of things. And by spring, I really felt one hundred percent better, and I think I had a very good and steady notion of exactly what direction I wanted to go in, who I was, what I wanted to do, and how to solve any marital problem I was having. And it all resolved itself. But the painting stayed the same. That is to say that this particular therapy, as far as I can determine, had very little to do with the painting, except that the people did come into the picture at that time, the painting of people.

[00:07:09.30]

Now, I was going to say one other thing, and that is that Stephen Greene—Guston and Stephen Greene had been teaching—well, really, Guston, in Iowa before that time. There was a tradition out there of this figure fantasy. Remember like Stephen Greene? That's why I mentioned his name. The figure involved in a space—

[00:07:35.99]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Created space.

[00:07:37.07]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Created space, in a sort of activity that had a kind of strangely surreal or almost forced surrealism. And I kind of latched on to that and worked. I mean, it seemed to be a natural progression from the earlier egg tempera. Is it still an egg tempera?

[00:08:00.02]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, in that work, there are hints at a sense of place and of landscape. Is that place all imagination, or is any of that the impact of the Iowa landscape, or specific people out there? Are these specific people, or still, are they imagined or idealized figures in imagined and idealized ways?

[00:08:22.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't think—no, they were imagined people. They weren't real people. I still wasn't dealing with the human being as a volumetric, you know, living creature. Somehow or other, it was still part of the decoration.

[00:08:41.16]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But Lasansky had taught you the techniques of setting the eyes into the head, and so forth, so you were somewhat moving in a direction towards understanding that more thoroughly. But even now at this point, they are not real people in real places. They're all out of the imagination.

[00:09:05.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they're all storybook, too. I mean, they're probably more—

[00:09:07.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  All literal, traditional, storytelling type.

[00:09:09.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:09:11.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, how did you sense the theme of them? I mean, is there a theme of them? Because they're like a page in a book. Take, for example, "The Duet," the print that you did. How did you sense that as a story or in a literal tradition?

[00:09:29.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't know. I think that I was just having to dig up subject matter. I left the city that was my place where I grew up. I'd never really been in the country before, except for Ox-Bow. I wasn't sure maybe what to do, or how to handle this time and space that I had at Iowa, and fill it up with images that related to my experience. And so I invented. There's no story that goes along with those.

[00:10:01.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You can see or read into them some, let's say, art history. Caravaggio's "The Lute Player." Things of this sort, was that part of the influences in some way?

[00:10:12.06]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, probably because, for instance, the—there's a painting of a woman sitting at a table with birdcages and all that really related to almost concepts of Vermeer. It has nothing to do with Vermeer. It has nothing to do with that period in history, and yet those things were things that I looked at and were very impressed by. It's kind of a situation in space.

[00:10:36.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  No literal interpretation but an idea of an interpretation. [Phone rings.]

[00:10:46.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:10:46.98]

The Iowa art history, when I say that Vermeer—or let's say that painting had nothing to do with Vermeer, I suppose it is in a way trying to avoid the issue of how I was subconsciously influenced a great deal by all this information that was just continually battering down the naivete that I'd been sort of posing under, because it's true that the early works certainly did all come out of the medieval or the early Italian paintings, you know, the egg tempera and metal leaf paintings of the Italians. And then the work proceeded.

[00:11:38.85]

And in Iowa, the—especially Renaissance painting—and I tell you, it was both Heckscher and—Well, I have to go back and say that Heckscher's specific interest, in a way, was Northern Renaissance, and he made it come alive. And I was very, very interested in that, and the emergence of genre painting in Europe, and then, of course, the development of the oil emulsions and oil out of the egg tempera. And it was as if I found myself moving through history, in my own way, still retaining this "style," in quotes, that was built on a kind of a Ben Shahn, Guston mythology but—and kind of using that to make my own path through art history. And then, I really did want to work with figures, but I did not want to work with them as I had done in figure painting class at the Art Institute.

[00:12:46.08]

And I didn't have any kind of a painting class like that at Iowa. I simply painted, and I made prints. As a graduate student, I wasn't really held to any kind of curriculum other than just doing my work and doing my thesis work so that I felt very free to do this kind of thing. And because of Lotterman's encouragement, I was really able, I think, to accomplish quite a bit. We also had a very, very substantial course in contemporary art history, too so that—although that had been good at the Art Institute and I—there, I had the museum.

[00:13:28.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But what was the scope of that? I mean, did they get into Abstract Expressionism at that point?

[00:13:34.62]

ELLEN LANYON:  A little bit, but we had a man named Lester Longman who was Chairman of the department, but also a historian who taught Modern. And he of course got through Cubism, and the Fauves. He got through into the School of Paris and began—I mean, there was—of course, there was Abstract Expressionism, but that was '48, '49, '50. At '49, it's still a little early.

[00:14:05.16]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But actually, Surrealism was well grounded by then, and Dada was—

[00:14:09.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, we didn't get into that as much, you see, as opposed to the Art Institute where we had more of an emphasis on Primitive, the Dadaists and the Surrealists. At Iowa It was a much more or less international school. And when it got to American painting, people like Kuniyoshi, the painters—James Lechay taught drawing out there. The New York painters of the '40s sort of brought—it was conclusive, you know. And Abstract Expressionism was happening at that time, and it was happening at Iowa too, because some of these painters were—had been through the war. They were six years past college age already, and they were involving themselves in a highly professional pursuit, so it wasn't quite the same as if you were in school.

[00:15:09.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were you still showing while you were out there?

[00:15:11.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  We did a lot of exhibiting out of Iowa. The Iowa Print Group was very active in pushing the students in the intaglio classes to send to print shows. And in those days, there were lots and lots of juried print shows all around the country. And everybody was very active. And there were a few prizes or purchases that came out of that time. And then, locally, the Des Moines Art Center or whatever, we would send paintings in, and there were a few shows at the time or purchases. So Iowa was especially good I think, in that it continued that [Joseph] Hirsch attitude that concerned being a professional. And even though you might be at that particular moment, in school, that did not really make a difference. You were really a professional, and you should conduct your daily life that way. You should send to shows, communicate, make vitaes, prepare yourself for teaching and the big world outside. It was very adult.

[00:16:14.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This is the kind of thing that was being pushed though by the university graduate departments at that time?

[00:16:24.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, yeah, because everything was led to teaching. And at least in the visual arts, you didn't think about getting a Ph.D., but other people did. Now the other thing is that Iowa was renowned for its creative writing department, and I knew some of the writers from there, not well enough, though, for it to make that much difference, I must say. I knew a poet or two, and I knew some of the writers. But I could almost say with assurance that it didn't have that much of an impact.

[00:16:53.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you were isolated actually from exactly what was happening, or immediate experience about what was happening in the New York scene at that time.

[00:17:01.42]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, but people came out. It was sort of the beginning of the visiting artists thing. Iowa was one of the first places that did that, and they had a gallery, and they had shows. And they were renowned as one of the best universities at that time.

[00:17:14.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, Momentum was going on in Chicago. Were there any ties into that? Were there frequent trips back to Chicago during the two-year period?

[00:17:22.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, we didn't go in, except for holidays and—but the next year, a couple of the people who had been involved with—like Dominick Di Meo came out to Iowa and couple of other people. And in a way, we sort of kept up a little bit with what had happened in the year or two that we missed. But you see, we were already looking ahead towards postgraduate life and not thinking that much about Momentum. And at that point, we weren't even sure where we were going to live. So it wasn't—that didn't—it wasn't involved at all.

[00:18:00.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right. So you were continuing your painting in egg tempera, and you were also involved in taking printmaking classes and drawing. Was there anything that you were doing at the time in the area of the 3-D—ceramics or sculpture?

[00:18:17.22]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, nothing.

[00:18:18.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you feel alienated from working in that?

[00:18:21.94]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't think it's a matter of alienation. I think that graduate school in those days was so full. You know, people clamored to get into the various schools. It was hard to get in, and when you were in, you were almost forced to make decisions. Like, I will be a painter. I could take a little etching, but I had to be a painter if I was getting my thesis there. And so you just couldn't go in and play around in it. I mean, in the sculpture department, I suppose I could have taken a course, but I had just a full schedule to keep up with what I had to do.

[00:18:56.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was that trying to—was the University Art Department trying to push people into categories? I mean, do you recognize that as a part of this phenomenon of the university and the art school?

[00:19:06.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  Maybe. I don't know. I really don't want to get into that, because I don't—I was not an educator, and I have not been a full-time administrator or educator in the grand university tradition. So I really don't feel very qualified to talk about it as much.

[00:19:24.67]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were there, in those two years, any other significant changes or breakthrough as it relates to your own work at that time that you can pull out? We've clarified a lot of that, but is there anything you want to say beyond that?

[00:19:43.82]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I don't know. I suppose that just people growing up and coming of age, and adjusting to the adult world, and to being self-motivated, self-reliant, responsible for other people. I mean, you know, it's all that maturing.

[00:19:59.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, part of that, of course, would be the attitudes that were formulating between you and your husband. Were there any was there any friction between the two different styles in which you worked—yours more in the literal tradition, and his more within the abstract tradition?

[00:20:19.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I wouldn't say so. I was unaware of it existing at that time, and I think he was, too. I think we were much too early in our development to be worrying about what we were up to, you know.

[00:20:31.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And there was no competition in your relationship?

[00:20:34.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, not that I could discern. We never talked about competition. We never—we really didn't believe that it existed. I think it existed later on, but not at that point. It might have, but I'm—I mean, it would be very hard for me. I could start in on a whole soliloquy about adjusting and—to marriage and early jealousies, and the male-female conflict. But I think that wasn't that much of an outstanding issue, so I don't think it is that pertinent to what else was going on in my life right then.

[00:21:14.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  As you look at work that you did later and then think back at people, instructors, other people that were in school during that period, you say that Lasansky was an influence. Are there others, or do you want to say anything more about those people as influences?

[00:21:36.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think, probably, our peer group was as important as anything, although, Lasansky was certainly very important as a leader. And I knew people. Arthur Levine was out there at that time. John Kacere, who's now known in New York. and painting with Ivan Karp. John Schultz was there then as an instructor. Now, he's really head of that photo department, and a well-known photographer. There were various people working with the art history people. Johnny Rosenfeld is now at Harvard. I think I've said all I wanted to say about it.

[00:22:24.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Okay, you mentioned the fact that you were thinking about the future and trying to decide. In relationship to that, how does your applying for the Fulbright fit into that perspective?

[00:22:37.22]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that in the last half of the senior graduate year everybody who could conceive of doing so applied for a Fulbright. It was the thing to do then. I mean, there were a lot being given, and the program was in full swing. And I applied for England because I had this whole this whole business with egg tempera. D.V. Thompson, who had almost emigrated and gone to England, was teaching there at the time. And so I wrote a proposal for a Fulbright to go and study egg tempera, to go and really work with this person because, mind you, except for Miss Van at the Art Institute, I didn't have a teacher.

[00:23:19.78]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Any formal—

[00:23:20.41]

ELLEN LANYON:  I just did my own teaching with a group. We sort of dug it all up for ourselves. And I was sort of anxious to work with the man who did all the translation of the Ceninni treatises because I felt that even though maybe I had read it all, I didn't think that was all he had to say, and that he probably had experimented a lot. And I wanted to go there, so I applied, and I got the Fulbright.

[00:23:48.23]

When I got to England, I discovered that D.V. Thompson had become ill or something, and he'd gone back to the United States and was not at all available. But they had they had substituted a course in restoration offered by the man who was the restorer for the National Gallery, a German by the name of Helmut Riemann who had been involved with the Van Meegeren Vermeer forgeries. And he knew a lot about fakes. He knew a lot about restoration. He knew a lot about work that was to be done on paintings from all eras—a very knowledgeable man.

[00:24:34.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  His specialty was conservation.

[00:24:38.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. So I entered that class. I worked very hard it was a—when one went on a Fulbright to England, one went to school from nine [a.m.] to five [p.m.] every day; five days a week and no fooling.

[00:24:50.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did that sort of come out of the sky? I mean, had you counted on the Fulbright, and then it came through?

[00:24:58.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I had hoped to get it. Actually, everybody tried for one, and I was one of two or three people that got them, only, out of the department. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I worked for Mauricio Lasansky and that he was very supportive of me, and recommended me highly. And I had an unusual project, very bona fide kind of reason for going to England. And so the decision was made to forego the taking of a job at that time. Roland had been offered a job at the University of Illinois here in Chicago, which was then just a two-year college thing. And he, after considering it a long time, realized that this was our chance to go to Europe. And he made arrangements so that someone would take his job temporarily, and he could come back to that job. And so we packed up and went to Europe.

[00:25:59.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you continued to paint during that winter that you were in London, studying?

[00:26:05.75]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:26:08.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Any breakthrough there in the work that you can sense, or is that obviously coming later?

[00:26:16.36]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't think so. I tried some things there, you know? Picasso was using Duco lacquers and things at that time. [Telephone rings.]

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:26:28.45]

A lot of people had tried them. And as a matter of fact, some people had worked with them at Iowa, and so I decided to try them. They were worked on a masonite panel, which I was accustomed to, a rigid surface. And I remember we had in London a place at Hampstead that had belonged to an artist. We sublet it. It was a ballroom in an old Georgian house, and with very high ceilings and very beautiful large windows. And so I could set up an easel and paint there. I had beautiful light. And I was really inspired to do some real easel painting instead of sitting down at a little table and doing the tempera.

[00:27:15.98]

And of course, here I was. I was now in Europe, and I was seeing all the things that I had seen on slides, or read about. And I think, very fortunate for me I had gone to Iowa and had that art history before my first trip to Europe, because it made a lot of difference. I knew much more about what I was looking at. I had one thrill after another. Finding a Piero here, or an honest-to-God Vermeer, or a Memling, or a van der Weyden, or something, which previous to that at the Art Institute, I would not have—I would have had an inkling, but not the same kind of background for it.

[00:28:00.35]

And also, then, I worked very hard at restoration, and we did—one of the things that we did that was interesting was we would get things from the palace, you know, Buckingham. This was part of the school's thing because this was the Courtauld Institute, a branch of the University of London. And we would get the Queen's pictures to clean, the lesser important things, and this was one way that government kept up, I guess, their huge collection, which was a lot of minor artists included in it and we'd get little things to work on.

[00:28:44.08]

And then we were also given assignments to copy paintings, and I just learned an awful lot about pigments and techniques, because when you clean a picture, you have to really deal with the surface, and you have to look at the surface and you have to see how that painter put the paint on it. And I think that training as a restorer and then subsequent work in the area taught me so much, continued my education and my growth as a craftsman. It had a lot—I think, probably the most to do with why I do think now I have a good grasp on techniques and possibilities, surfaces, paint application, et cetera.

[00:29:35.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, then, you spend a lot of time during this period in the Tate as well as the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery.

[00:29:41.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, or hanging over a job where I was taking the varnish off, and actually revealing color that was perhaps a hundred years old or more, that had been concealed with grime and varnish and sort of like unfolding for myself a little more art history.

[00:30:03.23]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And of course, the chemistry of all of—

[00:30:05.48]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Well, we had a spectroscope, which was sort of new then, where you could analyze paint samples. You could tell how old the paint was, or at least you could establish maybe the age of the painting because we knew the particulars of how old a certain kind of color was in history, when certain blues were used, et cetera. It was a very fascinating study.

[00:30:30.32]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What else—

[00:30:31.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  And—yeah, go ahead.

[00:30:34.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Uh—

[00:30:34.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  I did more, too, in London.

[00:30:37.13]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, go on.

[00:30:39.05]

ELLEN LANYON:  Roland was going to the Slade School [in London –Ed.] in the daytime on his GI Bill and using up what he had left of it, and the Slade afforded him a place to do etching. But he—we had some other friends over there. We met a lot of Fulbrighters on the boat, and it was a wonderful time, and we were pretty carefree. We had no children, and we were, both of us, really going to school and working hard all day, and then we would meet after school. And we both of us signed up at a London County Council school in—Edgeworth Road? Is that it? Because Roland wanted to work in stained glass. They had classes there, and he got really interested in the technique.

And they had intaglio, so I decided I would sign up for intaglio in the evening and continue my etching. I'd taken a couple of plates over to work on, and I came upon for the first time European printing methods, whereby the artist does the work the drawing, or the work on the plate, but then the printer, the technician, takes over. Now, that was absolutely contrary to the way I learned litho from Max Kahn at the Art Institute, or from Lasansky's insistence that an artist be a printmaker. If you be a printmaker, you make your plates. You print your plates yourself. It's all your own operation. That is what it meant to be a printmaker in the United States. In Europe, a printmaker—

[00:32:09.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Worked with a trained craftsman.

[00:32:11.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, you were an artist, and you created something on either a plate or a stone, and the technician took over from there. So I ran into a little controversy the first couple of days with a printer who wouldn't let me do my own printing, and I finally had to give in to him, because it was his shop. And then, I learned the joys of using a craftsman's collaboration, which is another thing that I've continued to work with until this time, and expect to continue—the joys of collaboration with a person who enhances what you're doing. You know, we were all brought up to be do-it-yourselfers. It was something in the home, and it was something in the school. I was making all my own paint. I was taking all my own prints. I was working at certain kinds of physical activities that I think probably were so time consuming that it had to take away from the time that one would normally spend with ideas and conceptualizing.

[00:33:21.21]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What about the rest of the impact on the lifestyle of an artist or just generally in England? This is a whole foreign ground for you. You obviously had your friends that were also Fulbright students, and Americans studying in London, but what was the impact of this whole English lifestyle on you?

[00:33:46.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I liked the English people. First of all, my background—I can't remember if we went into that or not, but my background is primarily British, anyway. And I had this thing from my mother who was crazy about her father and always thought about the British. And I don't even know if I remember telling you about how she felt my sister and I were the princesses. I mean, it was all built up in my mind. So to go to England was really—like it was almost necessary to go there, either to believe it or to destroy this myth.

[00:34:19.32]

And actually, I loved England. I liked the people. I guess I had just a natural affinity for them anyway. The blood was there. And I liked the way they conducted their lives and their humility, and the way they had survived the war. We were in rationing. We had coal rationing. We had sugar, meat, and coffee rationing. England in 1950 was not an easy place to live. The earth was still full of holes from bombs, and the people were just beginning to come out of it.

[00:34:54.84]

Now, my family, the Lanyons, were the American branch of the Cornish family, where they immigrated from. And I went down and looked up my cousin Peter Lanyon in Cornwall who was and still is—although he's dead now—considered to be one of England's greatest Abstract Expressionists. And we would go down there and visit with him, and we had friends—and this is in St. Ives. And we have friends who were ceramicists, and they were down there working and living with Bernard Leach, also in St. Ives. So we would spend many a weekend, and we'd stay with the Mackenzies and Leach, or we'd go over and visit Peter. And I did a lot of drawings and some paintings of that area of Cornwall, which is my place, my country. I did that little one of Mousehole which you saw, the little port, and another one of Porthleven, and various places down there. All still kind of in the medieval style. I'm still into that motif, you know? [Inaudible] mannerism.

[00:36:07.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was this style still as strongly reinforced by the people around you?

[00:36:15.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I guess so. Although you see, in England my work was rather private. It wasn't being done in school at all. And we did spend so much time in school that we weren't home very much.

[00:36:25.85]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Then, would you consider your cousin Peter Lanyon and these people and situation at the time to have had an influence at that point?

[00:36:37.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I don't think they had anything to do with my work. It was just a kind of broadening of my base. I was learning about living in Europe, and being different because it is different.

[00:36:49.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In that short time that you were in London, were you introduced in any way to the art scene that was going on there?

[00:36:57.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, well, a little bit. We got involved with the London County Council, which was I, guess, the first arts council in the world. And they got very hyped up on the Iowa Print Group, because, England had had this fantastic history of being renowned for its etchers. And then printmaking suffered a great decline.

[00:37:23.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  During the war years?

[00:37:24.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, over the war years. From the '20s on, It really began to decline. And so this breath of fresh air from America with new techniques, and the intaglio, and experimental things, and all that was really caught on. There was a man working at the Slade named John Buckland Wright, and he is also now dead. And he had been a colleague of Hayter's in Paris in the old days of the Atelier Paris.

[00:37:52.65]

And when Roland entered his class, he got all excited because he hadn't really realized how many people were working in intaglio the States and how much they had advanced in their notions of techniques and that. So he really became very good friends with Roland, and the outcome was that by the end of the winter, the London County Council invited us to organize a show of Iowa Print Group and bring it over. There was an exhibition, and then the show was traveled to Australia. It was traveled all over England and then to Australia before it was sent back. And at that time, the London County Council offered Roland and I an opportunity, especially Roland, to go down to Cornwall to St. Ives and they would set us up in a graphic workshop.

[00:38:47.09]

Now, this was a big decision to make, because Roland really wanted to come back to the States and teach, and we weren't sure if we stayed another year what would happen. We should have stayed. I mean, it was just the dumbest thing we ever did was to not take up that offer at least for a couple of years. But instead, we came back to the States and started our own workshop here, but that's another story. I mean, um—

[00:39:14.75]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So you would say that what you were doing, or what was going on in American printmaking sort of revitalized, or brought to the English attention and had some impact historically from that point on?

[00:39:29.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh yeah, a great deal. In fact, Roland I think was really important in teaching a lot of the techniques to the British in the school there.

[00:39:37.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it all blossomed after that too. There was more attention to the American scene and so forth.

[00:39:41.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. That's right. I was just going to say that in the summertime then, we went and traveled through France and Italy with Arthur Levine, who'd had a Fulbright to Paris. He met us there and we traveled with him because he could speak the language, and we just saw all the wonders of Europe.

[00:39:59.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Before we get on to that, I want to ask you one question, and that is what was the impact of working with these paintings, and seeing these paintings that dealt with a great deal of realism in them? Was there an impact at that point?

[00:40:20.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  I'm not sure about that. No, I don't think so. You see, I was still resisting that. I think maybe that it should be said as a general, maybe blanket statement, that although I had all the skills that were necessary to do realistic painting, now I wonder why it was that I didn't. I think that there was always involved with art this literary strain, and this need to create an image, a narrative. And I couldn't create it. For some reason or other, it was not within my—either scope or limitations to create it out of real stuff. In other words, I had to have it a narrative on my own terms, and it came out of a certain kind of stylization and mannerism that was very, very prevalent in the '40s in America.

[00:41:23.35]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it was very personal to you at that time, and it developed as a personal style. Now, to go on to talk a little bit more about your travel on the continent in France and Italy. Were there any experiences with other artists, or with specific places that or any qualities about just the lay of the land, or the light or form, or the way that you perceptually dealt with things around you that had any impact later that might be appropriate to mention?

[00:42:05.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know. I know that when we traveled through, we kept sketchbooks, and I did linear notes all the way through it on places we'd gone, and did nice little drawings of things. But it seemed to maintain that stylization all the way along. I mean, there seemed to be a separation, somehow. I want to talk a little bit later about the artist as a schizoid being, and I think this is part of it. You can travel, and see all this stuff, and want to work badly, and make sketches, and yet there's a separation there too. It's like your own fantasy and the fantasy of reality.

[00:42:56.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The fantasy of the reality that you've made for yourself in your style and for yourself.

[00:43:02.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Yeah. Or just traveling through Europe for the first time is like one huge—you know, dream. It's so wonderful to see all these things.

[00:43:12.71]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So basically, the—you can't call it a pleasure trip, but there's a note of just as a sponge during those years?

[00:43:22.63]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right.

[00:43:24.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What was the impact, or was there a trauma in the impact of returning to Chicago in America, or was that just something that you eased into?

[00:43:35.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that probably there had to be a certain adjustment to the idea that now the school days were over. The Fulbright adventure days in Europe were over. All the imagery, ideas, visions that had been absorbed from the travel through Europe, I mean the actual confrontation of all the weight of that history and visual material, was something that had made our lives so full and rich, that we, I think, felt that it was time to settle down somewhere and get back to work—not that we hadn't been working in Europe all the time—but to sort of begin to establish a place and then, you know—where we would actually begin to produce seriously, et cetera.

[00:44:35.73]

Well, so instead of staying in New York, since all our goods were in Chicago, and since Roland had been thinking about that job, we did come back here, and we established ourselves in a studio, our first real studio, which was a storefront on the west side near the Container Corporation, next to the railroad in the Polish neighborhood, and where we could find a cheap place. And we remodeled the store.

[00:45:03.59]

Ginzel had to take another job for a time, but then he eventually did get to teaching at the University of Illinois. He taught at Chicago for a couple of years, and we had been tempted to live on the South Side, which would have put us in a slightly different ambience if we'd been involved with the University of Chicago campus and faculty. But instead, we came to the industrial Near North Side, and settled there. And mind you, I was still doing egg temperas of the city at that time, and so I had a positive reaction to the kind of neighborhood that we chose to live in. That's where I would have preferred anyway.

[00:45:48.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is that where other artists were living?

[00:45:50.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no one lived there. We just happened to find a storefront that was ideal, and cheap, and could be converted easily into living in studio, and we took it. And now, we took up friendships again with various people that were still here from the Momentum days or other friends. I think that we might not have had the idea that we would stay forever in Chicago, but we were here, and we needed to get settled and start living in a—you know, pattern of life.

[00:46:23.64]

So we took up with our former friends. In the meantime, they had begun to become a much more cohesive group, as far as their art philosophy went. They had left off with the politics of the exhibition situation, and they had become much more involved with the politics of their work. And Golub, who is still very much of a—oh, one would call him a propagandist, I suppose, for humanism, and man's rights, and the deplorable human condition when oppressed. He was at that time very strong even then, and very politically minded, and he had other artists—or there were other artists still here—Campoli, and Rosovsky, and et cetera. And they had worked and become—well, I don't know now. And thinking about this, that sort of developed in time.

[00:47:33.80]

I don't know when the first so-called Monster School emerged, what year that was precisely. Golub was away in Europe for a while. But still, he was more or less considered the spiritual leader of the group for a long time. In any case, we did settle in. We did resume friendships. And I began to do restoration work, and Roland was teaching, and we were painting.

[00:47:58.93]

Now, I would say this about Chicago, that perhaps because of the scale of the city—that is to say, not too many collectors, not too many friends of art, that the events that took place that concerned these people—lectures or exhibitions put on by the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute, which served almost as a little museum within a museum. I mean, it was a core group of collectors who stimulated activity in the arts, and brought people in from outside to lecture, and that. They actually were very interested in what was going on locally, and they did work with us, and have us lecture and do programs for them. And so that in a way, there was a feeling at that time of being needed in the community, and having a place. And I think that encouraged people to stay at that particular time.

[00:48:59.53]

It changed, though, because we started a workshop here—the Graphic Workshop. We felt it was a crying need for a place where artists could gather and work together. And we had a press, a litho press, and somebody else had a—actually Arthur Levine had come back from Europe and settled here, also. And having come originally from Chicago, his parents were here, he had a very large, gorgeous French etching press that he put into the kitty. And we had a couple of other presses, and lots of equipment and stones, and we began the Chicago Graphic Workshop, which was a cooperative venture. And there was Roland, myself, Levine, Aaron Roseman, and Janet Ruttenberg. We all pitched in and opened the doors, and then we would, for a fee, allow a Chicago artist to come in and use the facilities and print. But it did become rather exciting in a small way—an exciting place, and many people, if they didn't work there, they'd visit. They dropped by. And there was a lot of conversation and—you know, stimulating to be around that kind of a scene.

[00:50:21.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did the workshop retain prints from each of the people that had worked in it?

[00:50:25.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. That's right. We established a file, sort of based on my experience with the Iowa Print Group. I've continued in that fashion, taking a print from every edition that was pulled. And later, we did organize an exhibition at the Art Institute home in their Print Department. We were very, very much encouraged by Carl Schniewind and people at that time.

[00:50:48.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was obviously an interest because of Schniewind and in imprint. And as you said, when you were in London, an influence developed out of your being there, and expressing what was happening in America. Did that same thing—were you a catalyst, also for the interest—in revitalizing an interest in printmaking here?

[00:51:14.23]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think we were a little early. I think the renaissance of printmaking in America came after that. It's too bad that we couldn't have hung on. Our workshop was only open three or four years, because we were so desperate for money. We just couldn't keep it going. There was enough interest, but the kind of people that could come and use the facility simply didn't have the cash to do it. Prints were not considered, except for maybe the AAA Gallery, or something that dealt heavily—They weren't really considered to be first-class works of art. I think the caste system within the arts was very much more delineated in those days than it is now. Now, multimedia has—or mixed media has certainly taken care of that almost totally.

[00:52:05.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It stands on its own, as opposed to at that time, the structure between painting and sculpture and everything—

[00:52:11.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Fell under. Yeah, below it. Anything that was not painting or sculpture was definitely a minor art, and so printmaking sort of got cast down with other things like ceramics and weaving, they all suffered from that.

[00:52:25.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you came back, you did start teaching again.

[00:52:29.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  I taught at the Art Institute with George Beuhr, and I also taught in a junior school on Saturdays. And so I began to work up a little vitae there for teaching experience, and I was very busy doing freelance restoration. So we were making out, as you might say. We had enough money to get by. And we had our studio, and we were working, and we were getting to sell. And I had gone back to the Benjamin Gallery, so—for Roland to sell our work, and we were flourishing.

[00:53:00.37]

But it was about that time that I began to question my own—oh, perhaps the success of my work. I've never really been able to cope with the fact that when art becomes easy—an easy chore, and repetitive, something that you simply turn out even though it could be your signature, and you have developed that signature, and it has taken you years to do so—when it gets to the point of being repetitive and not quite—

[00:53:36.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The adventure?

[00:53:37.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no.

[00:53:38.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Exploration?

[00:53:43.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  Uh—it's not just that, no. You see, I think artists fall into two camps. Either you are the kind of person who has a theory, be it scientific or not, and you pursue that one thing as a study, as an investigation of this theory that you have developed, and that you could possibly do the same painting over and over and over again with a slight variation and that would be your work, perhaps your life's work.

[00:54:13.81]

Then, the other kind of artist I think is a person who is—feels that what he wants to do is to continually interpret the continual burst of visual activity or imagery that he is subjected to every day. And so consequently he invents all kinds of things, not necessarily ever to be repeated again, that come out of his daily experience.

[00:54:47.63]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you feel that the abstract art in America is along—definitely along the lines of the first?

[00:54:55.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no. I think it's just different, that's all. Some abstract painting—I mean, you take a man like Albers—definitely; that's what he's all about. But then you take de Kooning or Franz Kline, and they're not about that at all. They're about another totally kind of unique expression—at least I think that's true—that is not really based on a series or a study or an investigation of any concept or—no, that's really wrong because it is a concept. But you understand what I mean. It is not like something where Albers has limited himself. These other people do not limit themselves.

[00:55:33.35]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was a time in Rothko's life where he became very dissatisfied with himself within the range of that format of reinterpreting the same kind of thing within the same wealth of range that was there, which was really a struggle within him that he couldn't resolve.

[00:56:00.35]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:56:00.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And then, there are people that have been able to overcome that, but he obviously is one of the first—And you consider yourself to be the latter, where you deal with the visual world and the exploration.

[00:56:12.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Definitely, that's what I mean to say, yeah. Mm-hmm [affirmative]. But—

[00:56:17.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In the Chicago scene at that time, there was a certain vitality that of these people with a full commitment—

[00:56:25.79]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, there was a lot, yes. And I was going to go on to say that I had the dealer, and the dealer was beginning to pressure me to do more and more paintings in the image of the last one. And I became suspicious, and dissatisfied, and uneasy with the work that I was doing. I was watching work that was being turned out by a group of artists that were coming out of the Art Institute a generation younger than I. And I was very, very interested in what they were up to. Not a generation—a decade, you know? But I could see that there was a touch of the surreal and the fantastic that interested me, but there were also many more formalistic situations occurring that I felt I had to begin to move out of my small scale, Primitivistic production, and begin to really open up more, and try to change the scale of things and the intent of things.

[00:57:40.84]

And so I discontinued working with the egg tempera, as such. That is to say, I did not work with the small brush and the small-scale panel. I gessoed up some large pieces of masonite, things that were three by four feet, or four by five, and took large brushes, and made up my egg the same as I had before. But instead of using one egg for a painting, I'd use ten eggs for a painting. And I was much more liberal with the way I applied the paint. You know, it was done broadly, and almost working with watercolor techniques, rather than the more rigid egg tempera technique.

[00:58:21.93]

And it was also at a time when I was drawing—beginning to draw more, and investigate nature, but still adding an element of a mannerism, a style, which I still felt was very important, because it was—well, it still is considered that way. It just takes a different form these days. But I think that the commercial gallery world has imposed that on artists, and they get hung up with it more than they should. It's important that one develop one's own hand and vision. But at the same time, to be so concerned about whether the thing that you are inventing is unique enough, you know—it's bad. It's really a hindrance to progress.

[00:59:11.06]

But anyway, so I really backed off, and I began to observe more closely my young colleagues. For instance, Ivan Michaux, Irving Petlin, Robert Barnes, Richard Hunt. Those people all came out of that generation, and they were doing a lot of eloquent work, and I was very impressed. So I stopped doing my small egg temperas, and began these larger-scale paintings. That would more or less coincide with about 1954 or 1955. About '55, when—My son was born in 1954. We were still living in the storefront, but we really didn't have hot water or bathing facilities, and it was decided that—Oh, and we were way over on the West Side, where to walk the baby in the buggy meant a shower of coal dust from the railroad, no trees, et cetera. So we thought it would be a good idea to find a place to live that would provide these things.

[01:00:19.74]

So I looked around and found an apartment that was right on Lincoln Park. Look out the front window, and there was the park. The beach was close by. The zoo was across the street. And we moved. And the Conservatory was a place that was a very special place to visit, especially in the wintertime when it was cold out, and you took a walk with the baby, and then you'd go in to warm up. And I became more and more fascinated by plant forms, growth forms, et cetera. So that the last large egg tempera, the free ones, are of conservatories.

[01:00:57.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  At that time, there had already developed in Chicago, and there already was a strong sense for the surreal, for the Primitive.

[01:01:11.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't know about that. It was coming on. I think that it developed much later. There was only a touch of it. I don't think you can call Golub Surrealist or a Fantasist. Golub is a figurative painter, whose intention, as far as I can tell, is to make statements and remarks about his political beliefs, and to do it in a fashion that really does that rules out certain aspects of the surreal or the Dada.

[01:01:46.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But Campoli was doing pieces that lent themselves to a surreal interpretation and—

[01:01:54.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  The early birth pieces.

[01:01:55.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yes.

[01:01:56.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, that's true.

[01:01:57.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And Richard Abercrombie had done—

[01:02:00.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Gertrude.

[01:02:02.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Gertrude Abercrombie.

[01:02:03.33]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[01:02:04.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And her work had the sense of that, and that was a long and well established person in the community, particularly that you had seen her work earlier. And Frumkin at the time was beginning to show some of the Surrealist—

[01:02:23.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yes. You see, I think that partly what came about in Chicago, there's a kind of multiple situation. One thing, the Field Museum was very important, because we had a woman here who taught art history at the Art Institute—her name, Kathleen Blackshear. She had come here from Texas to be an assistant to Helen Gardner, who wrote Art Through the Ages. And Kathleen Blackshear was absolutely mad for the arts of primitive man, medieval, and Oriental.

[01:02:57.89]

And then, she would sort of drop off in the middle, and bypass the Renaissance and 19th century, and she would sort of come back at about the time of Cézanne, and then get involved—very much involved with Picasso, and Cubism, and Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. And she ran art history courses, where we were more or less imbued with the same kind of enthusiasm she had for those things, and the same kind of maybe fare-thee-well well attitude towards the Renaissance.

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9962_m]

[00:00:02.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  She [Kathleen Blackshear –Ed.] probably had the most influence on developing certain schools, because a lot of the assignments involved going to the Museum of Natural History, as I said. They involved going to the Oriental Institute, and delving into ancient magic, ritual, patterns, symbologies—things that one could not very well ignore after the weight of their significance was collectively—

[00:00:45.85]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Impacted—

[00:00:47.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  —impacted—

[00:00:48.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Impressionable people—

[00:00:51.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  So I do feel that she had an extraordinary power over the development of certain people in this city. Now, mind you, at the same time at the Art Institute, there was a whole group of people who were Expressionists, who studied figure painting, and life drawing, and figure sculpture, figurative sculpture and—that were not involved in this. Hundreds of people—there were a handful that she was able to really influence. Campoli. Yes, one of them, for a time. Although Campoli bridged both worlds in a way—the Expressionists and the sort of Surreal Fantasists.

[00:01:32.42]

All right, then, the other thing was that Blackshear ran a class called Composition Criticism, which was practically—I think the thing was scheduled at first, if not so, then at least later on it proved to be so popular that it was. And she would take a group of people in every week she would assign a theme. And within the context of that theme, one would invent something to bring in. Now, some people were already developed enough so that all the works showed a singular theme, or stream of thought, and were connected. And then, for other people who were kind of wavering, or searching out a kind of conceptual imagery for themselves, would perhaps try different things different weeks, just to test themselves and see just what they were thinking about or what they could do. It was a very, very important class. And just about everybody that passed through that museum for a good many of years was involved with it.

[00:02:48.70]

At the same time, there were courses in the study of Japanese prints. There was a lot of gentle influence, I think, from the fact that Chicago collectors were interested in Surrealism and fantasy, Dada. And their collections were more or less open to us. We would be invited to visit them and keep track of what people were buying and bringing back here. And someone like Ed Bergman [ph], for instance, was very, very important, I think, in the collection that he amassed. And along with that went Joseph Shapiro and Mort Neumann, and Wilgus, who was a collector of Primitive arts, fantastic collection.

All these people were helped and guided a little bit, I mean, not totally, but Allan Frumkin opened his gallery at that time here in Chicago. And it was soon evident that he was interested in this sort of thing. He's really gone way beyond that now. And I mean, he deals in fantastic things. But at that time, I think he was very important to the development of that kind of school of expression that was going on here. June Leaf was around. A person named Ray Reshoft, who later died. A woman named Ruth Ross, who was a very good artist, but didn't really continue and pursue it that much. Irving Petlin came out of that time. And Seymour Rosofsky, and myself, et cetera.

[00:04:39.32]

Now, Robert Barnes, although I considered him at the time, and still do, probably the best painter to come out of that whole group—that is to say, for his skills as a painter, and his ideas, and the way he sort of managed to manipulate and put together almost a tapestry of an idea. He was superb, and I was very impressed with his work. So that between he and Irving and that, I absolutely had to forestall what I was doing and get busy and work in another direction. I mean, they were a strong influence.

[00:05:24.79]

But this other thing about the surreal and Dada in the city, I don't know—That was originally—if you read things that have to do with the Surrealist Manifesto, or whatever, you realize that a lot of that school was definitely based on dream imagery, was definitely based on introspection, and the narration of a person's autobiographical whims, or the life patterns. And these various elements from the Manifesto were taken up by people here, I think, in a fashion more or less because they—although they loosely worked as a group, there was this kind of fierce notion of being an individualist, and a struggle to keep that, and not allow the infringement.

I mean, there was something about a rule, and there always has been in Chicago, that you don't pick up imagery from other people, and you don't—I mean, if you see that someone is being influenced by you, it's disturbing, and it's considered a crime if you steal an idea from some other artist—which in New York is quite different, and it always has been. There are schools of painters [in New York –Ed.] where groups of people get together and discuss a premise or a philosophy. And then, they adapt that and they work it out in different ways within their group, but they're not afraid—

[00:07:06.02]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, would you—

[00:07:06.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  —of group activity. Whereas here, everyone very carefully, very suspiciously and jealously protected their own little ground.

[00:07:15.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, after—during the war and after the war, the heavy, sophisticated, international scene shifted from Paris to New York. And so you have a very sophisticated level, and you have that ability to have collective thought and dialogue and so forth, and development. The other attitude that you're articulating, which is more natural to Chicago and a number of other Midwestern areas, is a very definite self-sense, almost a security sense, very strong to what you were articulating a little bit earlier, which is that you do it all yourself, which is almost puritanical.

[00:08:03.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Well, I think that you have to think about Chicago as being a much more pioneer city, raw city. A city that occasionally pulls itself together and rises to the occasion of supporting something like the opera or the symphony. But they have had a terrible record when it comes to theater, to writers, literature, poetry. And really, not so good for music. And I must say that the visual arts have done considerably better than some of the others.

[00:08:37.47]

But at the same time, I've always had this kind of sense of the artist who is of a more delicate and searching nature, looks around this city of Chicago that was either very raw and very unstimulating—I mean, this is my personal opinion—but unstimulating visually in the way that, let's say, a city like New York where you can walk for six blocks, and you are bombarded with all kinds of wonderful delicacies of textures and objects and forms and ideas and inventions and all sorts of things going on.

[00:09:20.10]

Here, you walk down the street and, for the most part, unless you look up sometimes at the architecture, which can be interesting or not, there isn't that same kind of feeling and stimulation on our city streets. A lot of the good architecture that was done by Root—Holabird & Root, or Adler, or Sullivan, or Wright—a lot of those things have been torn down, too. This is a brutal city. I mean, it's a commercial city. If it's better to tear down a monument and build a skyscraper, they do it. To hell with culture and to hell with history and retaining anything. And it's very sad that this has happened.

[00:10:03.51]

Now, I think this element offends creative people here so that most of them leave because they know that at least in New York there is a regard for that history. Those people in New York, it's a much more European atmosphere, anyway. And a lot of people do come directly from Europe, and stay there in the East Coast. They don't venture out here. And things have been allowed to remain longer. And there's still a feeling of this regard for an object that has lasted that long, and has an integral beauty.

[00:10:41.88]

So in a way, the Chicago people gradually developed a sense of surrounding themselves in their little private space, wherever they might settle that to be, with things that they collected, and put up around to create a wall, so that when they went into that space, they had a much better feeling about relationship to other cultures and to other places. And they felt that this is something that stimulated their growth as a creative person.

[00:11:20.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  They were creating their own environments.

[00:11:22.22]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:11:23.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That leads right into—

[00:11:25.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Now, I'll tell you, though—I want to finish this, because I think it's important. It has to do with me, and it has to do with the Hairy Who people, it has to do with other people here. It has to do with—we haven't talked about Ivan Albright. And he was a very, very important figure in the '40s and '50s as a stimulus. He and Gertrude Abercrombie, and another woman named Julia Thecla, who was a Fantasist, with crazy little strange watercolors that people don't really think about very much or see anymore, but she was wonderful. And they all also had little collective things. I have been told by artists who lived here for 10, 15 years and had rooms full of memorabilia and bric-a-brac, that when they moved away, let's say, and went to New York, they no longer were interested in collecting. It as if their interest simply died a natural death. And I know that now that I've begun to travel out more and do things more, I have suddenly discovered the same thing for myself. I am as content to go there and see it, photograph it, look at it, make it part of my memory and not worry about owning it.

[00:12:38.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you think, then, it was often that the artists trying to build his own environment?

[00:12:44.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  And to hang on to it. Hang onto it.

[00:12:47.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And to use that, again and again—

[00:12:48.27]

ELLEN LANYON:  The Great West is not concerned with the retention of that kind of thing. You know.

[00:12:55.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well how did it—

[00:12:56.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  Of memories.

[00:13:00.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did it move into more trashy and trashier sorts of—

[00:13:05.72]

ELLEN LANYON:  What do you mean, the Hairy Who?

[00:13:07.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. Into the more common and common type of object.

[00:13:11.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, well, no, but that has the whole thing with the pop culture and Pop art, and everything else that sprung from the West Coast.

[00:13:18.47]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So that affected it.

[00:13:19.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I just think we—yeah, sure, we moved from the Victorian age in this country. We moved through the Great Wars and the Depression and through the Deco, and through the craft revival period, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and all of that. And you can treasure all these different little times in history and keep little oddities from all of them. And then, suddenly, in the '50s—the late '50s and early '60s, there was this whole pop culture revolution. And not only did people start to think that a Brillo box was as beautiful as a silver chalice, but they—or maybe not beautiful, but let's say, significant. Significance was no longer really involved with craftsmanship or immortality.

[00:14:16.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Talent.

[00:14:17.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, right. It had to do with something else. It was an immediate comment on what was happening. The Hairy Who people I do believe came about because, well, they were all students together at the Art Institute with Ray Yoshida. And they began exhibiting, and they were sort of suddenly made—Don Baum gave them a place at the Hyde Park Art Center. And they suddenly became something as a group. And at the same time, all these other groups formed. And at the same time in music, all the groups were forming. It was the time of the Beatles, and everything else that was going on.

And there was a whole—I think a drive, a force within the world to do things more collectively, and to make those things significant to our immediate culture, even though they be impermanent and they could destruct themselves. It was the time of tangling and this machine sculpture. And I think that it all had something to do with the way these people from the Hairy Who—I always think of Jim Nutt, especially—making graphic commentary about a world that he thought really stunk, you know? It was a disorder that he wanted to point out. And he didn't have a cure for it. His only way of somehow making it significant for himself, I think, was to just work it out on the page, on the painting.

[00:15:56.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, this whole thing you feel, particularly in this city, is a reaction to the brutality of the environment and setting up your own little womb, and your own little peer group and developing a collective sense of thought about that—basically, what I'm trying to get at is that because of the fact that there's no respect, and there were so many changes, so much destruction of buildings, and the harshness about the city here, that artists moved into their own private worlds, and that this memorabilia reinforce that private world and became a very important aspect of the Chicago scene.

[00:16:43.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And I don't know, for some reason, we had all kinds of organizations then as people collected in Chicago and worked together. One by one, they'd peel off and leave. But while they were still around, we had a lot of organizations. But they seem to have to exist on that basis. They were not, otherwise, casually experienced. You couldn't drop into a bar and find an artist friend, as you can do in, let's say—I mean, I always bring up New York because New York is the mecca. They do have a system of communication. They do have a certain idea about what it is to be an artist and how an artist lives and why he lives that way and what convenience is. And I mean, it's much more realistic there than it is here. This is a fantasy land. It truly is.

[00:17:34.53]

And I want to talk a little bit later, not maybe now, but about the whole aspect of being a schizoid as an artist in Chicago. I think you were forced into that position, because the only way that you can exist here and maintain a certain kind of insulated lifestyle, is to absolutely isolate yourself from everybody else in the city. There are very few eccentrics in this city that one can dig out and talk to and relate to. And when you do find one, you find that they are sort of camped out in the field there somewhere with a wall built around them. And they really don't care to talk to you. That has been their choice. That's the way they exist.

[00:18:22.03]

I had to kind of—I mean, I came out of this middle-class background with an eye for a certain kind of embellishment. But I also made a choice as to living with a husband, and having children, and carrying on that and I tried to balance it out. So a lot of other artists have done that here. And so that half of themselves gives in to middle-class values and style, and the other half is always struggling and grappling with the problems of being a professional artist in a city that is not really very receptive. And so that's why so many people give up and leave.

[00:19:12.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How can we bring this back to your development of these collectibles, and what these things—

[00:19:23.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  You mean, the objects themselves?

[00:19:25.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yes.

[00:19:26.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, okay.

[00:19:26.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And how that influences the—

[00:19:30.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  The work that I'm doing now?

[00:19:32.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Since you're back in Chicago and you are settled, you have a place to bring these things to.

[00:19:37.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Fill it up.

[00:19:38.17]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How does it start, and how does it grow, and what does it mean?

[00:19:42.34]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, in the first place, there are things in this room that belonged to my grandparents. When my aunt—did I have discussed Aunt Frances before—leaving her house?

[00:19:52.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  No.

[00:19:52.90]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. Okay, on the South Side, the Englewood house that I did talk about before, when Frances Lanyon finally left that house, because the Edens Expressway was going to take it go right through it. And she was still, actually, at the age of 70, was still working for Halsey Stuart as an executive. She decided that she would put herself in a retirement home. Very nice place to live and all, but she could not keep all her belongings so she gave them away. And I was asked to come and pick out anything I wanted, as was my sister and brother. Well, I didn't take the Dresden China, and I didn't take the Haviland dinner sets. But I did take all the strange and unusual objects that had been around the house, and that my grandfather had collected. And also, some jewelry that was rather unusual, things like that. I appreciate that sort of thing more, and that's what I want to surround myself with.

[00:21:00.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What were the objects?

[00:21:01.49]

ELLEN LANYON:  What were the objects? Well, things like that frog—ceramic frog, toad dressed in a red waistcoat, and smoking a pipe, who you see—that was my grandfather's tobacco jar. But in a way, that's Wind in the Willows, and that's the toads that I have in my work now. I mean, the whole relationship somehow comes through. I mean, I think it's kind of precious, in a way, to make all this stuff so obvious. I've always tried to not be too concerned with anything, and where it comes from, and why it's there, and why I do it, because I think that destroys the immediacy and the spontaneity of what actually does go on with an artist.

[00:21:48.05]

And then, people give you things, and I have a book collection, and I go somewhere to a resale shop, or to a flea market, and I always come home with some strange thing that promotes some kind of vision as to how it can be used. It's not bought just to sit there on the shelf, though. It's bought because I know it has a use. It will show up in one of my drawings or paintings. I work with it. It's my source material, it's my working material; it's my tools, almost.

[00:22:22.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It really didn't become that—

[00:22:23.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  I can't do what I do without them. Hmm?

[00:22:26.41]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It didn't become that until the late '50s and into the—

[00:22:31.87]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no. Yeah, but I had these things. Oh, you mean the use of them? No. But for instance, the books were here, and the old photographs, and I started using the old photographs. Now, prior to that time, I had collected all the things. But it's true, they didn't appear in the work. It's just that I like to have them around me.

[00:22:54.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And they meant memories to you even at that time, your grandfather's tobacco.

[00:23:01.15]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't think it has to do with memories so much. I don't think I'm that sentimental. You see, first of all, my family, the Lanyons, because of this—the crest, and the English castle, and the whole works, they had this great pride in family history, and the artifacts that embellished that history. And they—I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say.

[00:23:34.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That they were a part of your life, and just that—at that point—

[00:23:37.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I think that whole—Yeah, right. I think that whole responsibility that I seem to feel that I had to perpetuate the family position, went along with the fact that I had all of these things, and surrounded my—I felt comfortable. This is the way I was brought up. So this is the way I wanted to continue to live. But then, I began adding things from antique shops, or junk shops, or resale shops because I kept broadening and broadening, and adding to the embellishment. Because then it was my history that I was creating. I took on somebody else's. But then, I had to create my own.

[00:24:23.21]

And I think that whether it's apropos to say so now or not, when in 1960 I began to do the whole series of paintings from old photographs, all those people that I painted were my family. And it's as if along with all the objects that I had inherited, along with all the photographs that I had inherited, I now had to document that family, all those people and that time, that had been such a heavy—almost like a burden that had been handed to me. And I got it all out in paint on canvas.

And when that series was over, which was around 1965, I started on—and I mean, I'd worked, in the meantime, on the sports paintings and that. But still, that whole photo thing was over by about 1965, '66 thereabouts. It was done. I did not have to think about it anymore. I still have all the equipment, that means to say the objects and the photographs. And I save them. They're part of my collection. But I used them, and they met and accomplished their purpose.

[00:25:33.36]

And then, I started adding to the collection new things, because I had used up what I had. And then, I started adding new things. And as I'd add things, I'd get interested in a theme like alligators. I've got a lot of alligators. There's a lot of rabbits around here. Because when I did get into magic and the magicians' equipment and repertoire, a lot of other things came into my life and people started giving me things.

[00:26:02.44]

And then, I began to use fan motifs, et cetera. And I so now I have a lot of fans. It just depends on—there's just been a natural evolution of collectibles and the use of those things in my work. Sometimes, the object comes first. Sometimes, the idea comes first. And I go out and find the object. It just depends on how it's happening. But at the same time, I've tried to paint away from the studio, and I don't do very well. I mean, I simply need this situation, or at least I need—I don't need this room, but I need what's in this room. I need to go to the bookshelf and find a source when I need it, and not have to invent it on the spot. That's not how my work is conceived.

[00:26:55.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  We will, obviously, come back to this when we talk about these bodies of works. But I want to talk—go back to the point at which your son was born, Andrew, and then your daughter, Lisa, and deciding to have children, and domesticating your life that way. As an artist, how did you conclude those things, or did it just come with the settling process in Chicago?

[00:27:24.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that probably—I was brought up to believe by a mother that you could do anything you wanted to do. And all you had to do is put your mind to it. It was part of her Christian Science philosophy was—I don't know what it was. The Cornish people, my father's side, were very stubborn people. They believed that also. So in a way, I lived by that rule. And I decided that I could do both things. That I wanted to be—I wanted to have children, and I wanted to be a painter, and better and better painter that I could be. And so there was only one thing to do about it, and that was get busy and do it. Not think about it, or not worry about whether it was going to work or whatever. And I finally was able to conceive and have two children. And I worked out my time and my schedule.

And I suppose that if you could really calculate that there were so many years lopped off of my art life, or that I would have developed faster. But I don't think you—you can't measure things that way. Because you see, the addition of those children to my life, although I had to give them hours of attention, they added a whole new way of thinking about things, seeing things, and transcribing things. And the tight line—the double lot brush disappeared. And I began to work in a much more open and free manner.

[00:29:06.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Still with egg tempera.

[00:29:08.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the first ones—yeah, the first ones were egg tempera, and they were on rigid boards. But then, I went into oil on rigid boards. And then, pretty soon I was oil on canvas. And then, go on that way. My point being that I think that having children was a very important experience for me. It was the opening up of the flower, so to speak, and the emergence of the woman. I think I was really the girl scout up to—I was the do-gooder, the work harder, just the world traveler.

[00:29:43.33]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And with having those children, you return into doing images that are of people and interiors.

[00:29:51.17]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's—right.

[00:29:51.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And then, eventually, they become relatives and back into your life and bridging generations.

[00:29:56.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's how we got into the old photograph series was through—after I left off doing the conservatories, drawings, and paintings, I then started working with oil on paper, doing landscapes that were all sort of remembered interiors of rooms that were remembered, but being very loose and free and inventive with them so that you could not really identify these places. But I knew that that was a space that I was reinvestigating with my memory.

[00:30:30.28]

Then I started doing some very large paintings like that and I would portray my uncle's studio in New York with the grand piano. And then, I was portraying the sunroom of my mother-in-law's house. And then I would portray the Englewood living room with three sisters. Two of them are figures that are very much alive and standing there. And the third sister is in a jar on the table. I mean, there is a jar on the table with a face on it, and that's the third sister.

[00:31:03.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is that the sister that was institutionalized?

[00:31:06.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that's what I was intending. I did things fairly—you see, I was still—I've always done things with a kind of unpremeditated involvement. When I did egg tempera paintings of city landscapes, I would start in one corner of the board knowing pretty much full well what it was going to look like when it was finished, but in no way did I work on the entire composition. I worked from one corner to the opposite diagonal corner. And when I was finished, the painting was finished. I mean, I just did not pre-work it. And I develop ideas the same way. You start with one thing. And as I make the painting, I add things.

[00:31:51.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, there's something quite new in "The Three Sisters," which you did in 1960, and that is symbolic intent. Putting the third sister into a bottle on the table, which then, again, the objects and everything else begins a new world of almost symbolic intent. And obviously, that was a conscious change in a whole different way in which you looked at your art. In the interiors, there's the symbol of a remembered interior. In this case, putting into a jar one of your aunts that was institutionalized.

[00:32:39.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:32:40.52]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There's a new level there where you bridge and begin to use objects as symbols, or situations as symbols. How do you see that and how does it develop? Or maybe it doesn't really obviously develop through the next two periods that you—it obviously continues to develop later on in the magic things, this symbolic intent. But it doesn't with the tintypes, because they're still carrying that remembrance sort of thing. And then, later when you do the beach people and the sports sorts of things, there are other concerns. But here is something very important to your work. Was there anything else done during that period where you can see symbolism as clearly as that?

[00:33:32.10]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, but if you look through my sketchbooks, I think that's where I put a lot of ideas down like that. I didn't necessarily follow through in the paintings. I think I was more conscious in working on paintings that— I don't know, I was doing interiors and I was really working with some kind of space concepts that I hadn't dealt with before. Now, if you look back across at all these things, though, I can't help but feel that there's some kind of mystical intent or content. And if it comes across in nothing more than the way the color is wrought, or the kind of space that's used, a kind of provocative space, you might say, it's enough. Kind of half suggestions of figures—a lot of figures without faces. A lot of people—even in the tintype things. The figures came across without actual—

[00:34:28.67]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Features.

[00:34:29.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Features. You identify them. They were all—at one time, Harry Boris [ph] did a review of work that I was doing later on. But he referred to all of that as "sepulcher art." And he claimed that he had always felt that, somehow, I was painting ghosts, or I would—the rooms that I was painting that were empty—there was actually the aura of a person there. It wasn't there; the aura of the person who had just left the room. And I think I've always been interested in that.

[00:35:04.38]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So it was this sense—

[00:35:05.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  I mean, I shouldn't say "think;" I know. And it has—I mean, many of the photographs that I would collect myself that were not handed down to me were odd things, like the one on the wall where there's a group of people sitting. And then, someone has cut himself out and added himself to the picture. Or in some cases, you'll get a lot of photographs where someone has been—was missing, cut out and missing altogether. And then, they've been framed and hung as if—or a space is left, as if someone should have been there that wasn't there. It's very weird. And I get a feeling from the picture more than—it's not identifiable, except as my own response to that.

[00:35:52.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Does it have anything to do with the fact that this tradition in your family of undertakers?

[00:35:58.81]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it might have. I think as a child, I was very much impressed with the undertakers. We used to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in Englewood at this large refectory table. Over the table hung a very large stained glass and glass beaded lampshade so that you could barely see around it. It would illuminate the table. But I remember all the people sitting around the edge were in half shadow. And you'd see hands and you'd see light on the food. And there would be a lot of conversation about the business, because the morticians were always there for dinner. But they were always hurrying to finish their food or deciding which one would have to leave first to go back and tend the shop. Just in case somebody died, somebody had to be there to answer the phone.

[00:36:49.28]

I don't think that kind of holiday remembrance is something that most people experience. And I don't think that it couldn't help but influence somebody in the long range to have a certain kind of attitude towards death itself or the whole idea of—I mean, what happens after death or the corpse. I spent a lot of time at the funeral parlor. I was taught how to smoke sitting on caskets down in the casket room. It became a kind of way of life. The family was always going to wakes, whether it be family or friends. It was a gathering spot. You'd always drop by to pay your respects. It was more than just a casual thing in our family. And the other side of it was that my mother being a Christian Scientist, which disclaims the material being. I mean, between those two things, it was just kind of vague, I'm sure, as a young person, confusion and questioning all the time of what is life, what is death, where are we, who are we, do we exist, do we not exist, are we shadows?

[00:38:07.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This emphasis in your later work, particularly the things that have to do with table magic, use the hand in almost a way that you describe those holiday settings around that table. Is there any connection?

[00:38:25.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, there might very well be. I think about it sometimes. As I told you before, I'm very careful not to presume, not to try to make things relate because that's very, very forced.

[00:38:39.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And contrived.

[00:38:39.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it's too contrived. But it's possible. I mean, I definitely remember that table and the way that the whole thing—it had an impact on me, definitely. The bodies and faces dissolved. In the center of the stage was where hands manipulating the tools for eating or passing the plates.

[00:39:04.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, your palate, when you move from egg tempera into oils, continues to be a monochrome palette.

[00:39:15.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, it's chromatic, actually, in the beginning, because—

[00:39:20.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You mean when you're doing—

[00:39:22.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  Not monochrome. I mean, it follows the same color palette, pretty much, as the egg temperas for a while.

[00:39:30.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you're doing the landscapes, and so forth. But when you start to do the interiors—

[00:39:35.10]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they became more earth tones, perhaps. It led into the photographs, of course, which were very much limited. That was all done very purposefully. I mean, that was contrived. You see, at the time when I started that, I was very much involved with my image as a professional painter, and where I fit in, again, like in Iowa. I felt that I was really the oddball. I was out of the mainstream. Nobody in Chicago talked about any of us as being Fantasist, or Surrealists, or Imagists, or anything else. There was no such thing at that time.

[00:40:14.86]

Here I was sitting somewhere, painting away, and nobody was paying any attention. They just said—well, they were paying attention, but they weren't being that concerned with the product. They were saying, "Ellen Lanyon is a good painter." But they weren't identifying it any more than that. They weren't calling me anything. I wasn't put into any particular school. There I was. And so when I took up the whole business of doing the photograph, I added to the natural avenues of thought that brought it about in the first place, the more or less cerebralized idea of dealing with formalistic issues: color, pattern, et cetera. And so that played a part in it.

[00:41:06.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Also, you're much more definite in the way in which you apply paint.

[00:41:14.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, but you see, that wasn't my—that was my attempt to break into Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was the big issue then. And I felt that I must at least be somewhat involved in it. And I entered that world through Manet.

[00:41:35.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right, very.

[00:41:37.49]

ELLEN LANYON:  And that was the way it was, or perhaps some Delacroix. I took to not Delacroix, but—

[00:41:51.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Degas?

[00:41:52.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  No. I'll think of it in a minute—the Spaniard.

[00:41:57.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Goya?

[00:41:58.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  Goya, right.

[00:42:00.27]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, when you start to use the photograph, and some of those early images are from the photographs that you have. Here you're—as you mentioned, you're working through a whole series of work that is almost working out of your system, part of your past. And you use these photographs as your source material.

[00:42:24.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the way that—yeah, go ahead.

[00:42:26.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did that evolve?

[00:42:29.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I had made an attempt to paint a portrait of my father's father as I had remembered him. He'd been dead since I was a small child. But I recall sitting on his lap as he sat in a large, overstuffed chair in a side room in the Englewood house. And I tried to capture the light and the quality of that room, and the bulk of that man sitting in the chair. And as a matter of fact, it turned out rather successfully. It was within the same soft range of the earlier paintings of the two women in the sunroom, et cetera, that had come before—the oil on board I had done from memory, remembered interiors with figures in them.

[00:43:17.30]

And I submitted it to an exhibition, and got involved—I think it was in an American show and got a prize and all. And it had not only been successful in that way, but I had felt good about this attempt to do a more specific recalled identifiable people. However, his features were vague, and I wanted to become more specific. I also at the same time decided that I would now like to try to do a portrait of my maternal grandmother, who used to sit-in a very large chair by the window—open window, in the apartment in Woodlawn. She was a victim of asthma and spent many hours, sometimes all night and day, sitting upright in order to catch her breath. And that was a vivid memory that I was going to try to attempt to document. But I suddenly, for some reason or other, had become dissatisfied with my inability to make the features recognizable, and certain other things.

You see, what had happened was that I had ignored figure drawing at the Art Institute. I'd worked in the techniques class, and I'd gone into medieval painting. But I did not really pursue drawing, and I did not pursue figure painting. I made a few good figure paintings, but not enough. And suddenly, I was sort of overwhelmed with the desire to become a figure painter, a better one, at least. And with this in mind, the first step, okay, was to find a photograph of Grandmother, who was also dead for some years, so that I could make her more real.

And I did this. I went looking. I found a couple that weren't suitable. And then, I found one of her sitting on a park bench with all of us in the picture. But the way she sat there—she was also a large woman, and wore very large, loose fitted clothing. And she always wore sort of interesting hats, and carried large, interesting embroidered pocketbooks. And here was a photograph of her as I remembered her in that way. And I did not, therefore, attempt to put her in the chair by the window. Instead, I just painted her on the park bench right from the photograph. Well, it was like the doors opened to a whole new room full of wonderful ideas. And I could foresee myself being involved with all kinds of translations from the photograph to the painting.

[00:46:03.99]

I could now sort of tackle the figure again. I tell you, at this point, it's probably important that I say—and this will be very much true for most everything else we tackle—that I have—and we've talked about it in regards to images, or objects, rather. I have some built in aversion to working directly from life. Now, I've begun, at this point, to paint from objects directly. And I'm finding it very satisfying, and I think it will, again, open a new area of work for me. But at that time, to have someone pose for me, to work from a still life directly, anything, I could not do it. I had to be once removed. I never went to a sports event. I did go to beaches, but I certainly did not paint the people on the beaches. Everything had to have this psychic distance involved.

[00:47:05.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was there some sense of reassurance in moving in this direction? Because first, you had wanted to attempt much more of a realistic image. And also, because what you were attempting was with very familiar things with you. And you were doing it in—from an objective point of view from—not from life, but actually from a photograph. And because of the familiarity with the people that you were going—and the great intent that you had, did that ease you into the whole thing?

[00:47:40.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, perhaps. Actually, the people that I wanted to paint were dead, and there was no way to have them pose anyway. And it was a documentation of all these personae who had been so important in my life, and had overwhelming influence on me—my Aunt [Frances –Ed.], her sisters, my father. And so in a way, I suppose you could say that there was no choice at the moment. I couldn't get a live model. I took the photograph. But there was still this feeling of dealing with a once removed situation.

[00:48:19.39]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And because you had the intent to take it further, I mean, to present it more realistic, and you wanted to, you could bridge into this new area. Also, I see that you take on a concern for other very formal concerns, such as the limited palette and dealing with this—

[00:48:41.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:48:41.77]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —and this whole Expressionist thing that was sort of a challenge in the milieu, there had been a lot of this Expressionism—

[00:48:47.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, gestural painting, the joy of working with oil paint, and the broad stroke. And also studying for the first time, and getting involved with the elements of chiaroscuro and glazing, and all kinds of technical skills, which I had learned a little bit about in school, but totally ignored— put far, far behind me in importance. I was now having a heyday. And I did, I think, very, very significant work. And there's no reason that it should have discontinued, except that I suddenly suffered an intolerance for turpentine.

[00:49:37.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:49:37.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  I had to quit working. I had really reached an absorption point. I did this in a rather stupid way, having not used turpentine really in my life before, except perhaps when I was doing restoration work. And when I got into this kind of painting, I would work in a small room, I didn't have—at that time, you see, I haven't really talked about our physical being, our moves, et cetera. But we had moved into a house. We had moved from the apartment on the park into a house where Roland and I could each have a studio, we had a yard, we could raise our children. By this time, I had my second child, Lisa, a daughter.

[00:50:18.65]

It was necessary that I work in a small space. And I was working on large paintings and there was a lot of fumes. And I did a lot of work with varnishes and making my own varnishes, and a lot of turpentine washes and getting it all over my hands, and absorbing it more than I should. And one day it got the better of me and I was not able to work with oil and it was devastating. It was very, very difficult to overcome that limitation. I mean, that's another whole story of how I managed to work through that.

[00:51:03.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Let's do that just a little bit later.

[00:51:05.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  That comes later.

[00:51:06.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  After you finish this series of the relatives, and sort of purge yourself of that, you then take the formal concerns further, and you do it in the circus things, the sports things.

[00:51:19.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  The beach.

[00:51:19.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The beach, and so forth. In taking them further, you're dealing with more formal concerns, as far as taking the limited palette, and going further with that, freezing gesture into pattern.

[00:51:33.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:51:34.98]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And a stronger concern with light and shadow, almost delineating—

[00:51:42.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that became as important as my motivation to record my family, or people of that era. Because then, I did start to work with my husband's family after I got into the series. There were photographs that came from that side, people that I had never known. But they were all vintage—they were all the time. And I was much, much involved with the whole situation, and so I continued to use not such specifically motivated works, you understand? The things that fit into the pattern.

[00:52:21.94]

And I realized that more and more—the featurelessness of the people. And the way that I transcribed, which was a free hand. There was no opaque projector used. It was a freehand translation. The photograph was in the left hand, and the right hand was translating it in free form—That I was becoming more and more involved with the patterns of light and dark; the way in which the impasto and the chiaroscuro worked for me. I was finding great joy in that kind of collection of problems and projects that I set for myself.

[00:53:13.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And was that work well received?

[00:53:17.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, very well.

[00:53:18.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And at that time, you had a—a lot of that work was done in preparation for a show at the Superior Gallery?

[00:53:24.94]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, no. Superior Street Gallery was earlier. Really, that show was more of the remembered interiors. The first show that I had, of what I call photographic, or whatever, tintype paintings, was at the Fairweather-Hardin Gallery. And at the same time, there was a large exhibition at the Art Institute of a [Chicago and] Vicinity show that I entered a large painting of several of my aunts and their friends on a jaunt to Niagara Falls. Actually, I have to correct that. They went on an expedition to South Haven, Michigan. But they posed in front of a photograph of Niagara Falls, you know, as people did in those days. And the memento was taken, and I worked directly from that. And that was in a show at the Art Institute and got a lot of attention.

But I sort of ran out of my involvement and interest with the old photograph. And that's when I did move into the circus things. Because I think that was all frozen gesture. That was absolutely people posing. And it was fine, except that suddenly I wanted to realize animation and movement, and almost more realism. I think I was really headed towards very definitely being a Realist. And would have continued a lot farther had I not given up the oil painting at that point.

[00:55:01.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But at this time, there was another new group that you felt akin to. Maybe the one—and the thing that seems to me that was the akin thing, was everyone in the group was working in their own vein doing their own thing. Those were the people that you did show with at the Superior Gallery. And that's when you that Richard Hunt and Roland (your husband), and John Miller, and Pope.

[00:55:30.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Ted Hawkins.

[00:55:31.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. What about that group at that time? Was there reinforcement?

[00:55:34.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, we were very—well, we were friends and colleagues, but we were loosely knit. We had no other connection than that. We had no central—

[00:55:46.13]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  School of thought?

[00:55:47.15]

ELLEN LANYON:  School of thought. No, nothing. We were put together because, actually, Joe Shapiro decided that he would like to fund a gallery, which was badly needed in this town, so that we would have an opportunity to exhibit, and that's how that came about.

[00:56:02.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did you move from the photograph to—

[00:56:07.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  But no, wait a minute, we're getting—you see, you're getting—now we're jumping back and forth again, because that Superior Street Gallery and those people that I was associated with came before the photographic paintings began.

[00:56:19.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:56:19.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  They were earlier. They were the show that took place at the Superior Street Gallery with remembered interiors.

[00:56:28.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Interiors. Right. Well, in moving away from using the photographs of your relatives, and after you've taken that through, then you pick up other source material, which are the sports themes.

[00:56:40.61]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, there's a reason for that too, I think, that you can really tie down. Roland Ginzel won a Fulbright in 1962. And I'd been working with the tintype paintings for several years and had my show. And also, I got my first New York show at the Zabriskie Gallery. And that fall, we took off for Italy. Roland went to Rome for his Fulbright. The two children were entered into a school. We had a very wonderful, large, empty apartment that we both painted in. And I began to work with the sports things.

[00:57:21.80]

I had taken with me to Europe one photograph. It was a clipping from the sports page of a newspaper of Yogi Berra sliding into home base. I had seen it in a paper. And the same instinct that had moved me to do the photographic tintype things using strong patterns and sort of an eloquence—a kind of a narration of a sort, in a way, because it was—those patterns were describing a situation. I saw this in the sports page, and I was really taken with the quality of the light and dark patterning, and of the photograph. So I clipped it out and took it with me to Europe.

And after I got there and got settled, we lived two blocks from the Foro Italico, which is the new forum that was built for the Olympics a couple of years before that. And there was a huge stadium there, and every weekend, there were soccer games. I did not go to a soccer game because it's never been my way, but I bought all the magazines. And I would watch the crowds throng there and I would listen to them cheer. And then, I was interested in the whole subject. And I began with that photograph a series of sports paintings based on some of the photographs of the calcio, the soccer games, and based on the clipping from the American paper. And I continued to do that after I came back to America. Now, at the same time—

[00:59:05.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That were, basically, a highlighted frozen gesture, which you'd sort of been working towards gesture painting.

[00:59:11.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Right. It was not posed, though; it was action. It was caught action, right? Okay; or frozen gesture, as you say. But in the apartment building that I was living in, the landlord had saved, despite the ruling during the war—Mussolini decreed that all paper had to be turned in for recycling. This man had neglected to clean out his attic, and he had several years of something that was called Matina Illustrato. And I had found a collection of these magazines in the flea market in Rome, and had seen photographs like the "Painting for Jenny," the girl—the painting with the large beach ball, and the girls were holding it up. And I suddenly became involved with rotogravure color, which is different. It's kind of an acid aniline dye brilliance to that sort of old rotogravure. And then, I more or less dealt back and forth between sports and the beach things, which I ultimately called Heroes and Heroines.

[01:00:19.79]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And you used a lot a lot wider range in your palette at that point.

[01:00:24.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that was when color began to come back again was at the time that I started working with the beach scenes. And actually, they began to look or come about that I used that acid rotogravure color. Now, these are still all oil paintings on canvas, you know. And in a couple of cases, I would work on linen, and leave the linen exposed. And I don't know, I was beginning to think about being able to rid myself of the responsibility of the rectangle and the stretcher. But I really didn't want to make wall hangings, and I didn't want to make some kind of precious invention. So I pretty well kept to the format of the easel painting. But the solution was to gesso and paint on only certain areas. And so that one felt as though one were looking at a linen hanging with a painting on it, as in the large red ball there. I had done that also with some of the sports paintings.

[01:01:36.70]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you do those—

[01:01:38.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  Floating figures.

[01:01:39.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Did you do those beach paintings while you were in Rome?

[01:01:45.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Some of them there.

[01:01:47.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  To go in—

[01:01:47.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Some of them back here when I got back.

[01:01:49.63]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  To go into this whole Italian—the year that you spent in Rome, you obviously did some traveling there and in Greece. And there were certain kinds of influences that came out. Obviously, your palette changed, and we've gotten into a little bit of that and the concern for light.

[01:02:12.22]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[01:02:12.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What did that traveling, and the Mediterranean—

[01:02:16.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I think it had a lot to do with light. It's so extraordinary over there. I did a lot of drawing in Greece, little landscape drawings. And I suddenly became aware of the fact that I barely sketched in color at all. It was so brilliant that everything became a pastel; it became washed out. And I got so that I loved white, and handled white and used it—got to be used almost as a crutch, which is generally when I get to that point and I realize it, that's when I drop things with a loud crash. Because you have to just rid yourself of it quickly.

[01:02:55.19]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There were other things that came up, a certain interest in the fantastic, mystical, and strange. How does that come up during that year? I mean, was it the flea markets? Or people?

[01:03:07.28]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I started making a collection of things that I still have here that are part of my collection here—odd, eccentric little items. I still wasn't ready to use it, though, in my art, evidently. I still wasn't—I didn't see it, actually, as something that I was collecting in order to paint from. It just didn't enter my mind. I was collecting because I loved it, and I wanted to have it and I wanted to look at it all the time. And I think anything that I've ever developed and used—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9963_m]

[00:00:02.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  Anything I've developed or collected to use has usually been done without the preconception that it was going to be turned into the source or subject for a painting. It's been brought into my life, and I've assimilated it, and then all of a sudden, one day it becomes the issue that has to be dealt with that day. You see, generally when I've been working—and this would be perhaps oh, pretty much the case from the photographic time on—I'd get up in the morning, and if I'm where I'm not finishing something, I would have to make a decision about what I would work on next. And I would leave that decision so that it became almost a spontaneous thing, because it depended a lot on how I felt that day, and what I had looked at the night before, or what I was going to do later in the day, or whatever.

These things all, I felt, had a very significant role in making these selections. And I allowed just my senses perhaps to lead me along. I felt that it was a kind of much better and truer way for me to start working with something, to make a painting from it, than if I mulled over it, and changed things in my mind too much. I wanted it to be fresh and spontaneous and sort of an event that would be absolutely consumed with my enthusiasm for that particular thing that day.

[00:01:42.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, a lot of this body of work initially started with this return to the photographs of your family, and it sort of evolved out of that, to the formal concerns. And in evolving out of that, lost some of that thing that your work up to that point had involved, and that's that it was rather literal, or that it told a story type of thing.

[00:02:09.85]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:02:10.51]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did that just go out of the picture?

[00:02:20.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't know that it went out of the picture.

[00:02:22.91]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It just went back into the background for a while?

[00:02:25.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  You mean in doing the sports things?

[00:02:27.56]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:02:28.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that's telling a story—girls on the beach. For me, it was sort of it was describing an activity that people indulge in. That indulgement allowed me to indulge myself in patterns and colors, and the semblance of action, or whatever it was that I was dealing with in that particular piece. I don't think that I ever thought about it. In fact, I never thought about narration until about one year ago, and realized that what I had been doing for years was kind of a form of autobiographical narration based on those things which I felt had to be dealt with by me in relationship to my past.

[00:03:20.87]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How do you relate, or how do you see—do you see any other influences that came out of that Italian thing that might not directly relate to your work, but maybe to yourself, or your growth, before we finish talking about that? If there's anything, I want to bring it out.

[00:03:39.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  I'm not sure. I think—I don't know, I wasn't entirely happy living in Rome, although, by the time I left there, I was quite content, and was doing a lot of good work. I think living in Rome in that time, with children in school and all, taught me a little bit about adjustment to situations, and which also carries over into your art, of course. Taking something that exists and making do with it. Now you see, I think maybe that in a way is a lesson that comes up later on when I get through the acrylic thing, and I begin to really paint again. I made that resolution, you might say, that I would take what I had at hand and work with it, and make good work out of it. But that does come later.

[00:04:45.64]

I don't know what to say about Rome, except that it was again a wonderful experience. I spent days in museums, and had time to go to the seashore, had time to see the beautiful mountains and countryside around Rome. I did a lot of landscape drawing on the spot, just straightforward, no-nonsense landscape, you know.

[00:05:07.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So one of the major breakthroughs of that whole period is that you come back or you come to a new sense of color. In coming back to Chicago—that you just settled into easily, or do you?

[00:05:23.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think so. We came back, and settled back in and I continued to do sports paintings. I didn't do beach things so much, but I did sports paintings. And again, it was this whole business of not going to the sporting event, but doing it as a study, as a formalistic study.

[00:05:45.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In '63 after you come back, you have a one-person show in Dallas, Texas at the Haydon Calhoun Gallery. And you had shown in Texas the year before. How did the Texas scene pick up on your work, or was that just arranged by your dealer at the time?

[00:06:11.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, actually, it's interesting. Richard Hunt was in the Army in San Antonio, and he had met the people that ran this gallery. And he got out of the Army, and came back to Chicago, and then he went off to Southern California to teach for a semester, or be out there in any case. He and his wife and child went out. And I had had a one-person show at the Stewart Rickard Gallery there. And it was very successful. It was a sell-out. Richard had actually suggested that they look me up in Chicago. They had asked him if he knew a good thing, and he suggested my name. And I had a show. And then later on, we had a two-person show, and I actually went out and visited out there. And it was terrific, and the dealer was—they were very good, but they didn't last in the business.

[00:07:11.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you come back, you come to grips with a new area, too, of concern in painting. And that's the still life painting, which really is a part of your painting from there on to the present.

[00:07:22.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, well, but—yes; true. But I did make an attempt to work on some still life—several oil paintings. But then when I did get into acrylic, a couple are definitely acrylic paintings, because I could set objects up in front of me and practice. I needed to really learn how to use that paint. And I had to do a lot of practice paintings.

[00:07:45.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was that the very first working from the real thing that you had done and felt comfortable with, or beginning to feel comfortable with, this working directly from the object?

[00:07:57.20]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I suppose so. By that time, you see, I felt that all through the photographic era, I taught myself how to draw. I really did become a rather good draftsman, and it was just because I pursued it working from the photographs and drawing the situation out—not making it photographic, but just using it as I had done before. The photograph was really like an object, a source. And so I had taught myself how to draw, and then I got more and more interested as I had with the photograph, of working from the real thing. So I started setting up still lifes, and painting them.

[00:08:39.26]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now the type of drawing that you were doing at that time, were you doing—you were obviously doing a lot of sketching. Were you doing finished drawings, or preparatorial drawings for paintings as well?

[00:08:52.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yes, but not to the extent that I do drawing now. Just a little bit.

[00:08:58.34]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What had happened to printmaking during this whole time?

[00:09:00.92]

ELLEN LANYON:  No printmaking. Nothing.

[00:09:02.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Nothing in printmaking during this whole period?

[00:09:04.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, no. Wasn't involved at all. I went to—well, I shouldn't say that exactly because these years now we're going to start to overlap with Ox-Bow.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:09:17.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  As you look back then at the '50s in Chicago, how can you abbreviate what happened during that period and what the impact of that might have been on the whole scene here?

[00:09:36.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, well, I suppose you could say that until 1955 we worked with Momentum, and the activities, our social activities, life was pretty much dependent upon the group of people that we worked with there. A lot of our initial friends from Momentum had already left the city and moved to the East or they had gone to Europe to live. And out of Momentum, the dearth of a couple of years of not too much happening, there was a group of people, namely Vincent Arcilesi and Vaughn Kurtz and Dominick di Meo, and Jim Falconer, and people like that, who had felt that there was a great lack of opportunity for the artists here, and that was one reason why everybody was leaving—there was almost a panic as to see what could be done to keep people here.

[00:10:32.39]

So they began something that was called Phalanx, and they simply had a meeting. They made a long list of names; they wrote a letter to all the people on the list that said: If you would like to participate in an exhibition of artists' work in Chicago, you simply bring your work to Hermann Hall—this is the Institute of Design—at a certain day and time, and pay two dollars, which will provide a certain amount of oh, either security, or catalog, or list or whatever. And we'll show you where to hang your painting and you'll hang your own painting. And you will, in a way, be a member of this ever-growing group of artists, although we don't have a name yet and we just simply have this place available, and we want to use it.

[00:11:23.79]

And an awful lot of people came and exhibited and met together. And it became apparent that artists in Chicago could help themselves in this way. So we gradually worked to form Phalanx into a structured organization with a president and all, so that we wouldn't drift off and then just not do it again, because we thought it was very important. However, soon PAC was formed. I mean, that's what came out of Phalanx. And we got together, and we called it P-A-C. It was the same group of people from Phalanx, and then it was new, additional—Roland, and myself, and Vera Klement was working with us, and Martin Hurtig was working with us, and oh, countless people.

[00:12:21.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What year was that, this change?

[00:12:23.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  That was about 1965, I'd say, when we finally got going. And we had a hard time deciding just whether to take an old church, or to rent a storefront, or exactly where and how we could present this work. And finally, it was decided that we should have a store. We had been exhibiting at Hermann Hall. It was really a continuation of Phalanx. And the reason the word Phalanx wasn't continued and used was because an athletic organization in Evanston at Northwestern had that name already, as it turned out. And there is a rule about taking the same name, especially if you're going to really incorporate store materials. Anyway.

[00:13:16.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So Momentum had begun, dissolved, people had moved away from that. You had put your workshop together. That worked as a center that attracted people in the '50s.

[00:13:28.67]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:13:28.88]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Then in the early '60s, Phalanx came into existence, another organization. That was transposed in two years into PAC—

[00:13:37.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Which rented a store and became a very solid group. And we had PAC; we had shows and activities for a couple of years that were very, very important—about three years, I think it lasted.

[00:13:53.42]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This is part of the whole thing about Chicago's artists helping themselves. It started with—

[00:13:58.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's right. There's a whole history of it. Well, there's a history before that; there were various groups. There was something that was kind of an adjunct to Equity—there was an Equity group here, but then there was something called Artists League of the Midwest that still exists. And I just got a letter the other day from them wanting to know if I wanted to rejoin. And they had looked to me like they had quite a big program going. And I'd say that we have always had one or another organization that formed for the purpose of helping artists.

[00:14:27.93]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And it was—

[00:14:28.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  Artists helping artists, yeah.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:14:32.12]

You see, I think it's important perhaps to just summarize at this point, because it seems a little confusing—that from the time of Momentum, on—Momentum, having sort of skipped along and lasted about ten years, and taking in the assistance and activities of several different groups of students and young artists here in the city, and their energies, that lasted up into the very late '50s. And then there was a space of time when not too much happened in this respect. People were kind of settling in and working hard. And as Momentum began as a protest against the Art Institute, the next really significant thing that occurred was two other protest shows that were only exhibitions unto themselves. They did not result in an organization.

[00:15:39.13]

I've forgotten which one came first, but there was an exhibition at the Art Institute one year. The Chicago show declared that nothing could be submitted that would be more than seven foot in any one dimension. And a group of very young vital abstract and figurative people here in the city who—Expressionists in nature, felt that this was an imposition on their freedom, and they formed a show called Seven and Up. And we had it downtown in a space at—DePaul has a space downtown on Wabash Avenue, or they did at that time, and we had the exhibition there.

[00:16:28.06]

Then another year, there was a feeling of depression after a a jury had met and selected a show at the Art Institute. And the people who had been rejected formed another exhibition. It was held at the New Circle campus over at the University of Illinois in the new Union building there. They just took over a raw space, and they put up a show and called it "The Sunken City Rises," which was a far-out title, but it was an exclamation of "whoa," you might say, with the way the art scene was going in Chicago, the limitations of it, the fact that there was no other arena for the work of people to be shown than the Art Institute Vicinity Annuals, and they had been reduced by this time to an every-other-year situation. The sculpture and painting was juried one year, and the next year, prints and drawings. And that went on for two years, and then the prints and drawings section was dropped, and from that time on we've had only biennial. And it just was not enough for all the people here in the city, painting—and not having galleries enough, and not having places to exhibit. So these two shows took place.

[00:18:01.40]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Were there catalogs for those shows?

[00:18:02.96]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, just lists, we would just Xerox lists. But I remember that the people, the collectors and the museum people came and were impressed, and were really delighted with the prospect that the artists were doing something for themselves, because understandably enough, one museum in a city this size, which is really basically a repository, could not possibly supply enough exhibition time and space for what was going on here. So that's why the artists organizations were vital. There was no second museum then. There was nothing.

[00:18:40.77]

Now, that exhibition of Seven and Up took place, oh, in about '62 or '63. And at the same time, the Phalanx group was beginning, just as a kind of ad hoc group, very unstructured, but determined to have a place. And they had several Phalanx shows at the Institute of Design in Hermann Hall—I think there were at least two or three. And by the time the last one occurred, Roland and I were sitting in on the organization of the thing, helping to administrate the exhibition, which was just actually like a one-show stand anyway.

[00:19:32.57]

And out of that, as I said, came PAC, and PAC was a much more cohesive and organized and structured group. Many of the people who served as the administrators in that group became interested in the dialogue regarding artists' rights, regarding the putting together of bylaws and rules, and the philosophy of artists' organizations, self-help, and help from the outside. And it was a lot of conversation and a lot of rhetoric that went on, and in fact, almost too much.

[00:20:17.06]

In the end, it was decided—we had tried to do, as Phalanx had—the first PAC show was just a large exhibition in one place. And it was determined that if we were really going to be able to exist and do things, we'd have to have a space of our own. Now, Chicago is an interesting and unusual place I think for the size of the city in that they have never had a bar or a clubhouse, or anything where artists would naturally gather. Nowhere to go and know that you would find other artists there and fall into conversation and exchange of ideas. And PAC decided that if they were going to do anything at all, aside from the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, et cetera, this was the thing to do, was to create a place.

[00:21:13.23]

So we first of all looked—we were offered an old church, but because of a lot of problems, and also the fact that we would have been connecting up at that time with another organization that was being formed by a church group for the purpose of furthering the arts—and actually the multimedia arts—we decided not to go in with that but to remain independent. So we rented an old storefront on Halsted. And there began a series of exhibitions that were conceived as singular curatorial efforts: that is, different people were given the job of different months, organizing an exhibition with a theme that they had set themselves.

[00:21:58.47]

Their plan had to be cleared by sort of the central committee, but there was a lot of freedom, and there was a lot of energy, and it was very exciting. And the shows were good or bad, and people were—I mean, it was healthy, though, because you put yourself out. You didn't sit back and wait for someone else to do something for you, and you did not necessarily always succeed, but criticism was healthy and constructive. And I think it made an enormous difference in the art life of the city.

[00:22:38.22]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did the city receive it?

[00:22:39.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the city came out full strength. You see, that was the high time, as a matter of fact, for society to look at art and artists, and accept it, and welcome it, and use it for whatever purpose there was. And used or not used, it still benefited the artist in that he could sell a painting a little easier, and he could be a figure.

[00:23:08.28]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  He had a place in that society.

[00:23:09.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And I think that PAC did an enormous service in doing that. Now, one thing that, I'd like to bring in that I neglected to talk about before, was the fact that the Hyde Park Art Center had existed for a long time, and it was the first, and remained the most vital arena for artists' exhibitions and for bringing the public in.

[00:23:38.31]

Don Baum directed the Hyde Park Art Center, and he had a very lively board of directors and a membership. There was a huge South Side membership, many of those people coming from the University of Chicago community, and collectors, et cetera, from the southern part of the city. And they made that place go. And we all exhibited there from time to time. There was—everybody exhibited, either in group shows, there were individual shows, et cetera. In time, the Hyde Park Art Center spawned the Hairy Whos and the other groups that followed, and became a really vital area for the Imagists to exhibit.

[00:24:25.36]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The Art Center itself then became a platform where group shows would happen and then an identity of groups came out of that.

[00:24:33.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they put them—no, I'm not saying that—no, no, this has to be clear—anything else that went on in this city in the way of group exhibitions was just that, in other words, a group of individuals exhibiting together. But the Hyde Park Art Center, after they began introducing the Hairy Whos, who were—that was a group like the Beatles. I mean, that was a collection of people with a similar ideology who got together in order to present themselves as a group.

[00:25:11.82]

And not only did the Hairy Whos do that, but then they had one or two or three other groups right after that. The False Image, and—well, I can't pull it off the top of my head right now, but we could document it, at some point. It isn't important at the moment, because what I really want to bring out that the Hyde Park Art Center served the purpose on the South Side, and the PAC in a way felt that they were making a North Side. And for a few brief moments there, there were jokes made about the mafia, Bugs Moran and Al Capone, who were South and North Side contestants.

[00:25:54.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Folk heroes.

[00:25:55.77]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. [They laugh.] But it was a lively time. And it was really wonderful. And so that between the Hyde Park Art Center and PAC, there was everything. Every couple of weeks there was a lot going on, and you'd see artists, and there was a lot of high feeling. And just about that time, Allan Frumkin invited Red Grooms to come to Chicago and do a piece in the gallery, which was Red's, really his first big urban landscape, you might say. It was all constructed out of wood, and painted, and mechanized, and it filled the space. And it depicted in Red Grooms' own kind of ruckus style the Elevated structure and the monuments in Chicago and buildings and the city fathers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:26:49.05]

And he employed people here. Some of them have come from the Hairy Who Group and some others to help him build this piece. He stayed in town three or four months. And his presence here was a great kind of injection of energy, at least amongst some people. And he made a film that was called Tappy Toes, and he used a lot of the people that had helped him, plus some others, to make the film. And so it was really a documentation from the outside of Chicago, which was very provocative at the time, because there was a lot of commentary about no one from Chicago itself, depicting Chicago.

There wasn't one single artist here in the city who had ever done that kind of thing for their own city, that it took someone coming from the outside. But the very fact that Red used a lot of Chicago artists was good. And not that it really stimulated anybody to go on and do any more of that, but it was a healthy time. People like Ed Flood, Sarah Canright, Karl Wirsum, and his wife, Lorri, Richard Hunt, myself, Roland, our kids Andrew and Lisa, somebody named Rusty Meyers was around. Oh, and I'm trying to think about who else participated—Paul Carroll and Honora Carroll, Ed Paschke—everybody was in the movie. And we all made costumes and did our big number. It was a terrific time.

[00:28:35.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Was there a viewing of that movie?

[00:28:37.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, then—yes, then that sort of was a very high point in the Chicago activity art world, that kind of a situation, at least. The collectors in the city used the Grooms project in a way as a kind of a focus for an activity that had nothing to do with artists, but it certainly had to do with collectors and the contemporary society, et cetera. They asked if Red would show his film for one of the Contemporary Society's meetings, and then they put on a party—they used our house here, and about 400 people trooped through this place after the movie was shown at the Arts Club, and it was a big night. It was probably the night that everyone would remember for the longest time of that kind of high-energy activity in Chicago. And even though it did not involve all the artists in the city, nor did it involve all the various kinds of art that were being created in the city, it still made everyone feel, I think, pretty good about the fact that there was life and energy, and things going on, and that the public was paying attention to us.

[00:30:07.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There was a shot of vitality that it saw introduced here.

[00:30:09.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  A tremendous injection of energy for the art community here.

[00:30:15.73]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The Art Club—had that played any role other than sort of playing to the patron groups and the—

[00:30:25.39]

ELLEN LANYON:  Which art club?

[00:30:26.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The one—

[00:30:27.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, the Arts Club?

[00:30:28.03]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:30:28.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, the Arts Club was something else. They are established as a gathering place, a forum for concerts, lectures, and exhibitions that are definitely brought in from outside the city. They never exhibit, except for their annual members exhibit. They do not exhibit local people. And for a long time, they avoided exhibiting Americans. They were really much more interested in bringing the outside.

[00:30:56.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The international scene in?

[00:30:58.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes. Things from—

[00:31:00.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It was a self-serving group of arts-interested people.

[00:31:03.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Right. Correct. And then the Contemporary Society of the Art Institute served the same purpose there, so that the artists really did have to help themselves; there was no other avenue for communication other than that.

[00:31:20.21]

Now, I think that that helps to cover a lot of what went on, and I'd say to bring it up to the present time, the activities that have gone on since—because there was a little bit of a lull in there, and PAC dissolved, people really lost the ability to hold it together, and to afford the store on Halsted, and artists found out that when you have a co-op, you have to tend the store, and that's very time-consuming. We found out that ultimately two or three people do all the mish-mash, you know—work, and that it actually becomes something that is a tremendous burden on a small group of people for the greater good. And it was decided by those that were doing it that they indeed had to get back to their own work. And so PAC just discontinued.

[00:32:20.46]

After that time, we had several periodicals in this town. One, something called Art Scene, a magazine that was started by someone named Dennis Stone, here. It lasted a couple of years. And it served to be sort of a voice for the community. And it was very much needed, but it folded. Galleries folded, and we went through another kind of a slump period, which seems to be the thing in Chicago. You know, there'll be these high points, when you think that nothing could possibly go wrong again; we're on our way. And then all of a sudden, it's very obvious that we're hitting the skids.

[00:32:59.58]

Since that time, the Art Examiner has come into being, and although they are controversial in some ways, they are very important to the community—and now they've started doing downstate editing and stuff—in that they brought art criticism into the scene. We have three newspapers here, and there are three art critics, and you're lucky if there's any coverage of your show at all, at the time. And it's just a void. And so the Art Examiner was formed, and it has really managed to assist in that area tremendously. They run a lot of reviews now and a lot of articles. They have been very controversial, they have challenged art establishment situations; they've challenged the Arts Council. They've created in some cases upheavals for the good or the evil of whatever. But at least they have existed, and they're continuing to exist and grow. They are not—it does not look like they're going to pass out of the picture too soon. And then another newspaper, the Midwest Art started up and they're trying to serve the same purpose. And so I think things are moving along.

[00:34:36.22]

Now out of the Boston Visual Arts Union, and the Art Workers Coalition in New York, came the stimulus to begin the latest art organization here in Chicago, which is The Coalition, and which is really involved not with exhibiting, or the establishment of a gallery, or a place for artists to deal with their work—it's really a political voice. And they are trying to work for artists' rights. They are trying to establish a self-help for artists, insurance, and deal with problems that the IRS poses on artists, and well, all the many things that have to be taken care of in our social world, because it's become so complex that we really need that kind of a liaison between the creative person and the institution of government and politics—that if that's the way to put it, in order to allow the artists to have a better self-image, and to have a better grasp on what it is that he must do in order to live more comfortably in this society, which has become so complex and demanding.

[00:36:07.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And of course, all during this period, the university art departments weren't providing any ground for the artists to figure out how to fit into the society or—

[00:36:17.75]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, none.

[00:36:18.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —relate to government.

[00:36:19.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Right.

[00:36:20.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So they were filling a void.

[00:36:23.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yeah, but you see, the artists had sat back and allowed certain systems to develop and become institutionalized. And we find ourselves in a position of not being able to control our future, and not being able to control our taxation, or to have any real hold on our own work. I mean, once it is done, and we created this work, and then it's sold, we lose all control over it. We lose all benefit from it. And it's one of the things that artists around the country are trying to change—establish new rules for the artists, the sale and retention of certain rights for the artists, and publication and reproduction rights.

[00:37:17.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  WEB comes in along here, also there's the development of a registry of artists—

[00:37:23.77]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, now I want to talk—well, I have to talk about that specifically, because I'd like to, and I'm going to be able I think from now on, to talk a little bit about the feminist movement and what that meant, also, to an enormous number of artists, women artists, who had been living somewhat in the shadows, and the emergence of feminism, and various women's organizations in this country has allowed for just a tremendous influx of energy, I think, into the art community.

[00:38:06.29]

It was several years ago that I had been asked by Lucy Lippard and Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who originated an organization called WEB, W-E-B, to which was—I don't understand the title exactly, and I never could, but it's "West East Bag." And it was formed in order to encourage the establishment of registries in major cities in this country and newsletters, and to act as also a liaison between the various women's groups across the country.

[00:38:48.05]

Now, L.A. was the strongest place, and they always have been. The women in L.A. were really vitalized by Judy Chicago, who was kind of outstanding, political militant woman for women's rights. And so there they had women—Miriam Schapiro also was out there at CalArts; they were both at CalArts. They ran the first women's program in the schools, and created Womanhouse, and finding now in Los Angeles it's really the first place that a woman's building was established where they have bookshops, and galleries, and meeting rooms, and they involve all the arts—film, and poetry, and publishing, writing, theater, and everything else.

[00:39:42.11]

So in any case, in Chicago—I was asked by these people to see what I could do in Chicago, and I sent out a letter to about 100 women that I personally knew were professional artists of one sort or another, and the response was enormous. And we started to have a series of meetings and we formed the registry. We sent out newsletters, and a lot happened. And then we've had two conferences—one here in Chicago at the Art Institute several years ago. And then just last summer, in '75, we had a large conference at Ox-Bow summer school in Michigan. We took over the school after it had closed, for just three days. And we had 170 women who came from 14 states. And it was just a fantastic gathering of people. And I hope to say that we're going to repeat it and continue, because it's very vital.

[00:40:55.09]

Now, also out of WEB came the establishment of two cooperative women's galleries, which have added tremendously to the exhibition scene here. They are well-situated in the professional neighborhood, and they are professionally run. And they have made—I think that they have demonstrated to artists that it is possible to do this for yourself, the co-ops are a very viable way of taking care of the lack of places and possibilities for artists in any given city. And after that Main Gallery here, a third cooperative was formed by a group of young men and women from schools, primarily from the Art Institute, as I understand it. And they're doing very well. They're about to have a show in New York City as a group now, and—

[00:41:58.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  All of these things re-emphasize or become an example of the things that artists can do for themselves in a world that provides a big void for the things that you need, not only socioeconomically, politically, but just in once you've created your work, having a platform from which it can be seen, so—

[00:42:26.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yeah, I think it's very important. I also think communication between artists is important. I've always deplored the fact that this was something in Chicago that one had to just struggle so hard to establish. I think it's a lot better now than it has been for years. I think this has become—we've come around to a natural, or maybe it took all that background pushing and struggling and working to make it happen. A lot of the people, though, that did Momentum and PAC and Phalanx—are no longer in the city. They're all gone. They all gave up and left.

[00:43:03.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There's a whole new breed?

[00:43:03.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know what's going to happen with it—Well, it's a new breed, and it might be indicative of what's going on in the country, that is to say, more people are more willing to stay in their home communities and make it happen there, and insist on the spreading out and kind of a neo-regionalism. I'm not speaking about style, but I'm speaking about the social concept, that people must exist outside of the mecca of New York, and they must have a voice in the national scene, and they must be strong enough to make things happen where they are, because it is through that localized situation that various changes in—

[00:43:56.95]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Cultural strata.

[00:43:58.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it isn't cultural strata, it's—no, I mean, it's in the work itself. There's a very, I think a strong move now towards actually a work regionalism, and that you can see different parts of the country coming through and demonstrating whatever stimulation there is in that particular area that creates a look in the art that's produced there and is very definitely akin to that region. It has something to do with the people that live there, the landscape, the light, whatever, the color is part of it.

[00:44:46.82]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Then there's a sort of common denominator in a lot of that work, too, at the same time, which is basically characterized as living in just urban industrial areas—

[00:45:01.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right.

[00:45:01.50]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —to a certain degree and there are threads—

[00:45:03.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I'm not saying that it isn't all in one way or another influenced by the work that goes on in New York City, but then other schools have come along and come up. And as we talked about, the influence of the Dada, Surrealism in Chicago, and then the Hairy Whos, and the Imagists here. I mean, that's definitely a localized phenomenon. That's not something that could happen in New York, or as a matter of fact, that's even accepted in New York. New York is very suspicious of it and wary of this phenomenon that's occurring, because it is a threat—the California Funk School; California Landscapists; the Los Angeles Abstractionists; the people from Tennessee and Kentucky and Kansas and all over that are producing different kinds of personal expression.

[00:45:51.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you feel that any of that is spawned by the fact that government support is spread more broadly across the country?

[00:45:57.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Well, I would say that the arts councils are really important. I worked here on the visuals on the panel for about six years, and it gave me an opportunity to really understand what the councils do. And no matter how much they're criticized, they have to be praised for the kind of work and energy that goes into making federal funds possible, and then spending those funds the best way they can.

[00:46:28.78]

Now when the Examiner attacked the Arts Council here, it was kind of a bitter pill, and yet it did in its own way, bring about a leveling off, I mean, of various ideas. And it brought out into the open more what the councils are doing. The council was sort of forced to publish lists of things that they were funding, which they hadn't done before. I mean, they went about their business not really communicating with the public, either, or with the artists, and it made for an open situation. And now people understand what the Arts Council is doing, and how important it is. And then therefore people are more willing to give their tax money, and the state will give its money. It's all very important, I think, that this is understood.

[00:47:18.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So there's actually a new level in which this sort of participation is happening. I mean, some monies are coming federally into the scene—some from the State Arts Council, and the artists are putting back their energies into it somehow.

[00:47:38.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, and their money, too. I think it's a professional system that we have finally learned to accept, that artists are not some kind of unique, unusual, fragile, substance that has to be kept in suspension so that they can do their work—that an artist is a human being, a social being; he must learn to live in the society, and his contribution is such that he can dole it out as he sees fit. But at the same time, I don't think that an artist can expect to be supported because he's an artist. That he has to get in there and work just like anybody else does to make a place for himself. And—

[00:48:31.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A lot of what this does is redefine the profession, or it redefines the artist's concept of himself and society's relationship and interaction with him.

[00:48:41.81]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Right. No, I believe in that, but I also think then that the state control, which everybody was so worried about—I mean, if you take state money you somehow are obliged.

[00:48:54.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Obliged.

[00:48:55.44]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. But I think that that's being overcome, too. I think that it's really wonderful that the artist feels his own social position now and can stand up and comment "pro" or "con" in a situation that exists where monies are being fed in from the state or the government, or the federal government. And that he—

[00:49:25.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is knowledgeable.

[00:49:26.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  He's knowledgeable and he feels stronger in this respect, much stronger.

[00:49:31.62]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But what it actually does is revitalize the whole imagery of professionalism and self-concept for the artist, and in relationship to whatever that audience is—

[00:49:42.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, and hopefully—

[00:49:42.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —just the people that live in an area.

[00:49:43.40]

ELLEN LANYON:  Hopefully, it brings about—yeah, and hopefully it brings about more respect from the layman who sees the artist as someone who can at least make a major attempt to take care of himself—that he is not a burden on society and that art is indeed a vital part of our lives and that—

[00:50:06.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So the artist's image—

[00:50:07.47]

ELLEN LANYON:  It's got to be incorporated.

[00:50:09.24]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The image of the artist as it's changed from decade to decade, and from school to school, from bohemian to whatever and on, is now really changing quite drastically across the country.

[00:50:23.98]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah—

[00:50:24.75]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So you could almost sense a trend where the artist is—the beginning of the articulation of the artist as a person in the community that he exists in.

[00:50:33.18]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yes, and—

[00:50:34.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  A broader community, rather than just his peer group.

[00:50:36.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. And I don't actually mean to in any way diminish the strength of the artist as an individual or as a creative person. I'm not implying that he's selling out in any way at all, that philosophically he has reduced his energies in order to conform; I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the fact that since our social structure has taken us this way, that it's been easier I think for the artist. I deplore the fact, myself, that an artist cannot exist totally as a creative person and somehow or other make his way without having to work at other things in order to exist. Because I think being an artist is a full-time job, and it's something that one should to be able to do, just like anybody else that has a profession.

[00:51:46.48]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, an artist survives—

[00:51:47.06]

ELLEN LANYON:  But it is not possible in our society to do this yet. And I think artists are making the very best kind of adjustment they can to that situation.

[00:51:55.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It's sort of big—an artist produces goods and services. And it's being able to sell those in a system in such a way that they can be bought. And we're evolving a society that will buy—

[00:52:06.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes, without reducing the quality.

[00:52:08.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Quality of the goods and services.

[00:52:09.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:52:11.18]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And that's—you can sense that almost happening even across the country. Do you see a whole new vitality that there are no skids for, in this town, ahead?

[00:52:29.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I don't know, I hate to predict anything like that anymore. I'd like to be able to be assured that the galleries are going to stay open, and maybe there'll be some more galleries. And things will move along and increase. We've had a difficult economic time, and it's been hard, because art gets sort of hit first. I mean, the art scene here and in New York and other places is not so good right now. Everybody is sort of on teetering rock; they're waiting to see whether or not they're going to be able to survive the financial crisis. But it goes on. I mean, something else will happen. If galleries close, then perhaps that makes artists stronger.

[00:53:18.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[00:53:20.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  So who can say?

[00:53:21.63]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There's a whole history that gets—that we started threading when we were talking about the first years at the Institute, and last years in high school about Ox-Bow, and your whole relationship to it. And what I'd like to do is sort of cover that all now—

[00:53:42.24]

ELLEN LANYON:  All right. Okay.

[00:53:42.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —and see what kind of impressions you have from beginning to end.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:53:54.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  I'd say to begin about Ox-Bow, I'd really like to maybe restate a few things I talked about earlier. When I came out of high school, I was invited because of the classes that I had been in with George Beuhr at the Art Institute as a high school student. I received my scholarship to the Art Institute for the next—following year. And George asked would I want to take a work scholarship at Ox-Bow summer school of painting.

[00:54:26.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  That was in '44, right?

[00:54:27.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  That was in '44. And as I told you before, I really had never, except for one brief experience, been in the country. But this was terrific, and my parents agreed, and off I went for the summer to Saugatuck. Now, there I came in contact with Max Kahn, who was to be my litho teacher at the Art Institute, and I came also to meet Francis Chapin and his children, who figured later in the Ox-Bow scene. Nan Chapin later married Vincent Arcilesi and I'll talk about that in a little while.

[00:55:09.80]

I met Max Sinconi, and Margo Hoff, George Buehr's wife. I met the Lutzes from California, and Mike Mason, and Alice Mason, and a whole variety of professional people who sort of became my surrogate family, almost. They seemed to adopt me in some sort of way. And I felt very securely placed in the art scene—not only there, but in Chicago, because these people all came back here and were either my teachers, or they were the professional exhibiting artists at the time.

[00:55:52.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In '44 then, Saugatuck, Ox-Bow was predominantly Chicago people.

[00:55:58.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yes, it was, because—there used to be a myth stating that the Art Institute was the father figure of Ox-Bow, and that Ox-Bow was just their summer school. That never really was true. They were never directly under its auspices, although they always had a lot to do with it. And the Alumni Association of the Art Institute held a lot of stock in the school, and I think that's where that misconception came about. But it was certainly an independent organization. Totally independent of the school of the Art Institute. Anyway—

[00:56:40.55]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Independent in that it was self-governed by a different group of people?

[00:56:43.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, it had its own board, and it had no connection—autonomous. All right, the second after my first year of school at the Art Institute, I went again for another summer, came upon practically the same faculty, and met people, though, in the meantime, who figured later in my life, like Joan Mitchell, Richard Bowman, Miyoko Ito, Elaine Pappas—people that were very meaningful to me, and some who attained fame, like Jimmy Holland, who became Anthony Holland—he's now a Broadway actor, et cetera. So it was a valuable experience.

[00:57:25.61]

And then I went on into school. I didn't go back to Ox-Bow as a student. And I did not really go back there in any capacity until I think it was 1959. Roland and I were invited to go and teach, the two of us together. Betsy Rupprecht was the director. Now, Betsy Rupprecht was the daughter of Edgar Rupprecht, and—who had been very instrumental in the school for years. And Betsy still remains on the board. She was a stockholder, actually, and till we went not-for-profit. She was an active—

[00:58:09.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Shareholder.

[00:58:09.54]

ELLEN LANYON:  —shareholder, right. But she directed the school that year and she had made an enormous attempt to invite a very stimulating faculty. They were at that time Midwesterners, all of us, but she had Roland and I, and Joe Goto, and Seymour Rosofsky, and Zubel Kachadoorian, and Irma Cavat from Detroit. And she had a person named Larry Kolden [ph], from down in Carbondale teaching graphics. A person named Stig Spiller [ph] was there working in the ceramic area, and Phil Fike from Detroit doing jewelry. So it was really, it began that the Michigan-Chicago, the Detroit-Chicago connection, which continued for some years.

[00:59:01.69]

Well, we taught there—1960, and I think '59, just before we went to Europe on Roland's Fulbright. And there were several people—like Kachadoorian and Cavat went off to Europe at that same time, so we saw them in Europe. And then Seymour was there the following year. So it was really kind of marvelous. We had this wonderful time at Ox-Bow, and then we all parted, and then we saw each other the next year in Europe, and it was a happy time. We all had children, and who were growing up together, and it was a really good, wholesome full, time in our lives.

[00:59:45.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Zubel had a Prix de Rome at that time.

[00:59:48.35]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah.

[00:59:49.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  People were going under either grants, or—

[00:59:51.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. Mm-hmm [affirmative], Now, also I wanted to say that at that time we had some students who have continued—we had—who have continued to work, and be rather active in the art scene. And one is Michael Herson, who's exhibited quite a bit. Caroline Schock, who is a New York painter now, and exhibits a lot. Stanley Edwards, who has always been sort of part of the Chicago art complex, and a variety of other people that I won't even go into.

[01:00:33.24]

But—so, I began at least my connection with the school. Now, we went off to Europe, and when we came back from Europe as a family, we did not go back to Ox-Bow to teach. Instead, we sought out a summer residence, and finally bought a place in Canada, which oh, really consumed our time for the next four years or so. In 1967, so that's about five years—1967 I began teaching there again. And at first, I would come down at the end of the summer just for a week, and I would come next year for two weeks, then I came for three or so, and I did half a year as a Director and then I finally was a full year Director. And after that time, I decided that it would be—I would serve Ox-Bow best to be on the board, which is what I'm doing right now. I serve as a chairman of the faculty and academic staff committee for the school. Which means that I'm responsible for hiring faculty, looking at that.

[01:01:50.45]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What were those years that you were most actively—

[01:01:53.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think the school was growing and coming into its own. I think that I really did help to try to promote a better image for the school. It had fallen into a slump. It had gone through times when a woman, Elsa Ulbricht, from Milwaukee—who was a terrific woman, but who was far more interested in the craft area, built the school up as a craft place, rather than as painting and drawing. And then my work there was to establish it as a more well-known school of painting, kind of a Midwest Skowhegan. And so I made a really big attempt to bring in good painters, as well as keep the other areas going. We no longer have weaving, but we had a really fine ceramic department that built itself up and built a new building, carried on.

[01:02:45.39]

Dennis McWilliams, who had been originally an assistant up there, became our printmaking instructor, and he did an outstanding job in building up a new studio situation with presses and all the equipment that one would need to do lithography or etching. We put up—we set up a little photo lab so that people could deal with their photo work, or you could do photo transfer work in one of the other print medias. We set up seminars, and lectures, and visiting artists on weekends. And I instigated a scholarship search competition. Prior to that time, the work scholarship people, of which there were usually twelve—and they were students would come in, and in exchange for their summer at Ox-Bow, they would be given chores.

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9964_m]

[00:00:03.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  Are we recording?

[00:00:05.74]

The chores consisted primarily of, oh, either kitchen work, or housekeeping, or groundskeeping, or whatever. And a few of these people who had extra qualifications would be put into positions of technical assistance in either printmaking, ceramics, metalcraft work. And there had always been a last-minute hustle to get these kids to come up there. And people who were teaching there would find a student and say, would you like to come, as I had been taken there in '44.

But instead, I thought that one of the ways to build a more viable school, and benefit more people, was to run the scholarship program throughout the country and try to bring in a breath of freshness from other places, which would also be an injection of other kinds of ideas, people who are coming from other schools, and where the teaching philosophy was different, and it would mix with ours and probably broaden our concepts.

[00:01:19.38]

So it was rather successful. I did an awful lot of work at that time—paperwork, sending out letters and negotiating application forms, and talking to Deans of art schools or universities. Oh, we probably had 100 qualified people who tried out. And we sorted through all of their work and chose the twelve people. And I think it was sensational. I mean, the quality of the student that came that summer was really terrific.

[00:01:58.17]

Now, we had also set up a new system of having not only the scholarship students there, but giving a special rate to college students or professional—let's say people who worked at the college level in art could be an instructor, or whatever. But you had to—in order to take advantage of the dorm rate, you had to be involved with the school at the time, and you had to be willing to live in a dormitory situation, which was packing them into small spaces, nevertheless.

[00:02:33.14]

Now, this meant that the image of the school was changing. And at the same time, I made a great effort to hire a faculty that would represent various points of view, so that we were not just sticking with, let's say, a certain kind of landscape painting in one area or Abstract Expressionism, or rectilinear, or whatever you want to put it to. I tried to have a great variety, because the teachers would come in from anywhere from two to three weeks at a time only. The printmaking, and ceramic, and metalcraft, and photo staffs were constant for nine weeks. But our painting department moved along. And every two or three weeks, we would change the instructors. And then I would bring in these people on weekends to give lectures, which also added a considerable amount.

[00:03:35.58]

And so Ox-Bow began to be rather a vital spot. And people began to hear about it, and there was a lot of talk about Ox-Bow. And I think it took its place in the Midwest, and became more respected than it had been, because it had fallen into a time when people thought it was just some kind of a playground. You could go up there and you really didn't work very hard. You just ran around on the sand dunes and had costume parties, and it was a place—not in the '40s. I'm not talking about that time. But I am saying that through the years, it did sort of come about to have that reputation.

[00:04:14.97]

So in the late '60s, it came back into another kind of picture, and took on a new image. And I think that the school was really going strong. And then since that time, we have improved in one way or another. We finally got grants from the Illinois Arts Council to take scholarship people out there from the state of Illinois. We've had grants from the Michigan Council of the Arts to run special projects, and programs, and printmaking, and in ceramics. And now we're working on getting a National Endowment.

[00:04:55.76]

And we now have a big project going, which has been voted through by the board. And there's enough money being found one place or another to work it out, because we're really dedicated to the idea of transforming it from just the regular school curriculum into three three-week workshops. And the people who come there will not necessarily be what we might call students, but they will be participants. They will work with the artist in-residence that's invited in. So I think Ox-Bow's had a good history, and I think it has a bright future. It has some good people working for it.

[00:05:35.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When you talk about this vitality of Ox-Bow in the '40s, did that go on through—from what you can recall, people that have said things to you—through to the end of the '40s and into the '50s? When did that taper off? And then you mentioned that—

[00:05:54.89]

ELLEN LANYON:  Chapin stayed there, I think, until around '48, at least. But I lost track of Ox-Bow. I really did. From '45 to '55, I didn't know very much about it. In fact, even up to about '59 when I began to work there again in those few years.

[00:06:14.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, those were strong years. That's when Betsy Rupprecht was the director.

[00:06:20.30]

ELLEN LANYON:  See, after Betsy Rupprecht, there was a young man for one year, and it was almost disastrous. Evidently, he was very disorganized, and didn't work very well. Then Phyllis and Josh Kind took over and became the directors. And that's when I resumed my teaching there. That was in 1967. That's when I started going there.

[00:06:48.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  When did the organizational structure of Ox-Bow realize that they had to change their stock and shareholding structure into a nonprofit structure?

[00:07:01.22]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, they worked on that for years, but they finally achieved it about four years ago when a man who joined the board, a lawyer named Thomas Flack, was able to really work it out and get us a not-for-profit status and then subsequently a tax-deductible—

[00:07:20.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Number.

[00:07:21.02]

ELLEN LANYON:  —number.

[00:07:21.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Which then made you eligible for federal and state funding.

[00:07:24.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, in this day and age that's vital. Because I mean, anything, any school, any institution like that has got to have support. And support only comes through the fact that people who support you can deduct you from their income tax. So that's kind of the first step in anybody's book these days.

[00:07:42.53]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And as anyone that's ever spent a summer or even a weekend at Ox-Bow has some sense of the whole flavor of the ritual of a sunrise, sunset, day after day. The whole environment is a kind of—it's a very unique environment, and it's a very established kind of routine within the environment, even. Could you kind of reflect both on the environment and the rituals of a summer at Ox-Bow, from maybe a day's routine, to a summer's routine?

[00:08:24.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, all right. I'll try. First of all, you have to understand that Ox-Bow is set in a very remote, little pocket of land outside of Saugatuck, Michigan, totally removed from the tourist scene. Go down an old dirt road, through the woods, and you come upon the Ox-Bow lagoon, which is a section of the Kalamazoo River that was blocked off years ago when they straightened out the curve, and had the Kalamazoo River flow directly into Lake Michigan.

[00:08:55.61]

The old Ox-Bow curve of that river, blocked at either end, formed the Ox-Bow lagoon. That's part of the property so that it's isolated, and until this year was totally devoid of any kind of public traffic. Now we have some fishermen in there. But up until this time, we've had absolutely no visitors, which meant that there was a great deal of freedom at the school. We posed nude models in the landscape, and we had a regular class in that. Well, first of all—so then, let's say, there's the lagoon, and the sand dunes, and the forest. We have virgin beach and hardwood forest there that's exceptional.

[00:09:43.59]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  In extent, a substantial amount of acreage.

[00:09:46.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Now, the buildings of the Ox-Bow itself, the central buildings were part of a village that existed there years ago when that bend in the river, and as it flowed out into Lake Michigan was a very vital port for the state of Michigan. And the inn, and several of the buildings still stand from those days. And then through the years, the founding fathers of which—we had Tallmadge, and Frederick Fursman—both of them from Chicago—founded the school.

And from then on, people were permitted to come in and build private cabins with the reservation that when they died, they would not pass on to the heirs, but they would become part of the school. So now the grounds are comprised of the original buildings, then many cabins have been built through the years and then new structures that the school has been building itself. So that's the layout.

[00:10:48.11]

And there's a large bell on a bell platform which rings three times a day, signaling the breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And breakfast is very early in the morning—seven, seven-thirty [a.m.]. And everyone's up. And by nine o'clock, the morning classes begin. We've had a regular routine of drawing and painting in the mornings—figure, landscape, what have you. But there's always been a painting teacher on duty in the mornings. And then the other departments decide whether—I mean, they work out their routines, so that either you're in printmaking or whatever.

[00:11:25.97]

Now, a student who comes there and signs up can be anyone from anywhere. We don't review portfolios, at least up until now. Nothing has been done in that respect. We just insist that people are over 18 years of age, so we don't have to worry about them. Because people do live there. They eat there, they stay there, and they work there. And they stay anywhere from one week to nine weeks. The style is casual. The dress is casual, work clothes. People work at something and get involved with it. They don't have to stop to go through any formalities of cleaning up, or change. They simply eat because the bell rings, and they go back to work.

[00:12:08.14]

So it has always been a marvelous place, I think, for a person to go and totally immerse themselves in what they're doing, and be able to, on a very kind of a close basis, meet and communicate with others who are doing the same kind of thing. So I think it's a healthy place to be—very few conflicts, very few problems. An occasional individual has a trauma or something. You take care of it. For the most part, it's been very successful. And there's kind of like an Ox-Bow club all over the world. You go and you meet somebody that's been to Ox-Bow. And there's more, and more, and more people now that are involved in that.

[00:12:53.01]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, the name Ox-Bow comes out of the fact that the shape of the river at that point is in the shape of a half of an ox horn.

[00:13:02.67]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, no. No, no, no. Oxbow is a geographical term that applies to that kind of a curve in a river. And it is the oxbow of the Kalamazoo. And that's why it's called that.

[00:13:18.69]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The summer school also attracted, over the years, a lot of other people that would come for a weekend—architects, gallery owners—

[00:13:30.39]

ELLEN LANYON:  Poets.

[00:13:31.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —poets, actors, and so forth. So it was a center of its own. In the course of a summer there, the summer culminates in a ritual which is called a burial.

[00:13:47.75]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:13:48.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Could you go into that, and any other ritualistic aspects of—the volleyball game at Ox-Bow almost has become part of a routine that is a day-to-day activity.

[00:14:08.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yeah. It's the only organized sport there is. And people usually play it after dinner, because not only does it settle their food—we try to have good food up there. But it is designed to be filling. We have a lot of young men and women that have huge appetites. And so after dinner, people go out and they play volleyball. But I think it also serves another purpose. People live very closely at Ox-Bow. Because you are isolated from the town of Saugatuck, you can certainly go in, but people go in rarely, or they go in at night to dance or drink. They don't really go into the town for very much. So they live and work together in an intense situation. And that volleyball game every day releases an awful lot of tensions that would otherwise build up and become explosive in another way. I mean, if you really want to get back at somebody that you're mad at that day, you sock that ball at them, and that's your way of making your point for the day, maybe. And I think it's absolutely necessary that you have some activity like that.

[00:15:12.79]

Then there's swimming. And we have some boats. And always somebody turns up who's a fisherman. But then after all this activity, people settle down usually for the evening to lectures, or showing each other their slides, or some activity or another which is directly related to what they're doing all day long. It's probably the biggest, longest retreat system. Because I don't even think Skowhegan runs like that. I don't think people live in quite the same way as they do at Ox-Bow.

[00:15:48.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The tradition of having this burial, which the volleyball game culminates a certain kind of tension of the day, but at the end of the summer—

[00:16:01.03]

ELLEN LANYON:  You mean the burial?

[00:16:01.86]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The burial.

[00:16:02.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that's just—that started years ago when Elsa Ulbricht, and Chapin, and those people were up there. And they would dig a hole in the ground. Everybody would throw in a token of the summer. And they'd cover the hole up, and they'd put just a crude slab of cement on the top. And everybody would write on it, put the footprint. It was a Grauman's Chinese Theater—

[00:16:26.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Stunt.

[00:16:27.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Stunt, yeah, more or less. And they were interesting. They'd write the names of the people that were there that summer. And they formed a stepping-stone from the meadow, which is the central open area in the school, down towards the lagoon where an old studio building stood, which is now gone. And this was the sidewalk to the studio, so to speak, was made up of these stepping-stones. Well, then in later years people got the notion that they should make a much more elaborate thing.

And so they started making—one year it would be given to the ceramic department, the next year to the metal department, next year—and people would create these fantastic, extensive things that they left behind and are there. They're kind of tucked in behind the trees of the woods. Now, wherever the monument or the stone—we call it the stone—is to be left, a huge hole is dug. And every year, the hole seems to get bigger. You can drop a tractor in it sometimes. People throw things in, still. But the ritual has become much more involved with the drama of a torchlight parade and the high priest, and a whole team—

[00:17:48.81]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Costume—

[00:17:49.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, costume party. But then it's always followed by an all-night party where Ox-Bow provides the food and the drinks, and everybody goes, stays up all night, dances and carries on. That's the burial. And it's kind of the end of the year.

[00:18:07.04]

But I'll tell you, I think that rituals depend upon the group of people who are there at one given time. And sometimes those burial things work, and sometimes they don't. One year, I know that we were all very tired of the time that such an event consumed. And we had Burr Tillstrom, who's been a longtime friend of the school, come over and do a "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" show—actually "Kukla, Stan, and Ollie," with Stanley Rosenthal as the business manager. And then we had a party afterwards, and I thought that that was pretty nice. But in any case, somehow the end of the year was always celebrated.

[00:18:53.85]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What I'd like to do, if you don't have anything more that you want to recall about Ox-Bow, then, is really begin to deal with the work that came out of this magic period, the book that Andrew brought home, and the table stage magic, and how since we've talked a bit about it moved quickly into the—table magic into stage magic, and how that has all evolved into what you're doing now.

[00:19:25.83]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Well, before we go into that, I think I'd like to go back a little ways and reconstruct the process that took place from the changeover, oil to acrylic, and just briefly go through that just a little bit again because I think it's important to make it very, very clear. When I realized that I was allergic to the turpentine and had to stop the oil painting, and I started doing the acrylic paintings, I did some sports figures; I did some beach figures. But nothing really satisfied me. I did the drawing on gesso with the indication of slight color.

[00:20:09.91]

There seemed to be an audience for this work, and an appreciation for it, but I was very unsettled, and upset, and anxious about it. And I was advised at that time—I was still with B.C. Holland Gallery. And I remember Bud saying to me—"Well," he said, "your strength lies in your drawing at this point, Ellen. Why don't you just work towards having a big drawing show, and put all your energy into that? And perhaps in the process of working out these things on paper, you'll begin to find an avenue back into painting." And I thought that was a pretty good idea, so I did.

[00:20:49.78]

And in the winter of '68, I had my show at Bud Holland's. I've forgotten what month, but I know there was a blizzard. And so it had to be dead winter, February, probably—or January, February. I do remember that. Okay. I prepared for this show, and I had already done some very large paper drawing. And I got very busy and made additions to an already drawn series of things that dealt with the circus, or portraits of my family, or portraits of friends.

[00:21:29.06]

And Edvins Strautmanis, who worked for Playboy, had given me some gigantic sheets of paper that were four by six feet. And they were a pseudo-vellum. They had a texture to them that was very beautiful. And drawing on them was a pleasure. And I had friends come and pose and sit for me. I did a portrait of the seagulls. I did a portrait of Paul and Honora Carroll, Irene and Arthur Siegel. I drew Mimi Grooms. I drew my parents. I drew my children.

[00:22:06.09]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The Horowitzes.

[00:22:06.74]

ELLEN LANYON:  Hmm?

[00:22:06.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The Horowitzes.

[00:22:07.91]

ELLEN LANYON:  I did the big drawing of the Horowitzes. And along with that I did a lot of drawings from various photographs of that of the circus. And so there was—and sports things. An animation was, again, reintroduced into the work. And I was happy, and the work was alive and going. I had that exhibit. And then Bud Holland soon after that had decided that he was going to relinquish his dealership on all the artists that he was carrying, working artists. And I sought another gallery. And I went over to Richard Gray, who I've been with ever since, and began to paint the—well, I had already started because I know that I had done a very large painting of an ostrich cart, which I sold from B.C. Holland through him.

And by the time I had joined Richard Gray, I had worked further into the acrylic, but become ever so more discouraged by it all. And the drawing was not enough for me. And everyone was giving me advice, especially about—Holland said, "You should really get more into portraiture. That's your area." And I was bored with the whole idea. He mentioned still life, and I considered it for a while, but it was also not enough for me to chew on. So I sat down and tried to actually work it out on paper as to what would be the best process for me to get back into some kind of energetic, rewarding, and enthusiastic work again. And I said, well, you could do landscape painting. You could do still life. And how could you do these things?

[00:24:07.29]

And then it occurred to me to look through my collection of books for some kind of inspiration. And Andrew had brought home the spring before, or that spring, I suppose, a book from the Francis Parker book sale, which I have always gone to, and bought from all kinds of odd things that no one else really wanted—they would be ready to throw them out—things that contained a lot of interesting ideas that would act as source for me. This book that is called Magical Experiments had to do with things that you would conduct after dinner was finished in the Victorian age. You would assemble all the corks from the wine bottles, the wine bottles themselves, the forks, the spoons, the plates, a straw here and there, an egg or an eggshell. And you would make little setups, which you could conduct basic physics experiments to teach the children how, for instance, a siphon worked, or what is locomotion, or the mysteries of optics, and things like that.

[00:25:25.30]

And the book had some little engravings in it, little French engravings that fascinated me. They were set up so that the hands alone manipulated whatever was going on in some cases. In some cases, it would just be the setup; in some cases you'd see the full figure, and all—but the idea of the hands. And perhaps it did have something to do with that business of around the table in Englewood that we talked about.

[00:25:55.38]

That whole notion of finally ridding myself of the human being, except for the symbol of the manipulation fascinated me. And it also gave me an opportunity to bring in objects and paint from objects, and be painting what would amount to still life, but still giving it a life beyond that, where I could inject my sense of fantasy and my need for something that would be of greater creative powers than just simply painting the objects themselves.

I had to have this narrative, in other words, that comes back into it. I had to be telling you or describing something to you, and it had to have some kind of almost a memorabilia attached to it. Because it always seems to be the thing that comes into the work no matter what I do to rid it. I could have gone on being a portrait artist forever, and probably be a successful one. But it simply just—it just didn't do it for me. It wasn't enough.

[00:27:05.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, do you think that this, particularly the use of the hand and these things, once you got them worked out onto canvas, led you back into something that we had talked about earlier, where you depicted your fourth aunt in a jar, into symbolism much more obviously? I can imagine that your first use of hands at this point were from your source materials. But then obviously in the work, the sense of symbol becomes—

[00:27:33.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it started to become that way, but it was not very conscious, and it was not the intention at the time. I really was just simply painting straight objects in a still life situation, creating some kind of a fantasy beyond what was already created. I mean, I thought it was sort of fantastic anyway that one would make these strange constructions on the dinner table to demonstrate things to children.

[00:28:03.61]

But beyond that, I got involved in more than just the storytelling. I realized that now that the elements of Surrealism were becoming stronger, and I was beginning to locate this in my work, and feel that it was not a forced, preconceived thing, that it was just entered it in a very natural fashion. It was what I was really doing and wanting. The last figurative things were quite surreal. They were based on a strange kind of situation—women riding in carts with ostriches or driving crocodiles down the street. Things like that had an element to them that was beginning to lead out and beyond any of the work I had ever done before.

[00:29:00.07]

And with the new tabletop magic series, it became apparent that an even greater working towards the level of the unreal had to be somehow promoted and pushed. And so I worked with scale in order to make the fantasy more apparent, and to make it more believable. Then everything in the paintings had to be over-scaled. On a painting, for instance, that's three-by-four foot in dimension, a fork would be an enormous two or three-foot-high fork, or a goblet, or a straw, or an eggshell. And everything took on an overscale, a situation, thus enhancing the reality of the unreality, if you understand what I'm saying.

[00:30:10.38]

At least this was what I had worked out as being one of the elements which would make the series more believable to myself and to others as an extension, somehow, of the theme of table magic. That was not enough. It had to be carried farther, as far as in the invention of the works. Now, there are several different things that we have to talk about that will cover a lot of the later work. But I'll do it the best I can at this point. I'll be thinking of different things. It may get a little disconnected, but it's very hard for me to put in a totally orderly fashion, all of this stuff. And my mind—I get an idea, and lose it as fast. So you'll have to bear with me.

[00:31:02.63]

But scale was and still is quite important in the work that I do. The other thing that became important readily was why was I not constructing these things three-dimensionally? Why was I painting a three-dimensional situation, and enhancing the scale? And why was it that I insisted on staying with the easel format? I mean, this was a question in my own mind. And it was brought up occasionally by others, especially when I got into the whole series of painting magical boxes, and things.

[00:31:44.31]

Now, I think that probably—and I did try, I might say, that I went to some extent to construct some of these little setups where a hand would come in. I had a stage that I would build, a wooden box. And a molded hand would come in from the side of the box that I would cast in plaster. And it would hold a real goblet that I had bought, which inside of it would hold something else that had to be a part of it, or it would be pouring liquid. I was trying, in other words, to recreate these things actually in the third dimension.

[00:32:22.08]

It didn't work. It just didn't work. It was far too—there was so much involvement with the need to learn technique or manipulate the three-dimensional form, and to construct it, and to get in the other materials. What I really wanted to do was get my ideas down. I didn't have time to involve myself with another whole concept of presentation. So I rejected that idea, and I continued to work simply on the two-dimensional surface.

[00:33:01.38]

It always bothered me that for some reason I could not get away from the two-dimensional surface, that I could not get away from the canvas, the stretcher, the easel format. But I resolved for myself that I had to make a decision as to how much time and effort I could possibly put into the collage of elements to make a three-dimensional situation. I decided at the time it wasn't worth it, because that subject comes up again, as I say, with the boxes. And with the boxes, as with the magical things, there was another reason. And that was that if I decided that a hummingbird should suddenly appear hovering over the goblet or hovering over a box, or insects, et cetera, should be involved with this. And there was a sense of animation.

[00:33:58.89]

I did not feel that I could create the same believable activity with a three-dimensional form as I could on canvas, that by becoming a better and better realistic painter I could make the fantasy more real by keeping it on a two-dimensional surface and creating the animate and the inanimate there, and that for what I wanted to say, that is to say this whole business of message, et cetera, with the painting has always bored me slightly, and yet it exists, and one cannot ignore it.

[00:34:38.73]

If I want to make a statement with my art, the most believable way for me was to continue to paint and not to fool around with other odds and ends of technique, invention, or whatever. I simply had to get busy and do it on paper or canvas, so I did. Now, I did quite a few of those paintings. And I exhibited them here in Chicago in part, but then the big show that I had of those was in New York City. And I had not had an exhibit with Zabriskie for a couple of years at that time. And these things were received well.

[00:35:20.03]

But I think that from this time on, I had to reckon. I had had some success in New York. I'd had write-ups in the Times with the paintings and drawings, and I had really been received quite well. I even had one show in between where I showed some of the—where I showed the "Painting for Jenny," the beach ball painting. And I had shown a whole series of strange paintings that had been tucked away and thrown away that were all experiments with cutting up a pie and reassembling it to make a prismatic effect, which was done, as far as I could tell, before a lot of people did it. But then it became such a commercial gimmick. And aside from that I wasn't that interested in the idea, so I dropped that theme.

[00:36:09.11]

But all the work that I did up and through that, even, was readily accepted in New York. But the moment I started dealing with the fantasy that I am now working with, I've had a problem there. New York is involved with the international look, or the universal concept. They are not really involved or interested in private world expression. And it does present a problem for some of us individuals who insist on continuing in this way.

[00:36:49.27]

But in line with that, I had the show in New York, and it was received well enough. But I suddenly realized that I had to make a decision at that point. And it was sort of an open, professional decision that had to be made as to whether I wanted to continue to have a certain kind of acclaim in New York, or whether it was more important for me to continue and do the work I had to do. And I mean "had to do," because I think that's what it is when you're an artist. You simply have to do a certain thing, and you proceed and do it.

[00:37:19.85]

And in the same way that I made the decision years ago with the egg temperas where I simply had to quit doing what I was doing in order to progress, I decided that I'd have to take that abuse and continue on my own way, which I did. Subsequently, I left the Zabriskie Gallery because they simply were not interested in showing the work, since it had taken on that particular viewpoint.

[00:37:50.24]

Now, from the tabletop series, during that time, a lot of people became aware of the fact that I was interested in magic, that I was interested in situations like that, and they began to give me magicians' catalogs and books on magic. And I collected books on magic. And I began to even here and there find a magician's artifact, or one of his tools, or one of his props. And became more and more interested in—not the magician himself standing on the stage doing the performance, but in the—what could we say—the illusion of magic.

[00:38:43.35]

So the next group of paintings had to do with stage production. But I got to—I mean, I would work through, let's say, describing in paint the process of going through a stunt whereby one would fill a bowl with water, turn the bowl over. When the bowl was reinstated, all kinds of animals would jump out. Now, on the stage a magician usually is pretty well limited to doves and rabbits, and an occasional snake. But in this case, I decided that it was my privilege to take that suggestion and use it only as a kind of catalyst for truly a fantastic demonstration of what the magician could have done.

[00:39:44.33]

And so that at that point all kinds of animals, which were in complete scale differential to each other, were used, like a hippopotamus and a rabbit, which in a way would look almost like they were the same size. I mean, I just played around with any of the elements as freely as I wanted to, having no real compulsion that they had to be within scale or that the thing had to be believable, or anything else. And that was a very successful group of things.

[00:40:16.24]

And it's the first time that I was totally involved with substituting the animal world for the human, the world of human beings. Because before that, I'd combined them in the ostrich cart paintings, et cetera. The birds were there, but the human being was the prime element. And now the animals took the place of the human being all the way through.

[00:40:46.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Do you know why that happened at that time?

[00:40:50.32]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I don't know whether it happened at that time. I think it happened at that time because of stage magic and production, and so-called livestock productions. In a screen that I painted there was one figure of a woman, but she's more like a wax figure. She's more like something that was created for the stage itself. She's very theatrical and unrealistic.

[00:41:17.80]

I don't know. I thought a lot about it and wrote about it here and there, decided that it simply had to be a banner of substitution in my own mind for an animate creature, for another animate creature, and that certain things that I wanted to say about society or the world, or the interaction of man and the human condition, I could somehow say better working with the animal world than I could with human beings themselves, because I did not want to be and never would want to be a Social Realist painter, and that certain ideas and symbologies which I could deal with—for instance, what does the snake symbolize in what culture?

[00:42:19.32]

You can align all these things with human beings if you want to. I mean, I think that this was—and now I'm pretty well known. And when I say "think" and "know," it sounds very ambiguous, and one might wonder why I don't know for sure. But I don't think it was ever my business to know for sure. I think that those are things that come out of the human subconscious and our—I mean, they come before the consideration of why they occurred. And it's better that way for me.

[00:42:51.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You establish rather substantial symbolistic concerns, one for the box, and the trick where something—the candy box where something goes in one form and comes out in another form. And the idea of a house begins to permeate this concept. And you introduced houses into images. Can you go into that concern in the symbolism?

[00:43:24.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  Of the house?

[00:43:24.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  No, first in the symbolism of the box, and the transposition of a box to a house. What is that all about?

[00:43:31.25]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that sort of comes a little bit later. After the stage production work, I did the book. I wanted to talk just a little bit about the book before I get into the next series of paintings. Those paintings that dealt with stage production, and animals, and birds, and insects, and reptiles—formed, I think, a very, very important, small body of production. I somehow got an idea. Sometimes when I get an idea of doing something, it pursues me until it's a kind of a madness, almost. You have to do it. You just feel like it's the only thing that you really want to do, and until you've done it you will never rest.

[00:44:21.09]

And the Landfall Press had opened up here in Chicago that year, a litho shop. Jack Lemmon, a master printer from Tamarind, opened it up. And it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to take some money—I got a grant from the Cassandra Foundation, which are unsolicited sums of money given to artists to continue to work, or use for some project that they're involved in. And I was given $2,000 that year. And I thought, that's what I'll do with it. I'm going to march down to the Landfall Press. I'm going to start this project.

It took me one year to make a book that I called Wonder Production Volume I. It was 12 double pages, making up 24 actual pages of images. And there were 12 stage productions described. There was some writing, which was done by hand. It was all birds and animals. And it was a handbound, handprinted—and then I hand-colored some of the pages—very precious, only 12 volumes in the edition.

[00:45:42.04]

And it was something that I really had to do. I spent a whole year doing it, during which I painted very little. And it was as if I had exhausted the stage magic in me by the time I was through with that book. During the same time, of course, I was doing a few paintings, and I was also doing an awful lot of watercolors and drawings, all based on that subject. So that particular period consumed about two years of time. And during it, I became more and more involved with trying to establish the import, the meaning of the symbologies that were taking place.

[00:46:32.45]

And when I was through with the book, and looked through it, I realized that if you looked up in the various—now, I keep a book here that's Christian symbols. Then I have another book that's put out by a Spaniard, that just has to do with symbols in general, and there's a cross-reference so that you can deal with Christian mythology, pre-Christian, ancient pre-Christian notions of what the thing was symbolic of—Freud and contemporary notions of what things stand for. You could go through that book and find all kinds of themes running through it.

[00:47:18.57]

There's the theme of transformation. There's the theme of camouflage. There's the theme of sexual involvements. There's a theme of Christian moralities and ethics. I wrote a small forward that more or less implied this, and that one should feel free to deal with it. And at that point, by writing all that and by putting it all down, and by printing it and issuing it, publishing it, I sort of felt like I was taking for the first time a very definite stand in this area, that by announcing it as being an ambiguous situation that one could read into and work from, was stating my philosophy about this work, and that I did not have to pin it down to absolutes anywhere along the line.

[00:48:19.54]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And that philosophy pretty much hasn't changed since.

[00:48:25.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it hasn't changed until just now, but I think I've been—in a much more maybe prescribed and premeditated way. I think the new work is going to be quite different. But in between what I've just described in the so-called new work is another whole period of things to talk about. Actually, I'd like to just finish up about the Wonder Production Volume I book. Because the years' length work that went into it, and the consolidation of all the ideas that I'd had about the stage production resulted in this enormous effort. And I got a great deal of recognition for it, actually.

[00:49:20.07]

I constructed a show wherein there were panels of the preparatory drawings and watercolors. There were the earliest proof prints from the book. It showed each print in progress, and showing the final result. And then it showed the book. And then it showed the individual prints that were made in edition as part of the total edition of the book. Because when we pull 25 prints, let's say, 12 of them would go into the book, and 13 of them became single prints that one could frame. So the whole operation was totaled, and organized, and mounted. And I had an exhibition here in Chicago at the School of the Art Institute. I had the show at the Madison Art Center. And then it went to the Smithsonian, the national collection. And so for me that was—and then later on, I took part of it to Penn State. But it was a very significant point in my art life because it was as if—maybe for the first time I felt that I had truly completed and exhausted a cycle of invention that I had set out to do. And I, with a great sense of accomplishment, went on to the next group of things.

[00:50:45.78]

Now, I would like to just say here that these groups of works are very significant to me, that they do exist as group efforts, that I get an idea about a manner of presenting a certain kind of notion, and that I work that out as a series. And I'm only confused when there are too many foreign elements injected into that series of paintings. Then I get slightly confused. But if it's very absolutely delineated, such as stage production, then the next group of things I did really had to do with boxes and containers. And within that format I had other things involved—chocolate candy, heart shapes, et cetera. And I got more and more involved in researching the symbology of the various things that were used.

[00:51:49.54]

So when I talk about doing a series or preparing for a show, it is because I really do believe that although each painting must stand by itself eventually as a singular unit, that this exhibition is as if it's one huge, long sentence, and the paintings within it are punctuation marks. And they have to almost be seen that way at least once. I'm very, very jealous about releasing paintings until there's been some commitment by some gallery to show them as a group. And even if no one ever saw the show, I would know that they had once existed together in one space, and been documented that way. And then it's over. Then I can go on to the next thing. And so when I finished Wonder Production, I moved along.

[00:52:48.95]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There's a great sense of accomplishment. That was a very positive period in which you could explore—

[00:52:54.84]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:52:54.99]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —the richness of this new ground that you were dealing with, symbolism. Can you clarify a little bit now—you're thinking about the use of animals in these images?

[00:53:09.56]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I did that before. I mean, we talked about that before.

[00:53:14.02]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, but your experience with the Field Museum, and really coming to grips with the animal as—

[00:53:24.31]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I started going over to the museum and drawing a lot, for one thing. And I realized that the animals there stood—you know, they had been living creatures. And here they stood within their hides inanimately symbolizing the life that had once existed in them, and that they were a predictable group of creatures—or as living things, they were predictable, that you could depend on an animal for certain kinds of behavior. Or if you knew that an animal was unpredictable, at least it was documented, and it was a fact, whereas human beings were something else.

[00:54:15.13]

And I think that for myself, I felt a great safety in—I mean, it was kind of a double connection there with experiences I was having with humans and a great transformation that I was going through. You have to, in this conversation, take into account that I, at the age of about 45, entered the feminist movement, and became aware for the first time of the aspects of feminism in my work that I had never recognized, considered, or given time to, and that I suddenly had to begin to investigate certain sources that I had used. I investigated ideas that I had promoted in the work and all the symbols of the various stages in a woman's life, and her sensibility, and her sex that would absolutely have to somehow come out in the work sooner or later—or always does come out.

[00:55:27.45]

But then eventually, you begin to recognize these things, and acknowledge them. And part of that whole business of dealing with the animals, I think, was somehow putting back into the same framework as the photograph of my relatives—human beings—so that they were once removed from my experience, and I could deal with them, and I could study the situation, and I could illustrate experiences I've had with human beings without confronting them directly.

[00:56:03.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  And out of that comes also now the use of the box and the house.

[00:56:08.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the house, yeah—

[00:56:10.65]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Particularly the box, though, and other things that kind of haunt you from the past. The animals are still there. There's the candy. And the hand is still in the imagery. And there's an attempt at a self-portrait, this investigation of yourself.

[00:56:27.33]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, the hand comes in in a different way, though. You see, the hand before was not my hand. The hand before was the magician's hand, or the anonymous hand of a manipulator. But in the later paintings, in the box paintings, the hand—actually, I put my own hand down and drew around it, and used it in drawings and in paintings to symbolize my own magic. Because what happened was, I left off with the magicians—I left off with the manipulator and the table magic. I left off with the magician and the stage production, and I entered into my own magic making.

[00:57:08.53]

Because from this time on, from the time of a painting called "Spool Box," where I show a shaker spool box, and it's a thread web production, a web thread. It's where spiders took the threads that fed out from the spool box, and wove them into a fantasy. And there are ladybugs, and there are spiders involved. And there's threads, and spools, and a spool box, et cetera. That was the first painting that I did where I took an object out of my studio, one of my collection of boxes. Because I have a lot of boxes here that are, well, very—I'll talk about that in a minute. But I took one from the collection, I placed it on a stand, and I painted it. And as I painted it, I fantasized an activity that could occur.

[00:58:11.41]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Hmm. And then from that, you begin to really express your own fantasies.

[00:58:15.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's right. Then from then—

[00:58:17.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  You explore them, too.

[00:58:18.37]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's right. Then from then on, each painting was a development of an extension of this fantasizing from an object. I would take a central piece and work from it. Now, the boxes in the collection, I should say, are all things that change, or move, or have secret compartments, or they reveal compartments within themselves, or they have mirrored lids that reflect facets of various things, or whatever. I select these boxes, I guess, because of their unusual nature, opening up and revealing hidden sections, the whole idea of the—I mean, I think that's where the feminist comes into it, and where you have to begin to read into these things, the metamorphoses that women have gone through in the last—within the last ten years. Actually, it's more like the last five or six. And they're coming into fruition as a creative people who recognize their own powers creatively.

[00:59:35.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, specifically, then, in this work, you're entering into making magic and exploring yourself, and these things in self-realization—

[00:59:46.53]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right.

[00:59:46.68]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —and realizing yourself, or re-realizing yourself in relationship to the feminist movement.

[00:59:51.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. And it's partially too, I think, a total exorcism of all the things that a woman keeps hidden until she feels that sudden, final—that strength to erupt, and display this to other people, and take her stand, make her statements, make it open. And I chose to do it through a vehicle of symbology. I mean, a lot of the women have worked in other ways. And you have to get into a study of feminist art to understand what I'm saying, and I don't want to get into that, necessarily.

[01:00:34.03]

I don't think that soft color, veils, subtle nuances, et cetera have had a part in my work. But the notion of the box, the container, the envelope, the purse, all of these things being the vaginal aspect of the woman—the womb, the portion of her body that lends itself to creativity, and also the fact that—it's probably good to remember that the woman has surrounded herself with certain objects in her trade—her kitchen, her household, her home—things that have always been the established equipment that a woman dealt with. And so it's probably significant that now we feel a freedom to use these things.

[01:01:37.59]

There's been a whole new investigation with textures, and embellishments, and decorative surfaces, and color, and even just using these objects that I collect and depicting them directly in a painting, I think, have a lot of significance. Because before this time, I was very reluctant to put myself out there as such. I always felt that it wouldn't be taken seriously enough or that these things were not an integral part of the work, of what I wanted to portray. And I think that the feminist movement has released a lot of women's anxieties in this area and made them feel totally free to do anything, use anything within that context that they wanted to and make it significant. And of course, as long as it's good art, I don't for one minute promote feminist art for the sake of its gender, or its significance on that level, but it first has to meet the qualifications of quality art.

[01:03:00.88]

Okay. I would like to say one other thing, though, before we finish this, about the feminism, is that I was probably working within this context for years before I realized it. After it was pointed out to me by others and by myself, I've been very careful to not think of it as being the initial reason for my work. I have other reasons for doing what I do. I can see that they are directly related to this.

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9965_m]

[00:00:08.94]

ELLEN LANYON:  I was saying that I felt that the significance of the elements in the work that you could relate to, say, feminist art, are a portion of it. But I, for one, believe I am a feminist. And I will not hesitate to acknowledge that a lot of what I do is significant in that area. But at the same time, I try very hard not to make this something that I rely upon preceding the beginning of a work. I work because I'm interested in the object. I'm interested in the juxtaposition of various ideas. If they come out of the feminist sensibility, okay. But I don't want to make that initial reason for the work. After all, I think that time—another 50 years, we'll sit this out and it'll be a little bit more evident as to what significance the feminist movement has had on art.

[00:01:20.70]

The most significance right now is it has enabled an awful lot of women to come out of the closet, and to produce works, and to introduce certain things into the art scene that heretofore were almost taboo, and that are now being accepted as quite understandable, and much more readily humanistic for the direction that they come from—the source. And so that's what I'd like to say about that. Anything that happens, though, from now on in the work, has got to, in some way, be related to that, even if it is subconscious. And I'm quite willing to be aware of that. And now—yeah?

[00:02:13.63]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But your awareness of this has helped you to even deal with your work more formally at the same time, within the professional realm of understanding the reason why you're putting down a symbol, and so forth. It has helped you reinvestigate, or even caused you to reinvestigate, your work.

[00:02:33.43]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yes.

[00:02:35.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Where did it take you? Or where is it taking you now, into this series of box paintings?

[00:02:40.09]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, actually, the box paintings are pretty much over in a way. I mean, I see what's going to happen next, and I'll get to that a little later, I think. But first of all, let's go into the group of things that dealt with the boxes. Okay, after the Wonder Production book show was up and away, I began to work on a series of paintings that, as I told you, came out of the object in the studio—the first was the "Spool Box". And the second thing I did, a couple of paintings based on a black lacquer box that, when opened, had a kind of prismatic mirrored interior lid—on the lid, and pink velvet lining. And I painted that box in two different versions. One had an enormous cricket emerging. It had chocolates and sweets in the box.

And always, in a way, I started with the central object, and then I allowed my imagination to flow along. The cricket came in because the cricket is related to a sound, a music, a song. The box containing sweets—this whole series contained sweets of some kind, either chocolates or bonbons. This came about because they symbolized a certain kind of reward and a gift. Chocolate is also a danger, so it bears a double meaning. And many of the paintings began to deal with duplicities and camouflaging. Whereas I had been talking about metamorphoses before, now I became interested in a slightly different relationship of ideas.

[00:04:42.05]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is that the idea—or the conception of good and evil?

[00:04:45.80]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it's good and evil—the duplicity. Yeah. Now, for instance, there's two paintings that I did at the beginning of this series that are really not part of the series. But they precede things that are happening now, that came later. I decided to kind of limit myself at that particular point and not indulge myself, in other words, in these two directions, but to get the box thing out of my system, and then I could go on with the others. The first one was a painting of a live cockatoo who sits over—in large scale, as realistically painted as I could—sits staring down at a plaster clock that has a plaster cockatoo incorporated on it. The idea was to paint the two as realistically as possible, and making the implication of the inanimate and the animate within the same species. The same object is seen in both a live and frozen.

[00:06:01.64]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How did you deal with the ground in that painting? Because I think it's—

[00:06:04.64]

ELLEN LANYON:  The ground? In the background?

[00:06:06.72]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah.

[00:06:07.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, that painting, the "Spool Box," had certain kinds of painting in it that I re-investigated in this painting. That is to say, building up the background with many, many layers of color—alternating colors, so that each comes through. There's a scumbling technique, almost like complementary colors—like red over a green, and then another green over and then a—yes?

[00:06:35.60]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What I'm speaking about, is often, you put these objects into a realistic sense of perspective, and the work exists on a table.

[00:06:45.71]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. Oh, this is on a table.

[00:06:47.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah, I know. But later, this feeling of ground becomes a thing that you explore in a number of different directions. When you do the fan paintings, then they're on a rather flat sense. And some of the more recent paintings that you were doing now are on a total floating plane, where the objects make the association not in any sense on a ground that presents perspective to you.

[00:07:19.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, there's a space, though. I think there's always been a lot of space in these paintings. And if it's ambiguous space, there should be no question in your mind that the house is sitting in a landscape, even if it isn't there, even if it's implied by a mist, and in a way that these things do sit on a table. And I don't think there's ever been a question in my mind that clock was not sitting on a surface, and that that bird was perched on a bar or something over that. I mean, hanging on a—whatever.

[00:07:54.12]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  It's just that later the works—

[00:07:56.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  A swing, or whatever—a branch.

[00:07:59.48]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. Later, the works exist to make that association, and not quite the same sense of ground. And I think we've explored here what ground was about in your art.

[00:08:08.21]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think those things are very insignificant to me. I'm not really interested at all. I'm interested only as if I start with—let's say I start with this central object, or theme subject, whatever it is. From there on, I work in what I describe as a stream of consciousness system to add to the central theme, complementary hands, snakes, plants—whatever. I'm looking at something here that has a variety of things in it. I'm not concerned with whether that's going to end up having a landscape in the background, or just a simple painted ground, or whatever. I'm only interested in establishing that central object, and the subsequent juxtaposed objects in a spatial situation. And they're all worked on until that space is convincing.

[00:09:16.83]

And I don't think that I've—I mean, sometimes, I'll work—like as in the "Italian Box," there's a landscape. That was one of the first landscape backgrounds that I painted. And there's the landscape background in the "Thimble Box." I think those were significant, because I suddenly realized that I had an object which was a little more difficult to simply place in an ambiguous space. And I wanted to give it great space, great depth of field. And so I placed it in a meadow, or a vast valley with mountains in the background, to give it that kind of scale. It has, again, to do with scale. Whereas, I didn't want to think about scale when it came to the cockatoo and the plaster clock. They may be over-scaled in the painting, but that's insignificant to the concept of where these things exist. They simply exist in a realistic—maybe realistically scaled space. Whereas the "Italian Box" is really involved in landscape.

[00:10:27.24]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Right.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:10:29.19]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think we should consider each painting as separately as we can, because by describing what's happening in each one, I think it'll make it clearer. I think it's far too abstract and ambiguous to talk about the space, because that's something that comes along and is implied. But it's really second or third in consideration to what's going on with these paintings.

[00:11:00.25]

For instance, in the "Italian Box," let me say first that if I didn't have the box in my collection, and worked from it directly, then I had a book that was a collection of antique boxes. And I would look through the book, and I would find some kind of form that interested me. And then I would invent with it. It was like doing the extension of the stage production. I took a picture of a box, I drew it, and I embellished it. I put things in it. I made something come out from it. I made it function as a container for some kind of unusual situation.

[00:11:47.38]

In the "Italian Box," it came out of the book as being something called a "necessaire," which a person would carry with them when they traveled. And they would carry the bottles in it, and the bottles would contain whatever the necessities of life were in those days. And I decided that instead of that, I would fill the bottles up with candy Kisses. And there are Hershey candy Kisses in the bottles, and they are also strewn around on the ground around the box—the box setting in, as I say, this valley with mountains in the background.

[00:12:21.17]

Now, a snake forms a road that leads from the far distance, and it enters the box, and it resides in a drawer that is open. And you can see the snake in the drawer in the box. And then instead of the snake being completed, the snake emerges and becomes a metallic snake's head handle for the drawer of the box. All of these elements put together mean everything and they mean nothing. They just—there they are. They came into being because while I was painting the picture, for whatever reason, it occurred to me that these were things which belonged together.

The snake is energy. The path is some kind of mysterious—either you could leave the scene by this path and go to the mountains, or you could arrive at the scene on the path. And the path becomes the snake. The snake is danger. Chocolate is danger, as well as being sweet. The snake is danger, as well as being perhaps something that's desired. I mean, it has all—why is it called the "Italian Box?" Well, the painting is primarily red and green, and it reminded me of Italy. And I call it the "Italian Box." Now, this is the surface reality of what that piece is all about. And we could talk about it for a long time. And it might reveal more to you, and I myself might find out more about it. But I don't choose to do that.

[00:14:11.48]

I did another painting of a box from that same book, and made it into a thimble box. It was a small traveling sewing kit. I painted it on a gigantic scale, and added a cockatoo and scissors. And you have to see the thing to understand that there's some kind of a gigantic activity going on, whereby the scissor, which is really a part of the inside of the box, and the cockatoo that is supposedly painted on the front panel of the box, are related, in that as the scissor is set into this box, it forces this cockatoo to scream out. It's all related to sexual symbology. It's all related to pain and fear and anxiety and apprehension. It's all related to what? The box is a spool box. I mean, not a spool box—thimbles. Thimbles protect fingers from being pierced in pain. And yet, there's the scissor and it's piercing the box, and the cockatoo is screaming. And it's also set in the landscape. And if you look at the landscape carefully enough, the mountains are heads of dogs. I mean, there are double images all through these things. And there are double implications to all the various objects that are used as well.

[00:15:57.06]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So they deal also, again, with the multiple real—that something can be good or evil. Something can give you joy; it can give you pain.

[00:16:10.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  And maybe it's at the same time. Maybe those are the joys. I mean, maybe we experience joy, and it's a painful experience as well. Sure, that's a big part of it. On other levels, other things suggested—for instance, the black lacquer box with the mirrored interior and the bonbons. In one, the cricket emerges, and there's a hummingbird hovering over it. It's a very surface kind of juxtaposition. It's the hummingbird, and the singing cricket, and the music box, and then just a few bonbons thrown in as another kind of reward. It's a sweet painting. It's intended to be maybe uncomplicated, and a relief from some of the other tension.

[00:17:04.91]

And then the three heart-shaped boxes—in those, I started looking into bestiaries at the same time. And a bestiary has all kinds of words and meanings that overlap. For instance, the word for crocodile in ancient times was "cocodrilo"—C-O-C-O, coco, chocolate. Also, there are all kinds of things about the oils from the crocodile, and just the whole thing. I mean, I'd have to go into long conversation, which I don't think we really have time for. Somewhere, it will all be written down, and it can be read someday because I've written a lot about it. But in those three paintings, they're all very obviously heart-shaped boxes. The one big one that's—well, the one that's called "Cocodrilos," there's an alligator on the side of the box. The one that's called "Chocolato," which is an Aztec word meaning chocolate, the heart-shaped box almost forms the sign of infinity. And it is full of chocolates, spiders, roses, et cetera.

[00:18:28.78]

I mean, you can take a variety of different significance implied in this painting. I mean, I don't really care to go that much specifically into each work. I think that it's a great disservice to the work and to myself, because it's not something I care to talk about and reveal. I mean, I'm doing a little bit of it here to try to make it more meaningful. But from that point on, I would just as soon not be so involved in the specifics of these paintings.

[00:19:02.89]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. Because they hold a reality for the viewer that can exist on several levels. As they do for you.

[00:19:10.03]

ELLEN LANYON:  That's right, and I think it's destructive.

[00:19:12.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Yeah. Part of that process is the intuitive process. And if you explain it out to existence, the secrets are not there any longer.

[00:19:23.29]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:19:24.07]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Their sense of subconscious level becomes dead in exploring it.

[00:19:31.01]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah.

[00:19:31.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is that part of the apprehension that you have?

[00:19:33.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, right. I mean, it makes me extremely uneasy to sit here and talk about these things because I have not, in the past, gone into specifics. I show these works when I teach in schools or lecture. I show this work, and I let it stand. I will describe various things that I am trying to work with, which I will go into now, of formats. But as far as specific imagery goes, I don't like to get into it that much.

[00:20:10.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I say one—Is it that, in going into them, you destroy the magic in them, too—

[00:20:15.38]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, maybe that's a part of it. I certainly do not premeditate these paintings. And it's probably for that reason that after they're complete, I don't really investigate them that closely, either.

[00:20:30.44]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Then let's move on to the fan paintings which came after these box paintings.

[00:20:35.45]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, yes and no. I'll tell you, after this exhibition, I went to Yaddo, which is a foundation at Saratoga Springs, New York—a marvelous place where they provide the artist, writer, composer with a studio and food and a room to sleep in. And you're left alone nine hours a day to work. And I started and worked on a series of drawings there that were fans and were houses, houses being containers. And the "Cicada" painting, the drawing for that, was done at Yaddo, as were many others.

[00:21:19.17]

Now, the fan is a fan, yes. But it's also an architectural form. It's a tympanum, and it's a base on which to place objects and make them work in actually an ambiguous space—a controversial space. I like that provocativeness and the controversy of whether the thing that you're looking at is on the fan or off the fan, or what the hell is happening.

[00:21:54.09]

See, I first became interested in the fan as a folded object because for several years now, I have worked on Japanese accordion folded sketchbooks and made a series of transformations, one drawing leading into the next one. They're all connected, and each work—an object would suddenly transform a little into the next drawing, and then transform a little more into the next drawing and become something else.

[00:22:27.69]

A heart-shaped box with a nest on it suddenly became the snake's head and the snake's mouth, and that led into being the manicure set, and the manicure set became the face of a woman, and the face of a woman became a globe, and the globe became a melon, and the melon became—I mean, on and on, you see, things like that, in a whole series, maybe 24 of them in a row. And this would all fold down into one little, tiny book.

[00:22:54.88]

The fan—the same way. The fan existed as an unfolding, an open or closed situation the way a book does. You go through a book, and you read each page, and the tale unfolds as you go. So a lot of these drawings were done as that. But then I began to see the fan shape simply being kind of a flat theme laid down in the paper. And then these other things could float on top of it. And they began to extend above the fan shape and expand beyond it.

[00:23:33.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The fan shape became a stage for what was going to happen on it.

[00:23:40.50]

ELLEN LANYON:  Um—Right, more or less. So then I started doing paintings with the fans being used. And I'm not totally complete with that series yet. I mean, I am making a fan lithograph next week. And I'll probably do a couple more paintings. In fact, I was thinking of cutting some of them out, making them kind of a cutout form on the wall instead of being contained within the rectangle.

[00:24:10.29]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Which of the—there are several fan paintings here—about five or six that are out. Where did you begin with these? How do they relate to each other in any development of the way that you were evolving your imagery at this time, and your symbolism?

[00:24:29.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  I just think in the same way. It's just a continual extension. I mean, one of them contains a box—a revolving secret compartment box. And at the same time at Yaddo, this is actually—I never repeat a work of art directly. Maybe the "Snail" is the first one that I'm trying to work from, or the "Cicada." But normally, once I do something, that's it, it's finished. I've done it. It's taken its place. I don't repeat it. I do a drawing and it might suggest another theme, which I do in a painting. But this drawing with the revolving compartment and the ginkgo leaves was more or less conceived at Yaddo, where I strangely enough had never really seen a ginkgo tree. And I was just excited by the form of the leaf and all. And then the form of the leaf suggested the head of the cock of the walk, which is the bird that's in the painting,

[00:25:36.00]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There's a face that appears on the top of the boxes. Whose face is that?

[00:25:43.03]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, if you look at it, there's a male face on the left-hand side and a female face on the right-hand side on the smaller boxes. And if you really look at it, the top face is two faces. It's a double profile that makes a front view. It's a coming together of the two, male and the female. It has to do with the house and domesticity, and separation and togetherness. See, the gingko trees are male or female, and it's a very ancient tree. And there are not very many living things in nature that is in plant or tree form that remain male and female like that. The ginkgo is one of them.

[00:26:40.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I see that in this work, you begin to use more and more organic and plant life. I mean, you used a sense of landscape before. But specifically here, there are the begonias introduced.

[00:26:56.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:26:56.97]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  All very organic. And in some instances, they have a centerness to them, or an octopus, like an animal character to them. Is there something that spurted this interest in the plant life, and introducing it as a major element as you begin to?

[00:27:24.60]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I've been growing those Chinese begonias, for one thing. I like them a lot. And I like roses. Roses are coming into the picture. And the roses are very symbolic, too, of various things. I mean, I don't think I want to get into all that today. First of all, I'd have to get out my book and I'd have to read through and I'd have to recall. I don't keep all this in my head. One thing I absolutely refuse to do and can't do is be a dictionary or an encyclopedia of ideas. As soon as I've read a thing and I've put it into a painting, I have some sense of what it's about, I forget the specifics because I've got to think about something else. So I can't remember—

[00:28:04.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  What's in the present.

[00:28:04.86]

ELLEN LANYON:  I can't remember what roses are symbolic of. But in the specific instance that they're used, they have a reason in that case. White roses mean something. Red roses mean another thing. And it goes on and on. So in this case, I raised begonias. I also have a collection of postcards that come from Latin countries and show babies in various situations. And one of them is that babies' faces will become the central core of a leaf or a flower. And I've always been fascinated with the idea that in these two paintings, they happen to be two portraits. And the faces that are in the leaves have significance to the portrait of the person. I mean, although there is no one in it, it is a portrait of Andrew Ginzel.

[00:29:05.16]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Your son.

[00:29:05.70]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah. In a way, it's Andrew. In its way, it's Andrew and Roland. And then the other one is Lisa and I—my daughter and I. And this is sort of a double portrait of husband and father and son, see? So—and it's where the cigar suddenly elevates from the box and becomes the moth. And the moth, which is a catocala moth, actually camouflages itself until it flies away, and then you see it for what it really is. That's what happens. It opens up its wings and flies away.

[00:29:52.65]

And the fan in the painting is something that Andrew gave me. It's a cigar. If you can see what that is, it's one of those trick cigars that opens up and an American fan emerges. And the central thing is a container, a piece of ceramics that my mother-in-law had sitting on her shelf for years and years and years. And then she gave it to me, and it became the center. And the handle almost becomes a phallus. And it becomes a container for the begonias, which in turn have small faces on them. And the faces are those of Andrew and my daughter Lisa.

[00:30:34.08]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The two paintings, the one where you explore yourself, and the other where you're exploring Roland, your husband, and Andrew, were they conceived in that sort of Dutch tradition of portraiture of man and wife? You almost have a sense that they—as Frans Hals did. He did a painting of a man and then a [inaudible].

[00:31:00.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, actually. What I really think I'm doing is to make two more, and definitely make a portrait for Lisa. This is really Andrew's because of various things with the flag and all. And I thought of it as being—I call it "Bastille," which is his birthday. And it's really what it's about. And I want to make another portrait for Roland, and I would like to make one for Lisa—that belong to them. So I'm going to finish the—

[00:31:27.66]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So there would be four in this.

[00:31:28.78]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I'm going to finish the quartet off. That's my next project.

[00:31:32.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  So originally, there wasn't a conception that they were involved—

[00:31:35.73]

ELLEN LANYON:  No, I just started out. And then I had two portraits. And then I thought, shall I make them double? And now I really think it's stretching the point—that that's something that it's very contrived. So I'm going to do two more because I'd like to. I'd like to continue.

[00:31:49.92]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, the fan as a vehicle is something that you also dealt with as far as "The Screen."

[00:31:58.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. "The Screen," yeah.

[00:31:59.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  How does "The Screen" relate to this [inaudible]?

[00:32:02.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  "The Screen" started with the stage magic, because in a stage production, there are sequential happenings. The magician sets up his table. He puts the bowl on the table. He fills the bowl with water. He turns the bowl over, and out pops the rabbit or something. Well, the idea of sequential imagery or sequential events is interesting a lot, like the comic strip. But I'm not about to make comic strips. So the screens seem to be such an absolutely natural way of working this out. And so I did the one that's the "Goddess" and "Reptile Illusion," upstairs. I did another screen that was a "Silk Cabby." The Bicentennial Project I did in the East last year was a screen format. That is to say, it can be hinged and made into a screen.

[00:33:08.34]

I did another screen before that, "Oriental Tubes of Mystery," three different parts of these so-called magical Oriental tubes that produce all kinds of flags and banners, and birds and insects, and flowers and whatever. And so I'm still interested, and the Japanese folding book is part of that, and the fans are part of that. Anything that is folding and hinged—revealing—things that reveal, or things that suggest a gradual kind of unfolding of events. So I'm always continually interested in that.

[00:33:54.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  About this time, you had several commissions—the FTD, the flower commission, the flower show that traveled nationally. Did you have an approach to any of these commissions? Now you've had a whole series of commissions. What do you think about commissions, and why don't you talk a little bit about those different commissions?

[00:34:20.41]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I tell you, the first ones that I used to do—first ones I ever did in a way were a couple of album covers, which were not so hot.

[00:34:29.20]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  For records?

[00:34:29.69]

ELLEN LANYON:  I mean, they were good enough. But I didn't understand the whole principle of commercial enterprise or art, or what happens to a piece when it's reproduced—the color or the scale or anything else. And so I did very badly, I think, for a while. At least I was never satisfied with it. People who'd asked me to do things seemed to like it. But I was never very happy. Then Playboy asked me to do some illustrations.

[00:34:55.03]

The only commissions that I enjoyed were—for instance, when I did the Ravinia print, where I was given free rein to do a work of art. I didn't have to illustrate anything, or it didn't have to just represent anything else outside my own particular work. But then I did a couple other Playboy illustrations that I thought were better, because I began to learn a little bit about what it means to make an illustration for something. I think it probably helped me in my work in the long run. But I resist the whole idea, and I don't think I want to do that work very much anymore.

[00:35:35.26]

I did a book this last year. I illustrated a book of Jataka Tales, but that was quite different. It was something where I could use all the information that I had about animals and reptiles and birds. And you know, to illustrate a fable is something else, besides maybe illustrating a recipe for Playboy magazine, which I—

[00:36:03.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Or the cover of a telephone book.

[00:36:05.58]

ELLEN LANYON:  Or the cover of the telephone book, right. And at this point in my life, I now question myself. Why did you ever do all that, Ellen? Why did you? I think it's because when an artist is working along in a community and you have to make money, and the opportunity presents itself, your ego is touched. You're flattered to think that they'd choose you to do something like that. And then your pocketbook squeaks a little, and then you think that it'll help you to buy more materials to make your real art. So you go ahead and you do all these things, and you just do the very best you can.

[00:36:44.18]

I think the telephone book cover, for what it was, was very successful. It wasn't in line with what I was doing at the time. That's all. It was out of context. But it certainly fell into line with earlier work, so that was okay. But now the commissions that I've been doing for Bicentennial commissions, or the FTD or the Container Corporation, I've been given maybe a subject to work with or a theme, and then given free hand. And it's worked out, I think, very well. I mean, I seem to be able to produce a good work of art now because I've made myself promise myself that in no way would I compromise. That if I take it upon myself to do this, I will do it and they will take it. And if they don't like it, they don't have to take it. I will gladly take it back. But it's important to me that I'd be more selective about the commissions that I do, and that I turn out the very best possible work. I did a fan for Container Corporation. I think it was one of my best fan paintings, so I'm proud of that.

[00:38:01.31]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Now, at the same time that you're working on the fan paintings, you're working on several other areas. Some of them come out of the commission work—the commission from the Department of the Interior, and the painting that was done in relationship to the Everglades.

[00:38:23.57]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:38:23.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Could you go into some of the other areas that you're working simultaneously on, that we haven't talked about, besides the fan paintings?

[00:38:34.08]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, all right, I'm doing the houses. Now, the houses, I've done only three or four in that series. But they're almost like the boxes. They actually are containers set in a landscape. And the "Cicada" has a natural kind of explanation. I mean, a cicada lives in the earth for 17 years. And it emerges for a very short period of time wherein it procreates and dies within a matter of hours. So here it is, this creature emerging from a box, a container—a house in this case, and it happens to be a house. And the house is the home. Maybe the cicada is the creature that lives in that home. Maybe it's symbolic of woman's emergence from her domesticity. I mean, there are all these things that everybody could talk about, and everybody's got another idea about what it's about. But I must say that I just do the—

[00:39:44.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  One thing that's evident in them is that they're much simpler in relationship to the juxtaposition and relationship between the major elements of them—the house and the animal, where the fan paintings were more complicated.

[00:40:06.03]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:40:06.30]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Does this centering in on a juxtaposition, like the real cockatoo and the plaster cockatoo clock—is that—

[00:40:17.97]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that's coming into being now. I mean, that's what I'm going to be working on from now on—simplification. I think that the work became as complicated as it could possibly be, contained as many things and ideas as it could possibly contain. And it's all right with me. I don't mind working that way. But I'm right now interested in this other approach. I'm interested in building up a background texture and color, like working on the tinted papers that I've been doing, and pulling out the whites, and pushing back the darks.

[00:40:54.64]

I want to do that on a canvas now. So I build up a surface and a color on the canvas, and then I paint into it. And I'm going to be working more and more simply. It's something that I'm just more interested in right now. I mean, it's a formal consideration that I want to address myself to. Now, at the same time, I'm making lithographs. At the same time, I'm involved in making a lot of clay work. And that's something I haven't talked about either.

[00:41:27.40]

When I was unsuccessful in producing three-dimensional boxes and three-dimensional dioramas, you might say, of people doing the after-dinner magic table, I sort of felt like I attempted three dimensions and failed again. I've never been able to work in it. But while I was at Ox-Bow in the summertime, it was very difficult to set up a studio and paint all the time, or draw, because it just—I mean, I don't work that easily out of my studio. I have to have a real space and a setup and proper lights, and everything else. So rather than fight it, I decided that I'd go over to another area and try something.

[00:42:08.49]

And I began to work with Mike Zilka [ph], who was a ceramic teacher up there, and who would throw for me a cylinder, a plate, or a bowl—something that I asked him to do. I'd give him an idea of the shape and the scale I wanted, and he'd throw it. And then I would take the clay and embellish it with a reptilian motif or a floral motif or a butterfly, flying insect, whatever. And I would do this all by building it up sculpturally off the surface of the plate, or off the surface of the cup. And well, it's been a terrific side work for me. It's made me able, I think, to paint more three-dimensionally because I've been able to actually construct things three-dimensionally, and understand all the more you do this, you learn about form this way.

[00:43:15.10]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  This is collaboration, and you had some early experiences in London when Roland was studying at Slade, and so forth. And then there have been other times that you've had experiences in collaboration where you're working with the person who knows the technical area, and you explore with them what you want to get out in the new medium, or one that you are familiar with, like printmaking. What do you think about in relationship to collaboration? Would you seek out much more collaboration?

[00:43:57.04]

ELLEN LANYON:  Yeah, I like it. See, for instance, I also forgot to mention Walter Hamady—Walter and Mary Hamady and the Perishable Press in Wisconsin. Now, Walter has made books for a long time. He lives on a farm, and he has a press in his living room. And he handsets type, and he does the most magnificent, high-quality printing of limited editions of poetry, illustrated by some artists he knows. Not his own poetry, necessarily—other people's, hand-printed on handmade paper that he makes in his barn. And that's a collaboration. I draw. I've sent a manuscript of Diane Wakoski poetry. I make some drawings. Walter takes the whole thing, and he makes a book out of it. I get an idea for doing a series of plates. There's some new ones right now over here. I wanted to do a bunch of fish plates.

[00:45:00.15]

I have to go down to Missouri now where Zilka is teaching at Stephens College and stay for a week and do clay. And then I leave it with him, with ideas about how it's going to be fired, or what color it will be, or whatever. And he finishes it off for me, and we put our name on it, just as the books have our names. I mean, I'm given credit for my work that's in Walter's books. And Zilka and I put our names on the bottom of the plates. And now I work at Landfall Press or Stoneroller Press. And I go and draw, and they make the lithographs or etchings or whatever for me. I'm going to start working with something called Teaberry Press here in Chicago. That's just an etching studio.

[00:45:49.98]

And I think it's the privilege and the joy of the contemporary artists that in America, some of these European traditions are finally taking hold. We were brought up to be do-it-yourselfers, and I don't think that's always the answer. I think that your energy is so used up anyway. And there gets this limitation of just what you can do. And after all, if you are making [inaudible], if you are inventing the ideas, and then you are doing the drawing—and then if you have to stop and also do the printing and the firing and the typesetting, et cetera, you couldn't possibly. I'd have to quit painting because I like to do all of these other things. But they're very time-consuming.

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[00:46:48.90]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I sensed that earlier, when we were talking about your work—and I understand that you're in the midst of the exploration of three groups of painting. And I sense that the anxiety comes in dealing with it and taking it as far as you can, consciously. And I can understand some of those problems. Why don't you go into them? I can understand it particularly in relationship to going into it at the time that you're trying to resolve it or move it forward.

[00:47:28.81]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think that—yeah, I've heard part of the tape now. And I realized that I've been very evasive in many ways. I allude to a lot of things, and then I don't describe what I'm talking about. I don't go into detail. I feel like many points that I brought up, I didn't really explore far enough to make it clear to the person that's going to read this in the future. And I think it's all part of a hesitancy with vocabulary on my part. I don't really vocalize very well under these conditions. I lecture better than I do things like this, because it's very hard to put your thoughts together in an ad lib situation.

[00:48:15.01]

Also, it is true that right now, I am dealing with finishing up one group of works, and getting into the middle of another group. And I have still a third that I'm vitally interested in—more interested in than anything else, and I want to get on with that. And I'm in a particular time when a vast change is going to take place again. These changes take place just about every ten years. And it was 1968 when I went into magic, and it is now '76. And that I think is—I don't know, eight years or something.

[00:48:57.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Close to your cycle.

[00:48:58.13]

ELLEN LANYON:  And I'm getting—[laughs] I'm getting closer. And I realized that a change is coming, and I'm pretty sure the direction now that I'm going in. But the period of time that exists through this transformation is very anxious, and makes one very reluctant to discuss specifics in their work. And that's why if I seem halting, et cetera, it's because I am not really sure. I was very sure of what I did before and what was done. And I could talk about it with some perspective and distance. But I can't really talk about these things as well. I think that I could have discussed the house more because of its meaning to me in the past. And I never did even mention the fact that many of the houses in many of the works are mansions along Sheridan Road that disappeared with the advent of the high-rise.

[00:50:03.15]

I didn't really talk about the fact that a lot of these objects in boxes are memorabilia, really, and eccentricities of my own that I would even collect them in the first place. And recording them and giving them some kind of a life through the painting is a very important issue with me, with all the things I've done right along. So there's a lot of little loose ends hanging, I feel. And yet, we have covered a lot of ground. And probably, it'll be more understandable to people than I think it will be.

[00:50:37.61]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, do you believe that this is a period where lots of things are happening, and you've got a hold of three two of which you are trying to tie up in a strong direction that you want to take? This is the sort of period where things are filtering into place, and then out of that, a new perspective and a whole new body of work will come.

[00:51:03.76]

ELLEN LANYON:  Right. That's just about to happen. And at the same time, the other thing that enters into it, I think, is that as a person gets to be known professionally, then they are asked to do a lot of things that are aside from the work itself, but that I feel are rather necessary—not because of public image so much, but because it's almost a responsibility to take on some of these chores. For instance, I'm asked to visit schools a lot, and lecture, and do critiques. I'm asked to jury shows, and to act on panels that jury grants or advise on grant. And this consumes a lot of travel time and travel activity. But it's been wonderful to do it. And I don't regret the moment that I just go ahead and take the time away from the work.

[00:52:01.39]

However, suddenly, you do realize that it has taken a little too much time, and that your work is stumbling a little because of this. The confusion that comes with my situation right now, caught between these three things that I want to paint the most, is that if I had all this time just to give to all that painting, then I would paint enough in each area. So there would be no question in my mind that I hadn't given one or the other enough time—enough of a completion, you know—cycle.

[00:52:33.57]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Some people's psyches need the stimulation of other activities.

[00:52:39.11]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, it's good for me. Yeah. I'm stimulated by it. I'm stimulated by travel and meeting people. And also, I take that opportunity to go to museums that I can't get to otherwise to see paintings—historical works. I went to Kansas City and saw their Oriental collection—fantastic.

[00:52:57.16]

Now, there's one other point that I'd like to make that I'm usually very conscious of and talk about in this whole thing. And it's that despite the fact that I don't know what's going to happen next in my painting, from the day I began to paint—or let's say the day I began to have my first painting accepted professionally, was '46. In '76, that's 30 years, I think I almost completed a cycle.

[00:53:32.40]

The egg tempera paintings were a water-based media. They had kind of a brilliant color. They had an urban fantasy about them, et cetera. And then I went the full circle around through trying out Expressionism, and impasto, and oil painting, and chiaroscuro, and drawing on gesso, and tinting, and limited colors, limited palettes, prescribed color schemes. And suddenly, I'm back to doing something where I feel the edge and the color is much more related to the first paintings than anything in-between.

[00:54:22.14]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  There seems to be a movement in your work towards realism and to paint more realistically.

[00:54:34.26]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah, that is cyclic. I mean, I'm not about to return to the Primitive or to the distorted perspective.

[00:54:40.83]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But there is this flow in all the development of that work, and all of the different experimentation and growth in dealing with different media like tempera, oils, and acrylic. You're moving more and more towards presenting that fantasy of your own, or that imagery of your own. Your own personal imagery has to do with caught memories, or images that have to do with heightening the reality of a memory in objects—

[00:55:13.62]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:55:14.37]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —and pulling that off with more realism. That the image itself in having more realism portrays the association or the potential of that association through realism.

[00:55:30.93]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:55:31.11]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Is that just a natural conclusion that you came to, yourself, and that you feel very strongly that it will be one of the strong directions in the future?

[00:55:45.46]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh, I think so. I think it's taken me an awful long time to teach myself how to draw really well, and how to paint well enough to be able to describe my ideas. And I think that it's become more and more important to me to become realistic, because of all these reasons that we've stated. So I am struggling to do that. And I'm painting from objects directly, and really using my eyes to study out, and be able to translate more perfectly, to use paint better, to use surfaces better.

[00:56:25.06]

I mean, I don't think the artist ever quits adding to his repertoire or to his skills. And I would be devastated if I thought that I would sit here and say that, at this point in my life, I knew everything that I had to know, and that I had done everything, and that I can just rest on my laurels and keep painting, but not try to push out the boundaries of expectations a little bit more each year. I mean, that's the thrill of being an artist—continue that creative process.

[00:56:58.80]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  I guess we also should clarify what "real" means in this case. It doesn't mean that you portray the object as it is real in life—for example, the recent painting of the plastic little box with two birds on the end.

[00:57:17.59]

ELLEN LANYON:  Oh.

[00:57:18.46]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  The way in which you exaggerate to create a super-reality—

[00:57:24.34]

ELLEN LANYON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

[00:57:24.76]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  —or a fantasy, or the fantastic, and almost embrace a new kind of charisma, or question between the objects in the composition.

[00:57:37.99]

ELLEN LANYON:  Well, I think it's that—well I've called it the animate/inanimate, or the duality of a theme. And I think that's where it comes out the most.

[00:57:52.84]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  But you interpret those objects and often change the scale of them. Besides painting them on large canvases, even if you paint them small on smaller canvases, you might enlarge one of the objects within that composition, too, so that the realism is not actually portraying what you see. It's your interpretation or the exaggeration of that.

[00:58:28.73]

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, this ends the tape with Ellen Lanyon, done over a month period in December and January of '75 and '76. The interviews were done in her home. And each set of two—the first two tapes were done during a three-day weekend in December, and the last three tapes were done in [January –Ed.].

[Recorder stops; restarts.]

[Following the formal conclusion of the interview, there was the following: –Ed.]

[00:59:13.14]

ELLEN LANYON:  Realism? Realism is something that a person deals with because they must, in some way, portray what to them is a reality. And the reality comes out in different ways. I mean, that's all I can say. I don't know. This is not maybe the best game for me because I'm not—

[00:59:41.67]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Fantasy.

[00:59:49.52]

ELLEN LANYON:  I think all these words—and I have to say this—are words that are contrived by other people to denote certain things in works. And I've had to use them myself through this interview so that the layman would understand what I was talking about. But I don't ever use the word fantasy or nostalgia or realism to myself.

[01:00:11.49]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Truth.

[01:00:12.95]

ELLEN LANYON:  Truth? Everybody has a different truth. And I can only say that you must know my truth. My truth is what you see in my work.

[01:00:26.58]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Family.

[01:00:27.66]

ELLEN LANYON:  Family—that's very substantial. Warm, happiness, good feelings, and something that everybody deserves to enjoy.

[01:00:40.02]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Reality.

[01:00:41.88]

ELLEN LANYON:  Reality? Reality is coping with all the situations at hand and making the best of them, including your work and your life.

[01:00:57.96]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Mind.

[01:01:02.68]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know. I'm not just good at this game. I don't respond this way. I'm a literal person, and yet it's not appropriate somehow. I don't know—

[01:01:18.25]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  [Inaudible] the tape.

[01:01:19.51]

ELLEN LANYON:  I don't know what mind is. Mind is—yeah, I don't think it's a good game for me.

[01:01:23.74]

JAMES CRAWFORD:  Well, I don't think—

[END OF TRACK AAA_lanyon75_9966_m]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]