BIOGRAPHIEHarold Ambellan

I was born in Buffalo in 1912. It was the year the Titanic sank. I was too young to worry about that. I grew up in Buffalo, which was a wonderful place to grow up. It was a city not too large and not too small. We could walk from our house to the downtown area in 20 minutes and it was a pleasant walk. Buffalo was, and still is, a mixture of many immigration periods in America.

There was a large German section with a German newspaper, a Polish sector with a Polish newspaper and a large English-speaking quarter with two other newspapers.

I was born in the neighbourhood with an easy access to the town center and also very close to the edge of the town. In five minutes, I would be in an area that was neither country, nor city, but open neglected fields with streets outlined, waiting for construction and population and while I was young that whole area was being built up. Still, a circus ground remained and every year we would get” the greatest show on earth”. The Barnum and Bailey Circus came to town – truly a marvellous event.

As I grew older, in my teens, I wandered further on my bicycle with friends. The charm of Buffalo is that it is on Lake Erie at the beginning of the Erie Canal which is connected with Niagara falls. In Buffalo there was a ferry boat across that river to Canada. Imagine living in a city on the edge of two countries and I was able to cross to another country for 5 pennies on a ferry boat! There was no question of passports; just as freely as you wished, you could go to Canada and come back. The ferry boat took you to Fort Erie, a little town nearby and to the beach. There was a little train with a locomotive, a replica of a big one. Everything was reduced to a pleasant miniature size and that train took us to Fort Erie which was the bathing beach and pleasure center for Buffalo.

This Erie beach had merry-go-rounds, with a carousel, a modest thing that costed pennies. I remember there was a building with a long stairway going up to a slide going down and you entered there and they gave you a piece of carpet. You sat on the floor and descended several bumps. You were able to repeat that as often as you wished and the cost was 5 cents. Five cents was a magic amount of money. It’s amazing the value of money. During my youth and till I left Buffalo, it was almost unchanged. It remained about the same and it’s hard to believe that money could have been so steady and reliable, but it was.

With my bicycle, I went to the surrounding countryside. Just outside of Buffalo, there was an area where they grew cherries. It was called “Cherry Valley” and there were charming towns and they grew other things besides cherries. My house was built when I was one year old. We moved from German Street where I was born to Winslow Avenue and my father bought an empty lot and started making our house with contractors and workmen doing the work. We lived, during the time our house was constructed, in an apartment in the house next door and we were able to see our house being built very closely.

So we eventually moved into it. It was a very nice little house and is still standing, I do believe. Our house was very convenient for children because we were a city block away from the school, public school number 53, a red brick establishment which had a great deal of charm for me. My mother was very close to the school, because she had dreamt as a youth of being a teacher but she stopped going to school and her dreams of becoming a school teacher were abolished.
She took a great interest in our education and became a very good friend for the rest of her lifewith the school principal, a marvellous woman. My mother was very gifted but unfortunately she died very young during World War II. Luckily, at that time I was still in the States and I was able to come to Buffalo to visit her with my brother Fred before she died. I spent many afternoons with her and she was very heroic and very full of life until the very end. She died too young. She died of cancer in her 50s.

Of course, in my youth, I didn’t appreciate all those qualities but I recognize them now. When she wanted to emphasize something she wished to do, she adopted the name of an American Indian woman, Weptinoma, who was a chief of a tribe near Buffalo At a certain point, she would say very quietly: “Weptinoma has spoken.” Charming. My father was a painter and paper hanger and he had had an accident when he was younger.

He was working in a wholesale food establishment where there was a chute that went from the first floor building to the main floor. This chute was stopped during the day to make more space to move below and one day it fell on my father and broke his back. He was a long time recovering and after he was always subject to pain. There was no working insurance in those days and the thing you would expect when you had an accident in a company was to be fired.
No questions asked. My father was sometimes for weeks and sometimes for months incapable of working.

My brother Fred was just three years older than me, old enough to be physically stronger. He was fond of teasing me and playing practical jokes on me. He treated me like a servant. But I was much smaller than him (my period of growth was very late) and my brother took advantage of being stronger. He was also a serious student and I was never a model student.

My younger brother Charles was 6 years younger than me and he was a charming baby, full of life and laughter and joy, very expressive. Between my brother and an uncle of mine, we would toss that child in the air, like a ball and he would laugh. I didn’t have much contact with him as I grew up, I had my life and I really picked up with him when I was an adult, and he was a budding aviator. He was a pilot in World War II. It happened that all three brothers enlisted in
the US Navy. My father was an early driver of an automobile, the first car of our neighbourhood, a model T Ford and we were very proud of it. With this car we would go camping in the Adirondacks.
 

Camping at that time was a very, very dangerous idea: to go in the woods where there might be wild robbers and God knows what. So people threw up their hands when we were starting and we left with our tent with much stuff packed on that little car. We went to the Adirondacks and camped on the shore of Lake George, a big lake, and my father fished every day and we rented a canoe and Fred and I explored the lake and its little bays. Really very beautiful.

I was probably 6 or 7 when he bought the car. My grandmother was not living with us at that time but she came when I was 8. She had nine children, all boys except the first one. My father was the last son. She was at that time living in her daughter’s house who had wisely married a good man who died and left her very well insured. She became a very solid “bourgeois” and kept the mother in the kitchen. When my grandmother was 80 she finally complained to my father and his brothers, and started living in our house. It meant extra work for him and the responsibility of one more person to feed… So my father got a lot of respect from his mother but no help. She spoke English very well…

My grandparents came to America with all their children in 1859 or 1860 when America was in the middle of a Civil War. My grandmother and grandfather supported the antislavery movement and had a great affection for Abraham Lincoln. Her husband, my grandfather, was a mason, a house builder. They had a house with a stable, a workshop and storeroom right in the center of town.

My grandmother was a remarkable woman. She could see with only one eye but it didn’t prevent her from reading two newspapers a day. She read the English and the German newspapers and she read them down to the last lines. She knew everything that was going on. She lived to be 97.

Buffalo was settled mostly by Germans so the largest newspaper was in German. The second one was in English and later both were supplanted by the Polish newspaper. Poles after World War I came in great numbers and settled in Buffalo and cities around the great lakes.

My mother’s family had come over to America for different reasons: they chose to participate in what they thought would be the marvel of the world, a free country. They became a very important family in Buffalo and my grandmother married a man in the wholesale liquor business: wine and whiskies. He died early, leaving her with a rather nice house but also five charming children to bring up all by herself. She was very nicely helped by her brothers and sisters but her house burned down to the ground. Her house, adequate for her family of five children, was her only jewel. Then she was forced to move in a smaller, more compact house, easier to take care of.

One of the most “marriageable” members of the family when I was growing up was Dr Henry Frederick. He came to our house very often. He liked my mother very much, they had much in common. He stopped there often on his patients-rounds. He was supported in his medical career by his family. He practiced in his own way, often not charging his patients and never refusing anybody. He was a sort of a doctor of the poor with a good humour and a joy of living which was amazing. It was a pleasure to see him for a few minutes in the house and we were sure to laugh and be happy when he was around. A very charming man. Later, much later, my mother’s oldest sister married a Dutchman and had children. Her son Leroy became a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. He was very not at ease with the hierarchy; the Dutch Church was very select and well founded on strict lines of lineage and legion to the earliest pure Dutch religious tradition. He was obviously difficult to place in this category because he had such a sense of humour, he couldn’t take anything seriously, including himself. They appointed him as a church official in Brooklyn, New York, which was an early Dutch settlement. But they soon found out that he was too adventurous for their religious needs. He established a summer program for youth and they found out that he not only welcomed the youth of the Dutch Reformed Church but all the youth of the neighbourhood including several races and colours.

It was more than the Dutch had bargained for and they sent him out to a very small and charming town as a minister. For many years, they never let him escape to larger areas but he became a champion of all kinds of legislation that favoured poor coloured migrants. He was noted in Albany, the state capital of New York, as someone who stood up for the poor.One day, at a family celebration, he said: “We have a doctor in this family and it is very pleasant to know that you can be well for nothing and you have a minister in this family which means you can be good for nothing!”

This idea of writing a biography at once attracted me but with a little reluctance. In fact the whole idea of making a book or writing anything is a little dubious to me. It involves the ego of thinking that you are going to be read by people. And that people are going to buy your words that have been printed and occupy themselves maybe for a week or two weeks dipping into your book in their spare time. I’m a little dubious about literature in that way. It has to be very great literature in order to exist for me. We can’t all be Cervantes or Shakespeare.

I was a sensitive and very timid child to begin with and I think that this shyness is a kind of egoism in reverse and really you take yourself very seriously. I was timid at school. I wanted to please the teachers and do my part and be a good pupil. Sometimes I failed and sometimes I succeeded; if I sort of liked the subject, I succeeded. And if I hated it, like I hated mathematics, I had very great difficulty passing the minimum tests. In fact I remember taking algebra and my mother saw I was suffering so with this. I was trying to cram for an examination. I thought: “My God, if I don’t pass this, I have to pass the whole year again. I’ll quit school and go on the bum. I can’t face that”. So my mother took my book and studied it well enough to help me to calm down and get enough algebra in me to pass that exam. I think that’s a wonderful story of a mother and describes my mother very well. She could do anything, she could build a house if she wanted to. She was a beset woman too because she had a husband who had had a bad accident in his youth and was partly paralysed in his back, in his movements, in his spinal movements and he was often laid up. She got a job at the local grammar school which was only a very short distance from our house, as a cook in the cafeteria. And that we lived on very much of the time of my youth. She loved it because she loved the school. Her dream as a young girl was to become a kindergarten teacher.

I was talking about my mother and I was not appreciative enough of my mother when I was a child but I certainly thought she was a marvellous person when I grew up to be a little bit older. As I say, she could do anything. And she became friend of the Principal of the school. Her name was Mrs James. She was a cousin of William James and Henry James. A marvellous person too and she loved my mother. She told me later: “Your mother is the most wonderful person I have ever met”. At any rate I get very sentimental talking about my mother. In her later years, she became the local organiser of the Parent Teachers Association and one of its founders in the State of New York. So she was still partly working as a cook and being a lady organiser of a going movement and sometimes going off to the State capital, Albany on behalf of the organisation. It’s hard to believe this simple looking woman was capable of such diversity and change. Our family was poor, so I always worked when I was a child, like being a delivery boy for a local bread store. There was a horse driven bakery who sent wagons around and I had the job of hopping around from the bakery wagon to people’s houses to bring them bread, pastry, rolls, or doughnuts. There, I worked for the driver of that wagon. The fellow I was helping was really an alcoholic. So he gave me the wagon and let me do the rest of the route every day, which was about twenty or thirty houses. I’d come round this big area, come back, pick him up at the bar and help him into the wagon. We’d count the cash and I’d put it in a secret place in the back of a drawer. He would climb in the wagon and fall asleep and so I would just close the half door of the wagon and say to the horse: “Alright Roany, you can go back to the stable now”. And Roany would understand and he’d go off. And for fun I said ‘good-bye’, like that, and I got in the wagon to see how he did.... And he’d come to an intersection, stop, go very slowly forwards, look both ways and cross. If the traffic was stopped, he waited; he was a very intelligent beast. He was called Roany because he was a certain colour called roan. I don’t know what that meant really.

I did a lot of different things. I did a lot of gardening as a young kid. In this lower bourgeois or working class neighbourhood, hedges were very important. A lot of people had hedges around their front lawn. And hedges involved trimming and I was an expert, hair trimmer, a barber of hedges. I did it for three elderly women, three elderly sisters. I was their gardener for dirty work. I came in now and then in summer time and spring time. They had very nice garden tools and I had the key.

I had the right to come any time, take any of those tools and use them wherever I went. So I had quite a nice batch of tools and I’d trim hedges. And because I was a kid and hedges attract all kind of rubbish and dirt, I’d get down on my hands and knees and clean them. It was good for you. I thought that was very good, how working class kids would work in those days at any rate. You get the habit of working and you like working all your life. If you get to do things, it’s a pleasure to do even a simple, stupid job and do it well. I think I developed the habit of liking to accomplish tasks and I think that carries over in all activity except the things that you don’t like.

The following is an attempt to trace, over the many years that have passed the first signs of interest in art in my childhood. Some of the incidents are very close but I can’t very well separate them into the age limitations. In other words, I seem to be always the same age whether I remember things in my early childhood or my school years... There are some things I’d like to explain in writing about myself or in talking about myself concerning the given idea of the development of an artist or the development of the art motivation in a child or young person and the reasons for becoming an artist and the process of entangling oneself with this craft.

At any rate, the first thing that comes to my mind in looking for my artistic evaluation is that my father decided at a certain point to build a garage at the back of our house and this entailed digging an area for the cement driveway to be installed, which led from the street. In the process of digging that soil, I uncovered a large streak of pure yellow clay that was immediately in a condition to be rolled into balls. So, with a trowel or little shovel, I got out as much of this clay as I could and filled a couple of buckets. I immediately started playing with it, rolling it and making objects with it. I know I made some animals and I made some figures of people, of children. All these things disappeared and all I have now is the feeling of pleasure in learning what you could do with clay.

I bought clay at a much later time, as an adolescent of perhaps fifteen, sixteen years. I remember I had some clay and I made several masks and heads and portraits of imaginary characters. This culminated in a bust, of Greta Garbo. I saw a photograph of her that stimulated me, I believed she was the most beautiful personality in the world and it was my pleasure and duty to translate her into a clay image so I did it. It was about quarter life size and it was with the head thrown back looking up at the sky. Greta Garbo, meticulously modelled and scratched and scraped.... Finally everybody saw it. My parents, my brothers saw it and people were impressed by this effort of mine. And I learned how to make a cast in plaster and I made a mould in plaster and then filled the mould with plaster with a separation of soap in the surface of the mould and made a positive of plaster of it, which exists somewhere. Later on, my brother asked me whether he could have it in his house and I said: “Yes, you may”. I don’t know what happened to it. At any rate, that was my first sculpture. At the same time, I made little drawings but I wasn’t motivated by paper, canvas, crayons or brushes. I liked real form, three dimensional positive forms. Later on, my interest in art led me to join all sorts of painting clubs. I remember going out and actually trying to paint landscapes with a group of people. I discovered that was not what I wanted to do. The idea of copying landscape of trees, fields and earth was too boring for me. It was nothing I wanted to do at any rate. It was also taught by someone who was very academically minded. There was only one way to do it and he tried to inculcate his point of view. That was one thing. As a child I would go to the Natural History Museum, a short walk from my house. There, together with a group, we would paint and draw objects coming from American Indian, Aztec and Southern American cultures. That was a very interesting and very pleasing experience. As I grew a little older, I went to Albright Art School. It was an art school adjoining to the Albright Museum. The Art school gave life drawing free classes to people who passed an elementary admission examination to see whether they were serious or not. So I was chosen as a candidate for that school and I went two nights a week for several years to that art class. There was a model there, who was a very strong man who worked in a circus in summer and in the winter, he posed for this class, among other things I suppose. He was charming because he told very nice stories about his experiences in the circus and in theatres and so on. In the evening, in the rest room, in between poses, he had a rubber strap that you could extend and you could pull it round your back and push it forward and do all sorts of exercises with it He showed us how strong he was by pushing this thing out, and giving it to us to try. So one day he had that thing he had already shown us and he had a whole group of us looking at him and listening to his story. He put this strap behind his head and pulled the two ends of it forward and trapped his head stiff with his neck. So he got the thing out very far and then he dipped his head and the rubber slipped off the top of his head and carried off his wig. We had not known that he had a toupee on. Then, he simply walked across the room and found the toupee and made as if to spit inside it and flattened it on his head. It was all a premeditated act. It was beautiful to see the modesty of a man making a fool of himself in order to amuse his friends. Even at an early age, I discovered why I was interested in art. The desire to conform to a certain pattern on the part of the people of that period was general. They approved of everything that society dictated. Art was the only activity that could possibly be a personal choice to rebuke the deadly conformism. In other words, I came to believe and still believe that chief artistic motivation is criticism of certain aspects of society. In the way the artist or writer or dramatist or musician even decides that he will try to win people over to a new interpretation or a new point of view or a conflicting point of view to the popular one. I still believe that art begins with this “negative” criticism of conformist ideas.

Until the age of fifteen, I lived in a country which was very prosperous and where everyone who wanted to work, found a job or a profession or trade that allowed him to live and raise a family.But when I was fifteen or sixteen the Great Depression hit America. By the time I graduated from High School, jobs were extremely hard to find. I graduated in 1930 at the age of 18. I remember looking for work very assiduously. My brother Fred on the other hand had begun college and a very affordable college because it was a teachers college and it was free. It was a State Teachers College. He became a teacher for life.

I looked for work in the daytime and went to Art School in the evenings. But my parents bemoaned the fact I was interested in art because even if there was any job it was not for an artist or an art student. I remember going on long lines for companies that advertised for a certain position and the lines were sometimes seventy people standing in line for one very low paid job.

I finally got a job as a male clerk in a life insurance company in Buffalo New York. It was nothing that I liked very much but it was very simple. I had to collect letters. I was sort of an interior postman. I had to buy stamps, stamp the letters and see that they were properly addressed and deposit them in the mail box. Also I had to file correspondence in a battery of filing cabinets. My family was very contented and I brought home a little money to help out. Everybody was very happy except it was a very boring job. The only thing that relieved the boredom was that there were one or two people that I liked among the staff, a girl by the name of Edna and a young boy by the name of Tom who later took my place.
I continued that job for about a year. Then somebody moved out, died or quit or I forget what.

There was a movement of everybody going up one step in the hierarchy. So I was promoted from a mail clerk to a counter clerk at the counter where people with insurance would come in with their problems. And hell, I had enough problem... It involved figuring out premiums or whether this was right or that was right or whether it was more advantageous to do this or that. The chief of that office, who hired me in the first place, called me to his desk. His desk was right in the middle of the office. He said, “I hate to do this but you are not happy and you are not going to be happy in this work ever, because you are not made for this kind of a job”. He said: “I will keep you on for three months anyway but start to look around for another job. Don’t worry and if you need to go out and interview with people I will understand that”.

He gave me a three month period in which to find something else. He was very, very kind and very nice and I could see that he just had to replace me with somebody who belonged to the world of insurance. Before the three months were up, I found another job in a large department store as a stock boy in the books and stationary department. That meant opening cases of books and stationary and sorting them out and bringing them from the dark basement up to the stores and placing them in their proper place on the shelving. This was not a very wonderful job, 16 dollars a week, I think, which was bare subsistence. I don’t know how that ended but then I got a job in a Cut Price department store on the same main street in Buffalo. I was hired just before the Easter season to unpack and bring the chocolate Easter bunnies in from the warehouse to the shop, as needed. They were made in an adjacent room in the warehouse by a man who earned his living by filling tin moulds with chocolate and rotating them to get a film of chocolate on the inside. He made many rabbits and eggs which he somehow decorated with warm chocolate that came out of a tube. You could even write names and Happy this and that. The Easter season passed and there was nothing for me to do in that department anymore. So they transferred me to the furniture section where they needed someone to help.

I was assigned to help this elderly, dignified man who was an excellent artisan in wood. I was mostly sandpapering, varnishing, staining and waxing counters and showcases and putting glass in windows. It was interesting, pleasant work and a very charming boss taught me lots of little tricks of the trade. He spoke very well of me to the boss, Mr. Wolfson, who sent me to his house to fix some windows that were stuck and do some little repairs in his rather bourgeois house; not really a mansion but a respectable house on the parkway.

And so I did that, and he also trusted me with his wife, who was very, very nice to me. A very charming and nice woman, not at all my dream girl, but a very nice person. So I did these things and he couldn’t praise me enough. He was happy with me. He came when I was just leaving, when

I was just finishing for the day. And he told me what a fine workman I was, repairing those things so quickly and so well: guillotine windows where the sash finally breaks and has to be replaced and all kind of little problems like strange legs on chairs and so on. He treated me as a young man, a friend. When I finished the house, I worked for a while more in the store in the same department and Mr Wolfson one day called me into the office and said: “You know you are late this morning”. They had a time clock. “You are sixteen minutes late.” I said: “I know I am late because the street car didn’t come along. I found there was an accident on the street car line so I had to walk the rest of the way. You can call the street car company and ask them”. He said: “I told you, I tell everybody I hire: if you are late three times you are out. I can’t make an exception for you, Harold”. So he fired me. To fire me, he had me in his office where his desk was on a slight platform to bring him higher than the person he was addressing. So he fired me in glory from his platform and he said: “It’s with great regret that I do this” and such nonsense. So I said: “Don’t worry about it, I’m very glad to get out of this place, don’t worry… It’s nothing much of a job, you know”. At any rate, Mr. Wolfson won. The boss always wins. My mother felt guilty that I had to work at these jobs instead of going to art school. So, she enrolled me without asking me in a mail order art course found in the newspaper or magazine which of course was commercial art. They sent a folding drawing table, some primary colours and measuring instruments, rulers, compasses and pencils. I was supposed to follow a course of lettering and anatomy and tricks of light and shade and so on. I quickly gave that up. I didn’t want to tell my mother that she had made such a stupid buy and finally I did use that table. It was quite ingenious; a very solid drawing board that fitted at a slant which was variable. It was a very good thing. I wish I had one like that.

The Depression had already set in. Mr Hoover was defeated and Mr Roosevelt was elected. Mr Roosevelt commenced by taking very sweeping decisions, protecting labour and taxing industry. One of the ways in which he solved the problem of unemployment was to make schools for all different trades and projects that fitted in with these schools. It became finally the Works Project Administration, WPA, which covered the whole nation. It built and furnished schools, hospitals, homes and bridges and necessary roads, forestry control, rebuilding the American wealth which is within these things. So he was very popular not only with the working class and the unemployed but with the middle class and even with some of the exploiting class. Later on in retrospect some of these people who liked him and profited by his actions and his decisions, hated him for these same actions. Because they wanted to get back to the good old days when industry was free to do what it pleased regardless of the consequences.

One of the results of this Roosevelt dream was a new art school in Buffalo, not connected with the museum, not a school for wealthy children but a school for anybody who wanted to study art. The school was on the second floor of a downtown building, a very adequate place. I found out about this very quickly and being out of work I registered with the school. I chose the class in sculpture because somehow during my youth and during all my artistic adventures I decided I’d rather do sculpture than painting or colour work. I believed that sculpture was more achieved, more definite, more of a statement than painting. I was wrong and today I don’t believe that at all. So we had modelling stands and portrait models and figure models. Some for a few days and some for extended periods; a life figure could sit there three or four weeks. We worked in clay and learnt a great deal about armatures and clay and keeping clay in working condition and so on. The students became friends and we were very interested, we were all interested and we got more interested as time went on and we exchanged ideas with each other. At any rate I had some of these friends for all of my life, all of their lives.

We were a group of six or eight serious artists and we were in touch with a lovely elderly woman who said: “I have a studio of my brother’s that is not used and if you boys want to come up and make use of that studio, I will give you the key.” It was like heaven you know. She gave us a vast cleaned out room in Buffalo at the edge of the down-town district. She was very kind. So we did some work and a lot of talking there. I found out that in art you learn more from experience and from your fellow artists than you do from teachers or books. 

At a certain point, I had no job and I felt I could do something to at least help my family because I’d always given money from my paycheck to my parents and I figured that they missed this. I decided to go on the bum, to go on vagabondage, picking fruit in the south. It was also coming on to winter and I thought I’d get a job picking oranges in the south and stay down there for the winter and if I made any money I could send a little gift home. So I left and I went on vagabondage, hitch-hiking. I thought it was possible to get nice rides and meet people and so on. But it was an introduction to all kinds of gangsters, perverts, and dangerous characters, but it was very good education. I went to Florida. On the way down, I stopped and visited Washington. I went to the State of Virginia. My father was a great student of the American Revolution and one of his favourite figures was Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, so I had a sentimental journey there too. Coming into Florida from Alabama, I got a lift from some young men in a large open car with the back down. . It was pretty full but there was room for me. They were nice, of good-fellowship and pleasant, and as we were going along I guessed that they had stolen that car and that they were on the bum like me. In the evening they went carefully up and down the streets of a town. I didn’t know what they were looking for. They were talking to each other there in the front and I was in the back, I didn’t hear. So they finally found what they were looking for. They found a car and they got a rubber tube and opened up the gas and stole it from this big car and filled up their tank. They did this two or three times. I was part of a travelling gang. I was with them all the way through Florida and we slept in the side roads, somewhere. Then I went to Palm Beach, Florida. It’s a town of exclusively millionaires who are on one side of the main highway running through the town. They are on the sea-side and the other people are on the other side of the highway. In Long Beach, I left that group of gangsters in the big touring car. They went on and I stayed in Palm Beach. I went to an open air vegetable market and asked for a job. I met the boss and he looked me over and he said: “You talk to that man over there and he will put you to work”. So I went to talk to a young man there. And he told me: “Look, that boss of ours, he doesn’t like to pay real salaries, he likes to pay the minimum. He hates to pay more. I know you have to have money to live on so you will be paid a certain amount by the boss. You can just put a little money in your pocket from sales you make. Keep that minimum and just get what you think is an honest salary”. So I did like everybody else. And everybody was content. It was a very busy market. And really a lot of the customers tipped you for bringing the vegetables out to their car so there was some legitimacy.

I looked for a room right away and I went down the street there and saw a sign on a house saying ‘Room for rent’. So I knocked at the door and a lady came. She said: “Well, it’s not really a room, but I’ll show you it”. She had taken her chicken coop and turned it into a little room. It was airy. It was just a shelter really and it was lined with mosquito netting and a mosquito net door. It was very clean and newly painted and the floor was covered with a piece of linoleum and a carpet and so on. So it was quite pleasant and the bed was satisfactory. I stayed there for several weeks.

Of course the problem was eating. I didn’t earn enough money to eat in restaurants because the restaurants were very scarce and rather expensive there. So some voice in the fruit stand said: “Go out to casino, a gambling casino, and go around to the back door and you will see a little table there. And you knock at the back door and they will bring you something to eat”. So I went to the gambling casino and somebody said: “Yes, you just sit there. This is a good hour. We have gamblers that nervously order food but never touch it. It’s a shame to throw it away, it’s perfectly good. If it has been messed up and so on, we wouldn’t give it to you”. So I ate very well cooked food there. And I could come any time I wanted in the late afternoon when business started there. In the middle of the town, available to both the rich and the poor was a little park. In the park there were shuffle board courts like on a ship. It was a meeting ground of the very wealthy and the poor. I was playing shuffleboard now and then with very well dressed, well-heeled, obviously very wealthy people. They were very kind and very nice.

They were mostly old retired millionaires, beyond the age of making money who had reverted to a very simple life. It was a very interesting combination: an outcast associating with these very wealthy people. Miami was a big city. I met another gang that included one of the people I knew from the previous ride. And I remember spending some time with a group of young transients. Sometimes these boys were really high on hashish. I was innocent. I knew hashish in Buffalo. It was considered a sure way of failure so I was not at all tempted. I was with these guys and they seemed so strange and fantastic to a person who wasn’t smoking this stuff. I remember this boy holding my shoulder to go down a curb because he was afraid it was too deep.

After, I came back to my fruit stall for a while. Then I went north because I got a letter from my mother saying that she would like to see me back and ”am I all right?” She was missing me. My paternal grandmother was living with us, and she also missed me and so I decided to go home. I had ideas of picking fruit and really you had to know somebody to get the job. So then I left Palm Beach and I started on the track home.

There were so many young people on the roads, hitch-hiking like me, men and boys that the government turned old Army bases into transient camps. They opened the thing and you ate at the government expenses. And so after a lot of dubious and painful passage sometimes you could get into a place like that, it was like heaven. You had a bed for yourself. You had a locker to put your things. I was arrested by the police as a vagrant in Jacksonville. They got me into the police station and they said: “Now you have a choice, you can either go to prison camp or you can go to this government camp. Which do you wish?” “Well, the government camp”. They said that because the prison camp was notorious for punishing convicts by putting them in a little outhouse, a wooden house with the sun beating on it leaving them there for ages. Some of the prisoners died in there. I can’t remember the name of that camp, Sunbeam camp? Maybe...

I was in the government camp and we had voluntary work and you could work in the morning or the afternoon, cleaning or sweeping. They were making a road through the everglades and I got a job as assistant to the architect who was laying out this road. He was a specialist and had worked on the railroad routing rails for trains. He had been one of the architects of a completely new railroad center in Cleveland, Ohio, and he was out of work.

At any rate I started coming back home. I started hitch-hiking and I was near the rail-road line. And I met some guys and they said: “Take a train if you are going back to Buffalo. You’ve got a train here; it will take you to Cleveland and then you gain a lot of time”. I went with them and they went off on a train. I wasn’t ready and so I wanted to see how they got on the train. I didn’t look carefully enough. It’s quite a trick getting on a rolling train even though it’s going rather slow. You think it’s going slow but once you get hold at the iron ladder that goes up on the side, you have to hang on very tight. There is a ladder on the front and the back of some cars. I made the terrible mistake of getting on the back ladder instead of on the front ladder. On the front ladder you swing with the motion of the car and you have to mount the ladder at the same time.

On the back ladder, you swing round the corner of the car and that’s liable to break your hold and cast you off. And it’s liable to cast you in between the two cars right in the wheels. So I did that. I did the wrong thing. Luckily I landed not in between but I hit hard on broken stones, on gravel of the railroad line… Not really gravel but broken rock. There was a viaduct there and these guys who had seen me fall came, picked me up very carefully and brought me in under this viaduct in a shelter. They found a place for me and got some cardboard, laid me down and took care of me as if they were my family…Very, very nice. For two days I couldn’t move at all. And people brought me things to eat: bread, cheese and things to drink. Then there was a big black fellow, that came and he offered me cigarettes. I was smoking rolled cigarettes. He offered me cigarettes and I rolled one. And he said: “Roll one for me, will you! I can’t roll cigarettes. My fingers are too big”. So I rolled a cigarette for him and he brought me paper and tobacco and chocolate bars and so on. And I rolled him cigarettes. He was very contented. He said: “Ah, that’s very good. I love to smoke”.

So, I knew that my elder brother Fred was getting married. I knew the date, and this fall of mine made it very difficult for me to move. So finally I recovered a little bit and I got out on the highway and bummed a ride towards Buffalo. I stopped on the way in a transient camp to rest for a day there. That was a main highway. The automobiles sometimes were very terrible, very rude. They would do a trick. You would be standing there with your thumb out and they would come up and slow down and you would think they were going to take you and then they would go off. It was really terrible how some people can become sadistic, you know. At any rate, I got to a little outskirt town of Buffalo and I knew somebody in that town. I knew them through my elder brother. I knew the address having been there. I had to walk a great deal. I came to their house and I knocked on the door. His wife came to the door and I collapsed. She knew who I was and so they got me inside.

And I woke up on a couch there and they took care of me for a day or so. Then they took me to Buffalo in their car. I got to Buffalo the day before the marriage. And I phoned my brother telling him that I was coming. I had to go with him to a place where they rented out suits. My brother was getting married in morning suit with tails and striped pants and a black coat. So from being a bum on the highway I was suddenly dressed up. This was typically my brother to get that kind of a fancy dress marriage.

Fred was a school teacher. He went to the State Teachers College in Buffalo and then had a job in the New York City area. And he ended up on Long Island teaching and finally became a director of a school and administrator for the town. He was a devoted worker.

When I arrived in Buffalo, my grandmother had just died. She had died while I was on the way and was buried. She was 97 and really nobody paid any attention to her except me. My mother had animosity towards her because she had already a husband and three growing boys to cook for and another person in the house was difficult. But I liked my grandmother because she was an avid newspaper reader. I don’t know how she saw because she had glasses on that were sometimes double field glasses. She ploughed through two newspapers every day. And she knew everything down to the local gossip and the local politics and so on. And she had always done this. When I was in seventh grade or so and I was studying American history, I talked to her about Lincoln. And she got out clippings of newspapers of the death of Lincoln and obituaries and so on in the local papers. She had been a fan of Lincoln and that endeared her to me. And she was in the crowd when the coffin with the body of Lincoln was in the train all over the US. So at any rate I continued my art school and really there we formed a group of art students who were rather serious. And we worked together and talked a great deal about art. I found out really that much I learned about art, I learned from my fellow students. We got curious and we looked things up and so on. For example, I was a student of a German emigrant sculptor. He was a rather nice man, not interesting as an artist at all but with certain basic hints of how to handle clay and certain technical information. There were students who were more or less serious like our little group there. There were also people who came to pass their time playing at being artists. They were interesting too. And there were people sent by their psychiatrists to help them because they believed that art was good for them. That worked very well. So in several cases, many of these people were miraculously integrated. I remember people who were very nice. All my life, now and then, I have helped people teaching them how to model. It has always been very interesting and very pleasurable to see somebody wake up. I had an elderly man, coming to see me in France and he paid me something for the use of the studio and for my help. He was very nice. He had even a tiny bit of talent and was serious. He did some rather nice things. It was a pleasure to have that experience.

In the course of events we had exhibitions. I started doing some individual work which wasn’t in the school curriculum. And I had some success. I had people who liked my work. I showed in the area, had an exhibit in the museum and I got a prize from the Chellenor Foundation. It was a small amount of money, 500 dollars, but very pleasant for me. And later on I met Mr. Chellenor. He was a very interesting man. He was the son of the man who had established the prize.

So I decided to go to New York. Buffalo was a town with no galleries. No visible signs of interest in art. So I went to the big city, New York. I had in my pocket a letter addressed to Gaston Lachaise, a French artist who came to America and made his reputation in the New York area. A very fine man, a very fine artist. A friend of Mr Chellenor who met me gave me this letter and said: “I know Gaston Lachaise and if he needs you, he will hire you”.

I went to New York. I didn’t go to see Gaston Lachaise right away because I wanted to get a little settled first. So I got a room and I even got a job. I got a job in a restaurant chain where they made all the food.

I was 22 or 21. I can’t tell you exactly because it’s all jumbled up in between graduation from high School and this job. In a few years, a lot of different things happened. I got to New York in 1932. I graduated in 1929, so that’s three years. I might be a little wrong. I got this room in 9th Avenue. I got the job first and then the room very close to the job. I started night shift going to work at one o’clock and getting out at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, having two meals at the job. It was work that didn’t pay very much but you had all your food. Then I was working there and I got shifted around from one department to another from the bread bakery to the pie bakery to the handling to the oven man. I did all sorts of things. One of my jobs was now and then to unload flour. They had a delivery of flour once or twice a week and I’d be called to help. Two of us would have to unload these trucks onto trolleys and other teams would take them away: truckloads of sacks of 200 pounds.

I had a fellow worker there who I liked very much and we formed a team because we had to do it two at a time to really load these trolleys fast. You had to do it fast because you had to clear that platform for the next truck, you know. There was a series of trucks that came. You couldn’t have the trucks standing out on the street. So I worked with this very nice guy several times and one day we were working together they asked me to do something else, I forget what. And that day there was rain and he slipped from the iron platform. And they had to take him to the hospital because he had developed a hernia, I went to see him in the wonderful New York hospital, which had the highest standards. Anybody could go in there. While he was in hospital, we made a collection for him to have some money for when he got out of hospital, because he

had no insurance. At that time there was no compensation. There was no way for him to get any money from this company and they didn’t offer anything, not a penny. I think that’s cruel. I saw him a little bit after that. He couldn’t work anymore.

Meanwhile I went to the art school in New York, which is called the Art Students League and it was established years ago. It’s a school entirely run by the students. The professors are chosen by the students and the courses and instruction also. So it’s called the Art Students League.

I went to the professor of sculpture, Mr William Zorach and I showed him my photos. He said: “No question about it. You come and work here whatever you want to do”. So I went there. I was working nights. I spent several hours there. I did nothing, really, except go to that school and go to work and cram in some sleep. And one day I was reading the New York newspaper and I read about the death of the addressee of my letter, Gaston Lachaise. Later on, I met a young man that had been what I would have liked to have been, his assistant. So he told me a little bit about him. And I regretted that I hadn’t met this great man. His work is now in the New York Metropolitan Museum, on the roof. They have a terrace on the roof with marvellous sculpture, very nice.

While I was in the art school, a young girl student, very charming and very nice, told me: “Well, you’re going to join the union”. I said: “What union?” She said: “The Artist Union”. I said: “I don’t know”. She said: “Oh yes. You come along with me and I’ll show you”. She was a red hot unionist, I went to a meeting and I found the whole union in ebullience: they were protesting against a New York Project where the artists were employed to wash and reframe paintings in the City Hall and do errands for the museum and wash the public monuments in the parks and so on. They demanded to open up a project for creative art. Art by artists. So in order to do this they said we were going to meet Mrs Audrey McMahon who was the director of the project. We were going to meet Mrs McMahon and we were going to state our whole case to her. We needed a good following of people to impress her. So we had a meeting arranged with her and showed up with 219 odd members and she said: “You don’t have to be that many, I could just talk to two or three of you, that’s all. I’m all in favour of your ideas, but I have no budget now. I have to present this to my superiors.” The organisers of our union said: “We’ll wait here until you talk to them”. So we sat down.

This was the first sit-in (in December 1936) that stimulated the same action in all different parts of the labour movement. This was the first sit-in with a group of art students. There were 219 of us. Later it became quite an honour to be one of the 219. So we were there. The police came and said: “You must vacate these offices immediately”. So we sat down on the floor and they had to pick us up, one at a time and escort us out to police vehicles and carry us off to the police station. We said to each other: “We won’t give our real names. We’ll give the names of famous artists”. So we gave the names ‘Leonard da Vinci’ and ‘Michelangelo’ and so on. And the newspapers wrote a wonderful story about the ‘great artists of the world were in New York and being taken to the police station’. It was funny. We got very favourable support from the press. It was obvious you don’t have artists working at just washing and polishing. You have them making art. It was very interesting.

This artist union later became affiliated with the labour movement in America. CIO. Of course we were attacked for being leftist. We ended up having a great deal more members. Following this, the writers, the actors, all the cultural workers became organised even the entertainers, the musicians.

It was a wonderful period. They took over a theatre that had been closed because it was the Depression. The prices of tickets were reduced, so you could go to see a play for the same price as an ordinary movie: 25 cents. I remember seeing Orson Wells doing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for 25 cents. I went on one of the last days and Orson Wells came out on the stage after the play. He said: “We, this same group, are now going to rehearse the next play which is to start next week. If you want to stay for this rehearsal, come back in 25 minutes. You will have time to go out and have something to eat”. So we saw the other play which was called the “Shoemakers Holiday”, I don’t remember who wrote it but it’s a very good play, too. We had the best musicians, the best concerts. It was a very creative and wonderful period. Of course it was hated by some people even though they benefited from it. The wealthy people had a natural distrust of anything that was social or socialized. But it was a fantastic period and it was due to the wonderful cooperation of the President Roosevelt, and the wonderful vision he had. He said: “It is absolutely impossible to have a country where people are unemployed. I will do everything to create employment. If we have to spend our last money, it’s well spent”. A wonderful man. He is the greatest political thinker since Solon, the Greek. Just imagine, he started a camp where untrained boys, young men coming out of school, could get paid for planting trees. It made a wealth for the nation which was fabulous. It required lots of money and great decisions.

So I found myself involved in this new project. I was assigned to a group of people making cement castings of animals for children’s playgrounds. The children would crawl over the animals. And so that was my assignment, not very interesting, but I said: “It’s not going to last for ever and I’ll get something else to do later on”.

So I had this job and then I rented an empty loft, in lower New York. In a street with lofts that had been all sorts of things before, small businesses like the clothing business and so on, with nothing but walls and the floor. 
I was fascinated with New York and I started doing a sort of survey of lower New York, and so in no time at all I was drinking too much. I was staying up late at night and sleeping almost on the job. Finally there was an assistant supervisor of this sculpture project I was on and his name was Maximilian Machovsky.

He came on the job and talked to me. He said: “What’s the matter with you? You’re looking so dopy here.” He had talked to the other people on the job before and they were all a little bit worried about me and I said: “I’m all right”. He just nagged me saying: “Look, first of all, you’ve got to clean up that cough you’ve got. I want you to go hospital and get that cough examined”. He said: “You take off tomorrow and go to hospital and see so-and-so…” So I did that and he followed me up the next day. He came to see me and didn’t find me there but he found me in the street. He said: “Look, your studio is there. Let me see your studio!” So I took him up to my studio. He said: “This is not a studio. This is absolutely the end of the world. You got to get out of here.” So he found me a studio, that he knew was empty, a real art studio. He insisted in helping me personally to move, and settle there. He followed me up for a week and I responded very well because I was being a bit experimental there. I really wasn’t an alcoholic. But, I could have become an alcoholic. At any rate I think of Max Machovsky with a great deal of pleasure; a red haired Polish Jew “a real Pole.”

So things went on in the artist union. We had a section of sculptors and became busy with that and then we had official shows in government sponsored galleries. But we also had shows of our own, so we had quite a busy schedule. I was working and making things and enjoying myself. I had some success. I was president of a new group of sculptors called ‘the Sculptors Guild’. It was at first called something else. And they were a very nice group of people. Of course, the unions were undeniably part of the Left.

The following years, from 1933 to 1937, I was in this organisation and this work. At a certain point we had projects: we made sculptures for government buildings. I made a sculpture for a Post Office in New Jersey. Then, with another sculptor, we made four grand figures on the walls of a housing project. It was in a black area so we did things that could be interpreted as black too and so on. It was a housing project where all the doorways had sculpture models on each side, small sculptures. Four or five buildings had large implants of sculpture on the walls. It was quite a nice thing and it got some publicity.

Then partly because I came from Buffalo, I was asked to make some sketches of a new bridge crossing the river from Buffalo to Canada called the Peace Bridge because it was between two peaceful, neighbouring nations. I made some studies and the architect was very much on my side but they didn’t want the project.

So, during that period I exhibited in Philadelphia, in Boston and in several other places.. I had as much of a reputation you can get in America, but there is very, very little chance of making a living with sculpture anyway. You can successfully show things but it never really pays; Basically they think art is a hobby and you are getting pleasure out of it and that is enough. And that is the way people, many people, talk about art. You can’t make a living out of it unless you have money behind you or if you have an unbeatable ego and are ready to push. Even then I have known people that have had very great difficulties even though they spent every day trying to succeed.

Now at the end of that period, the war in Europe had started and production, business and industry had picked up in America. So there were a lot of new war contracts and a lot of employment created. So this wonderful situation was abandoned, that political marvel that led you to believe that we were on the road to democracy, because there were so many people converted to a new outlook on life. I remember I was on a neighbourhood committee looking for people who were suffering from malnutrition and abandonment. So there was a house survey, we had a door to door survey, going with a couple, a man and a woman. This was started by this union. We belonged to something called the Workers Alliance. We discovered that there were people who were living in respectable areas, in luxurious apartments, who were at their very last penny, starving to death. They owned an apartment but they no longer had any money coming in and they were too old and just dying of starvation. I remember we found a woman, an elderly woman. So we went to this woman and talked to her. We said, “Well, you know the government has funds for people like you. Just come and apply for that, we can come with you.” She said: “Oh no, I’d never do that, I’d never do that, I’d rather die.” I said: “Oh no, you wouldn’t rather die, you’re too nice to die.” I remember that woman. We finally got her to apply and she became a member of this Workers Alliance.

And so came the end of the art project because normal business started. War makes money and money makes jobs possible. The only time capitalistic society really works is preparing or recovering from a war. So I lost my job and my project was cancelled. I had foreseen this and I had an idea. I had a friend, an artist who was investigating silk screen printing. Silk-screen printing at that time had been used for theatre, for automobile advertising. Large posters were considered a cheap substitute for lithography. But lithography was much more varied and more complete. I had done a little bit of ceramics and I thought: “That’s an interesting thing”. So I decided I’d make ceramic tiles with this method instead of brushing them individually. I made some samples of this new technique and I had some encouraging results.

So when the project ended and I was out of work, I took these tiles around to a man who made iron tables, iron garden furniture. Some tables had tiles I had seen and liked very much. I knew where his shop and his little factory was. So I took some of my tiles and brought them round to him. He said: “My God, it’s just what I’m looking for. You know I can’t get any more Spanish or Italian tiles and those were the only tiles for my business. How much do you want for them?” I said: “I don’t know.” And he said: “Well, you figure out how much you want! How do you stand for money?” And I said: “I have to go easy.” He said: “If I give you a thousand dollars, will you be able to put this thing on?” And I said: “Yes”. A thousand dollars was quite a piece of money at that time. So I started to do that and I had a business then that lasted fifteen years. At the same time I met a woman, Elisabeth, that I liked very much and she wanted to help me. Finally we got married and we lived with each other during that period. She was very apt as the manager of such a business. We had five to eight and later on about eight or ten people working there. We started in the New York wharf, in the New York business area where we could print these things but we didn’t have a kiln. And you have to fire these things in a kiln so we started there and made a deal with a place in New Jersey to do the firing. Finally a great deal of our effort went into transporting these things two ways. So we took a new place with a little room and bought a large kiln and that worked like a charm for fifteen years.

By this time, the Spanish tiles came back again and we had built up a certain clientele for a different kind of design, a little less Spanish. We did all sorts of things: some were floral designs, some were pictorial. We had a tile with a poem about coffee drinking. They were often inspired by the civilisation of New England. At any rate, we had a rather nice collection. It wasn’t art but it wasn’t the worst kind of commercial art and we had a lot of very happy - I don’t know how efficient - but very happy workers there because we took especially people that needed a job, or needed support, or friendship. My wife Elisabeth was very social and attracted these people who came to her for help. The tiles were made with a squeegee in your hand and a moveable platform. One person would put the tile on the platform and picked up the squeegee and did a stroke. The other person took the tile away and brought another one so it went pretty fast. One every two seconds perhaps for one colour. And there were four or five colours.

I had a friend, Ben Karp, who came in and wanted to work. You could hardly get him away from the machine, which was a sort of a wooden contraption. Ben Karp was a very fine person, our teacher, an innovator of techniques for teaching. He was an artist himself. His wife, Vivian Fine, was a pianist who specialised in things that were terribly difficult and terribly powerful, disturbing and dramatic. She became one of the finest composers of America. So he was the husband of a woman who achieved greatness in her lifetime. Very nice woman. 

I had many friends: Ernie Meyer was one of my greatest friends in America. He was a reporter for the New York Post. He was not only a reporter, he wrote a daily column on the front page called ‘As the crow flies’ meaning ‘straight’. A charming man and a dedicated left-wing figure. I met him through other friends of mine and I was invited to his round table. He held a round table once a week where he paid all the drinks and all the bills and only invited people he wanted to see and talk to. It was a very interesting group because it was not at all definable politically or socially. There were all sorts of people there with all kinds of approaches and ideas and so on. He said, “If I only chose people with my ideas, I’d get nowhere at all. I like to hear other people, other people’s idea; they might be better than mine.” A very, very, very fine man. He was Milwaukee born of a German speaking community there that were mostly left-wing, anarchists. The anarchists that I’ve met in my life have been the most gentle people in the world. We used to meet in New York. The jumble shop was on Eighth Street, the main street of Greenwich Village. It was a real ‘village’, with a kind of social ‘camaraderie’ which was remarkable for a big city. Everybody gravitated there for interesting things, for seeing things, for the few galleries that were down there, for the Whitney museum. It was the cultural center of Manhattan.

I also used to come to Ernie Meyer’s house and sit with him. He loved having company and he was not very physically fit. I enjoyed visiting him, I think he enjoyed having me. There was a difference of twenty years in between us. He was just as interesting as my younger friends, much more really.

When he died, there was no funeral. He was buried by his son, the only witness to his funeral, it was a simple affair but he left a fund for having, one month after his death, a ‘soirée’ Ernie Meyer. He had already rented a room, the second floor of a restaurant there. So the whole evening was devoted to his friends and there were people that made up speeches and poems about Ernie and recited them and told stories about him and it was the most perfect funeral I’ve ever been to. It was not a funeral. That was typical Ernest Meyer. He was one of my very best friends.

Another thing that is interesting to recount was that my studio on 31 East 21st Street was on the top floor of an old brown stone building that was at one time the single home of a wealthy bourgeois family with four floors with a lot of bedrooms and servants quarters. I had it for 20 dollars a month. 20 dollars was a very low price but quite common. I bought second-hand linoleum and covered the old floor which was very, very worn and bumpy really with probably half a century or a century of workmans’ shoes use.

Below me was a woman and her husband who were sort of theater amateurs. They had theatrical or musical ‘soirées’ from time to time and they invited me as a neighbour to come and see. They were very nice neighbours. The first floor was taken by the ‘Photo League of New York.’ It was a league of professional photographers for the whole country. Every photographer of importance belonged to that league. So it was through it that I met a marvellous photographer. I can’t think of his name because I have a sudden lapse of memory for names that I should remember. I met also Weegee who has recently become sort of a figure of importance. He liked the accidents of the enlarging machine and the accidents of acids and chemicals on photographs, as well as exaggerations. He was a police photographer. And he did all kinds of lurid photographs. And he was out all night of course. He was a night walker of New York. He took pictures of the opening of the New York Opera. Of people getting out of their cars and taxi cabs and getting in again later, leaving tired and their make-up gone. They showed these very, very rich families the highest ranking social families in America, at their very, very worst. And at the same time with a certain human sympathy. With some kind of a feeling of ‘well now, can’t be any worse than that’. So these photographs appeared in the big magazines in large. So he was considered a very special photographer.

I also knew a young photographer there who told me he was going out to photograph seagulls on Long Island. That he’d found a place where there were the most seagulls nesting and he was going to spend a week out there. So I saw him just before he left. And I saw him when he came back. I met him in the laboratory downstairs where he was developing his pictures. And I saw these photographs. This young man really became a bird. He became a friend of these seagulls and he had little seagulls on his hand and seagulls all over him, walking over his feet, stepping over his feet. Marvellous young man.

The other thing I wanted to bring up was theatre in New York. I think when I first came to New York, they played ‘Tobacco Road’ written by Erskine Coldwell. It was playing for something like its 200th performance and it went on for several years more. The leading figure was the man who played the father of this poor Tobacco Road family. It was played by Will Gear whom I met and I liked, and he invited me to come… He said, “Anytime you’re up town, drop in the theatre and say ‘hello’.” So I did that and it was a pleasure to watch him prepare himself for this role. He said: “This role depends on the clothing I’m wearing there and the dust in these clothes. If I create enough dust, I know that I can act it very well. Because I believe what I see.” Very charming man. I met him through Woody Guthrie. 

In recording all these things, I neglected something that was very important in my life – my musical side. I really owe quite a bit to my High School. I had several very good teachers there. One morning a week we had some lecturer or something interesting or something made by the students, some play. And one day I went there and they had Carl Sandburg, a poet of the mid- West. He was a poet, a very simple poet of simple things and simple people and very profound. A very, very lovely man. He was a Swede I think and living in Chicago or Milwaukee, one of the mid-western towns. And he had written several books of poetry that were quite popular in America. He came and recited his poems and we were all very pleased because he was quite well known and when he finished reading several poems, he went off stage and brought his guitar on the stage. He said: “This is my real interest at the moment, I’m finding these lovely folk songs, American folk songs which are fine poetry and very expressive.” So he sang several songs, prisoner songs and escaping prisoner songs and farmer songs. Very well chosen, funny things and interesting things. That gave me an interest for folk music for the rest of my life.

So when I grew a little older I had a ukulele, that was my first instrument. I played it when I was eight or nine years old. As a matter of fact, the first ukulele was made with a cigar box, a home- made instrument. Then I got a present of an ukulele from my father and mother. I spent hours playing and singing and making up songs. When I grew older, in my last years in High School, I had a real guitar but it was a five string guitar and very hard guitar because they usually have six strings. I played that also by ear, simple chords that you learn, and quite repetitive. I was in great demand at family reunions and birthdays. We were a great family for all getting together for these simple birthdays and confirmations. I would accompany singers. They all sang. I played these songs very well with simple chords and I sang with them and knew all the words. I knew all the songs of my generation and also of my father’s and mother’s generation. I knew all the popular music of the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties.

When I came to New York I was busy with other things and finally I bought another guitar. I played a little bit. Elizabeth found that there was a singer from the mid-West, from Oklahoma, who was in New York and he was coming somewhere to sing. There I heard Woody Guthrie and I was really captivated by his original folk music. I remember being in a small gathering in a small room, a couple of dozen people listening to his dustbowl blues. And his songs made up about the

dustbowl and the poor people being driven out of their homes by the dust and going to California, hoping to find work picking oranges and their bitter surprise to find there were thousands and thousands of such people fleeing from the dust bowl and there was no work for them at all. I had made this friend Woody Guthrie and I invited him round and accompanied him. We became very good friends. Finally at one point he needed a room and I had a large studio at the time with a little room in the back. A little room all partitioned off. The former occupant had a place to sleep. It was a business but he had a little corner to sleep in and to rest. Woody Guthrie for several years was a member of my family and I invited people to hear him play. Woody Guthrie was a very simple person who had absolute judgment of what is right and what is good and what is wrong. He had this disease that causes mental break-down at the age of thirty or thirty-five. And before that you are perfectly normal. So I was with him one evening and we were coming down the street and he got talking and I said: “What is he talking about?” He was angry and he came to a store with a little show window in front, and to emphasize what he said, he hit that glass with his fist and broke the glass and his fist started bleeding. So he immediately calmed down and said: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He said: “I’m going the way my mother went.” From then on he was very careful but eventually he had to be taken care of. I saw him very little because it broke my heart to look at him. So I sent him messages via friends and I’d write him postcards and little notes and so on. A good man. That was in New York. He went to an institution in Jersey when he became ill. And there is a fund created by his ex-wife to fund for this disease.

Somebody gave me a couple of dozen folding chairs and I had sort of a folk music centre for all the lovers of this special kind of music in the New York area. I had all of the American folk singers, singers from the south, Aunt Molly Jackson... Leadbelly was another folk artist that I met. I met him before I knew Woody, before I met with Elizabeth. I was going out with a girl who was a home-relief investigator. She said one day: “I have on my case role a very interesting man, a black man who plays the guitar. His name is Leadbelly. So she invited him with his wife to her house to have dinner. They came very well dressed and very polite with his twelve string guitar in a case and I was late for that dinner party. I was late because I had taken a nap in the afternoon and slept too long. I was an hour late or half an hour late. So we had dinner and polite conversation and after dinner he got out his twelve string guitar from its case. And he said: “I’m going to play you a song about a young man who is so busy with his affairs that sometimes he is a little late.”

So he became a very good friend over the years, in fact he was a friend till the day he died. He started making records and did rehearsals in my place with some people accompanying him and with a group of singers. It was very, very pleasing. I had a very large loft and I loved to have this kind of contact.

I also knew a lot of jazz people more or less through him because he was also very popular with the jazz singers. He was doing a different kind of thing but they saw his value and they liked him very much as a person and as a singer. So I had a very nice friendship and also he had a very charming wife, just a loveable person. At a certain point he went to Europe and he sang in France. He had a concert in Paris. He had other concerts arranged. He couldn’t finish them. He became very, very ill and had to come back and went straight to hospital. I forget what the disease was but it was incurable. It was an incurable disease of the nerves, I forget which and he died. It was a very rich friendship and really a direct experience with a black person from the South. He was from Louisiana. He said: “I was in prison to fill the camp, to fill the prison camp. There was a white man shot and they arrested every black man in the whole town and put them in jail. And they charged them all with the same murder. I was one of those men. I was condemned for man slaughter of a man that I didn’t even ever know.” He was singing in prison. A singer was necessary for a work gang because he kept a rhythm for their work when they were chopping or when they were carrying rails. There were certain rhythms for certain works and he was an expert at that. And he made a record of these songs while he was in my studio. He did it with a group of singers called the ‘Golden Gate Boys’. And they were black singers from California. He said: “They had to learn how to sing like prisoners.” And he went over these things with them and finally they got the spirit of these songs. And they made a record that was really monumental, really fine. A fine work of art these work songs. I don’t have the record any more. I’ll have to find it.

So I picked up all these songs from everybody. I know hundreds and hundreds of songs that I learned over the years, that I have often sung for my friends and for organizations sometimes. In fact in New York I was singing so much that I had notices in the paper listing me as a singer. I said: “I’m not a singer, I’m an artist.”

In France I always sung. I sing even by myself a great deal. I enjoy singing so much. I’ve sung for the American library in Montpellier. I did a concert for them and it was very pleasant because I sing only in English. These songs are really only appreciated by people who understand English. But I sing now and then for French people and they enjoy it too. I made a couple of records not commercial at all, some records for these organisations. Lately my guitar developed an illness, doesn’t work and I haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed or getting another guitar because I have been too busy with other things. So my career in music has halted but I enjoy it very much. I enjoy serious classical music too. So that was a little insight into my musical career. 

I would like to talk to you about my sailing career. I had always loved sailing even when I was very young. In the summer time we went to a lake and my family hired a row-boat for the week we were there and I made a stick upright somehow attached to that row-boat with a bed-sheet sail. I had it made up and I sailed it, so when I got to New York, I always wanted to sail. I joined a club and I went sailing with a group on Long Island Sound, on Long Island sea shore. There is a coast there protected by a barrier or sand dune and an inside bay, I forget what it’s called. It’s a large area of very protected water and also very shallow water. It’s mostly four or five, sometimes three feet deep. So it’s impossible for a normal sail boat of any size. They solved the problem by making a wide boat that had very little draft, very little depth. It had side boards like the Holland boats have, and so it could sail in those waters. And I sailed in those boats with a crew. In strong winds you had to have a crew to balance the boat against the wind, to go up on one side or the other. I did some sailing on that and loved it. In a way it was the best sailing I’d ever done.

Later on I bought a boat. I was looking for a boat and somebody said: “Oh, I got a boat for you: my cousin has a boat and he has got to get rid of it because he’s moving and he doesn’t want to leave it there. And he doesn’t have any place for it. So you can come and have it.” And I said: “Well I don’t know.” He said: “It’s a nice little boat.” I can’t remember how long it was, something like ten feet long. So I went to look at this boat. It was a nice boat. I made arrangements to come and get it. The property was on the East river, just downstream from Brooklyn Bridge. In fact you could look up and see the bridge from that place. There was a nice little house there, an old house, one of the early houses of New York. They were getting rid of the boat because they were going to do some big construction there. So, I came with a lunch pack and a little suitcase of things I needed. I came at the lowest point of the low tide. We got the boat in the water. The East River is really a tidal stream. It flows six hours one way and six hours the other, back and forth. So I got it from the beginning of going up-stream from New York Bay to Long Island Sound. I got in the boat and shoved off and started. There was no wind, I had to paddle and more or less steer. I started going up the river and at a certain point I got under another bridge, a large automobile bridge and hit some whirlpools there and just kept going round and round. It was very difficult to get out of those. But at the end of six hours I was in Long Island Sound and called up my brother Fred who lived in Long Island. He knew that I was doing this venture and so I said: “You know, I made it there.” And I told him where I was and he came to see me. Then I continued. I went to Great Neck harbour and found a mooring there which I could use and pay for. I had a place to keep my boat more or less looked after. So I did some sailing in that boat and had it on Long Island Sound for several years.

Then I wanted to sail in the Hudson River, so I had the boat taken there, I don’t know how. So I sailed in this river which is not a tidal river. It’s influenced by the tide but really it’s closed from the sea. It doesn’t flow back and forth. I had the boat just above the bridge. I can’t think of the name of the bridge in the north part of Manhattan. I sailed there. That was also a question of watching the tides and the tides moved you a great deal. So you did some sailing but you did all sorts of displacement with the tide at the same time. It was quite tricky sailing and very interesting, very interesting problems of judgement. It was a very beautiful river and then of course the Hudson River is a highway of New York, one of the first navigable streams of the settlement of New York, the settlement of America. I had that boat near a place close to the Spuyten Duyvil, which means Spitting Devils in Dutch. At that time, all of New York City and the Hudson Valley was a solid Dutch community. And even after the Dutch left, the descendants remained there. There are still people who speak old style Dutch in the families in Eastern New York State.

The “Spitting Devil” is a fabulous thing. I had heard the name and I knew that it existed and that it was around there somewhere but I had no idea what it was: One day I was with a friend in the boat and there was a very slight breeze and we were hardly moving or talking. A noise started all around and we looked at the water. The water was like a million little fountains spraying a few drops each one straight in the air and there were slight waves. There was no wind. And this happens twice a day in that area. I can’t imagine how it happens, thousands of little droplets with a whispering noise. Those were the devils, spitting devils. For me, it was one of the marvels of the world.

I haven’t told you about my other boat. Now before I can discuss the war I’ve got to get the boats problem settled. At a certain point with my venture in the ceramic tile business, I began to make some money. I started looking round for boats. I didn’t have money for a great new boat. I looked around for a bargain boat. In a yacht yard, I found a yawl, an old fashioned boat with two masts with a small mast behind. The back sail protrudes over the water. I found this old-style boat had a certain beauty. I had read a book of this voyage of Captain Slowcum and he had a boat something like this. And I thought: “Well that’s a nice boat, if Captain Slocum liked that kind of a boat, that’s the kind for me.” So I asked the price and he said: “I don’t know the price, I’m going to find out from the son. The ex-owner is dead. At any rate, you are going to have that boat.” So he found out and he said: “They would like five hundred dollars.” It was a very cheap price for a boat which sleeps eight people, you know, and forty five feet long. So I became the owner of that boat. They said: “Now you’ve bought the boat, we want you to get it out of here, get it in the water. That boat has been sitting here for three, four even five years. You’ve got to get it out by spring.”

I had met a Dutchman I liked very much, a young guy, my age, and his wife was a dancer in the ‘Joos ballet’, but she was also a writer. He was an artist, but I’ll tell you the truth, he was a very academic artist, very Dutch, but he was a charming guy and a very competent sailor. So I met him because I liked ballet, and modern ballet was very interesting. ‘Joos Ballet’ was a charming company with very interesting material. Nobody had such material. They had for example a thing called the ‘green table’, a sort of sarcastic view of world politics with these gentlemen sitting at a table deciding how to run affairs. They expressed the whole thing in a dance with this table and just dancing and you got everything they meant, you know, it was devastating. Very interesting. The delays in the “chicanerie” and the bargaining.

At any rate I had Mr Jan Houwij as a partner. I paid for the boat but he put a lot of work into it. He was a very good partner. He knew more about sailing than I, about boat handling and so on. So I bought this boat and took it out to Long Island Sound and had a summer with that boat with some friends in Great Neck. A group of us rented a house, a summer house. The house had bed bugs, so we took all the furniture and put it in one room and locked it in. And we slept on mattresses on the floor so we could clean the mattresses. The lady who rented the house came and visited us and was astonished that we did this. We said: “We’ll put it all back. We’ll put it all back.” But she developed a hatred for us and put her fingers to her head when we passed. She told everybody that we were crazy and dangerous and so on. We spent a good summer anyway. And with my boat I sailed a great deal in that bay of Great Neck which was a very nice patch of water off Long Island Sound.

I liked that boat very much. I painted it yellow, a very nice yellow partly because I was influenced by Van Gogh’s sunflowers. And I liked everything yellow at that time. I still like yellow. I have yellow shirts, I like them very much.

During the boat period, I didn’t belong to a yacht club, but I had bought my boat in a yacht club and they wanted me to stay there. They wanted me to become a member but I just put it off. The war started. The coastguard of America set up a system where boat owners became patrollers of the coast. So I went out on patrols with other boat owners and we went on night patrols, not in my boat, but in a motor yacht. We did exercises in proper navy style. I did that for a while.

After the war there was a certain naval architect I liked and I admired his boats. And I had him make plans for a boat for me. I was going to build a boat or have it built because with my little business of designing tiles, I was making some money. So I had these blue prints made of a boat that was more or less my dream boat and I went to Europe on vacation. In Europe I went to Holland and found a ship constructor that was recommended to me and I gave him the blue prints to make a study. And he did his study while I was in Europe. It was my first real trip to Europe. This was after the war. I had been in the navy during the war.

So this boat yard gave me a very reasonable price. I thought: “No, I want to be an artist. I want to continue my art career. I don’t see how I could mix that up with being an amateur navigator.” My experience with yacht clubs and yachting people was very bad. I considered them a bunch of drunkards and time-wasters. So I said: “You don’t want to go with that crowd, you don’t want to live that life, you can’t do it”. I gave it up. I don’t even have the plans anymore. I took the plans back and I got out of it. I didn’t build the boat. 

At that time, 1941, I was drafted to the Navy. So I reported where I had to and I saw no reason why I should get out of this. At that time I was almost 29 and the limit was thirty. Although I could have got out by saying that I was in this coast guard service, I thought: “It’s not nice if other people have to risk themselves. Either you are an anti-Nazi or you just make-believe.” So I said: “The honest thing to do was to go” But it was not, it was the stupidest thing to do because the Navy was a big time-waster. The Navy and the Army too, what I’ve seen of them, are vastly incompetent organisations but they are so big and so powerful that in the long run they win. In the long run, they learn from their errors a little bit and in spite of everything they are victorious. In the Navy I went to training camp and had a sailor’s uniform with a funny white hat. And I was in this camp with mostly kids of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and they were so juvenile. There I was and so I went through a lot of tests, a lot of nonsense, a lot of training. I got very healthy because I was marching and running and doing obstacle races and so on. It was good for my shape and health to get into that training, which was half a year or less.

Because I was an artist I was assigned to do things like posters and so on. I made things for a navy dental college, including teeth. They were very good wooden models of a tooth. You opened it up and you saw all the different qualities of the inner actions of a tooth. I didn’t paint them, but I provided just the form.

After a while, I was asked whether I would like to get into a special service. I was told: “I can’t tell you what it is, but we are looking for people with art training to do special work. So I said: “O.K.” I was transferred to Norfolk, Virginia and interviewed by a guy there who said: “Well, what we are doing is we are making maps.” He said: “The job is making maps of the future invasion points and because these maps are highly secret, you will be without visitors, without leave, you will be confined to this building.” He said: “You will have a lot of time for recreation too and for physical exercises and so on.” So I said: “O.K.” And I got into that and it was fascinating. We did relief maps. The area was modeled according to the topography of the land and a plastic cast was made of it. On that casting we found all the roads and the bushes and the trees and the houses. We reconstructed an area so that you could not only read the map, but you could see more or less where the houses were, fantastic details, cut out of little pieces of linoleum, glued on and pieces of sponge and all kinds of things... Then that was sprayed with lacquer and then greased and moulded also with a plaster mould. The mould was cleaned out and from that plaster mould they made reproductions of this original in sponge rubber, so that they could be rolled up and transported and were indestructible, with all those little houses there and all repainted, everything painted. In doing this we did for instance Hiroshima. We had a man brought in to see us who had lived on Hiroshima for years and knew everything. He helped us interpret the photographs and the maps we had and so on. It was interesting.

We did the Normandy beaches, the Normandy area. The Navy sent photographer planes that would fly very low and very fast and would take hundreds of pictures on the way. They had a camera with a certain speed and you got overlapping views. And so we took those overlapping views and placed them on the table. We had a viewing apparatus. You could take two neighboring pictures and put them together under these lenses and get the relief. So we did that and we had other photographs. We got most of our maps from that. We found out the houses and we had photographs showing people and dogs. People looking up at us and so on. We looked at a wooded area there. Photographs came in every other day. I had some photographs that I was looking at. I was looking at a shoreline, and a little bay and woods, little trees and so on. I had the feeling that there was something strange. It was a cloudy day so this was all laid with clouds but with this stereoscopy view you can look through thin clouds. And we had plenty of time to do it. We would work in one hour sequence and then your whole picture would be taken to another and you would make notes of what you saw. So the next one would read your notes and look and see and there would be drawings and so on. There was something funny in the camouflage because it was obvious to us that there were some camouflage trees. We got that through these pictures. Finally after I don’t know how many hours but after a lot of study with several guys looking at this, we found out that was unmistakably a rocket launching site, to launch rockets against England. So we made a report and gave it to the chief there. He got in touch with Washington, so they knew where it was exactly. So we sent it off and didn’t think any more of it and passed to other things. Then we had a man from the Navy, a high-ranking man, some kind of captain who came to visit us right after that. And he pompously said: “I have something for you boys. The pictures of the same site bombed out.” Something like two days after. I got a medal for extra duty, later on. No, I got the citation for work beyond the normal range of activity. It was very exciting.

I worked there, I had good friends there. They were a very nice bunch of people. There were several animated cartoon artists. They were three guys who had worked for Disney. But I was suddenly discharged from this project and amazingly turned loose in the public world with my head full of the invasion which is very stupid of them and the officer in charge of our project was shocked. He liked me very much. Between the officers and men there was no difference. We were very easy and no command apparent at all there. So I was loose and able to go two or three afternoons a week into Norfolk. The base was just outside Norfolk. I could go into the town and do whatever I wanted and so I saw the commandant of the camp and I explained the thing to him. I made so many enquiries that it was embarrassing for the Navy to keep me around there so they put me on a ship. The ship was an LST, a landing ship, tank also called the Long Slow Target. So we went to train for sea rescues, landing, getting rafts ready, man overboard and all kinds of things.

It dragged on for two or three weeks there still in Norfolk and finally we went away. We went out into the ocean on our way to Europe. In the course of that training there, we shot an awful lot of ammunition at flying targets. An aeroplane would go by dragging a long sort of balloon with a long bag and we shot at the bag trying to avoid the plane. We landed in Londonderry. Finally I came back to America.

On the way back it was also a slow trip because of the weather. It was in the hurricane season, I think, and we had a hurricane to dodge. We were finally caught in it. It was a great experience but very dangerous because these ships were not made for bad weather but for transporting a lot of stuff and they were extremely heavy. They had a very shallow draft and even though we had a great deal of ballast we didn’t have enough: we went over waves that were as tall as our mast, they were maybe sixty feet or higher. You’d go up, the ship would be lifted and then you’d think you’d never stop going up and then finally you started going down on a sort of a slide and a very hair-raising but very wonderful to see. The sea and winds in that hurricane sent the spray of the waves horizontally. It was just picked off the waves and flung. And so we had that hitting the ship and the conning tower where I spent my time. It was a very, very great experience. I was in the upper deck in the conning tower, a large room with the steering wheel, with room for several people: the radioman and the helmsman and the officer of the deck, the officer of the day...

In this hurricane, all of the plumbing broke in the ship so that the whole living quarters were flooded, very uncomfortable. We had dry bunks but the floor was sometimes impossible to walk without getting wet feet. But the people that suffered were the engineers down in the engine room which is below sea level. And they felt the force of these waves more than anybody. And every now and then, they would say: “Can we come up now?” At a certain point they were so sure that we were about to sink, they asked if they could come up. And so we had to comfort them and say: “No, it’s going to clear, it’s going to clear.” We were headed for the New York area and instead we had to go south to get out of this hurricane and more or less we were driven that way.

And so we went into the Gulf of Mexico, on the other side of Florida, I forget the name of the town, maybe it was Orlando. There was a port there where we finally arrived. We stayed there for a little while and we enjoyed very good weather and we were able to do some swimming and sea-bathing and it was very nice and very pleasant. We swam right next to our vessel. We had some kind of a ladder going down, I forget how. The funny thing was you would be up on the deck and looking down at the comrades swimming and you would see the sharks coming in to see. They were a little afraid of being next to that big boat and so on but they were very curious. And when the swimming period was over and everybody came up, the sharks would smell the water all around to see whether one of us was left.

We went up the coast to Boston. We anchored in New York but we didn’t stay there. We were put into barracks in a camp in Boston and the ship was put into dry dock too for repairs and rehabilitation. In these barracks we stayed in, it was really old Navy style and we slept in hammocks. The Navy issues a hammock to every sailor and you used the hammock to wrap up all your things and sling it over your shoulder, that’s your valise more or less but you never use it because the ships are equipped with much more comfortable berths and little mattresses and so on. But there we slept in Navy hammocks. We were completely free during that time. We could go out and come back any time we wished and so on, very pleasant. I had a few friends in Boston and I spent a lot of time there. Through some friends I met a college professor who was interested in art. And he invited me to the Harvard club to eat. I never had such a delightful meal, fish chowder and clam. A very beautiful restaurant. I enjoyed Boston very much. I liked the museum there very much, I paid a lot of visits there and I went sailing in Boston. I went sailing on the Charles River. There were little sailing boats there. It was for children and adults, mostly children. We were told we could have free use of those boats. So I went down there. I got into this little boat. But a teenage boy said: “We have to give you a test to see whether you are able…” So he took me out and said that I should do this and turn and turn into the wind. And I passed the test. It was a fifteen or sixteen year old boy, very sweet and I sailed in the Charles River, charming. While I was in Boston, I got a leave to see my mother who was in Hospital and I was able to see her before she died. She died rather young a difficult death of cancer and with treatment that was very painful. I remember visiting her in the hospital every day before she died and she kept on begging me, and I begged the doctor, to stop the treatments. That’s the trouble with doctors: they start something and it goes on like clockwork. At any rate, both my brothers were also in the Navy. So we were all in uniform and we were all in Buffalo for our mother’s funeral. So we had a photo made of the three of us in uniform. I have it somewhere. I don’t like to look at it but I have it. My brothers were officers. I was just a common sailor.

I was sent in 1943 to Europe. I was put on a ship, a LST, a landing ship, tank. A very exciting crossing. It took us 29 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean because we zigzagged to avoid submarines. We were eternally going in opposite directions. But we somehow got there. At one point we were spotted by German submarines; we saw them on the radar. The Germans didn’t have radars but we had them even on our little boats. Also we had an escort of four destroyers and a flotilla of 12 LST.

I was in the wheel-house. I was made quarter-master. A quarter-master in the Navy has nothing to do with quarters. You are in charge of naval maps and keeping them up to date, and Navy books of ports and so on. And you are in charge of the steering wheel. And you are supposed to be able to take the steering wheel at any time. I told them right away that I didn’t want to steer the boat at all. They said: “But you don’t have to because we got seamen who are just aching to do it and they do it very well.” I was terrified because I’m not a person that you can trust with any kind of commands. Being in the wheel-house was nice because you had also access to the radar. You could see where we were going and the radioman was there so you were in touch at least with the other ships. And we also had a radio there that we could listen to. We could listen to the German propaganda broadcast, which was an interesting way of passing time.

We were also the leading ship in that flotilla. We led the procession and we had on board the commodore. It was an honorary title, he was really a captain only. He was a regular Navy man, most of us were just recruits. We weren’t the official Navy, we were the war-time Navy. So this man was in charge of the fleet. Very pompous old boy. He had a deck-chair and he roped off a certain portion of the upper deck that was his property. And he lay there in his deck-chair. He was on a cruise.

We finally reached the north of Ireland and we were heading towards the river Foyle. This river goes from the North Sea into Londonderry. It’s a little river or a canal. That was our goal. When we got up to the Northern coast of Ireland, there was a very rugged, big rocky formation there. The whole coast is a kind of a rock barrier. So we travelled along that north coast, looking at those rocks, looking for where we were going.

Our radioman could listen to other radiomen talking to each other. At one point, one of the officers of one of the ships, asked the commodore by radio: “Isn’t that where we go in? There seems to be a river there.” And he replied: “When the time comes I will take you by the hand.” He was saying that hoping that somebody would quote that.

So then we were in Londonderry and we stayed there for a month maybe. The town was very nice but the streets were so dirty that you could see the bugs hopping around on the street and the fleas were enormous. The whole crew was very flea-bitten.

Then we went down the Irish Sea into the southern coast of England and stayed at Portsmouth, Weymouth, Falmouth... We were waiting there for the invasion. This commodore was really a sample of high Navy intelligence - absolute stupidity. We did certain exercises over and over again, especially when there was nothing else to do. Fire drills and abandon-ship drills and poison gas drills where you put on a gas mask...all kinds of drills.

So we were sent out to do these exercises one day, the whole fleet going out with our leading ship with the commodore. We did our exercises, we were moving around in the sea. Finally, at the end of the day we got the orders to go to our assigned anchorage. We had a numbered anchorage and the number was on the chart, the navy chart that we had. The commodore took us in and finally gave the order to drop the anchor. We knew we were in the wrong anchorage and we were there quite a while and suddenly we got a message from the British base on the shore saying: “Your ship is on the wrong anchorage”. Ours only, the other ones were all on the right anchorage. They had got their numbers right. Our commodore was given orders from the naval base there. So he gave the order to pull up the anchor. The anchor came up very slowly with a lot of strain and we were all looking to see why. A big canister as round as this and as tall as I am, was hooked on to the anchor, a land mine able to blow up many ships. The anchor had lifted that and it was caught in the anchor. What did he do? He called for the boatswain. And he said: “You have a boatswain chair?” A boatswain chair is a plank with a rope. So he got on the plank and they lowered him down and he was told to take that chain off the hook. There was probably two tons of weight on that chain. So he fiddled around there and a small vessel from the British port came out and saw it. We got the message, not from them, but they had phoned the shore and the shore gave the command to our commodore to leave our anchor and get out of there. We had another anchor, a stern anchor and they said: “You go to the correct anchorage and anchor with the stern anchor.” So we did that. The next morning we left that anchorage and went out and did more exercises.

One morning, we continued our stupid exercises of putting a net overboard, and all kinds of things climbing up a rope ladder and so on. So at the end of the day we were going into the port. And the normal thing is that two small tugs each hold a net that closes the harbour. When somebody wants to pass they back up and take the net with them for you to go through. So those two tugs are normally tied together to close the net completely. We headed straight for the port and disregarded those two tug boats. Our boat was empty and very shallow so it’s a very shallow draft and so we went over the net. The net is all made of cables. The propeller stopped us because it had got caught up. And there we were. The same English had again something to complain about and so they came out with a little boat and looked at the thing. So they sent out a special boat with mechanics there, took off the propeller that was a bit chewed up by the net. Then they liberated us and towed us in. So there we were in dry dock to put on a new propeller. So we had nothing to do and next morning there was a lot of commotion; a lot of ships were changing place and so on. What had happened was that the invasion was the next day. Our commodore knew that.

So we missed the invasion. I know that two of our flotilla sunk in the invasion; everybody on board sunk by German planes. We got a propeller on immediately the same day and we were back in the water, back in action loaded with material and sent to the invasion front. So we made the invasion front a day and a half later. It was all finished. I don’t know whether I’m happy or unhappy. War is a terrible thing. Hitler is a terrible thing.

We went to what was called Omaha beach. That was the name we had for it. We delivered trucks full of materials and telephone poles. Telephone poles for stringing up telephone lines because a telephone is important. War works with the telephone. That was all army equipment. So we got to this beach, we made a peaceful landing there. It was deserted. All the American troops were on their way, they were not hanging around that beach. There was no French population in that area. We had to wait for a tide. We had to come in on a certain tide and wait for the next high-tide to lift us out. And so we took a walk to the interior and came to a little village there. You would think the war was a thousand miles away. People were doing whatever they had to do, just as normal. The fishing boats were out again fishing.

We made several trips like that bringing supplies, trucks and tanks and so on. And coming back we brought German prisoners who were pathetic because Hitler had sent all the old men and children to the front. He didn’t believe that the Allies were going to land there. He fortified another area, I forget where. The German prisoners said: “We practiced saying ‘I surrender’, ‘I surrender’. We tried it on each other, we criticized each other if we didn’t get it right, ‘I surrender’. We had to have a piece of white flag, a white handkerchief, something white.” In 1978 I met a German fellow who was an artist, I met him when I had an exhibition in Solingen. This fellow was originally imprisoned by Hitler for being a socialist. He was imprisoned with socialists and communists. He said: “We were bitter enemies but we were thrown together and we loved each other in prison. Then I was taken out and sent to the front. Then I was captured by the Americans and sent to a prison camp in England. Then the war was over and I was sent to another rehabilitation camp in America. That was endless, years, I’ve been a prisoner for years, political prisoner, soldier prisoner.”

At the end of the war I was sent to Norfolk again and released from there, I think. At any rate, I was in Norfolk and I had my ribbons on my uniform. I looked up and found there was an officer there. So I went in and said: “I want to clear up a situation.” And he said: “Come on in.” And so I said: “I was discharged from a post in Norfolk Navy yard… And I would like to find out whether you have any records of this.” He said: “Oh, This can’t be possible, you are a hero and you are one of our boys in the front and...” So I said: “Look, I’ll wait.” So he went into another room there, came out and didn’t look at me. He more or less turned his back to me and looked out of the window. And he said: “You know, you are not telling me the whole story… You know, you were in an organisation, an organisation that was very dubious.” So I thought he was going to say the Communist Party, but he said:” The Artists Union.” And I said: “That was a professional organisation of a trade there.” But he said: “But it had a reputation of being completely communist directed. We have evidence that it was run directly from Moscow.” I said: “I don’t believe that at all; it was not” and he said: “That’s what we have in our books.” So I said: “What am I to do about it?” He said: “Just do nothing.” I said: “I’d like to clear this up!” He said: “No. Don’t bother clearing it up. If you made a mistake, you’ve repaid the mistake by your service.” I found out at any rate why I got discharged and it was because of a poor old innocent artist union that became a C.I.O. organisation with the nicest bunch of people, the most democratically run organisation that I’ve ever seen. We took a hold on everything. We had meetings that were planned and if you had something to say in the meeting you’d have to schedule it on the agenda before the meeting. And you would have time to give your ideas and your comments on the ruling, or on the project or a plan or an action. It was very, very nice. Two of the leaders of that organisation later died in Spain in the Spanish war, very charming people. So I was finally back in New York and out of the Navy. My wife had continued to keep the business going, in fact, better than I could have. She was much more able than I to take care of the running of the business. I was good at making changes and doing technical things and so on.
 

When I left the Navy and came back to New York after the war, there was a great rehabilitation of the French in every way. Through my wife I became a member of the American Committee whose aim was to aid war orphans of the French Resistance. We adopted a French family (a mother and two children) and sent them regularly packages of one thing and another, books and food. So I had photographs of the children there and they sent little letters and so on. Of course it was a distant thing anyway because after all I was a foreigner. When we, my wife and I, finally came to France in ’49 (several years after the war), we looked up this family and the sponsor of the French Committee. We were met by the mother and the two grown children as if we were foster parents. And this little boy who had never had a father came on to me like a ton of bricks, he was so possessive. I was really almost frightened, you know, because he depended so much on his image of me that I had to somehow rise up to the level of that image. And it was a very good lesson for me knowing that your actions can have a very, very dramatic effect. So I kept in touch with that family for several years. They lived in the suburbs of Paris. I can’t remember exactly where.

The head of the Committee was a French lady, the wife of a Communist who was executed by the Nazis and said before he died: “I lived to bring a thousand better tomorrows.” I will look up his name. His wife was taken prisoner in a Nazi camp and the husband was shot in Paris, because he was some kind of official in the Communist Party.

We had lunch with this lady and met her on several occasions. I remember having lunch with her and at the end of the meal she said: “There I’ve done it again, I‘ve eaten so fast that you must be shocked by the way I eat. I haven’t forgotten the prison camp and we ate fast to make sure that we didn’t leave anything on our plates.” Beautiful woman, lovely woman...

Later on I met Martha Graham because she was also on this committee. I was interested in her from the very first time I saw her work of which I became an ardent supporter. As time went on, I met people more or less in her ‘entourage’, especially Bethsabee de Rothschild who was the daughter of one of the greatest fortunes of the world. She was a supporter of Martha Graham. She furnished a lovely building, a studio that really gave a great deal of emphasis to her career. Marvellous, very, very fine woman this Bethsabee de Rothschild, ultra democratic. As a matter of fact I liked her very, very much. Before I knew Martha Graham I had met some young friends of mine who were dancers in her troupe. And on some occasions after a few glasses of wine, I would dance with them. I thought this a beautiful ‘metier’ and if I hadn’t been an artist I might have become a dancer in Martha Graham’s troupe.

Martha Graham was on this committee to aid the children of the French Resistance and there were a lot of Resistants killed who were fathers, so it a was very necessary and a very active organisation. Martha Graham not only gave her name and sat on the Committee meetings and so on, but played a very active part in that organisation. I was one of the people who aided at the bar and the events that we had. At a certain moment they invited a black singer from Trinidad called the Duke of Iron. There were all noble names there, the Duke of Iron and other nobility. The Duke of Iron was supposed to sing at this evening in an apartment at Park Avenue. I was asked to bring my guitar. It turned out I was supposed to accompany him because he didn’t play the guitar. He said, “Oh, if you can’t do it, I can sing without any music at all.” So I tried it. It was a simple song with repeated verses and really quite simple. He said, “Oh, that’s perfect!” So I accompanied him through this song. He had literature to read concerning the work of the committee and asked us several questions. And he was there scribbling on a piece of cardboard. When he was finally asked to play and I accompanied him, he presented a complete new poetic version of a song written about this committee and its work. The song was perfect in its rhyme and it was interesting and humorous. The hit line of this thing was ‘you must remember that these children are the survivors of children that contributed with their little pennies to make the Statue of Liberty and send it to America’. All that in perfect rhyme and perfect meter and also with the Trinidad accent. That was a great moment for me to accompany such a really fine poet, a fine mind going by the simple name of the Duke of Iron. 

So the post war period started. I threw myself into work. In the Navy, I had tried to do a little drawing and so on. Really, the whole atmosphere was so unartistic. I just put it aside. I did some very nice things in the next few years, quite a lot of work. I exhibited and I sold some things and people thought I was very successful. I wasn’t. I didn’t make enough money to live on. I had this business and it was really a godsend. To do things you have to be a little bit free from money worries. So I had quite an active artistic life then. I was doing sculpture. I enjoyed very much doing things. I really developed my basic talent.

I made some very large sculptures after the war. I made very large more or less cubistic, abstract things that were a sort of training. I did some things directly in plaster, working with wet plaster and a trowel and adding plaster on a net frame.

So I was doing design tiles and at one time I rented or was given space in a studio with two other artists that I knew. And I worked very hard there. It was good to be in a studio with a couple of guys. I liked to have their friendship and support while working and to have them look at things I was doing and see what they thought and so on. They were very nice. One was a painter, a very good and quick draftsman, humorous and so on. He worked for the New Yorker magazine, did all the little designs for the heads of columns which changed constantly. He had a very nice job there and besides that he was doing some paintings and some engravings for himself. The other one was Joe Leboit, a very prolific painter.

Then I had this show in the Rockefeller Center. There was a movement, started I think by our artist union, to make pressure for bringing art into the subways. We interested the director of the Modern Museum who said: “That’s fine. I’ll sponsor that.” So he gave us the date and we got a group of people who made projects for that exhibition and I did one too. My project was a man wheeling a hammer. My relief was regular, this man against the wall. The relief was hung with a tiny space all around it, a bit away from the wall. An electric bulb behind just gave a little halo around the sculpture. My sculpture was chosen for the catalogue and for the invitation. The show was held in the new museum of Modern Art which was in the Rockefeller Center at that time. So that had a great deal of publicity and I benefited from that and I was in all the newspapers. But it’s temporary, it comes and goes. I liked the piece and it was really a sort of new thing to do that, to make back lighting. It was pleasant and there was a very nice group of people.

I also taught for a while. I taught in a school in New York, called the Workshop School of Art. It was a school to teach art to people who were looking for a career as a designer of furniture or a type-setter, branches of art that are more practical and so on. But the authorities in that school decided that these students needed art training, not just commercial training. Art would benefit their career, so I had people who had already had commercial use of art. I was to teach two or three mornings a week and I was asked by the director of the school to do a year’s study of what these sessions would be covering and how I’d bring the students from this to that. I would associate different techniques, different styles, different uses of art to teach these students. I made a planning for the year, working with different media: wire, clay, three dimensional objects, cardboard. We made all kinds of projects. The students were very good. I had a project for example with a certain kind of three dimensional idea made of three different colours of cardboard. I would discuss the thing with the students and they would ask questions and talk about it and so on. I had to provide the utensils, the tools and the material. Before doing anything they would discuss the material and what the possibilities were. “What can you do with a piece of cardboard?” You can roll it to make a tube, you can curve it, you can cut it into different shapes, you can fold it into different shapes, you can paste it together to make all kinds of things by gluing pieces of it together, and all of these suggestions were drawn out by the students. “What can you do with it?” They had to think about it and to decide what they could do with it. There was a very close time schedule that was fifteen minutes. Then we would discuss the tools: what tools do you need, what you can do with them with this particular material: scissors, knife, pencils? Then everybody went to work for about two hours. At a certain point, I had to watch the clock, because they had to put down, clean up and put all the tools away. They had to clear up any mess they had made and line up everything on a long table. Then we had a discussion looking at all these objects without naming the artist. The students learned a great deal by analysing and discussing their work among themselves. They were enchanted with this program. Later on I met some of these students who were very nice to me, very grateful for my education. It was quite a nice experience.

When I started teaching in this school, the director called us all in and said: “Look, we never thought that you have to have a degree or any kind of teaching certificate but the Board of Education is after us because we are running a school and we have to have people that are qualified according to their teaching standards, so you will have to submit to a 25 hours teacher- training course.” We were all a little ego-hurt but we saw we had to do this. “There is no choice , you have to do this or we have to close the school.” So we agreed. They sent us a woman teacher called Miss Darling, if you please. There were six or eight of us in this class. We decided that we would show her that we knew what we were going to do better than she. And that we knew how to teach. So she started by saying very apologetically: “I know it’s difficult for you to do it. It’s only a few weeks, then it’s finished.” And in two sessions she had us eating out of her hand. She was such a brilliant person and had such wonderful ideas on teaching. There was no question about it, we were very happy with her. Quite a lesson there. When the course was over, we gave her a dinner and bought her a present. We bought a book for her, signed by all of us. Miss Darling. A very nice experience. There are a lot of things I learned from her that are still important to me. Very fine teacher. I have a little certificate from that. A certificate from the Board of Education of New York, University of New York. Very good. Then, I forget why it was closed. I don’t know what happened. I had been asked to teach there because I had some reputation.

In my personal life, I was married to Elizabeth. We worked very well together and she took care of the business. I had more or less taken care of the thing when she was going back to University. She took it over when I was in the Navy. She was very good and it worked very well. A very happy business, a very happy team, the most unlikely group of factory workers. So we got along but our marriage was a failure. We were polite and nice to each other. I respected her very much. We got on very well ideologically. I respected her judgement. One day she told me she had decided to ask for a divorce. I agreed. Very difficult to end something especially if you really like the person, you know. I was afraid she was making a very bad decision because she had an affair with a guy very much younger than her. I met him once and I didn’t really trust him. So at any rate, we got a divorce and I had an affair with a very nice girl named Mona. I married her because she said she was pregnant, but I was still in business relationship with Elizabeth. So we split our bank account. We had a few thousand dollars put away. With this new girl I went to Europe for a change and to get away from New York for a while. I thought I was going for a year. I went to see old friends of mine.

I went to visit an artist, Sandy who had been badly injured in the First World War; his jaw had been half shot away. So he was treated by an American doctor living in France after the war. And this doctor who was also a war hero made twenty operations on this artist he liked very much. In the First World War, he was seventeen years old. He tried to get into the American Air Force by lying. They didn’t take him. He wanted to be an air pilot. He went to Canada and he lied and the Canadians believed him. So he got into the Canadian Air Force, went finally to Europe and got into the war and was shot down in a plane. He was hospitalized and the Canadians kicked him out of the service because he was too wounded. Then he became an ambulance driver in the war. He was awarded the ‘Croix de Guerre’ because he had gone out in an obviously impossible situation and brought back many people alive. Sandy lived in Cagnes- sur-Mer, in the South of France and so I went to see him and his wife, a charming Danish woman whose first name was Tusnelda. My wife and I stayed there.

Then I got the key to a house of a friend of his on the condition that I would clean up the house, the garden and get it habitable again. This person had inherited the house and never lived in it. So I found this beautiful house there and did a lot of work on it. I spent a very pleasant year in that house. Cagnes-sur-Mer before World War II had been more popular as an artist colony but it was still a very nice place to live in. Very nice people there, from different nations. I think half the population were foreigners, Dutch and Danes, especially northerners coming down for some sunshine.

At that time, my second wife Mona had inherited some money when her father died, but it was tied up with his debts and problems. So she didn’t get the money and then suddenly she got something. She said: “Let’s buy a house in France.” And I said: “Good”. So we looked for something. We had conflicting ideas. I found a little hotel that we could buy. I thought it would be fun to have a hotel and live on the top floor and have all these people, coming and going visitors and guests, especially in the South of France where people come from all over the place: Italians, French and English... She didn’t like that very much. And we finally settled on a little farm house near Fontainebleau in a town called Ferrières-en-Gâtinais. Very pretty area, very lovely. By the way, my wife didn’t have the baby. I think it was a fairy tale. She had been abandoned by her parents and sent to one boarding school after another. She had had a pretty bad youth and she resented it. Her father divorced her mother and then married a woman who was very nasty to her. Her youth was pretty grizzly, pretty bad. She was a very pretty girl, very nice.

So we found this farm and lived in it for a couple of years. I started working. We had a barn there and I fitted up a corner to work in. I went to Paris now and then. It was about an hour's train ride away. Then my wife got sick. She became very morose and said: “Don’t bother with me.” When I was in Paris, I found a little studio in Montparnasse and she urged me to take this “pied- à-terre” to have a place to keep working. So I did that and I made some friends there. I would come back to this farm once a week or once every other week, for a weekend, and finally we divorced. I think that her brother persuaded her to divorce me. Her brother was a business man, very money conscious and he figured that I was absolutely no good for her. So we divorced and she said: “Well, this property will be yours, I would like to live in it now while I’m in France.” I don’t know why she told me that. We made a paper with her lawyer saying that, but then I went on vacation and I didn’t see her for some time. I went down to the South of France for a vacation and when I came back, I said: “I think I’ll call up.” I went down to Ferrières and found the house closed and locked. The neighbour woman said: “Oh, she left, you know, you know that she left?” I said: “No”. “She left a box with a lot of your things in it.” And she had a box there with books and a few things of mine but by no means all my things. She had sold the house saying that I had disappeared and that she didn’t have my address. She left and went to England. Nothing to do. At any rate, that house belonged to both of us... 

Shortly after the departure of Mona, I met Esther Rachel in Paris who was to be my third wife. She was younger than I and looked younger than she was. She was a very pretty, very simple, innocent and pleasant person. We lived together. I lived in “rue Froidevaux” in Montparnasse. I had found a little studio there. The studio was on the street connected with a bar room at the corner. It was separate but it was their property and they were my landlords. It was a charming little place with very good light and a little balcony with a very nice view over the street into the Montparnasse Cemetery. This little studio was

I did a lot of small sculptures and small drawings. I was really in a formative period, I did a lot of experimentation with forms and lines and I enjoyed it very much and I learned a lot. For example, I have done thousands of small drawings the size of a large postage stamp. These are drawings that show the principal lines in the composition that could be applied to a picture of any size. So I have studied the problem of composition and I love this investigation too. I work with lines and I believe in movement in my work. I had a very good friend, Ben Karp who said: “you have a moving line.” He saw movement in my work. He was a very fine, very interesting man and was a very, very good friend of mine.

Most artists somehow believe that if they just do things mechanically, they will learn and hit on things by accident, and it’s not true. For me, you have to study and try and make a lot of things to find a way of expressing things worth looking at. I believe that an artist takes on the role of a preacher or educator, somebody trying to instil some reaction in people too lazy to think for themselves. I also believe that an artist is basically critical, critical of himself and critical of society, critical of art movements of the past and the present and constantly re-evaluating his view-point. An artist tries do things that draw a response from the viewer, that are either pleasant or interesting or exciting, that have some effect on him. That’s my idea. I don’t know whether I succeed. I believe too that it is a disturbing situation, to think that you are somebody that has better ideas than other people. But it is also very painful to have the problem of working in a vacuum, with an idea of having the potential to make something of value. It is a waste of time to do something that has no value, that has been done before, that has been done better by somebody, that is perhaps not worth doing. It’s very difficult to keep the balance there. On the whole I enjoy my work very much. I don’t miss a day when I don’t work, do something. I buy little sketch books, little yellow books and constantly make drawings. I’m a person that builds with a plan. I make a thing small, then larger and larger, maybe repeating a thing later to do it better, not starting out with a blank canvas and putting some marks on and developing an idea which some artists do very successfully. But it is not my style. I believe that the basis of art is line, is drawing lines; outlines, construction lines and decorative lines and all kinds of lines, a kind of a scaffolding. Then I fill them with contrasting values of colour that introduce some kind of depth and some kind of form to these lines.

After Montparnasse, I moved with my wife, Zoë and new baby Anne born in 1962 to Antibes. That year in Paris was so gloomy. It was a year where I think there were two days of sunshine in the whole summer. Through some friends I located a property in Antibes consisting of a store, a vegetable or general store and an apartment on the first floor. It was originally an old mansion. I had this store and the back room of the store facing another street at the back. The apartment ran between the two streets. I had the two for nine thousand francs a year. I bought a lease and I had to pay the sum every year.

When I arrived there my friends who had found the place for me, said: “Oh, it’s such an ugly place and it’s in such bad shape.” I found what bad shape was. There was wallpaper falling off the walls in some places and cracks in the plaster here and there… Otherwise everything was in perfect order... And my friends thought it was irreparable. It became a very lovely and spacious apartment above the shop and the studio with high ceilings. I found a fire-place, cleaned the chimney, made it work and it was our pleasure and our heating in the winter time. Naturally the store turned into a gallery. My wife liked very much to take care of the gallery so I made a bell. When the door opened, the bell rang upstairs as well, so that she could manage the business of the house and take care of the gallery at the same time. Very few people opened the door but it was open to the public. The gallery was in the lower part of Antibes, a block away from the old port.

While living in Cagnes-sur-Mer, I had often gone to Antibes and liked it very, very much. It was a beautiful town. Very sleepy and very neglected as far as tourism goes because the tourists came only to places with beaches and there were no beaches. There was a tiny little beach so people went preferably to Juan-les-Pins, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Nice. And there weren’t that many tourists. After the tourist business increased and Antibes also became touristy.

So I had a gallery and I set to work doing a lot of drawing and a lot of small things. When I say small, I mean 40 cm large and 40 cm tall. Really, moving to Antibes and taking this old grocery store and turning it into a gallery was a very, very good thing for my career. In the first place, I had some money left from America, but not very much. I had to think of providing food and groceries, and raising my family. So I first put on prices that were minimum gallery prices. I found that people looked at my work, admired it but didn’t buy. So I reduced the prices drastically and people started buying. I sold enough to take care of all these problems of living and I was stimulated to make more sculptures or drawings. Most artists are choked up with material and want to make more but still don’t yield to make things at a reasonable price for ordinary people. So I reduced my prices. The thing was that if I sold a drawing, I thought: “Well I’ll have to get back to the drawing board to do some more.” So I developed a habit of working not just casually, but working seriously, at heart. This helped me to see and think, not just dream up an idea but actually do it in so many gestures, get it finished, ready and mounted and ready to show. This is something in my career that goes back to my early days as a ceramic manufacturer. I had to get things out and shipped on time and so on. All the details had to be taken care of. That is a valuable experience. It enables you to cut short all distractions and put your time to good use. That has influenced my work.

The gallery faced “rue Thuret” and the studio faced the street behind, I forget the name. It had a good name but I forget which. I very much enjoyed the people in the back street. It was sort of an alley, a really very small street. It had a very varied population, old French fogies and gypsies and a tin-smith and an electro-plating outfit. A very nice mixed up place. Also, it was a street no automobiles could go through. It was a playground for children, they came there after school. So outside of my door, I had children playing games, jumping rope and singing songs which I loved. I learned all the French rope-jumping songs from them and from my children. They’re quite elaborate, quite nice. There is a song about ‘Malbrough, s’en va-t-en guerre’. It’s a sad poem, probably from the fifteenth century. The children don’t know at all who he was, they just take it for granted that he was lost in the war and his lover was in a tower and weeping. Beautiful song and they sing that while rope jumping.

So that was my background. I had very good large not transparent glass panel letting in a lot of light. It was very pleasant. I built my kiln and luckily had a vent in the ceiling for an old stove, with a seating for a coal-stove or a wood-stove. I was able to make a sort of contraption to catch the heat and send it up the chimney which was very handy. I brought that over the gas kiln. It worked very well on “Butagaz”. I made it and I was very proud of it. It worked very well.

The beauty of terra-cotta is that you make something in clay and when it’s finished, it’s ready to be fired in the kiln. And when it comes out of the kiln, it is ready to be either enamelled or patinated or waxed or coloured and then ready for sale. Whereas with bronze, when you have finished the model, a cast has to be made. There are seven different steps in the process of bronze casting and they are all expensive. My attitude was that: ‘what is important is the form, not the size or the colour or the material’.

So I exhibited and I’ve had loads of people who have been very happy with my small sculptures. I sometimes sold these sculptures at the price of a machine-made article or because I liked the person or thought that I could make more. Occasionally somebody would come in; they’d seen a little figurine in the window and they would bargain and barter. And in a couple of cases, I’ve had people that have bought a sculpture to put on top of the television set, on a doily, a little mat. The top of a television set is usually a little curved, so it’s very dangerous. So these people brought back the broken piece which I would glue together.

I was friendly with the neighbours there... So one day, a very interesting Tuareg woman brought an Arab candle-lamp in terra-cotta, all lace-work giving a light and shadows all over the room. It was in many pieces. She asked: “Would I put it together? I kept every piece because it was the heart of my house.” I put the pieces together.

I was friendly with the neighbours there... So one day, a very interesting Tuareg woman brought an Arab candle-lamp in terra-cotta, all lace-work giving a light and shadows all over the room. It was in many pieces. She asked: “Would I put it together? I kept every piece because it was the heart of my house.” I put the pieces together.

I met a lot of nice people thanks to the gallery. I met a group of young Parisians who came down to Antibes with the idea of showing their work in the summertime. They had some kind of a barrack they rented and advertised their exhibit all around, waiting for the tourists to come. But the tourists didn’t come down that street at all. At any rate, I met a very nice group of young artists there and I remained friends with two or three of them all my life. 

While I was living in Antibes, I spent quite a bit of time in Rome around the seventies. A sculptor that I liked very much, Herzl Emanuel, was there in Rome. He was a very interesting man and he had married a very beautiful model who was the daughter of a very rich man. Everything went very well, he married this girl and the father of the girl gave him a bronze foundry in Rome. It’s true that the foundry was old and very dilapidated but it was a working foundry. I worked with him when I had some work to cast in bronze; he gave me very good prices and very fine treatment. In return I learned a lot about the bronze foundry business and I was very helpful because I spoke reasonable French and English. And most of the ‘clientèle’ were American, French or English. When he was away, it was handy to have me as a sort of a ‘presence’ there… I also learned the language of the foundry working man. I respected those workers very, very much.

They were very interesting and very nice. They had started as apprentices and by the time they were twenty, they were experts in all aspects of the bronze casting activity. I had a very special friend there, a little short man dressed in rags. (The workers clothing was subject to spillages and accidents of all kinds so they wore old fantastic clothes that they bought in the ‘marché aux puces’.) He was called Remo and I learned a great deal from him about Rome and bronze casting and all sorts of human activity. He was a very intelligent man dressed in shabby clothes. One day I was talking to him and he somehow brought up his father. His father was a bronze caster, naturally, but his grandfather wasn’t. So I said, “What did your grandfather do?” And he said: “He was an executioner for the Pope, for the Vatican.” The Vatican had the right to extermination... Very nice boys. I would like to go back and see what has happened.

My friend got weary of the life of a bronze caster and arranged the transfer of the bronze casting to the workers. The foundry bore his name ‘Foundry Emanuel’ and he left it to them. He said: “Oh, it’s not worth very much.” He was quite prosperous at that time so he gave it to his workmen. And he is my idea of the sculptor. I liked him very, very much. He did sculptures more or less abstract of characters from Shakespeare, very, very nice. And he tried to get the particular quality of their personality, very charming.

I met in Antibes another friend who was born on the same day as I, a German man, Werner Veith. He was a professor in a famous German University. In Hitler’s early days, he was successful in getting all of the Jewish professors out of the University and onward to America. He was working with some American friends and he organised the whole thing. He was marked by Hitler but the Nazis didn’t do anything to him because he had a great position as being a law expert and was very highly regarded in educational circles. So he remained in Germany. He was one of the few people who were allowed to travel freely.

He did a great deal of work in South America, much lecturing and so on, very interesting. I asked him: “Do you speak all these languages?” He says: “Well I speak a little Spanish but I really don’t speak Portuguese. One day, I was in some place and I met a man that I liked very much from what I saw but we couldn’t really speak together and then suddenly we found out that we both knew ancient Greek very well. We carried on a conversation writing in Greek. It was so wonderful for me because it brought back to me my first days learning Greek. Wonderful language.” His love of this language inspired me and I regret very much that I had never studied Greek because it’s the foundation of everything we know.

I stayed with Werner Veith and his wife. And he organised an exhibit for me in 1977 in the town where they lived in Solingen in Germany. Solingen is traditionally the town of making cutlery and silverware and umbrellas. He married a woman from Solingen and that’s why he was living there and she was the daughter of one of those families of the cutlery business. In fact this cutlery business made the first folding umbrellas. So he organised an exhibition for me in the museum of Solingen. He said: “You can bring all you have.” So I brought something like three hundred different drawings and small sculptures and set up a wonderful show there with a very nice man there who was the director of that museum. It was a very nice exhibit and very successful. I made enough money there to last a couple of years.

During the war he was listed as anti-Nazi and was in contact with the Americans and English at the end of the war. He became one of the members of the temporary German government set up by the English and American forces. He was also one of the founders of the U.N. Childrens Fund. A very nice man. I think it’s a great thing to have such beautiful people in your life. 

After spending 16 years in Antibes, I split with Esther Rachel and moved to Arles in 1978. The interesting thing is that I found myself living in a house on the ‘Quai de la Roquette’ a street I had visited thirty years earlier. I had admired these old houses and almost everything was empty there because the railroad had come. Before that, the ‘Quai de la Roquette’ had been a place where people unloaded ships. All traffic was by river. When the railroad came it became a slum and it was always a rough neighbourhood of working men, sailors and ship-loaders and so on. When I came here again in 1954, I did a lot of walking there in the lower part. And at that time, there was still much prostitution in that neighbourhood, as well as gangsters… The ‘rue du 4 Septembre’ was fifty percent bars and cafés and really a little dangerous, a little off limits, and somebody well-dressed might get mugged there. There was a feeling of insecurity.

There was a little street coming off the ‘Quai de la Roquette’ and the second house in that street had a very interesting entrance; At one side there was a room with a large window. I said: “My God, it’s not a shop!” It was a brothel with a woman in the window to attract customers. Until early in the twentieth century Arles was a military base with large barracks. So Arles having a reputation for being a wild, open town, many people came to slum from nearby Marseille. I met young artists in Arles. There were only a few, because really it was a very difficult town for an artist to penetrate. At that time there were no galleries and today there are practically no galleries. But I’ve had some very nice young friends here; some of them are talented too.
 

I would like to share with you some thoughts about art. The trouble with the system of course is that art is over-magnified as a kind of a sub-religion, something holy and very, very precious, very secretive, that you can only understand if you have a lot of money. That is very bad for art. In fact money is bad for art. The idea of art being sold for money is already difficult. James Joyce said that art should be as free as sunlight and morning air. And he wrote a book of poems called: ‘Poems, Penny each’. There were 200 poems in it and it sold for 20 shillings. So the poems were really a penny each. I think James Joyce is another important person in my life. His ‘Ulysses’ is a gigantic very important book with a depth of understanding. I enjoy it very much. Of course he is a wonderful student of English language and he knows English and Irish history down to very, very fine points, almost going back to legends. I belonged to the ‘Joyce Society’ in New York when I was young. Joyce was considered firstly a pornographic author. My first copy of Joyce was smuggled in from England because I had friends that were very enthusiastic about this book which was forbidden in America. Hard to believe, it’s so profound with such research and so elegant, with a highly developed style and language. It’s hard to believe that such a jewel of literature could be forbidden.

Another author that in recent years has interested and influenced me very much is I.F. Stone. He was a newspaper reporter turned into a critic of the society. He had written commentaries on World news and American news. He wrote a newsletter -a personal interpretation of what was going on- that I received for many years in America. When he retired from that, he wrote a book called ‘On the Trials of Socrates’ and I have it. In order to write this book about Socrates, he studied Greek at the age of seventy and he learned well enough to read all the Greek classics that he needed. He devoted himself to studies of Greek democracy. He was a very fine writer, a great man. I very much regret that I never studied Greek as a child. Not Latin but Greek. Because Greek is the language of research and great literature.

That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy. During my later life, I have been very interested and motivated by the image of Greece and of democracy that was born there. The Greeks were living in a world where war, slavery and domination were common. Even the Greek nation thought that war and the results of war were inevitable, that this was not to be discussed. They believed in peace but they believed in peace as a rest from war. Even the Greeks had slaves so the question was brought up in Greece during the democratic periods “Why not let the slaves also come to these meetings?” And it never happened and it was obviously a fault of the Greeks not to extend democracy to the slaves. The idea of conquest and war was embedded and any country that didn’t do that would be completely powerless, overrun and conquered by others. My political relation to democracy dates back to my first years of history in the Grammar School in the seventh or eighth grade. My American history teacher had a Scotch name Mac something, Mac Man, or Mac Mahan. She explained very well the choice of leaders of the American Revolution, in between Democracy and Republicanism. Democracy called for meetings open to everybody. She said it was felt there was no possibility of that because the country was already too big to be governed by one city or one area and that it would be terribly difficult to get national agreement on any one question fast enough. And she said: “But we are in America, now we are at the threshold of a new age because education has reached a point where these problems will be solved and we will one day be democratic. Meanwhile we have republicanism which is a gesture towards democracy. It’s just a question of participation.” So this was a thing that very much impressed me.

And all my life I have been thinking of these simple facts that democracy is much better and differs greatly from republicanism. The Roman Republic was formed to co-exist with the rule of the Caesars, so when Nero was in charge of Rome with the most treacherous and brutal force, Rome was also a democracy. But democracy was completely silenced by the Royal command of the Caesar. Although he was obviously crazy. He killed his mother, his wives and his brother. And nobody dared to stop him. But the government was still a Republic. It co-existed with being a brutal monarchy and a republic with the voices of certain voters.

As a matter of fact, in America there were only men and only white men voting. So it was not very broad even for the things they claimed. Now really republicanism is a bad substitute for democracy. The trouble is that we have an institution. We glorify these things without any thinking, without any reason. We take pride in the Republic. The word has some magic meaning for us, because we have decided that it’s ours. And because it’s ours it must be good. And because it exists and that it’s the only thing we accept it on the basis of them being ours. The saying: ‘my country, right or wrong’ is absolutely stupid but is considered logical. Patriotism, somebody said, was the name of a scoundrel. Patriotism is scoundrelly.

Come to think of it, flags are also overrated objects. Each country has a different rag of different colours and so on and they attribute this to God knows what. It almost becomes a holy relic. A flag is nothing but a piece of coloured cloth. And people are going to die for that cloth. It’s ridiculous. Because of patriotism, you have people doing terrible things, serving their government whether it is right or wrong. I must not do what is good for my government but what is right for people.

Another thing about patriotism, it is impossible, especially in America, to talk about love of your country. It is impossible to love that much, thousands and thousands of miles of territory and thousands of towns. It’s possible to be somewhat patriotic or somewhat proud of a town or of your neighbourhood maybe of your county. You ought to be proud of what is done, because if there is something good done by a group of people, you’ve got to give them credit for it. Also a government of a big country becomes too complicated. It lives on being complicated. Complications are there to hide the corruption that is inevitable in such a government. In fact the governments of today are run as a business and the politicians in charge are paid and favoured to see that the government continues that way...

I have been thinking about the question of the content of art because really what I most want to do is explain myself as an artist. And that’s really difficult to do to the general public without boring them.

Of course there is an old saying that a person can be a ‘Jack of all trades and a master of none’. It might be true but I believe that a human being should not be limited to being one thing only. For example I sing, I like to sing. I don’t want to become a singer but I enjoy singing. And I can sing very well, I have a tremendous memory for songs. I enjoy it and I do it. At a certain point I wrote a lot of poetry. I have written a couple of plays because I wanted to try them, I wanted to see. I don’t regret that at all. You have time for everything if you want to do it. If you have interest in doing something, you should do it. And these things are all interlocking. These things that you learn in one field are helpful in another. Don’t ask me how but they are. And there is no time wasted. When I was young, Jane Keaters wanted me to become an actor. I worked in the theatre as a volunteer artist painting scenery. She saw that I came to all the rehearsals and that I was interested. And she tried to get me to become an actor. I was very timid but that wasn’t all. I was also very wary of becoming trapped in a thing that is very, very possessive. If you’re an actor you are in a group apart, really. I was very careful not to become an actor. If you have a successful show that goes on for two years it must be terrible to come every night and put on the same make-up and say the same words. I love the theatre. I read and reread Shakespeare which is the greatest theater in our language.

In my work as an artist, I have observed other artists and myself to see what really motivates our activity as artists. In the first place, I am old-fashioned enough to believe that art has something to do with beauty and also that it has the possibility of bringing light to certain cloudy things, of making clear something that is ‘caché’ or clouded. Now the average artist of today is very concerned with expressing himself and I don’t believe in that at all. I don’t believe in expressing yourself, you can’t help expressing yourself. That is something that is normal. You talk and you are expressing yourself, you walk and you are expressing yourself. You don’t have to have any ‘volonté’ to accomplish these things. The other thing, of course, is that art for many, many centuries has been the exclusive property of the very, very wealthy and they had a taste for a certain kind of art. In the Renaissance they loved to have their portraits painted by artists and the connexion with artists was a little more real at that time because they were all soldered together by the Catholic Church. The Church saw art as a wonderful means of spreading the gospel, of spreading religion. The artist made these folk tales and stories of the Bible come alive in flesh and in costume of the Italy of that day. So that you see simple people playing the part of important characters. The other subject that appealed to rich patrons of art was the military deeds of their country and of themselves. They enjoyed for many years pictures of battles and conquests. All of these things are historically interesting as documents but they are a little aside from the problem of making art. Art is not just luxury. It is sometimes just the opposite, it is sometimes degradation and sometimes you find subject in very desperate conditions, desperate attitudes, desperate stories.

When I was a young artist at the art school, I was in a sculpture class and we were very concerned with the Renaissance at that time. We were very ready to make our heroes Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, great artists. Then, I had a German sculpture teacher who was a refugee from Germany. He got out and came to America with his wife. He was modern in a very Germanic way, very bold and very serious. He believed in exaggeration of forms to get more interest in them. So I progressed and we discovered the artists of modern art but we were also a little influenced by the reception it got in the American press. These artists were considered adventurous and egotists and perhaps a little worse. At a certain point we discovered Van Gogh and the sculptor Brancusi...

In my artistic career, everything I’ve thought about, I’ve done. I’ve done realistic and other things inspired by all sorts of “motifs” and images and all sorts of senses of touch and balance and so on. I believe that work is a key to happiness, not slavish work, not when it becomes a torture,. And also when you work at something, you enjoy the work of others. You have a better perception. An artist looking at art has a different response than another person because he compares it with what he does. He has a very strong feeling when he looks at a great work of art for the first time. I have had a response to that in a way that is almost physical, almost like a blow, like a dizzying quality, an elation. I remember this happening some times in museums. Really, I’ve experienced this looking at a piece of work that has some kind of direct message over and above any kind of explanation. And it’s not analytical. It’s something that is quite mysterious. Because that can happen with art you don’t particularly like other examples of, but that one just sets you off, just looking at it, it hits you in a certain way. I remember the first time I looked at Picasso’s Guernica was in a newspaper clipping, black and white, about two columns wide and not very, very clear… And from that newspaper clipping I had that feeling: “This is a marvel.” I admired Picasso but not that much.

I am busy these days on a concept that is very important and very logical for the final years of my career. One of the problems of art has also been the problem of creating art in space, especially sculpture. Sculptors were very conscious of the fact that what they created, existed in space. It can be seen from all sides and takes its place in space gracefully. Now the expert in extending this theory was Brancusi. He made a sculpture that he called ‘a Bird in Space’ and he was very conscious of the fact that space was to be penetrated by sculpture and that sculpture must exist in space.

So I have been working on the use of space as a component of the work itself. In other words, space enclosed in form in some way becoming a part of the sculpture or creation as well. When one has a flat object it is two dimensional; bent, it becomes three-dimensional. Three- dimensionality is caused by the space that is enclosed within this object. And that concept of space put into practice produces all sorts of things. And as I continue in this line of modelling and of making objects that conform to this idea, I find that it is very, very stimulating to the creative spirit. When you’re working with this mental concept of space every day, it becomes so simple that you are almost able to see the space you are creating. It almost becomes visible.

At any rate, whether this is just a theoretical manoeuvre or idea, or not, whether it’s a real or simply imagined idea, it is very stimulating as a part of artistic creativity. For me this is reality, that this space is something that makes a new concept of sculpture possible. There are many ways in which the uses that I have made of this are mostly abstract. A painting that anyone considers as completely realistic is also an abstraction in the sense that it is the space translated to a simple plane. It is not penetrable, so sculpture has the advantage of being in depth, of having dimensions. I think it’s a valuable thing for art and I enjoy this very, very much and that is a sign that it is also worth doing. So that’s what I have been doing lately and I’ve been working with small models of this concept. And I’m now in the process of doing some larger things. By small models I mean 20 to 30 cm tall. Now I want to make it somewhat larger. That’s my project. The difficulty with my project is that I’m not able to move around as well as I should, as I could before.