Painters Painting (1972) - full transcript
The definitive documentary on the New York School Painters. Featuring footage of all the major figures of the New York Art Scene between 1940-1970, showing many of the artists before they became famous.
(P.Leider) The problem of American painting
had been a problem of subject matter.
Painting kept getting entangled in
contradictions of America itself.
We made portraits of ourselves
when we had no idea who we were.
We tried to find God in landscapes
that we were destroying
as fast as we could paint them.
We painted Indians as fast
as we could killed them.
And during the greatest
technological jump in history,
we painted ourselves as a
bunch of fiddling rustics.
By the time we became social realists,
we knew that American themes were not
going to lead to a great national art.
Not only because the themes themselves
were hopelessly duplicitous
but because the forms we used to embody
them had become hopelessly obsolete.
Against the consistent attack
of Mondrian and Picasso,
we only had an art of half truth,
lacking all conviction.
The best artists began to yield
rather than kick against the pricks.
And it is exactly at this moment,
when we finally abandon the hopeless
constraint to create a national art,
that we succeed for the first time
in doing just that.
By resolving the problem forced on painting
by the history of French art
we create for the first time
a national art of genuine magnitude.
And if one finally had to say what it was
that made American art great,
that was that American painters took
hold of the issue of abstract art
with a freedom they can get
from no other subject matter.
And finally, made high art of it.
(Hess) I think one of the big problems
of American art
is that it is American.
And what is American?
How can you be an artist, not a
provincial, but still American?
After all, you are here.
Artists like deKooning and Newman
saw this with immense sophistication
and moved into what i would call
a cosmopolitan plane.
When deKooning first came into this
country in the late 1920s, early 1930s,
there was practically no American
art world.
For all intents and purposes
it didn't exist.
And deKooning came over here as
a European, a trained European artist,
and was caught in the bind that all the
other American modernists were trapped in.
(deKooning) Well, I felt a certain
depression over there [the Netherlands].
I mean I felt caught,
small nation.
I went to Belgium and
worked for a while.
The American movies always being,
the Paramount movies, all that movies,
..Warner Brothers movies..
It [America] seemed to be
a very light place.
Of course, I didn't know that
movies were all taken in California.
But everything seemed to be very
light and bright and happy.
You know, particularly the comedians
like Harold Loyd and
Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix.
I always felt like I wanted to come to
America, even when I was a boy.
(Hess) His first pictures
were abstractions,
more or less geometric,
more or less hard-edged,
more or less bright colors.
From there he moved into
a series of men:
poetic, tattered, romantic,
poor looking man,
tragic, haunted man.
Certainly there's an idea of
the Depression.
And of the breadlines, and of the hoboes
and the bums,
and of the tragedy of
the unemployed in these pictures.
(Pavia) Roosevelt [WPA] thought we should
decorate all public buildings,
which was a marvelous idea.
And we should hire these artists
by the week. And which he did
- 23 dollars 90 cents.
He hired a lot of artists and you have
to had some background to be in on it.
And we're all trained and schooled.
There weren't that many artists.
It was a very lonely
profession at the time.
So we decorated airports, public
schools, terminals; whatever you had.
That was the function -
adore the public buildings.
(Newman) I felt the issue in those
years was:
What can a painter do?
The problem of the subject
became very clear to me
as the crucial thing in painting.
Not the technique, not the plasticity,
not the look,
not the surface.
None of those things meant that much.
Those things, I suppose, could
find them their way,
but the issue for me,
and I think it existed for
all the fellows that,
you know, for Pollock
for Gottlieb.
What we're gonna paint?
I think the best distinction has been made
by Professor Meyer Shapiro,
who was talking about subject
in painting.
He made a distinction between
what he calls the object matter.
For example, people think that
Cezanne's objects were the apples.
Well, it's possible to argue that
that's what it is
and for a long time
I was very antagonistic to
those apples,
because they were like superapples.
They were like cannon balls.
I saw them as cannonballs.
But he does talk about..
but Meyer..
And making a distinction between
the subject of a work
and the objects in the work
I think, make say, remarkable distinction
that should help people
understand
that even though, let's say
my painting as it developed,
didn't have any of those objects,
that did not necessarily mean therefore,
that there was no subject there.
(Hess) America was a backwater,
Paris was the center of modern art,
then the war intervened and
Paris was sealed off,
which turned the New York scene
into kind of pressure cooker,
of which a number of American
artists found their own way.
(Geldzahler) Jackson Pollock was one of
the major American artist in the 1930s,
who worked for the WPA.
Pollock felt, and said explicitly too,
that it was time for painting to go
from the easel,
from the small picture,
which was within the confines of
the window frame
to the mural,
to the wall-sized picture.
He did the painting here
on the floor,
working on it from all four sides
the way the Navajo Indians did
their sand-painting in the desert.
Pollock was from the West and
knew about Navajo Indian traditions.
And he painted gesturally,
not just brushstrokes
or the wrist moving,
but the whole arm moving
across the canvas.
As you can see how the
gesture encloses itself
again and again to make
the entire design of the picture.
It isn't just arbitrary.
If you look at the corners, at the
bottom, to the sides of the picture,
you see that the design continues
to close in and refer itself to itself.
Let's say, it's continuous,
gestural, balletic design
like choreography, perhaps.
The painting, the mural, the canvas
becomes a field of action,
in which the artist makes his gestures.
(Motherwell) One has no
conception of
looking at the finished works,
you know, the madness
the risk, nerves
things on the edge, this.
It seems to oneself why
one's actually making them.
So they seem perfectly supreme
and ordered after their time.
And I think all of my generation,
the most of my generation,
to critics, express them as such.
(Greenberg) Pollock is still taken
for this example of far-autism.
The people who admire him most
on the New York scene that day,
don't take him as a painter.
They take him as an example
of a successor,
an artist in the line
of Duchamp.
Someone who knocked,
knocked you flat
with his arbitrariness.
(Kramer) The whole Pollock phenomenon is
a kind of symptomatic one
in that his position is
based on certain idea of art history,
an idea of art history that
the museum, collecting,
criticism, art market,
is all geared to,
and that is what one might call
the heroism of the big breakthrough.
(Kramer) Pollock was a very
intense personality
but he wasn't a great artist.
His work like the work of
all the New York school
is based on, well to
put it in elegantly,
a kind of a mopping up
operation of School of Paris.
It puts together certain
remnants of Cubism, Surrealism
and attempts to charge them with
another kind of energy,
which, in turn,
requires a larger format
and a bigger gesture,
because something is
being drawn to an end.
(Kramer) I see the whole Abstract
Expressionism phenomenon,
and Pollock in particular,
as a kind of last gasp of
modern European modernism.
(Greenberg) Pollock's paintings
live or die in the same context
as Rembrandt's or Titian's
or Velazquez's.
There's no interruption,
there's no mutation here.
Pollock asked to be
tested by the same eye,
that could see how good
Rafael was when he was good.
(Newman) I feel that I'm
American painter in the sense that
this is where i grew up,
live, was born
and where I developed
my ideas and so on.
At the same time I hope,
that my work transcends the
issue of being American.
I recognize that I'm American
because I'm not a Czechoslovak.
And my work was not painted
in Czechoslovakia
or in Hungary or in India.
But I hope that my work
can be seen and understood
on a universal basis.
That it is a language,
that is over nature
That it doesn't
have the necessity
for its American labels.
But all these issues in the
end whether it's American
or whether it's painterly or
whether it's..are false issues
raised by aesthetes.
I expressed myself on this
issue many many years ago.
When at a conference
between aesthetes
and artist I said
to these aesthetes,
that even if they're right
and even if they can build
an aesthetic analysis
or aesthetic system that would explain
art or painting or whatever it is
it's of no value, really,
because that aesthetics is for me
like ornithology must
be for the birds.
(deKooning) I don't think painters
have particularly bright ideas.
(deAntonio) What do they?
(deKooning) I guess the painting things..
Not such a bright idea
for Monet to paint those haystacks
at different hours of the day
(Hess) A series of women in the late
1930s and early 1940s
seemed to be searching
for a way out of the European crisis,
or the crisis of art.
He was trying to find forms and instead
of finding them in abstractions,
like the circle for a clock,
he'd found them in an elbow or a shoulder
and try to create his own elbow or
his own shoulder
or his own eyes.
And he moved from there
into a series of abstractions.
And this was his really
revolutionary move.
He got rid of color,
the abstractions were black and white.
To everyone's intense surprise
as soon as he had mastered
his black and white pictures,
he stopped them and began
to paint women again.
(deKooning) I found to make it
easy for myself
to put something right
in the center of the canvas,
like a head, two eyes,
and a nose and arms and feet.
I had a lot of mouths cut out of magazines,
and I noticed that when I had something,
a photographic image
like this, the mouth,
it gave me a point of reference.
It was something to hold on to.
(Hess) He'd just cut it out of
a newspaper ad,
this was a "Lucky Strike- be kind
to your T zone" or maybe it was Camel.
It was a woman's mouth,
and that was the area around which -
let's say it was an eye of the hurricane.
(deKooning) I pasted it and
it hit me and it was a shock.
Then I knew where I had to go,
more or less.
I also felt that everything
ought to have a mouth.
I mean, I think that was very funny.
But I think a mouth is
a very funny thing,
because you do everything with it.
With your ear you only hear, your eye only..
you don't put spinach in your eye, for instance.
A mouth is a very stunning thing to me.
And of course the woman's
mouth is very appealing.
It's interesting, though, that
I could only do it with a woman.
I couldn't do it with a man.
Like the Japanese, they make those
monstress scowling, you know
what I mean.
I guess because I'm not a woman.
No, I began with the woman because
it's like a tradition, like the Venus.
This is like Olympia, like Manet
made "Olympia" [1863].
You take a brush and
take up some paints
and make somebody's nose out of it.
It's kind of absurd,
not doing this, this is absurd.
(deAntonio) You paint it right on the paper
and then.. (deKooning) Yeah.
(deAntonio) And then what happens?
(deKooning) Then they're pasted
on the linen.
You make a such a beautiful job,
because I think it's better than
painting on canvas.
(deAntonio) You are a serious
paint inventor.
(deKooning) Very much, yeah.
(deAntonio) What is painter
remain?
(deAntonio) Well, I think,
it's done with a brush.
I have three sizes.
Those are all the big ones,
oh, here are the little ones..
And I use those..
And then I make those
large landscape pictures,
so called landscapes.
I work with very wet brushes.
Those kind of brushes you
use when you paint a ceilling -
it's drips all over you.
They're made out of a fiber
and very little hair.
Like I put them in boiling
water until they get kind of rubbery.
It gives me great comfort
to paint with them.
Paint can get some kick,
that I used some newspapers
to flatter them out on the canvas,
to absorb the oil out of it.
When I took it off,
I saw
the back-print of the papers, and I
thought I was nice. That's about all.
It had no social significance that way,
you know,
like Rauschenberg used it or something.
I was just an accident.
(deAntonio) How old were you when
you has your first one man show?
(deKooning) 44.
(Newman) I had my first one man
show in 1950, I was 45 years old.
(deAntonio) In 1943, Hans Hofmann
had his first one man show,
at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, the
art of this century, in New York.
It wasn't until he was 65 years old.
Hofmann, as he put it later,
spent all his decades
sweating out cubism.
(Pavia) All the language and
all the criticism
in American art came from the
idea of the two-dimensional plane,
the push and the pull.
All these were Hofmann's words
he gave to his students.
(Greenberg) Hofmann had a great
responsibility
in the fact that he kept, let's
say, artists like Matisse,
in the forefront of attention.
At the time his stock was down,
Hofmann had this sense of continuity.
with the past, the whole past was there,
even when you didn't consciously know it.
Hofmann was very unsure of
himself the way everybody is.
He showed it, he wrote it out
because he were the way
other people didn't.
I think Hans got into high
gear sometimes around '54, '53.
So he painted some great
pictures in '42,'43.
Anticipations of Pollock,
anticipations of Still.
(Motherwell) As you know, the movement
is, such as it is,
it is usually called
Abstract Expressionism.
I think very few of the artists involved
were really interested in the Expressionism.
And I think the, so called,
expressionist element has to do
with a certain anxiety
and a certain violence,
that, I think, certainly is
in American situation.
Would you say the Abstract Expressionism
was the first American art
that was filmed with anchor,
as well as beauty.
And from that stand point,
the point of inherent,
was the most balf one and
Alfred Barr has told me
the most hated expression ever
to appear in this country,
by other artists.
(Newman) We had no general public
the only thing that we did have
was the opportunity of seeing
each other in shows
And between '47 and '52
you might say Betty Pasons
Charlie Egan and in
some extent Sam Kootz
but the only places
where any of us had
an opportunity
of presenting ourselves,
of showing our work.
It was not, in that sense,
a true marketplace.
It was not necessary
even a showing place.
It was a primitive
cultural situation,
in a sense that in honest
we each lived in lower art studios.
And then there were just a
few isolated places
with someone that would suit with the work.
And there was the open door
and that's all that was.
(Motherwell) My presume
was that one of the most
ideal circumstances
was at Peggy Guggenheim's
gallery called
"The Art of This Century".
All the abstract pictures
had their frame taken off,
there were hung on poles
and universal joints
so you could actually take hold of
Mondrian and
turn it, swivel it into
the light
and so on, and really
use it with same familiarity
that one does in a library
rather than standing like
one does in a museum
at a distance, awestruck
before this altar.
And "The Homely Protestant" [1948]
was the result
of all kinds of revisions.
I mean, it's what's left over.
After revising, revising
and revising.
There always was meant to be
a figure in it.
You might have a difficulty in
finding a title for the picture,
in my despair of finding
the title for the picture.
So I think titles are important.
I like titles that lead
into the picture.
In this particular picture,
which puzzled me,
I wanted an accurate title
but couldn't find one.
I remembered the Surrealist device,
which I'd never used before,
of taking a book, and it had
to be a favorite book,
so I took Joyce and
opened it at random.
Without looking at it, I
put my finger on the page
and where my finger rested
it said, "The Homely Protestant",
and I thought "Of course".
The picture is "The Homely Protestant",
which is to say, it is myself.
(deAntonio) Why do we seem
to get involved
bigger and bigger paintings
with the American artist of today?
(Motherwell) Oh, there are lots of
reasons for that.
The scale of America is different.
I would say that most American painters
work in what where once small factories,
whereas European artist work
either apartments or studios
that were designed
in terms of the scale of
easel painting.
There's no doubt, too,
that there's a different experience
in a large picture.
But I think it has more to do
with a heroic impulse
as compared with the intimacy
of French painting.
(Newman) My first painting
where I felt that I had
moved into an area
for myself, that
was completely me,
I painted on my birthday,
birthday in 1948.
And it's a small red painting
and I put a piece of tape
in the middle.
And I put my so called "zip",
people which I would prefer to call.
Actually, it's not a stripe.
The thing I would like to say about
that is that I did not decide,
either in '48 or '47 or '46 or
whatever it was, to say to myself,
I'm going to paint stripes.
I did not take an arbitrary
abstract decision.
I suppose I thought of them
as streaks of light.
When I painted this painting
which I call "Onement",
I stayed with that painting
about eight, nine month,
wondering to myself what had I done.
What was it?
And I realized that up until then
whenever I used that attitude
I was filling the canvas
in order to make that thing
very viable.
And suddenly in this particular
painting "Onement" I realized that
I had filled the surface.
It was full.
In that painting I've
got rid of atmosphere.
That stroke made the thing
come to life.
(Motherwell) Chance is not a primary idea
with me, nevertheless it is true
that the "Open series" I
discovered it entirely by chance.
One day I put a small
vertical canvas
against a large vertical canvas,
observing the smaller canvas against
the larger one
I thought "What a beautiful proportion".
And without a second thought, I picked
up a piece of charcoal
and outlined it
on the larger picture.
In the opening handings,
among other things, I'm involved in scale.
And I've investigated
small scale, large scale
would make, I've made as small
as five to seven inches.
The largest so far is
eighteen to twenty feet.
I've decided not deliberately,
but it has come up that way,
that I would like to see wine back
in that painting,
starting with the whole surface,
beginning to divide it,
rather than I did with many years,
beginning with the image and
integrating it onto this surface.
(Newman) I feel that my zip does
not divide my painting.
I feel that it does the exact
opposite.
It does not cut the format in half
or in whatever parts.
It unites the thing.
It creates a totality.
That is, you get .. You see it.
You look at it and you see it.
And if you don't, there's nothing
to walk into it. It's not a window,
leading you into a situation,
where you walk through
some interior or exterior world,
from which you then come
to a conclusion.
The beginning and the end
are there at once.
Otherwise, a painter is a kind of
choreographer of space.
He creates a kind of
dance of elements, of forms,
and it becomes a, might say,
interactive art
or it becomes a narrative art
instead of a visual art.
When you see a person,
you have an immediate impact,
you don't have to really start
looking at details.
Your first reaction when you
meet a person for the first time
is immediate and
it's a total reaction,
in which the entire personality
of a person
and your own personality make contact.
And to my mind, that's almost
almost a metaphysical event.
If you have to stand there examining
the eyelashes and all that sort of thing,
it becomes a cosmetic situation,
in which
you remove yourself from the
experience.
(Motherwell) In some way it's easier
to say
what I'm doing by saying
what I'm refusing to.
And if I look at one of the pictures
"Open series"
I see that I refuse to have
a ??? rather than ???.
There're no ???
there's very little representation,
the space is ambivalent
and that the line is cluey
joint on a flat surface,
nevertheless from a certain distance
the shape also swims in an airly space
I refuse to have the surface
impersonally painted.
But my touch is on the surface
everywhere.
There're enormous differences
in the ground,
in terms of thickness, thinness,
rhytm, or flatness, et cetera.
All reflection I do, I use
orange round window sash brushes.
All which I do by
a pressure of the brush.
bringing it back and forth
in terms of thickness and thinness.
Sometimes I let the brushstroke
be very visible
and the other time it's very neutral.
(Newman) There's no question that
my work and the work of men I respect
took the revolutionary position
you might say
against the bourgeois notion of
what painting is as an object,
beside what it is as a statement.
Because ??? even contained
an ordinary bourgeois home.
NEWMAN'S STUDIO
AT HIS DEAD
(Newman) There's more to the problem,
it seems to me
than any old-fashioned idea
of what an easel painting is.
A painting can be bigger than anything
that can go on an easel,
and still be, in my opinion,
an easel painting.
And in the end,
size doesn't count.
Whether an easel painting is small or big,
it's not the issue.
Size doesn't count.
It's scale that counts.
It's human scale that counts.
And the only way you can achieve
human scale is by the content.
(deKooning) Does the space for each artist,
and Kandinsky said that not here,
not there but somewhere.
is a place by your happiness.
Like, for instance, now I'm very much
influenced by the idea of water.
Here, we are all surounded here in
this neighbourhood by water.
I like the ??? point and
look at whatever it is.
You have to be in that state of mind.
To do that, i guess.
So I go on a bike and
look at the water.
And I try to get light
of this water.
All the light here.
And it helped me enormously,
because I felt in New York that
I was using colors just prismatically;
red, yellow, blue, black, white.
I had no way of getting
hold of a tone,
of the light
of a painting.
That I'm a collective artist as
there seemed to be no time element,
no period in painting for me.
Like last summer I was in Italy and
those early Christian-Roman wall paintings,
they just threw me for a loop.
Particularly if a brushstroke does it
- I like painting with a brush.
(Rauschenberg) The Abstract Expressionists
and myself, what they have in common,
what we have in common was a touch.
I was never interested in their
pessimism.
or editorializing.
You have to have time
to feel sorry for yourself.
if you're going to a good
Abstract Expressionist.
I think I always considered that a waste.
But what we did,
like what I did,
looks like Abstract Expressionism is that
with their grief and art passion
and action painting.
They let their brushstrokes show.
(Johns) The idea that come to me that
I should have to mean what I did.
Then, accompanying that was the idea that
there was no reason to mean
what other people did.
So, if I could tell
that I was doing what
someone else was doing
then I would not try to do it.
Because it seemed to me that
deKooning did his work
perfectly beautifully and there was no
reason for me to help him with it.
(Warhol) Well, but everybody's influenced
by everybody.
(Frankenthaler) I did not want
a small gesture,
standing at the easel with
a sable brush.
And having looked at Cubism
which can be very detailed
minute and fine,
and has that essence
at times of the easel and
the sable brush.
I literally wanted to break free,
put it
on the floor
and throw paint around.
(Noland) I was more interested in
the making aspect of Abstract Expressionism,
than I was in subject matter.
And I mean by that
the fact that artists were
handling the materials
in a psychical way.
The fact that they were making paintings.
That handling aspect
of the materials
that both Pollock and Still used.
They didn't suppress
the tactile quality of
the handling of materials to
any other picture image.
You never lost the sight of the touch
of the making in their work.
(Stella) The thing about Picasso being
such a big figure and
particularly Picasso and Cubism
was something that I just
sort of passed around
I suppose, largely owing to the
example of Pollock.
And both Pollock and Hofmann
seem to me to have
I don't want to say, solve the problem,
but at least to solve the problem
in a sense for me.
They came to terms in some concrete
and accomplished way
with what has happened with
twentieth century Modernism
in European painting.
I don't want to be chauvinistic
or sound that
but what I can say that they
established American painting
as a real thing for me,
something that I had confidence in
something that you didn't have to
go all the way back and
worried again about where I stood
in relation between Matisse and Picasso.
I could worried about where I stood in
relation to Hoffman and Pollock.
(Frankenthaler) For me learning Cubism
was great
freedom and exercise,
really analyzing what Cubism was about.
Why a guitar appeared
related to or didn't related to
the symbol of a base note
down there
How things pushed each other around
in a cellar or ambiguous space.
That's black.
Or I can make it
if I'll do it right
by arms.
Because of a color and a shape,
things go back miles to
come back forward yards.
Often called this "Push and Pull".
And I think every bit of progress in
the development of abstract painting
goes back.
I've painted "Mountains
at Sea" in October '52.
And I had recently returned from
a driving trip through Nova Scotia
and Cape Breton and I think
I've had a summer of
making small careful after-nature
watercolors.
I've got into my own place on 23rd Street
and felt sort of
"let it rip!".
I guess I've ordered a lot of unsized,
unprimed cotton duck
which we all bought from a
sailing supply place.
So I left the stuff on a floor.
I poured the paint on
and used relatively few
brushstrokes,
since I did not increasingly
as I've been working,
I didn't want the sign of a brush or
how the picture was made to appear.
That area not painted on
didn't mean paint,
because it had paint next to it.
So it operated as ??? and
the thing was to decide
where to leave it
and where to fill it.
This doesn't need another line
or another pail of color.
The very ground was
part of the medium.
A red-blue against
the white of cotton duck
or the beige of linen
have the same play in space
as the duck.
Every square inch of that surface
is equally important in
depth, shallowness, space.
So that it isn't as if
the background is
a curtain or a drape,
in front of which there is a table,
on which there is a plate,
on which there are apples.
But the apples are as important
as the drape and
the drape is as important
as the legs of the table.
If you just put drips down or
or circles or stripes
or bleeds,
that become yard goods.
But if you put that stripe
with magic there,
against that particular background,
near that particular circle,
and you're involved in the whole
ambiguity
and play in depth,
knowing full well that it's all
on that flat thing, then
you could just skate on it.
A picture that is beautiful
or comes off or works,
looks as if it all was made
in one stroke at once.
I myself don't like to see
the trail of a brushstroke,
the drip of paint.
To me that's part of a kind of
sentiment or cluing in,
that has nothing to do
with how a picture hits you.
(deAntonio) Is it hard to be
a woman and a painter?
(Frankenthaler) Oh, I think
the first issue is
being a painter.
(Geldzahler) Clement Greenberg included
the work of both
[Morris] Louis and [Kenneth] Noland
in a show that
he did in Kootz gallery
in the early 1950s.
And Clem was first to see
their potential.
And he invited them
up to New York,
in 1953 I think it was,
to Helen Frankenthaler's studio
to see a painting
that see had just done
called "Mountains and See"
which was one the first large
field pictures
in which the stain technique
was used.
(Noland) Morris
and I used to talk about
what we called
one-shot painting.
If you were impressed with
what you're doing
you only had to do it
one time.
Each thing that you did
was just done that one time,
with no afterthoughts and
it had to stand.
You wanted to have this happen
out of just the use of material.
And everybody was assuming
that the way you went about making art
was to start out with drawing.
That had been in the Western tradition.
In order to imagine how to
set yourself up to work,
people would take,
artists would take
a pencil and a piece of paper and
make sketches or would
make plans about how
pictures were going to be organized
and to imagine what the result was
going to be.
Most artists wouldn't just go out
and get materials and start
messing around with materials,
and find some way out of handling
materials and techniques,
to have the result of what they
were making come out of that.
They were using drawing
in order to structure
where they put color,
shape, scale, depths etc.
It didn't just start
by handling materials,
which is a current drawing
is another aspect of drawing,
but is not the aspect of planning.
It's not assuming drawing is
a way of planning
how the result of making art.
You start with a roll of canvas and
some paint.
It's a matter of getting those
materials together.
Almost more in a tactile sense,
texture sense
than in a drawing sense,
or diagramming sense.
Just how you handle the materials.
How thin or how thick the paint is,
what the weave of the canvas is.
(Geldzahler) Color-field, curiously enough
or perhaps not,
became a viable way of painting
exactly the time as acrylic paint,
a new plastic paint
came into being.
Oil paint would always leave
a slick of oil,
a puddle of oil around
the edge of the color,
while acrylic paint stops
at it's own edge.
(Noland) I roll the canvas out on the floor
and staple it down.
Then tape off the quantities of surface.
(deAntonio) How do you apply the paint?
Sometimes with brushes,
sometimes with sponges,
sometimes with rollers.
Any way that I can get it on,
where the tactile result
is compatible with
the nature of kind of the color
I'm going to use there.
One thing that people don't
generally talk about
is a fact that the experience
of color is tactile.
We talk about the relative coolness
and warmness of color
or transparency or opacity
and really all those descriptive
terms are tactile descriptions
rather than to do with, say,
the redness of red.
When the color is first laid down,
it doesn't have anything to do with
the resulting size of shape really.
Once you lay it down,
you can choose by sight,
how to bring the total color
into a certain quantity,
deciding how much of that color
going to be left there,
will determine
what the shape
and size of the picture will be.
That's left to last.
You have a way of getting
the color to take on
a different degree of speed,
translucence, transparency,
even warmness and coolness.
I'm interested in the pulse
of each color,
finding its place in relation to the
pulses of other colors.
If you get that combination
into a certain kind of focus
then that focus itself dictates
the size and the shape.
So then the judgement comes in
and, I think, judgement
is crucial.
You know, I mean, you do decide
and that has something to do
with taste.
Taste is usually,
we use it the negative sense but
there is the best taste,
there's the right taste,
there's the real taste.
There's the real thing.
(Greenberg) The 1950s saw the emergence
of an avantgarde scene for the first time
this country.
The scene replaced academic art
as a kind of category in which
you place yourself,
by to some extent making fun
of art as it honestly or seriously
carried on.
Duchamp is the scene,
he was the first artist who
consciously realized that there's
such a category
as avantgarde.
And he became an avantgardist
in the most radical way yet,
that you made yourself
significant.
Not by producing good art,
but by producing recognizably
avantgarde art,
with shocks and surprises and
puzzlement build into it.
(Castelli) It is advised to $40.000 but
actually I'll be satisfied to get 35.
I have $15.000 profit of that,
you know, after all.
No, I'm not very busy,
I have deAntonio here
and then, making a film.
He's making a film, you know.
Like ??? film, but without ???,
about the art world.
(Scull) I always knew I was going to
buy art.
It was simply a question of having
enough money for,
with three boys to bring up,
with the house of country,
but I always knew.
(???) Art today is art
for a very small number of people.
Art in every period of history has been
art for a very small number of people,
mostly the artists themselves,
and one or two dukes.
(Castelli) Hold the phone up, I'll tell you
(an assistant) Leo Castelli, take one.
(Castelli) But the great event
of my career
happened a little later, just about
one month after my opening
And that was a show
at the Jewish museum.
One painting that I
stumbled upon,
that surprised me very much,
and I was quite stunned by it in fact,
it was a green painting.
I looked at the nameplate
and it said Jesper Johns.
I've never heard that name.
I almost thought it was
an invented one.
But I also didn't understand
what the painting was about.
Because the green painting,
the squared green painting for me,
I didn't recognize it,
as I found out later,
that it was a target
[Green Target, 1955]
Anyway, three days later I went to
Rauschenberg's studio
(Rauschenberg) I don't know,
I''d like to say I've learnt humility.
But I was so uncertain and shy,
that I don't think that I
can use more humility.
I went over discipline, however,
not humility.
Like what I learned from Albers
that you had to have a good reason
to decide one color
over another.
But in the exercises,
seeing the clinical tricks,
that were involved in color.
I've met a lot of nice colors.
I picked arbitrarily the most
difficult color,
that I could work with.
And it was red, because red
goes black very quickly.
None of those early things were
about negation or nihilism.
They were more like
celebrating the abundance of color.
As oppose to the swindle of color.
Then just gradually
it opened up,
I found it got a little
closer to yellow,
which made orange, and then,
you know.
(Castelli) Nobody had understood
Rauschenberg before.
I had been wildly
enthusiastic about his show
a few years before at Egan's,
it was the so-called red show,
which was a fantastic event,
that nobody understood.
He didn't sell a single painting
out of that show, except perhaps
to friends,
who gave him $50 so he
could go and pay his rent,
for a painting that would be worth now
$40-50.000.
(Rauschenberg) One of things
I wanted to try
was an all-eraser drawing.
I did drawings myself
and erased them,
but that seemed like fifty-fifty.
So then I knew that I had to
pull back farther.
If it was going to be
all-eraser drawing,
it had to be art
in the beginning.
I went to Bill [deKooning] and
I told him about it.
Then knocked the door,
and started with portfolio
of drawings,
and then "No, none of those".
Then we went to another
portfolio
and he said:
"These are drawings I would miss".
So he pulled out one
and put that back.
Then he said: "Now I'm going
to give you one hard to erase".
And he picked out another.
And he was right.
I spent, I think, nearly
three weeks
with no fewer than fifteen different
kinds of erasers.
And that made it real.
I wasn't just making a few marks
and rubbing them out myself.
I may have said that painting relates
much to life as it does to art
or viceversa, but I don't think so.
I said you couldn't make either.
And you had to work
in that hole between.
(deAntonio) What is that space in between?
(Rauschenberg) It's undefined.
That's makes the adventure
of painting.
(Geldzahler) One of the key
early pictures
within the proto-Pop movement,
perhaps the most important of all,
is "Rebus", which is a word
that means puzzle.
In this single painting of
Rauschenberg's, as early as 1954,
there is a veritable anthology
of the possibilities that are going to
take over during the period
that's coming up.
(Rauschenberg) So I prepared
a ground of newspapers
but colored sections,
which happen to be the funniest.
So that I had an already
going surface,
so that there wouldn't be
a beginning to the picture
and so just it all be additive.
I mean like it doesn't really matter,
like, when it stops.
Because you're dealing
with an object,
what it can make you think of
how it could continue.
You begin with the possibilities
of the material.
And then you let them
do what they can do.
So the artist is really
almost a bystander,
while he's working.
I mean the hierarchy of materials
can be completely broken down.
(Castelli) In my first show
of Rauschenberg's
there was a curious couple called
"Factum I" and "Factum II".
(Rauschenberg) I painted
two identical pictures,
but only identical to
the limits of the eye,
the hand, the material
adjusting to the differences
from one canvas to another.
Neither one of them was painted first.
(Castelli) He wanted to show that
nothing was really casual, even
the slashes, the brushstrokes,
the drips were calculated.
And curiously enough, it was
in defence of the movement
that he had actually moved
away from.
It was in defense of
Abstract Expressionism.
(Rauschenberg) I wasn't
involved in chance
as much as I was, hmm,
I felt isolated.
I wasn't interested in
attaining
a precious state of isolation.
I was interested in what
was around me.
Art doesn't come out of art.
I mean, you don't work with one
foot in the art book.
And no painter has ever really
been able to help another
and I had no interest
in being better or worse
than any other artist.
I've had enough self-respect to
know that
somehow we were different and
my work when it functions
celebrates that.
My paintings are invitations to
look somewhere else.
And they have been for a
long time.
Like the new piece.
It's like "How not to throw
your newspaper away".
Because that's
where it is.
And if you are
contentious at all,
information there
in one newspaper,
no matter where you picked
it up, blow your head.
If you pay 15.000 dollars
for something,
you're not going to let the garbage
in it, right?
I don't know, I don't know
who buys newspapers,
but I know how they
don't read them
and take them seriously.
And it's the best book
in the world.
(deAntonio) We might have one last
thing on that.
(Castelli) Shortly thereafter,
Jasper Johns appeared.
He was a modest, shy
young man.
And I was so curious to see,
what his paintings look like,
that I told Bob:
"Could we interrupt looking
at these paintings and
go down to see what Jasper's
paintings look like?
So he, you know how Bob's
always generous and friendly.
And he said: "Of course, let's go down
and see Jasper's paintings first."
And so down we went.
(Jasper Johns) It had been my intention
to be an artist since I was a child.
And in the place where I was a child,
there were no artists,
there was no art,
so I really didn't know
what that meant.
And I think it meant that
I would be able to
be in a situation other than
the one I was in.
I think that was the primarily
fantasy.
The society there seemed
to accommodate
every other thing
I knew about
but not that possibility.
So I think that in part the idea of
being an artist
was not kind of fantasy,
but being out of this.
Then, because there is none
of this here,
so if you're going to be
an artist
you'll have to be somewhere else.
So I liked that plus I liked to
do things with my hands.
So I deliberately then
tried to
set up in new frame of mine,
of myself.
Now whether that how
deliberately one can do that
I don't know, it might
just be the thought
occurs at the same time that
you're ready to do this,
I don't know.
I worked in various ways and
destroyed various things
and became perhaps too serious
about what I did.
And the paintings you were
talking about
started with the flag painting.
One night I dreamt that I
painted a large American flag.
And the next morning I got up
and I went out
and I bought materials to begin it.
(deAntonio) What was the collage
material made them?
(Johns) Paper, rags, newspaper.
Any kind of paper.
(deAntonio) What is the order of
application?
(Johns) In that painting,
it would be hard to describe.
It would be very hard to
describe because some things
I stitched onto the canvas with thread,
I think.
I don't know what the canvas was.
I think it was a sheet,
things were sewn on.
And it's a very rotten painting
because I began it in house
enamel paint
and it wouldn't dry quickly enough.
And I had in my head this idea
of something I had read
or had heard about: wax
encaustic.
And I changed in the middle
of the painting to that,
because encaustic just has to cool
and you don't blur it again.
With enamel you have to wait
eight hours before you do that.
With encaustic you can just
keep on.
(deAntonio) In a sense that it was
precise opposite of a drip and all that?
(Johns) It drips so far
and stops.
Like each discrete movement remains
discrete.
Say, within the area of red,
you can still divide that
into something else. You could
see drips of something,
piece of paper, whatever.
Even that was all red.
Then I thought what difference
this color make then.
If what you're doing is,
not looking at the color,
but looking at these other things.
The combination of this new material
and this, for me, new image
or this new idea about imagery,
made things very lively for me
at that time.
They started my mind working
and my arm.
(deAntonio) I always thought if
there's a connection
between the American flag and
the fact ???.
(Johns) My Aunt Gladys once when
she read a thing in a magazine
wrote me a letter, saying
she was so proud of me
because she had worked so hard
to instill some respect
for the American flag
in her students.
And she was so glad the mark
had been left on me.
Thinking about the imagery
of the flag
and what it was trying to say,
what it was like
then I thought of the "Target".
Then I had, I don't know why I had
this idea, but i had this idea,
that I would have the target
with these wooden blocks above.
I was concerned with
the approach and
distance and contact
with painting.
So I had the idea that
these blocks could be movable.
They could be attached to something
behind the target,
that would make noise.
So that each one would make
different sound.
That was the way it started.
Then I didn't like the idea.
I don't know why.
Maybe it was too difficult.
I don't remember.
But at any rate, my studio
had in it various plaster casts,
that I had done from people.
Like hands and feet and faces
and things.
So I simply thought of these wooden
sections,
instead of moving back and forth
and activating sounds,
as being able to lift up and see
something rather than hear something.
And then I saw these things I had
and I decided to put them in it.
So I did.
[Target with Plaster Casts '55]
(deAntonio) What about Dada and Neodada
and Duchamp?
which all have already been allied?
(Johns) What about Dada?
What kind of question is that?
What about Dada?
(Greenberg) When Duchamp made his
cage of marble cubes,
it looked just like sugar cubes.
Representing of fashioning what
could easily be duplicated
and he fashioned them in traditional
artistic material like marble.
Making marble look like industrial
product, like sugar cubes.
Johns followed him by casting a flash
light or a beer can in bronze.
And then painting them in some cases
to look identical,
or a coffee can filled with
paint brushes.
Casting it in bronze and then
carefully painting it
so you couldn't tell the difference between
the bronze version and the real version.
Well, the point of that is supposed
to be the point.
(Johns) I think all work has
relationship to other work.
I think the idea is,
an idea, around what
we're talking about, is
the possibility that I
deliberately
behaved in a Dada fashion
in my work,
which is not true,
because I didn't know anything
about Dada at that time.
Actually I didn't even know the term,
I must confess,
I didn't, but Bob Rauschenberg did.
And when someone said that, he explained
to me, what Dada was and then I thought
I thought I should find out
firsthand what it was.
Bob and I went down to the
Arenberg's collection in Philadelphia
to look primarily at the Duchamps.
And I didn't know
Duchamps work though,
Bob did to the some extent.
I found it very interesting.
Over the years I found it
more and more interesting.
I'm not embarrassed by any
relationship that anyone could make
between my work and Marcel's.
My work is not imitative of his
and I'm entirely sympathetic to
everything he has ever done.
I don't think there's any
stylistic similarity.
The Dadaists were Dadaists
by saying they were Dadaists.
If I'm Dadaist?
I'm certainly not.
(Philip Johnson) The collectors have
made an enormous contribution
not only to the market but
to painters themselves.
It seems to me that the effect
of the Sculls,
the effect of Dr. Ludwig,
these people that buy,
that set standards
make everyone else
itch to emulate.
The itch to emulate,
the desire for status
is certainly one of the main things
in our society.
(Scull) My first great purchase after
the Abstract Expressionists
was to buy out almost completely the 1958
show of Jasper Johns.
He did very poorly in that show
and I couldn't understand why
he wasn't selling.
I thought it was so marvelous,
because he was using
techniques of Abstract Expressionism,
but he was the hatchet man,
who really was the moment that
Abstract Expressionism started to
come to the realization that
something new was happening.
I told Castelli I wanted to buy
the whole show.
And he said: "No,no. That's very vulgar.
We can't do that."
So I bought about eight things.
(Castelli) Prices of Jasper's have
gone up fantastically.
The "Target with Plaster Casts",
for instance.
It was my first show
I bought personally.
The price was $1200.
The "Flag" was the most expensive
painting in the show.
It was $2000.
Now these two paintings would be, I think,
$150.000 and $200.000, respectively.
(Johns) I've heard that
Bill deKooning had said
about Leo, with whom he was
annoyed over something
"That son of a bitch, you can
give him two beer cans..
and he could sell them".
And that time I had made
a couple of sculptures,
I've made one or two flashlight,
one or two of a light bulb.
They were small objects,
sort of ordinary objects.
And when I heard this story
I thought:
"What a fantastic
sculpture for me", I mean,
really, it's just
absolutely perfect.
So I made this work.
I did it, and Leo sold it.
(Castelli) Painting, I think that,
frankly, this accusation,
that's leveled against the dealers,
that they are responsible for shaping
the art market,
is a very silly one.
Naturally, we are there to do that job
and we are doing it.
Now if people - ourselves
and the critics and the museums
- go along with us, then
there is a consensus there
and therefore we are right and not wrong.
I think that we merely
doing our job.
(deAntonio) I want to know if
artists have any chance
of being up there
where decisions are made,
instead of having to go
through you to the Rockafellers.
So I thought, if you have to go to brothers
Rockafellers in order to get your job?
You know, that's where the authority
comes from and, you know,
that's where you have for
any authority to begin the future.
I want to know if we're really
gonna be up there,
whatever all you would call it,
where the policies are made,
or whether we have to go
to this indirect.
Round about!
(Hightower) I think the chances
are probably pretty slim.
(Scull) I became aware of the fact,
that collecting is just not
going to a gallery
and buying a painting. Suddenly
I became very deeply involved
with artists who'd later
make up group of Pop artists
but they didn't even know each other.
We had parties up here
and dinners up here,
where lot of these Pop artists
met each other.
And my purchase of their pictures
seemed to be crucial
to the development, you
know what happens
to a young artist when you buy
a painting of his:
he looks at you like
you're completely mad.
And then suddenly he
starts painting like a maniac.
(Geldzahler )The Sculls in their
front hall have a double portrait
of themselves by George Segal.
I remember Ether calling me
before she went out
to Segal's to be cast.
Wondering whether she should wear
a real Courrege or a copy,
because she was going to be
destroyed during the casting process.
And I think she wore a copy
and she didn't see a point in
destroying the real Courreges.
(Scull) I don't believe in anything
but my own intuition.
And so, when I met Oldenburg,
I started to buy
and then I heard, someone mentioned
to me about a fellow called Andy Warhol.
I wanted to see him in '61,
early in '61 and he said to me
"I want to sell you some paintings."
And I said: "What do you mean
some paintings?"
And he said: "Well, I don't care how
many you take, but I need $1400."
(deAntonio) Andy, when I first
knew you,
you weren't painting and then
you did become a painter.
I wonder if you could tell me why that happened
and when it happened and something about it.
(Warhol) Well, you made me a painter.
(deAntonio) Let's have the true things.
(Warhol) That was the truth, wasn't it?
You used to gossip about
the art people.
That's how I found out
about art.
(Brigid Polk) No, you thought it was chic,
that's why you started art.
(Warhol) No, no, D was making art commercial,
and since I was in commercial art,
I thought real art should be commercial,
because D said so. And that's
how it happened.
Is it true?
(deAntonio) No.
((Warhol) Yes it is.
(deAntonio) No, that
totally ain't true.
Henry in talking about
your works at the show
said that you did Dick Tracy
independently on Lichtenstein.
And he stopped doing the
Dick Tracy kind of painting.
I wonder why that happened?
(Warhol) Oh, because he did it
so much better.
I was just copying it from
magazines and
look at to make
something out of it.
(deAntonio) What's your relationship
to Pop-art?
(Johns) The things that have
interested me in painting
and in thinking of other things
- of course I will tell lies here --
are the things which can't be located,
or are the things that turn into
something else while you locate them,
or are things which
are located so
nicely that you know
they can't survive.
But it's never interested me just
the idea of forming a territory,
or a thought and defending it.
My idea for Pop-art is
something in that area of..
I don't like the idea that things are..
That you're sure what they are.
It seems to me that the term
Pop-art suggests that.
That everything is certain.
(Geldzahler) But here are hand-painted
32 Campbell soup cans.
They are painted very flat,
very dead on.
Andy that time said that
he used the can soup because
every day for lunch he had
exactly the same thing,
a egg sandwich and a can of
Campbell soup.
(deAntonio) You said all people are
the same
and you wanted to be a machine
in your paintings.
Is that true?
(Warhol) Is that true, Brigid?
(Polk) No, he just wishes
it was all easier.
He said to me last week on the phone,
he said "Brigid, wouldn't it be nice..
if in the morning we could get up
and at ten o'clock
go to all the movies
and then all the galleries,
and just think it would be, just like
Teeny and Marcel used to, you know.
Then how would you get your art done?
Andy can do that, but I can't, because
I've got to do my paintings
and my books..
(Warhol) Your hair.
(Polk) My hair, sat under the dryer..
The great art
to come out with dry hair.
(Greenberg) Pop has the same
something, an attitude
somewhat similar to the Dada,
to the surrealist artists,
who deliberately used
academic means
to illustrate unconventional things.
With the Pop artists, there's
hmm, a trick of saying:
"I'm going to make it look...
just the way the cheapest art looks".
But with a difference and a twist.
And people like Lichtenstein
and Warhol,
they paint nice pictures.
All the same, it's easy stuff, you know.
[about the Tenth Street painting]
It is. It's minor.
And the best of the Pop artist don't
succeed in being more that minor.
And it's scene art.
The kind of art that goes over
on the scene.
The best art of our time,
or any art since Corot,
not just since Manet,
makes you a little more
uncomfortable at first,
challenges you more.
It doesn't come that far
to meet your taste.
Or meet the established taste
of the market.
And the Pop artists,
almost knowingly,
come more than halfway to meet
your taste.
You no more tell if you can
see for yourself
or something makes see
to fast.
It's gonna be mine.
(deAntonio) How did you actually
paint the painting,
when you started doing it
six or seven years ago
before Brigid did them?
Could you tell me the whole process?
Tell me about the electric chair, which
is one of my favorite paintings by anybody.
(Warhol) Oh, I just found a picture
and gave it to the man
and he made a print and I just
took it and just began painting.
(deAntonio) And he made a silkscreen print?
(Warhol) Silkscreen print, yeah.
They came out all different because, I
guess, I didn't really know how to screen.
Brigid just does all my paintings,
but she doesn't know anything about them.
(Polk) I know what's good.
I know what's good.
(deAntonio) What do you mean,
Brigid does all your paintings?
(Warhol) Brigid's been doing
my paintings for the last three years.
(deAntonio) How does she do them?
(Warhol) Well, I haven't done any
work for the last three years.
(Polk) I just call Mr.Goldman
and I just tell him the colors.
I took Polaroids of the four flowers
and I switched the colors around
and superimpose four cutouts
one on the top of the other.
I take picture and have
Mr. Goldman do it.
(Warhol) But Mr.Goldman's dead.
(Polk) No, his son.
(Warhol) Ahh.
(Warhol) The reason we can say
Brigid's done my work, because
I haven't done any
for the three years.
When the papers said that
Brigid 's done all my paintings,
Brigid can say she does all
my pictures,
she can say, because we haven't done any.
(Scull) Well, you just talk about Andy's.
(Ethel Scull) Well, Bob had asked
Andy to do a portrait,
which sort of frightened me,
naturally, because
one never knew what Andy would do.
So he said: "Don't worry,
everything will be splendid."
I had great visions of going to
Richard Avedon.
I have magnificent pictures
of me taken.
(deAntonio) Must have been photographed?
(Ethel) To be photographed.
And we do a portrait,
so he came up for me that day
and he said: "All right, we're all off."
And I said: "Well, where we're going?"
"Just down to Forty-second Street
and Broadway".
I said: "What are we going to do there?"
He said: "I'm going to take
pictures of you".
I said: "For what?"
He said: "For the portrait."
I said: "In those things?
Oh, my God, I look terrible."
He said: "Don't worry" and
he took out, he had coins.
About hundred dollars'
worth of silver coins.
He said: "We'll take the high key
and the low key...
...and I push you inside and you watch
the little red light."
(deAntonio) The automatic..
(Ethel) The thing you do the passports..
Three for a quarter or something like that.
And he: "Just watch the red light."
And I froze. I watched the red light
and never did anything.
So Andy would come in and poke me
and make me do all kind of things.
I relaxed finally, you know.
I think the whole place,
wherever we were,
thought they had two nuts there.
We were running from one
booth to the other
and he took all these pictures
and they were drying all over the place
And at the end of the thing,
he said: "Now you want to see them?".
And they were
so sensational that you don't
need Richard Avedon, you see.
(deAntonio) How much did you
pay you for your portrait?
(Warhol) It wasn't..This is..
(deAntonio) Surely $5000.
(Warhol) Hers was so much fun to do.
(deAntonio) How much money did
she pay you?
(Warhol) I don't know. $700.
(deAntonio) $700 for that portrait?
(Warhol) I'm not sure.
(Polk) I think it's fabulous.
Every time I see the picture,
I'm always flipped out when
I see the picture of Susan Thorn.
(Ethel) When he delivered the portrait,
it came in pieces
and Bob said to him: "Don't you want to
sit down at this too?
Because there were all these
beautiful color.
He said: "Oh no. Let him do it
any way he wants".
(Scull) And I said to you: "But you
could change it any way you want".
(Ethel) But if I.. he said: "If you ever
get bored by these..
we can always change them". I've got
no more pictures, he said, but
you could change them yourself.
What I liked about it mostly, was
that is was a portrait of
being alive
and not like those candy box things,
which I detest and never ever
wanted as a portrait of myself.
Andy was very clever,
because he knows on your side,
and I wore sunglasses.
And he said: "Let's have with the
glasses and without the glasses.
And he directed me, I tell you, those
days he's running in the movies.
Or doing movies.
(Warhol) Let's talk about politics.
(deAntonio) All right, let's talk about
politics.
Why did you choose you subject matter?
The subjects you chose?
What led you to the series like
the car crash, electric chair.
(Warhol) I think it was on July 4th,
and the radio kept saying
six hundred people were death, or seven hundred,
on a highway. I think that's what did it.
(deAntonio) That's for the car crash.
What about all the other paintings
that have to do with death?
Like the electric chair.
(Warhol) That was the time they
stopped killing people on electric chairs.
Or was it before? So I thought it was
and old image and it would be nice to..
(deAntonio) You ran into some
practical political problems
at the World's Fair, right, it was
in Flushing in 1964, wasn't it?
(Johnson) The story of Andy and the
most wanted men
was a peculiar political event of 1963.
We had at the World's Fair,
at the pavilion that I did
for New York State
a space on the wall that I hired six
- was it six? - great artists.
I just gave them the space and said:
"Do what you want to."
And Andy did a dramatic sequence of
the most wanted men.
(Warhol) I guess I painted the most
wanted men.
(deAntonio) Can you tell who were that men?
Can you tell me that?
(Warhol) The most wanted men of that year.
(deAntonio) Who wanted them?
(Warhol) Oh, the FBI.
(Johnson) It just happened, though,
that in the research
it turned out that
these men were not wanted.
They were all well and happy
and living with their dear families.
Perhaps more important politically,
they all had Italian names.
(Warhol) They thought they might
find them at the fair.
(Polk) Doubt that they had the opportunity.
(Johnson) So how it got to the government,
I don't know.
But he called me in anguish,
and we had to drop the thirteen
most wanted men.
(Warhol) We painted them up.
(Johnson) So I never looked into
whose fault it was
whether they were wanted or not,
we have just dropped the idea.
(deAntonio) Did you paint them up
or they painted them up?
(Warhol) No, they painted them
in silver.
(deAntonio) And then what did you do?
(Warhol) Then I did do a portrait of Moses,
somebody liked him.
(Warhol) And then I didn't put it up.
(deAntonio) So it stayed..
(Warhol) Blank.
(deAntonio) Silver?
(Warhol) Silver blank.
(deAntonio) What about politics?
Are there any critics you like?
(Warhol) I like kind of critics that
when they write, they just put
people's names in,
and you go through the article and you
count how many different names they drop.
(Polk) Suzy.
(Warhol) There are more
but Suzy is the best.
(deAntonio) The best critic?
(Warhol) Yeah, when she drops more names.
(Polk) She has just said that
everybody's name is in the party.
You feel happy that you've
been mentioned.
That was the biggest artie
article published.
That's what we're all about.
(William Rubin) The dominant direction
since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism
has not been abstract painting.
There was, however, a small group
of painters
that came along in the later 1950s
and early 1960s,
that created an abstract painting
of equal force
and equal power to that of the best of
Abstract Expressionism,
which is very different in character.
Its posture is not romantic,
its method is not improvisational.
It's a kind of more classical,
more controlled art,
that in a certain sense reacted
against the action conception
of Abstract Expressionism
and against what by the late 1950s
had come to be a great deal
of very bad painting made in
Abstract Expressionism's name.
(Stella) It seemed to me that basically
the action painters
and particularly the second generation
of action painters
adopted an attitude to
its painting which was
based a lot on an idea
of allover attack.
But they were inconsistent.
They didn't really carry it out.
In other words, it was supposed to
be an allover painting,
but it ended up working with
to much conventional push-pull.
The other big thing was,
as far as I was concerned,
was that they all seemed to get
in trouble in the corners.
They always started out with
a big expensive gesture
and then they ended up
fiddling around,
or trying to make that one explosive
gesture work on the canvas in some way.
It seemed to me so the painting and
the energy turns finally compromised
by all the fixing up
that went around
the supposedly loose and free
explosive images.
I mean we've got to be an
illustration of energy
than an establishment of a
real pictorial images.
I didn't want that.
I wanted to be able to have
which I think are some of the
virtues of Abstract Expressionism
but still have them under control.
But not control for its own sake,
a kind of a conceptional paintingly
control
that I felt made the pictures
even stronger pictures.
I wanted to make my pictures at least
stronger when I was doing.
The business about my work being
unfeeling and cold and intellectual
I mean, I can't quite explain it.
The only explanation I can make is
a biographical one.
Certainly no one would see the black
paintings now
as a kind of cold and calculating,
or very logical.
But they seem to seem that way
in the context of '59 and '60.
They would lean compared to some
paintings above,
but the general look of them, if you really
looked at it, it seemed to me
that they have awful lot to do
with Rothko in the general feeling.
And no one accused Rothko
for being cold and intellectual.
There were certain
literary things in the air
that corresponded to it
[to the idea of repetition].
At the time I was going to school,
for example Becket was very popular.
Becket is pretty lean, I guess,
you might say, but also
slightly repetitive to me
in the sense that
certain very simple situations
in which not much happened
are a lot like repetition.
Through the use of a flat
regulated pattern
I could make a painting situation,
that read or scene flatter.
I felt that flatness
was kind of
just an absolute necessity for
modernists painting at the time.
And I felt the black paintings
are really right.
There were a lot of things
in those paintings that were
not in anybody's elses
paintings at the time.
It seemed to me that they were
concerns that painting had to
adress itself to.
I got very involved at that time
with the black paintings with pattern.
I began making little
drawings and sketches.
And in some of the sketches
I got involved with
patterns that travel.
They were moved and made jogging
and I had this slightly
shaped format.
And the more I looked at it,
the more I liked it
and that's the way I built the
stretches and painted the series.
And that was the beginning of
shaping, for me at least.
I've already has an idea of a
kind of paint I wanted to use
I was interested in this
metallic paint,
particularly aluminum paint.
Something that would sort of
seize the surface.
That it would be also
probably fairly repellent.
I liked the idea, thinking about
flatness and depth,
that these would be paintings
very hard to penetrate.
All of the action would be
on the surface.
The idea was to keep the viewer
from reading a painting.
It seemed to me that you have to had
some kind of way of addressing
yourself to the viewer,
which wasn't so much an invitation
as it was a presentation.
In other words, I made something, and
it was available for people to look at.
But it wasn't an invitation
for them to explore,
and it wasn't an invitation
for them to read a record
of what I have done exactly.
In fact, I think one of
the things you could say
about my paintings, and
it's probably a good thing,
it's not immediately apparent
how they're done.
You can say that it's finally brushed
or it's sprayed or this, that or other,
but the first thing you do is see it,
I think, and not see how it was done.
It's not a particular record of anything.
That may explain in some kind
of way its unpopularity with the critics.
When I said, make it hard for
the critics to write about,
I mean, there's not that much
for them to describe.
First of all, basically, it's
a simple situation visually
and the painting doesn't do
that much in conventional terms.
They can't explain to you how
one part relates to another.
With thereafter, that's so easy for me,
so their effort couldn't be of any good.
Saying, there's no suffering,
no dust, no feeling,
there's no no questioning, I just keep
doing it, I don't have trouble periods.
I don't have crisis
and anxieties and all that,
that are documented
on the canvas.
There's a tremendous assumption
of artistic humility,
which I didn't seem to have.
Too much of success and being essentially
too smug about it in some kind of way.
There's nothing in descriptive terms
for them to say
or to point out something, that you,
the viewer, might have missed,
if you were slightly untrained
or not so used to looking at paintings.
That critical function is subversive.
I don't think that's a big
accomplishment,
but I think on the positive side,
and this, again, becomes suddenly,
or not so suddenly, but does become
very subjective, but has to do with finally
both the quality and the value
of the painting.
If this presents a kind of visual
experience to you, that's really convincing.
It also can be a moving experience.
In other words,
that apprehension-confrontation
with the picture,
that kind of visual impact,
that kind of stamping out of an image,
and that kind of
sense of painted surface,
being really it's own surface.
I think it was a kind of attempt to give
the painting a particular life of its own,
in relationship to the viewer.
I've always thought
in terms of pictorial structural
organization.
Later on, with the more
eccentrically shaped pictures,
color just became, I don't know,
inevitable in a certain kind of way.
If they were multicolored,
then they had to be monochromatic
and would leave only a linear structure.
And that's not what those
paintings were about.
They weren't conceived
to be that way.
This is one the recent paintings.
The edges here are actually fairly hard.
I mean, they're not soft at all.
There's not much bleed in a
combination of fluorescent
water soluble and Lenny Bocour Aquatint.
You probably can't see the pencil line,
but it's drawn out over the canvas first
and taped over the line.
This is part of the Saskatchewan series.
These circular Protractors made
to fit into rectangular format.
This is one going up here,
but you don't see the other half.
And another one coming
through from the outside.
One you see pretty much
the whole blue in there
and one coming up from the other way.
I started with the drawing,
usually a rough drawing,
in which I plot out mainly how
the bands are going to intersect.
Once I know the width of the band,
once I decide that and everything
else falls in the place..
(deAntonio) How the marks are set?
(Stella) The drawing is done from points.
It's done with a beam compass,
which I make myself out of lattice.
I punch a hole in a wooden lattice
and use a pencil
and a nail at the other end
and I draw the pencil lines
on an unsized canvas.
I then use masking tape,
which I tape over the line.
Once the tape is done,
it's ready to paint.
And they take this pult afterwards.
The color here is
intuitive or arbitrary
or a combination of both.
And what I'm really interested in
terms of color here,
is not so much in the interlacing,
but rather I'm interested in
using the curve to make
a color travel.
With the interlacing, particularly
in the picture like this,
there's no question if you have
some illusions
and some kind of figure
ground relationships.
What keeps the push-pull from
defeating the picture
what I think keeps it on the surface,
is this feeling that the colors move
they follow the bands,
they have a sense of direction.
And it's the directional sense of the
color, I think that
holds the surface for the painting.
(Scull) I have learnt from many people,
who seemed to be taken
with the fact,
that my purchasing art has changed
lives quite of few of these artists.
And of course I'm aware of
just a few of them.
One of them is Charles Chamberlain,
who was a hairdresser
when I met him.
Big fellow, huge mustache, I couldn't
image him of being a hairdresser.
And working on a sculpture was
such a horrible situation for him
to suddenly making a shift from
being a hairdresser
to working with this powerful
iron and tin.
And so he said to me if he only had
$10 or $15 a week of a steady income,
(I think it was $100 a week)
he said: "I would be able to tell my boss
to go to devil and really do this work".
And I was so impressed by his work,
that I said: "Go ahead."
And of course, right after that..
Right after that summer,
he was never a hairdresser again.
He became a full time sculptor.
With Larry Poons...With Larry
Poons I found out,
he was a short order cook.
And I said: "How much you make a week?"
He said: "Twenty-five dollars."
I said: "What are you talking about?
Nobody makes $25 a week anymore".
He said: "Well, what I mean, I only work
two hours a day..
and that gives me enough to"...
I said: "Well, I'll give you eight weeks'
worth of salary...
and I'll buy a painting from you".
And he looked at me very suspiciously,
and he said
"Well, I'm willing to quit my job,
but I want the eight weeks in advance".
because if you change your mind,
I'm out of a job.
(Poons) Robert Scull never walked up to me
and said:
"Here, Larry, I want you to..
I want to help you."
He did it through Dick [Bellamy] and
he was a dealer and it was a business.
I mean, if he wants to think of himself
in that way,
I've got nothing against it.
I might say the first
major influential painter for me
for me was probably Mondrian.
I mean, I was never a student
of painting
in any kind of normal sense
of the word,
that I went to school and
studied art history.
I've seen a lot of paintings but..
As Mondrian was the first
that time first moving painting
experience for me that I can remember.
(Geldzahler) The paintings have always
based on very accurately plotted drawings
and what happened was that the dots
appeared at the points on an invisible grid
where lines had crossed in the
early compositions.
The grid was completely suppressed and
what you were left with,
were the dots indicated
in the key pattern.
But the pattern became something
that was difficult to read
and the entire thing
became a color field
the way Frank Stella's paintings of a
few years previously had been.
What happened to Larry Poons
during the 1960s was,
he moved more and more
towards the sensuality,
where he began mixing the colors,
the background became more subtle,
the dots slipped into ellipses,
and from ellipses slipped even further
into slipped brushstrokes.
And the influence of some of
Greenberg's principles
and the influence in particular
of work of Jules Olitski
changed Poons from rather
hard and cold painter
to a painter of beautiful pictures.
(Olitski) I decided to be a painter,
when my grandmother died.
There was something about dead
that made number of things clear to me.
You know, I was a kid,
fourteen, fifteen, sixteen..
And I have loved her very much.
And I someway felt she was one of
a few people that supported me,
or that she loved me.
And I got nevertheless
the sense of
an absolutely wasted
thrown-away life,
like a dead cat on a garbage pale heap.
And it made me..get a very
clear look
on all the people around me.
Family, their friends..
One things that got through to me
was the notion of
if there's anything that you want to do,
that's meaningful,
in my case it was painting,
do it, do it.
If I just get spray the roller in the air
somehow it could stay there,
that would be it.
So to spray a painting or
using a spray gun
suddenly seemed a
way of achieving
of a look that I wanted to get.
Painting is among other things,
one of its essentials is color.
Otherwise it's drawn.
But there is an area or
there is that aspect
of painting that is
inescapable:
the drawing is inevitable to it.
And one place where
drawing is inescapable
in the making of a painting,
is its edge.
The line where you decided
that the painting ends.
This is where it's going to
be stretched to.
It's drawing.
It's a drawn line.
It's an edge.
To me if you made
this line within
the painting, it's
introducing drawing
into an area where it's
not essential.
But my feeling is that color
is essential,
in the sense of the essence
of painting.
(Geldzahler) Artist are used to talk
about color, about shape, about form.
It's obvious to anybody
who thought about it,
that you can't have
a pure color in a picture.
Because the color has to be..
the shape has to have a color.
Color can't exist by its own.
What the color feels painters have done
to the most successful extent than
anybody has done previously,
is to make color the subject by
completely denying
notational references,
completely denying illustration
and having the color itself
expand, and bellow and
rest on the surface.
It's the color which is
the subject of the picture,
not color describing something
else familiar,
that color invented by the artist.
(Olitski) Well, look,
to begin with
it's almost impossible to
say what the painting is about.
I don't think one really knows
what the experience of
making a painting is.
More than the things that
this painting is about
is, I would call it,
flooded surface.
Flooded surface. And if I try
to introduce drawing within..
the painting or more within..
In here there is a kind of
flawing womp of paint.
which introduces some
drawing within.
I want a painting in which
the structure develops
out of its color.
I decided to do it with
the expansion of the painting
and the bearing on
where the painting is.
That kind of decision.
I tend to work from the inside-out.
So the beginning from the inside,
I mean, pretty much in the center here,
with color and the relationships
of other colors to it,
and its expansion outward.
And then the decision where
it does end.
Where does it begin to tape a roll out,
where is this line still in it.
Where is it still alive?
Now you make a develop
up to here, you know
and here, and there,
you know, or it might not.
Or I might decide,
well, it's really this,
too much refeet of color.
It's also making the chance
to flood into rack,
to destroy.
I find it very exciting
and it was irresistible
to go that further or
to try to go to the further step,
to see what would happen.
You know, you get a thought in your head,
if all of this I put this
or I change this in that way,
to spray some more on it,
to spray the whole pool
of color over it,
or any of the number of
things you can do.
What will happen? What it will
look like?
(Poons) The paint is acrylic, Aquatech.
(deAntonio) How is the paint applied?
(Poons) Well, pouring. I've been
pouring for about a year now.
So the combination of pouring,
muscle..
Sometimes, you know, I can get
an effect by..
doing it hard or just
laying it down soft.
A lot of it has come from knowing
the slight shift on the floor,
that I'm working on, because gravity
does pull the paint around.
I've kind of gotten used to this floor.
it has taken a little while.
(deAntonio) And
then what happens?
How long does it take for
the painting to dry?
(Poons) This paint is actually pretty thin
compared to some of them.
Say, paintings up to a couple of months ago
were much thicker,
and I used a great deal more pigment
They would take up to
three weeks to dry.
(deAntonio) Do you feel there's drawing
in these painting?
(Poons) Yeah, I think there's probably
a lot of drawing in it.
Yeah.
(deAntonio) How?
(Poons) Well, there's much it is,
you know, color stops,
forms appear.
Some kind of imagery
is suggested, I guess.
It's more a point of discovering
a drawing than making a drawing.
Which would kind of get into,
when I start cropping a picture.
(deAntonio) What happens to this
painting now?
(Poons) Well, I take it up from the floor,
roll it up,
and take it upstairs and put it
on a wall and shape it.
Would you believe a beautiful
painting come out of this?
Down, down.
Up a little bit.
OK.
And move the ladder up.
Just take in it off
the left side.
Yeah, that's kind of thing
that gets exciting.
Like this excites me.
And this came out, that
purple starts come out.
Well, I though it looked really good
on the wall.
Down a little bit, down.
Well, I had a feeling that it looked
a little, a little too slick, good.
Stay up there, Dany, and
put about two tapes,
two tapes on the left side.
The right side there,
where the tape is now.
(Dany) Two tapes?
(Poons) Two.
When you've even got one more.
When you're up there,
put the two on.
And then put one more
for the top too.
Down, down,
down, down, down, down...
down, down..
Down.
Well, I mean, when I'm putting
color down,
and when I'm thinking what color
to put down next,
I'm making the same kind of decision
as I'm doing now,
saying there's too much of that color,
or there's not enough of that color,
set on pouring it,
I'm dealing in a
quantity of color,
at this point.
Rather than a specific color,
you know, the specific color is there,
now I'm dealing with the quantity,
how much of it.
You know, or to say now
if I do this,
I wanna know how this would look like.
Which is the same process like I wonder
what purple would look like here.
Do you see what I mean?
(Newman) There's more to the problem,
it seems to me,
that any old-fashioned idea of
what easel painting is.
A painting can be bigger than
anything that goes on an easel
and still be in my opinion
an easel painting.
In the end, in the end
size doesn't count.
The size doesn't count.
It's scale that counts.
It's human scale that counts.
And the only way you can achieve
human scale is by the content.