OLITSKI
9:50 p.m. Monday, August 9, Bear Island, New Hampshire
Q: You’ve said that from an early age you knew you had talent, that you were able to draw accurately from a model as a boy. Your family members weren’t artists. Where did that come from?
A: I don’t know but it began as a child. I must’ve been about 3 or 4 years old. I see myself on the linoleum floor. There was some paper in front of me, some paper from a pad, and there was a newspaper opened, showing Jack Dempsey, the prizefighter, posing. And I drew that. Another time I see a rather round-bellied wrestler. And another time I see Charles Dickens, who looks so impressive to me I remember thinking, God must look like him. And I would draw them. It was just an impulse.
Q: Where did the impulse come from, do you think?
A: There was really no explanation. I didn’t have any culture in my family at all. No music, no art, no literature. There was never a book or anything in that house. Well, there was one. I remember just one book ever being in that house. Isaac Singer. So I don’t know what the explanation was. I’m tempted to say genetics. My father was executed before I was born, so I never knew him. But I knew from my mother that he had been educated, and given to the arts. There was no art, certainly, in my immediate surroundings, not in the house
Q: You came to the United States from Russia with your mother and grandmother. You’ve said that you decided to become an artist at the moment your grandmother was lowered into the ground. Can you elaborate on that?
A: Yes, my grandmother died the same day Will Rogers died. I was 13. We were driving home from somewhere and we heard on the car radio that Will Rogers’ plane had crashed and he had died. Then we got to our house and there was a phone call telling us that my grandmother had died. Same day. My grandmother meant a lot to me, so it was a great loss. She would walk across Brooklyn, this old woman, just to protect me from my stepfather. He would treat her very badly and make fun of her and not let her stay in the house, and say he was going to put me in the reform school. It was terrifying and she would hug me. She was always there for me. My mother loved me too but she could not protect me and the feeling was, and she was right, that this man was clothing me and feeding me, and for that reason I took his name.
Q: He would hit you, mistreat you?
A: Terribly. He took it upon himself to teach me arithmetic when I was 4 years old. He would come home from work, have his dinner and take me down to the basement and teach me arithmetic. He was a very powerful-looking man, with eyes like coal, large red face, very intimidating to me. But I was his son. So he would put out two matches here and another two matches a few inches away and he would say, how much are these matches added to these matches. My mind would freeze, become absolutely paralyzed. My mother would be against the wall, mouthing the number but I couldn’t read what the mouth was saying. My two stepbrothers would be smirking because they knew what was to come. And finally when he said it enough times, each time with greater emphasis, “How much?” I would shout out some number, like “Nine!” at which point he would knock me to the floor. And that was the entertainment for my stepbrothers.
Q: This went on for how long?
A: A year, at least. Maybe I could have been a mathematician. But to this day if I am sleeping and I wake up and look at my watch and it is three in the morning, let’s say, and I want to know how many hours is it between 3 and noon, I have to say add it up. From 4 to 12 is 8, I know that. And so add one more and you have 9.
Q: When your grandmother died, was it literally that day or that moment that you decided to become an artist?
A: I had had some awareness by then that I had a gift. And I had a lot of awareness of the limitations of this family and their friends. Coarse, limited, low. Good decent people, I’m sure. And I’m being hard on them. Much less so than then. Then I judged them very harshly, as children do. Without mercy.
Q: What was it about her dying that correlated with becoming an artist?
A: Well, there was the graveside scene and we were sitting at that huge cemetery. There was a gray, drizzly rain, and my stepfather was there, my uncle, who didn’t care for his mother, my stepbrothers and the friends of my parents. And I just had this thought, this feeling, that there has to be more to life than the lives that these people lead, which seemed entirely limited, coarse and low. And I remember thinking, as my grandmother was lowered down into the grave and the dirt was dropped on her, that if there is something in me that means anything, that is real, then that is what you must do. That was the feeling. And I knew to me it was making art. I had no idea really what that meant, except it meant a life that had a certain goal that I felt was a higher goal. A life worth living.
Q: You said once that Rembrandt was the first artist who lifted you, took you where you’d never been before.
A: Yes I saw a painting of his at the World’s Fair in 1939. And I felt this urge to reach out and touch it, and I did. I felt a connection. I knew that was Rembrandt and I had to touch it. I think a young artist – and it continues through his life – relates to paintings because there’s a certain structure that he feels akin to, without even knowing it. And the structure of Rembrandt, the way he composes, is a glow of darkness and light over the canvas, what we commonly call chiaroscuro. And I said this once about a good Rembrandt – not all Rembrandts are great, but when they are, they’re something – there are no holes in a great Rembrandt. That structure still has its effect on me. When that happens, there is a feeling of family, of relatedness to one’s own vision. One’s own vision is always developing. And I think any artist whose ambition is to make high art feels he never achieves that. The great example is Cezanne, who toward the end of his life said I have not realized. But that is the feeling of it, you find your family. So for me it was Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, and it continues to this day.
Q: At the time your interest was starting to evolve you also had a high school art teacher who took you under his wing.
A: Yes, a wonderful man. He wanted me to be a high school art teacher. He took me to NYU and introduced me. I had been brought up to believe by these kindly relatives of mine that I was a moron, that I looked like Frankenstein’s monster, which didn’t do me much good in making friends with females for a long time. So seeing myself as a high school art teacher? I just couldn’t picture that. I thought, no, I’m going to go to the National Academy, learn to paint like the Old Masters. I didn’t know how I was going to make a living. I had no idea if I was going to.
I’ll tell you about one incident that had a big effect on me, on my career, on my view of art, on my life. I was maybe 15, and there was a young woman who was the girlfriend, I think, of my older stepbrother, and she noticed that I had a gift and she encouraged it. So she told me one day that (Jose Clemente) Orozco, the Mexican muralist, was in town, staying at the Hotel Pierre in New York and that she had met him. She said I should call him. So I had the temerity to call him and he said yes he would meet me. So we’re talking, I’m a young artist, dumb as the day is long. He was in late middle age, he had one deaf ear, and I think he purposely put his deaf ear close to me, to protect himself from this young artist who could be so crude and limited. So can old artists, by the way, I know some. So I say to him, because he paints representationally, I don’t understand these modern artists, such as Picasso. He said to me, “Do you speak Greek?” I said, “No.” He said, “Do you read Greek?” I said, “No.” He said, “Then you’re ignorant of Greek?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, art is language and this is a language you are ignorant of. And you should do something about that.” Boy, did that sink in. I thought I’d better go and look and I did. I looked for 10 years and that’s how Matisse came into my life.
I think I can say, to my credit, that I accepted influences, with pleasure. I looked at Matisse’s work and Bonnard’s and others. Young artists analyze, and they think, that’s how I’ll make a painting. And, yes, I began to love Matisse. He had a big show at the Museum of Modern Art. So I began to find my way in this world.
Q: Like a number of American artists, you went to Paris on the G.I. Bill in the late 1940s, and you had a breakthrough where you first began to find your own language. The first works that drew attention were the blindfold paintings. What’s the story behind those?
A: I always felt very much alone as an artist, as a person. I always felt that everyone knew something that I didn’t know. And, I thought, well, maybe I can find out what that is by reading. And I still read that way, thinking that on the next page, or the next paragraph or the next sentence, I’m going to find it – Oh that’s what it is! But there I was in Paris on the G.I. Bill, which was a wonderful thing. I had met a few of the American artists although I tended to stay away from them. And I found myself alone in a house, out of town, and I’m asking myself, what’s going on? What happened to that graveside thing, the vision? I looked at what I was doing and I thought: What does this art that you’re doing have to do with that feeling you had when your grandmother died? I thought the only way I can find out, to let those feelings come out, is to go back to the feelings I thought, If you were blind and didn’t see what was in front of you and you just painted what you felt what would that look like? So I wrapped a towel around my head and spread out some paint on a big plank of wood, I remember, at this house in the country and put out a canvas on a chair. I kind of knew where the colors were, there was an orange here, a yellow here, a red here, and I began daubing and daubing at the canvas. And I began to look at what I had done and it looked pretty lively. I did it again the next day, and the next day and again for a few months. It never occurred to me that this was art, and I knew very little about non-objective art. I just wanted to see if this damn child was there.
Q: Those were your first true works, when you felt you were speaking your own language.
A: Yeah, I wasn’t aware that they were art, but they began to look very fresh and exciting to me. And so after some months, I don’t remember how long, I thought I can continue from here and I don’t need this towel around my head. And I began painting what was abstract art. Then I let other things creep into that art. I’m fond of saying that I came into modern art ass-backwards. I also came into surrealism that way, without knowing anything about surrealism or caring for it. But I let conscious dreams enter into it. The way dreams are described in movies is not what dreams are really like. The conscious dream sounds like not a real thing – letting your mind float, let’s say, and letting images come into it, some of them, nightmarish images, and then erotic images. Well, one of the great things the French had, I think they no longer had it, although it smelled terrible was the pissoirs. I would notice the drawings there. The French pissoirs, to say something kindly about the French, the drawings were much better than the American drawings. I’ll give that to the French. So, I began drawing their drawings and letting them get into the paintings.
The Americans in my generation who were in Paris at the time started a little art gallery. I submitted my work to them, I won’t mention names, and they turned me down. I had a couple of friends among them who would come to see me and knew what I was doing and we had a show of those paintings – what came out of the blindfold paintings. And that got me attention and respect from my American peers at the time.
Q: Between then and your first one-man show in the States, at Iola in 1958, you had some rough times. Did you really work as a barker for a while in Times Square?
A: I did. What happened was I couldn’t get a job. I was living in Hell’s Kitchen in a cold flat. I had no money. If I was going to eat or make painting I sometimes had to resort to robbing. I stole from art stores, where they sell paint and books. I stole food. I shouldn’t be proud of that. They were difficult years.
Q: Eventually, though, you went back to school, got your master’s and became a teacher at Post College.
A: I went to NYU only because a boyhood friend came and saw the deplorable conditions I was living in – rats, just deplorable – and said you can’t live like this, you have two years left on the G.I. Bill, at least go and become a university professor. I thought, no I’m a moron, I’d have to be among people, I’ll be older than the students. But I thought at least I could use the money. So I did, I went to NYU, where there was a great head of the art department and I had a great time getting an education. I took philosophy, the philosophy department wanted me to become a philosopher. I got straight A’s except for one son of a bitch. William Barrett, teaching existentialism. Maybe I asked the wrong question. I have a facility for saying the wrong thing. He gave me a B.
Q: You continued to paint during the rough times and the time you went back to school. Was it always the most important thing?
A: Oh, it was the only thing.
Q: Emerson’s quote – “Do the thing and you’ll have the power.” You said that was a guiding idea with you, even before you knew the words.
A: Yes, this is very shaky ground to talk about because it can sound so hammy and cheap – spirituality. But I believe what seems to me to be self-evident: That there is a creative force out there. I mean, how did all this get here? Here we are. It seems to me evident that there’s a creative force. It’s not necessarily a creative force that is interested in me or anyone else. But I start with the evidence. The evidence is that there is this creative force in the universe, a power. If I’m part of that, then why not let it work through me.