Oral history interview Al Held, November 19, 1975. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview by Paul Cummins

You were born in Brooklyn in 1928?
Right.

And went to public schools?
Right.

Did you grow up in Brooklyn? Did you always live there or did you move around in the city?
I was born and raised in Brooklyn. I’m very bad on dates. When I was around thirteen years old my parents moved to the Bronx. I lived in three places in Brooklyn. I was born, I think, in Bensonhurst, then we moved to Brownsville, and from Brownsville to Bedford-Stuyvesant, and from Bedford-Stuyvesant we moved up to the East Bronx. Then when I was seventeen I left home and joined the Navy.

Do you have brothers and sisters?
I have one sister.

Is she in the arts?
No, she’s a psychologist. She figures it out!

Aha. Well, what schools did you go to?
Well, basically none. I went to grade school, went to public schools in Brooklyn. By the time I was twelve I became very restless. I was an habitual truant. So at the age of sixteen I was asked to leave school. That is the legal age in New York City. I remember the very phrase clearly. My mother was called in to school. The assistant principal said to her, “Mother, it would be better for the child, better for us if he left. Good.

Sweet and simple.
So I left school, that was the extent of the education.

Now you grew up in the 1930’s during the Depression. Do you member much of that?
Yes and No. I was just going on this with some other people. But I never hunger. My parents were on what in those days was called relief today it would be called welfare. My earliest memories are being on relief. I always had enough food. We lived very poorly, modestly. My father was out of work. Thee was a lot of anxiety I remember the investigators coming to the house, my earliest memories are of coupons for shoes and coupons for clothes and what have you. But in a jewish family food was important

Food was there.
You were never without food; you did without things but you did without food. They were hard times but I don’t remember being hungry of being without things. And of course the whole world around me was poor so one never felt poor. I remember growing and thinking that the Irish were the Establishment. They were equivalent of the Wasps. The only other Protestants I knew were the blacks. The Irish were the ones who somehow knew their way around the world. The Poles and the Italians and Puerto Ricans and Spanish or the Jews or the Russians they were all immigrant families. The families of all the children who were my friends were all very poor, working class. They would never imagine anything else. … began to work like sixteen, seventeen hours a day seven days a week. They wanted me to work there, too. I remember revolting, being very, very unhappy about it. That’s when I began to kick up my heels. And then I’d say, oh, around 1942 World War II was already on. My father got his job back in the jewelry business. The economy had just begun to come back. That’s when we moved to the East Bronx, which was coming up in the world, to the East Bronx.

Well, what was school like: What do you think made you rebel so much against the system?
I don’t know that I rebelled against the system so much as, I don’t quite remember. All I remember is that I was miserable. It was more of an escape. I spent a great deal of time on 42nd Street. By the time I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen until I was about sixteen I used to go to two double features a day. I became expert at sneaking into all the Times Square movie houses. I managed to get in for nothing. The rebellion was a quiet one because, aside from running around with gangs, which I did,but I was able to go off by myself. I didn’t want any of my friends with me. I would get on a subway and go to 42nd Street at eight o’clock in the morning and instead of going to school I would go to a double feature, get out at twelve, go to Grant’s for a hot dog and a soda and then back to another double feature.

And that was the whole day.
That was the whole day. So I spent a great deal of my adolescence in dark rooms looking at screens.

But did you have books, did you read, were you interested in things like that
No.

Any kind of… Newspapers?
No, nothing, Zap. Just zap.

Were there any people in school that you remember, any particular friends or teachers, activities, subjects?
There was one teacher, and art teacher that I remember only because, well, I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t an art teacher, I remember her because she was buying, I was behind the pickle barrel on a weekend and she arrived in a chauffeur-driven limousine to buy something and I was shocked out of my head. And that’s the only teacher… I remember one other teacher who was an old maid who I remember was an anti-Semite. This was in a school that was probably 90% Jewish kids. I remember her, too. But that’s about all. The only other thing I remember about school was, again, the pickle barrel sequence which was that from Tenth Avenue if you run an extension of it down through to Brooklyn downtown it goes very close to Pratt. I was twelve or thirteen years old. I remember there was a class came up to sketch the marketplace. The herring pickle stand was in the middle of two long blocks of markets. I remember being sketched by these kids and being very impressed by it. I had absolutely no interest in art, I had never been to a museum, I had never seen a Painting. It wasn’t part of my consciousness. That’s about the only early memories I have.

So school never had any particular interest? I mean none of the subjects or anything? It was just to get through it and get out of it and see what happened?
That’s right.

How did you pick the Navy?
Well, you have to remember that all through the war I was searching for something. I was inundated with all the war propaganda. So when I got to be seventeen it was a chance to get away from home and there was the adventure and it was very very glamorous. It turned out to be very lucky for me because, if you can visualize it, I don’t know what it’s like with other cultures, but for a Jewish father to sign for a seventeen-year-old, a parent had to sign for a seventeen-year-old to join the Navy… For my father to sign this paper was scandalous.

It was like giving you away or something.
Yes. It was something out of his culture, something that he couldn’t possibly understand. But to do it he must have been terribly desperate to get rid of me. At any rate, it turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. I got into the Navy. I was a terrible neurotic, malcontent. So I got into the Navy, I signed up for two years. By the time I was nineteen I was already out. And the Korean War had started. Now it i had been nineteen, a high school dropout during the Korean War I would have been killed in Korea because,

Perhaps, yes.
I would have been right there, the right age, right into the infantry, ready to go. So I spent most of the Korean War in Paris on the G.I. Bill. So the events worked out beautifully for me; by this series of accidents.

Well, what happened in the Navy? What did you do? Where, what bases did you go to?
During the time in the Navy I was at boot camp at Camp Perry in Virginia which turned out to be a CIA camp now. At the time it was a boot camp, it had been a Seebee camp during the war. It’s down near Richmond, Virginia, near Williamsburg, near William and Mary College.

This was your first trip out of New York, wasn’t it?
It was the first trip I ever made outside of New York. Well, actually once before in my whole life I had ventured outside of the neighborhood. That was when I was much younger. I must have been about ten; my uncle took me to the country, to the mountains for a week or so. The interesting part about that was that I was there for two days, the first time I had ever been outside of the city, and a dog attacked me and bit me. I got sent home. I hadn’t left the city again until I was seventeen.

And went into the Navy.
Right. Well, in the Navy I was sent to Camp Perry and at Camp Perry I was assigned to a ship that turned out to be in the submarine service. So I was assigned to a submarine squadron for most of the time I was in the Navy. I ended up striking forward in electronics. It was the beginning of radar and sonar and that stuff. So I got involved with that. Then the squadron went down to Panama. Spent a lot of time around Panama in the western… all through there.

How did you like all that? Did you see much of it, or was it…
Well, I was a kid and all I saw were bars and whorehouses. That was all I knew. Not much else. The only real adventure was that I had about three or four months to go and I had a chance to get on a submarine to go on an expedition tot he South Pole in 1947. I wanted desperately to go but they wanted me to sign up for another two years and I wouldn’t do it.

Enough was enough.
Yes. I learned very quickly that I didn’t like the Navy. So I got out of the Navy and came back to New York. That’s about it.

Now you were in the Navy for two years, you were now out, and you now had the G.I. Bill.
Yes. I was nineteen.

Did you have any plans? Did you have any interests?
I still had no interests. I remember the only book I ever read in the Navy, by coincidence I was on night watch and the only book I read in the Navy was that Ayn Rand book on the Architect, a very famous book, they made a movie out of it about the architect. I’ve forgotten the name of it. It’s a very funny thing that I would have picked up that book of all books and read it then.

It was a novel, Point Counter point or something like that? By what’s his name?
No, that’s a Huxley book.

It’s not a Huxley book?
No, no, it’s by Ayn Rand.

Oh, Ayn Rand, Fountainhead.
Yes, Fountainhead. The one book I read in the Navy was Fountainhead. At any rate, I was out of the navy, I was nineteen. And there was another set of circumstances: my father all his life was a leftist. And I was raised in an environment where when I was a child, a baby, I was pushed in a baby carriage in the May Day parades. The reason I’m going into this is that it has something to do with my getting out of the Navy. What I’m trying to say is that when I was nineteen and was back in my parent’s house int he East Bronx I was hanging around, I was getting unemployment insurance, that business they call 52/20. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do. A couple of kids came to me and said they were going to go down to the Village to build May Day floats. The reason I bring this up is that the idea of building May Day floats for leftist programs was not something that was fearful or that was strange to me, it was something that was very common. My father kept putting me into these organizations all through my adolescence, which I would then skip out on and go to the streets and run with the boys. He kept putting me in all these youth progressive organizations at which I looked around, saw a bunch of creeps and left. But what I’m sort of suggesting is that the culture was not foreign or alien to me. So when kids came to me and said they were going down to the Village to build May Day floats I went with them not necessarily to build the May Day floats but for what the Village represented, girls, sex, action. So I accepted and went down to the Village because of that kind of attraction. I was nineteen years old. And we did build May Day floats. That was okay with me, too.

Do you remember where they were?
Oh, yes, very clearly. We went down to Pete Seeger’s house. That was right down here where the N. Y. U. Law School is, right across the street. It turned out that some of these kids belonged to this cultural group called Folksay.

Oh, yes.
Do you know about Folksay?

I’ve heard about it.
Oh, really!

Somebody else mentioned that.
Nick Krushenick? Have you interviewed Nick Krushenick?

Yes.
Okay. Now what happened was that I met these people down there and stopped at all the girls because I was promptly rejected as being a yokel kid from he Bronx, unsophisticated, stupid. I was terribly put down, et cetera.

Here you were an old Navy man, right?
Right, an old Navy man. But I was just a very dumb, innocent kid. So what happened was that I got involved with them. As I said before, because of my father’s background it wasn’t a strange, dangerous business more like everybody knew that.

Right.
I started going to some of their meetings and some of their dances and what have you. And there I met nick Krushenick and his brother John Krushenick. Nick was living up in the Bronx at the time, too. Now you have to remember this: that in the Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods are marked by subway stops. Nick lived on the same line that I lived on but one stop away. So I was going to these meetings and meeting these people. Then I decided that I wanted to go back to high school to get my high school diploma and become a social worker.

Hmmm. That was through the influence of these kids?
Of these kids, yes, well, they weren’t really kids. They were college students mostly. The Weavers came out of this group.

Oh, yes, right.
So I started going back to high school. But the interesting thing is that I would come down every Friday night and I met Nick Krushenick. He had just gotten out of the Army, and his brother John who is a year or so older had just gotten out, too. Nick was very interested in art all of his life. He was planning to go to the Art Students League. At that point I had never seen a painting in my life. I had never seen a real painting. The only paintings I ever saw was the New York Post in 1940 offered a portfolio of Van Gogh prints to their subscribers which my mother got for a dollar. Those were things in my mother’s house that I was raised in.
And that was the only art that I ever actually saw. So then nick had started to go to the Art Students League. And I was going back and forth to these meetings with him and he was boasting about these great paints he was going to paint. And I was talking to him about the great paintings he was going to paint. And I was talking to him about the great paintings he was going to paint. What happened then was that we would go home together and we would stop at the subway stop and have a cup of coffee late at night and sit around he would talk about the great murals he was going to paint, the social things he was going to paint, et cetera. I got more and more interested in his art. By that time I had realized that I had this GI Bill extension but I was very stingy about it, I was very protective of it. I didn’t have any money. I knew I needed it so I was setting it aside to go to college to study to be a social worker. Then I decided to take a course at the Art Students league. An anatomy course. And that’s how it all started. To tell you how naive I was the first day I went into this anatomy course, I knew there was going to be a nude model there, usually a female, and I was nineteen. And a friend of mine said like, you know, in those days his prick was so erect that he tripped over it. Like, you know, anything that moved… So the first few sessions I wore a jockstap to the sessions to make sure I wouldn’t embarrass myself.

Oh, marvelous! That was just a drawing class though, wasn’t it?
Yes. I mean I still couldn’t take myself seriously. I would do it as an exercise, do it like fun. I paid for it myself. I didn’t want to start the GI Bill. And all my friends raised their eyebrows when then heard that I was going to take this little class. Wow!

Well, what happened? I mean Krushenick obviously somehow created some interest?
Mmhmm.

Did you know what it was? Or was it just his enthusiasm? Or,
I just got interested in his dreams. Hew was fantasizing about these marvelous paintings he was going to paint. And I got more and more interested in those marvelous paintings he was going to paint. Then I started taking this course as a summer course. By the time summer was over I had decided to enroll in the Art Students League, and invoke the GI BIll, get it to live on.

Right. So those first few sessions in the summer you paid for?
Right. I paid for it. I wanted to make sure that I was really serious about it. I didn’t want to use it up on frivolous things.

How long did you go to the Folksay? Or how long were you involved with that group?
It must have been a few years.

Oh, really? It was quite a…
Well, it must have been at least two years. By that time I had gotten, through this group, socially oriented and politically oriented and I became politically active.

What was the appeal of politics?
I don’t know. My father tried to interest me in it. During all my adolescence I was totally uninterested. I would imagine it was the peer group that I had associated myself with. It was a kind of lucky coincidence of getting connected with this cultural group, it was a folk culture, Folksay. They’re the ones who started singing around, . But they’re the ones who started doing that. They used to have these public square dances at the, to raise money. And that was around the time of the Wallace campaign and we were very active in the Wallace campaign. We had a big, truck and went all over Harlem and we campaigned very strenuously for Wallace. And, as I said, i was enrolled at the Art Students League. At that time I studied with,

Nicolaides?
Yes, Nicolaides. And then from there went to Harry Sternberg who was a social realist painter. And then after about six months with Harry Sternberg. harry Sternberg lovingly called me up, well, he didn’t call me up, asked me to come visit him at his studio which was in Union Square and sat me down and talked to me like an interested father and, in essence, told me to give it all up.

Really?
Yes, that it was not for me. It was like a kick in the balls.

What did you think though, I mean what did your family think, for example, when you said you were going to go to the Art Students League?
In the beginning I told them I was going to commercial art because I didn’t want them to… Very quickly after that I moved out of the house, I moved down to Col… Street to a cold water flat. I shared a cold water fate with two other kind of leftist-oriented kids from the Art Students League. I tried to persuade Nick to take an apartment with me but he didn’t want to leave his parent’s home because it was cheaper to live there. But I moved out and we got,

Who were the other two?
I’ve forgotten their names now. I forgot who they are. But by that time I was deeply involved in the whole political situation and I was already deeply involved with the social realist fellow students. But by that time I was interested in going to Mexico to study with Siquieros. As a matter of fact, that was around the time that the Rosenbergs got picked up. They were living down the street. They were living in the lower East side too. I remember there was a kind of hysteria among leftist circles. It was the beginning of Fascism and many believed this was a big conspiracy to round everybody up. I had decided I wanted to get out and go to Mexico and study with Siquieros. I had all the papers all drawn up and I was about to go to Mexico when Siquieros got into a gunfight with some people and they closed up the school and threw him into jail. I couldn’t go to Mexico so I decided to go to Paris. But I didn’t particularly want to go to Paris. I remember that to get enough money to go to Paris I was going to the Art Students League from nine to four; from four to eleven I was working as a dishwasher up in the cafeteria there. So for about six or eight months I opened up that bloody place and I closed it.

Those were long hours.
Oh, it was a heavy scene. But I did get enough money together for the boat fare and even a couple hundred bucks to live on until the checks started to arrive. And took a boat to Paris.

Now something obviously happened at the League that got you reinterested and committed to doing this. What was that? I mean Sternberg seems to have not been a help.
It wasn’t so much the league as it was being with this group, it was this group and Nick Krushenick and the whole kind of idealism of serving the people and being an artists and painting great paintings, with great messages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it was almost a social impetus rather than an art thing? Or was it a…
Well, thing happened very quickly. What I’m saying is that we’re not talking about a period of a year or two.

It was all in a few months.
Well, no, it was more like a year or so. But things happened very, very quickly after that. When I started painting I started reading and I started thinking about all these things that I had never given any serious thought to before. And so getting involved with painting actually sort of got me involved in reading, got me involved in educating myself.

What kind of things did you start reading?In the beginning it was mostly political things, philosophical books and essays and political things, and then novels by the Russians obviously because of the whole political orientation; and gradually expanding to other things.

So the Folksay group was really an important kind of cultural beginning for you?
Right.

It broadened all your interests?
Right. And, as I’ve said, Nick was the first person I ever met who was interested in art. And that’s when I started looking at paintings. I had never even looked at paintings, I had never seen an original painting before that.

Did you start going to museums then?
Mmhmm. Then I became an art student.

Went to all the,
Museums and everything else.

What was that like? I mean you started that somewhat later than most other people do. So many start drawing as a child and keep on drawing and going through various things in high school.
What was it like?

Yes. What was your experience/ The Museum of Modern Art was already established very well. The Metropolitan Museum was there.
Well, the Modern was really the most important, not the Met. Just to jump ahead a year or two, I started going to the Modern and those were paintings. I didn’t know good from bad; those were the paintings. I told this to Dorothy Miller once. I wanted to tell this to Alfred Barr but by the time I got enough out of my shyness to tell him, he was senile. When I got to Paris I was still a very, very dumb kid. I was shocked at the quality of the work in Paris because as far as I was concerned, modern painting was what I saw at the Modern. I had no other criteria but what I saw at the Modern. I realized that the French student of my age group never saw the quality of painting that I saw. So I was raised on top quality painting, top quality French painting actually, ut not knowing that there was anything worse or better. I mean it wasn’t like; oh, that’s a good Picasso. That’s Picasso. Or: that’s not a good Matisse happened to be the Piano Recital, or the Studio. And so the Modern was absolutely marvelous. Like one of my roommates on, street was copying a Vermeer at the Met but that didn’t interest me at all. I had a lot of trouble with Pollock. Pollock was the devil incarnate as far as leftist kids were concerned.

In what way?
He was a modern artist who said nothing but the painting texture and all that shit. I had a lot of trouble with him because when I first saw my first Pollock it really hit me, it really kicked me in the head. But I couldn’t justify my reaction to my program. My program was social realist and here I am getting emotionally connected with this thing, and yet i’ve got this whole ideological thing over here which says that’s shit. And so I had a lot of trouble until I was able to rationalize it. Then I was able to bring the two together and say to my self that Pollock was the personification of speed and violence. And if you remember back when Pollock first appeared, that wasn’t hard to do. Now it’s lyrical, & poetic, sensitive. In those days it was violence and gesture, it was all that. So it took me a while to formulate some kind of rationale to fit into my program that Pollock was able to grab me because he really was expressing that kind of content that I was interested in. But the Modern was crucial in the sense that they weren’t good paintings or bad paintings; they were the only paintings. It wasn’t until I got to paris that I realized that I was looking at great paintings. It never occurred to me before that they were either great or not great. My feeling is that Alfred Barr had a great deal to do with American art, even though Barr is record in terms of recognizing American art is bad, I think in terms of educating whole generations of artists it was,

It was incredible what he did.
Right. So his education of a whole culture was unsurpassed, just talking subjectively I didn’t realize it until I got to Paris. I couldn’t see French painting in Paris. Now the Museum of Modern Art in Paris has come up in the world because all those old guys have left their estates to them. In those days, in 1950, there was nothing there. There was nothing in the galleries. So the Modern is an incredible place.

What about the Whitney Museum? Did you go there ever?
Yes. The Whitney was there and there were good paintings there, like Pollock; I had already begun to look at Pollock and de Kooning and things like that. But it was more random, it was more scattered, it didn’t have the same power that the Modern had. I remember sitting in the cafeteria at the Art Students League. In those days there were a lot of ex-G.I.’s, a lot of more mature people around than they have now. I was very, very young and very innocent and I remember listening to conversations that these guys were having about different painting styles, about issues, you know, and they would sort of pile up a dozen issues and talk at length about them. I remember very clearly walking away from one conversation and saying? I’ll never be able to think about time, space, influence, color all this at the same time, I’m putting the thing down. How can you think about all those things? I mean it was that kind of innocence.

But now you were really then at the League for how long?
I’d say about a year and a half. Remember the political climate. It was about the same time as the Rosenberg-McCarthy thing. There was quite a bit of agitation and what have you.

Right. Who else did you study with besides Sternberg?
He was the main one. Then I took some classes with Tanen… and Charlie White occasionally came in and I worked with him. Once in a while. He was a black artist.

Right.
He was actually very influenced by the Mexicans. And who else? I used to scurry around to different studios but basically those were the ones.

How did you like Sternberg? Was he useful to you? Or,
No.

He didn’t, it didn’t coincide with what you saw at the Museum?
It coincided very well in terms of the social realist thing, but I never liked his painting. Even from the very first, paintings were not something I respected. But thinking back now that you’ve asked the question, there wasn’t anybody in the Art Students League, with the exception maybe of Charlie White who I liked only because of his big boldness. But that had to be from Mexico which I was very involved with. But there wasn’t anybody really at the Art Students League that I would take on as a master. There wasn’t a painter there whose paintings were something that I would emulate. Not that I had anything to emulate, I mean there wasn’t any desire to,

What kind of things were you doing in terms of subject or images?
Well, it went very quickly from crude figure drawings to paintings the very first things I started doing were related to the Mexicans. And I remember… I’m sorry that I’ve destroyed them all now because they wer,

None of them exist any more?
No. I destroyed them all. I mean I deeply regret it.

When did you do that?
Oh, you know how you are when you’re young, you don’t want to carry them around, they look terrible to you, you look back on them two months, or five months, or a year later and they look terrible. You say: oh, Cripes did I do that awful thing. I regret it now. What happened was that, as I’ve said, I was getting ready to leave the country, I was going to go to Mexico rather than go to Paris. I was going to use the G. I. Bill. I had no money.

Right. That was it.
On painting I did was of a big asexual monster, it was a nude, it must have been a male figure, sort of a monster, it had no genitals. The monster was stride two buildings, one was a church and one was a bank. He had two outstretched hands and from each finger of the outstretched hand, like this, hung a black, lynched, you know,

The whole imagery.
Visualized the whole imagery. And then another painting I remember was a figure that was broader than the frame in the manner of the Mexican things that Siquieros and Charlie White blocked out big massive block figures. I mean these were terrible, terrible paintings. I’m only describing the image and not the ability to create that image. I remember these being packed in the space almost larger than the canvas. Those were the only two paintings. I also remember very clearly that when I first started to paint I was drawing at the Art Students League for quite a while and I got terribly fearful of making a painting. I couldn’t. I was very scared.

For what reason?
Well, it just was intimidating for some reason.

You mean switching to oils and canvas?
Right, I bought some canvas and oils and I couldn’t touch them. Clean while surface, couldn’t touch it.
Yes. So what I did was I got kind of desperate, I was in painting class, I wasn’t painting, so I stole a half-finished painting and brought it home and painted on it.

Oh, I see, somebody else had started it?
Right. Somebody else had started the painting and I stole it and brought it home and painted on it.

Oh, I see, somebody else had started it?
Right. Somebody else had started the painting and I stole it and brought it home and secretly worked on it at home and brought it in. But that was the way I used, It’s a terrible thing to say, but,

Well, you know…
But I was so intimidated by that white canvas that I had sitting in my room that I couldn’t touch it. So in desperation I stole this half-finished canvas and brought it home and finished it well, finished. So those are the kinds of experiences I had to in the Art Students League.

Do you think the League was useful to you in any way? I mean it did get things going but…
I think so. I think the League was very useful. I use the experience not only for myself, I use it in terms of teaching now in terms of how to design an art school, in this one sense: I learned much more from my fellow students than I did from my instructors. So that whole atelier situation at the Art Students League with a mix of inexperienced people and experienced people in the same room I learned more from watching another student paint than I did from my instructors criticizing my work. I think it was very useful in the sense of the mixed bag of the,

Young kinds and the old ladies or whatever.
Well, as I said, in those days there were a lot of older guys who had come back from the service who used the G.I. Bill and worked there. So there was lot of activity that I’m sure is different now. So I learned a lot just from osmosis, just being around these people and picking up ways of putting paint down, watching, not even talking, just watching them. And then my introduction to art history was in the cafeteria just sitting around listening or participating in conversations about this painting or that painting or this man or that man. That’s how it all began, how I got started. I think it’s a very good way to get into painting. As I’ve said, the instructors did teach something I’m sure, but my memories of things are that I usually got easily as much, if not more, form other students than I did from my instructors, just working with them side by side, day in and day out. That kind of mixed bag I think was very good.

You really must have had some schedule working in the studio and dishes and classes?
I didn’t set foot back in the Art Students League for fifteen years.

You’d had it.
We went to galleries and museums, groups of friends of mine and we discussed all the paintings. As I’ve said, I was very, very naive.

Were there any students who became particular friends of yours at that point?
You mean aside from Krushenick?

Yes.
There were a couple of people that I remember. You wouldn’t remember him perhaps, Rocco.

Oh, yes, a sculptor.
A sculptor. He’s now living in Woodstock. He has the Woodstock sanitation garbage truck.

Oh, really? I wondered what had happened to him. And there he is.
Who else There were not too many people there. More in Paris. Paris I guess would be like my graduate school. That’s where I really got turned on.

Well, before we start there, which is obviously the next step, what did your family think of this?
As I said before, for about a year I lied to them. I told them I was going to commercial art. My family knew nothing at all about art. They never had any interest in it. My father started getting me jobs. He’d round up little commercial jobs. Embarrassingly I had to sort of turn them down. Finally I had to tell him. And he got, they were both very upset: what am I doing , to myself and so on.

The most impractical thing in the world.
Anyway, they had no power over me because I didn’t need money. I had the G.I. Bill. So the couldn’t do much more than moan and groan and create the emotional pressure, but they couldn’t do anything else besides that. They were very disapproving. They didn’t like the idea of my going to Paris, they didn’t like the idea of me painting, they didn’t want me to move. When I moved to Monroe Street my mother and my father refused to visit me. My mother was raised on Hester Street. She said, “My God! thirty years! It took me thirty years to work myself out of Hester Street and now what does he do! He goes right back there!” Not that she had, the East Bronx was no piece of cake, but in her terms it was a great accomplishment to get out of Hester Street. And there I was right back where she started from.

I’ve had a couple of people tell me that, that the same, that they got a loft down there and their parents say: I don’t believe it. It’s fantastic.
And down there there were all kinds of people. I remember meeting Harry Jackson down there. He had gotten very involved with Pollock. Guys like him always do things that I am envious of that I could never do. I remember he got interested in Pollock and decided, well, he got on the train and went to East Hampton and knocked on Pollock’s door and said, “Here I am.” And Pollock too him in for a week. I remember thinking with absolute fascination that here was something I really wanted to do because even though I was a fan of Pollock I was too shy to even dream of doing something like that. Just incidents like that.

The whole growing art world.
I wasn’t hanging around the downtown art world except that I would go to the Waldorf and sit around there for a while but I was too young and too naive to really understand what was happening. I keep going back to the fact that I was very, very naive. I don’t know where you’re from, but being raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx is like being raised in Oshkosh, Michigan. It’s so provincial, it’s incredibly provincial.

It’s another world.
It’s a very provincial place.

Well, how did, you know, New York as a city must have changed for you during this period. Did it, in terms of living down on the Lower East Side, being involved with the Art Students League, knowing different kinds of people? Did it change? Or was it that you were just so busy doing what you were doing that it didn’t…
It was a series of radical growths but it was a kind of growth which is not conscious growth.

You were just busy carrying on and doing, doing, doing.
I was busy doing and busy taking on attitudes. I was too busy taking on attitudes and just absorbing to really analyze what I was absorbing. I wasn’t analytical at that time. That’s why I keep going back stating how naive I was. There was no analytical process involved. It was more like I was a sponge, I was just simply taking it all in, taking what I could and leaving what I didn’t. Like, for instance, down on Monroe street there was a big movement besides the political movement there was a big movement of the right…

Oh, yes.
Stuff like that. I would argue on a conceptual, intellectual level but it never interested me, I’d never get involved with stuff like that, really.

No commitment?
Oh, yes, I’d sit in the box once in a while if some girl insisted before we had sex. Why not? But it wasn’t something that I… It never interested me. It was all around me; all that stuff was around. But I was still very, very much a provincial kid. The New York culture didn’t catch up to me until I got to Paris.

Why did you decide to go to Paris? I mean you wanted to go to Mexico?
Right. I wanted to go to Mexico. I couldn’t go to Mexico because of the Siquieros incident. I was very much a leftist. I felt very strongly that McCarthy and the whole cold war was at its height and that the world was coming to an end. So then it was just simply a matter of getting out.

I see. Paris was the logical,
What happened was: there was a guy at the Art Students League who had just gotten back from Paris. When the Mexico thing fell through I asked him: what school did you go to? He told me the school, the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. So I sat down and applied to the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. I got back a letter of acceptance. And that was it. I didn’t speak a word of French, not one solitary word. I still can’t speak a word.

Well, you know, this was a whole new thing, getting on a boat, going of to France.
Mmhmm.

How did it happen? What happened in terms of leaving New York and going there and setting up?
Well, I was anxious to get out. My friends were, I was already restless with my friends. The leftists that I knew, even the Folksay group, were too bourgeois for me. I remember pleading with Nick Krushenick to come with me. I had something like three years left on the G.I.Bill. He had only about six months left on the G.I. Bill. I said: “Nick, we’ll both live on my G.I. Bill; come with me.” He had just met a girl who is now his wife and he didn’t want to come. But i was already restless and wanted to get away from that place. It was an instinctive urge to start a new life. Which is essentially what I did do in paris. What happened was, do you want to stay in New york before we talk about Paris?

Well, if there’s more in New York. And then we can…
Not really, except that by coincidence just before I left New York I had looked at a loft on East Broadway which I didn’t take when I decided to get out. It was when I was on Monroe Street. The reason I bring it up is that on the boat coming back from Paris three years later I was thinking about that loft and went back to it to rent it and there it was still thee waiting for me.

Oh, really? Fantastic.
Yeah, it was fantastic, I burnt it down, a year later. So I was restless. I had no ties here. I was anxious to get away from my family. My friends were, you know… I was restless. I was restless and anxious to get out. Well, it was kind of like when I joined the Navy. It wasn’t something that was thought out; it was more just like a nervous, anxious, neurotic kid sort of itchy. It was a good way to move. But i promised my self by the time I left for Paris I still wasn’t sure about being an artist. I mean I was one of those kids who was so serious, well, “serious” isn’t the right word, so insecure that at parties when I’d meet new people and they’d ask me what I did, you know the new york syndrome “What do you do?” I would tell them anything but that I was an artist or an art student.

So there was still some ambivalence.
Yes. As a matter of fact, I promised my self that I’d only stay in Paris for six months unless I got down to work and cut out the shit, but that I’d give myself six months to prove myself to myself. THere was no other, I had no other, I wasn’t like saying well some teacher or some institution will test me. It was more like I gave myself six months to either prove myself or not. Oh, one thing I’ve left out was at that time Nick and I… You have to remember that the New York art world was not like it is now, the wasn’t this kind of prosperity. Nick’s father was a carpenter, and old Ukraninian carpenter and he got Nick and I jobs as apprentice carpenters in the construction trade. And what Nick and I planned to do, and we were very serious about this; it wasn’t a question of being serious about it because it was some kind of idealistic love, it was more like we worked this out in terms of economic necessity, we had planned to become carpenters and work six months, make enough money and then live six months off the money we saved and paint. That was the plan. We did become carpenters, or carpenter apprentices, and nick actually worked many more years at this then… I did because I went off to Paris. But the plan was to be a carpenter and paint.

And have a mode of support.
Yes. Because it never occurred to us, I mean it just wasn’t in our consciousness that there was any other way of doing it. Which is radically different from today.

Oh, yes, I know.
Art students bitch if they’re not supported in the style that they expect. I don’t blame them. i don’t think it’s their fault. I think they’re living in another world. They’re only functioning in the world that they’re functioning in. I’m not saying this in terms of purity. We weren’t even conscious of purity. It was really like this is the most practical thing to do.

So you did go to Paris?
I went to Paris.

What did you do when you got there? I mean you didn’t speak French, you had to find a place to go, to live and work.
Well, I went on a student ship. In those days the cheapest passage was on the Holland American Line.

Oh, right. Everybody’s done that.
Did you go that way?

Like $160 or something. Lots of fruit and basics.
Right. Well, I went on a ship of the Holland American Line. There was a whole bunch of students. There was one student, an art student that I ran into, a Jewish name Friedman something like that. He is now living in London. He was sharp and he knew what he was about. He was a college kid and he knew what he was about. He studied with Hayler & he was going there to study with him. He knew where he was going and what he was going to do. I didn’t. I knew nothing. All I knew was that I was leaving, I was getting away, I wasn’t going anywhere, I was getting away.

Out.
Out. I got to Paris. I got a cheap hotel room. It was off Saint Germaine. It was a miserable hotel; as a matter of fact, it was a terrible hotel. I remember we all scattered… We landed in Holland, we didn’t land in Paris, we landed in Holland or Antwerp or some place, I’ve forgotten now. Then we took the train to Paris.

Maybe at Le Havre.
We might have landed at Le Havre. We took a train to Paris. And we all scattered. I was on my own, I didn’t have a friend I met on the boat. The only experience on the boat was there was a whole group of Mennonite C. O.’s going over to Germany to work on farms or something. I remember the tremendous contrast between the kinds on the ship like myself and the Mennonite kinds. I remember the preacher who chaperoned them saying in his Sunday sermon, “Do not scatter pearls among swine.” It got to be that bad.

Oh, boy!
At any rate, I got to Paris. I was enrolled at the Academie de la Grande Chauiere which was essentially like the Art Students League, smaller; basically I would say the Grande Chaumiere is the prototype of the Art Students Leagure rather than the other way around. I got this hotel room in Saint Germaine. I spoke no French. I remember going to a restaurant on the first night, I pointed to something on the menu. The waiter looked at me, he brought it and it was tete de veau. Well, with the amount of money I had I didn’t want to make that mistake too often. I think I ate omelettes for about