Never Let The Screen Door Slam
Frederick Hammersley, filmed by Vanessa H. Smith.
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interviews. Show all posts
Monday, 29 December 2014
Frederick Hammersley, Never Let The Screen Door Slam (2010)
Never Let The Screen Door Slam
Frederick Hammersley, filmed by Vanessa H. Smith.
Saturday, 27 December 2014
Josef Albers - Interviewed (1968)
Conducted by Sevim Fesci in New Haven, Connecticut. June 22,1968
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Josef Albers on June 22, 1968. The interview took place in New Haven, Connecticut and was conducted by Sevim Fesci for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
SEVIM FESCI: Before we start to talk about your experiences in the United States and the creative process involved in your work, I would like to ask you a few questions about your childhood.
JOSEF ALBERS: Yes,
SEVIM FESCI: I think your parents were artists themselves? Or --
JOSEF ALBERS: I started once also at the request of some writer to write about my youth. And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. I was in the workshop and watched him. So as a child so-called art was not my view. That was, in my opinion, my father's job. But I liked to watch him; he comes, as my mother also, from a very craftsman's background. My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know. On my mother's side there was much more heavy craft. They were blacksmiths. They made a speciality horse shoes and nails for them. So, as a child, my main fun was to watch others working. I loved to walk to the neighboring carpenter's place and up to the neighboring shoemaker in my home town.
SEVIM FESCI: Your home town is Bottrop?
JOSEF ALBERS: Bottrop, yes. That is in the Ruhr district. Do you know what the Ruhr is?
SEVIM FESCI: Yes. Very industrial.
JOSEF ALBERS: That is the Pittsburgh of Westphalia, of Germany. But a hundred times bigger; a hundred Pittsburghs all together. One never sees a boundary between the cities. And everywhere there are mines and furnaces and metal melting there. It was loud and very dirty, and unpleasantly ugly. The whole region is. Except at night when you go on the train through that country the fireworks are just incredible. So that's where I came from.
SEVIM FESCI: And you didn't feel at all the urge to draw or to paint as a child?
JOSEF ALBERS: Well, not to produce, as I said, so-called art. That was not my idea. My father painted all those stage sets, you see. I found in the woods little mushrooms. And I learned very early how to make imitation of wood grain. This is something I have in common with Braque. Braque also learned very early from his father how to imitate marble or wood grain. So I could easily make the appearance of oak or walnut on pine. That is very easy; a very simple technique. And I learned how to imitate marble. I never made such a good joke as Braque died. When he was in the Mediterranean he fooled his friends. He painted a rowboat that had wood on one side and marble on the other side. You see, when he'd row out of the city it looked as if he were in a boat of a different material than when he came back, you see, one side was imitation wood and the other side was imitation marble.
The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Josef Albers on June 22, 1968. The interview took place in New Haven, Connecticut and was conducted by Sevim Fesci for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
SEVIM FESCI: Before we start to talk about your experiences in the United States and the creative process involved in your work, I would like to ask you a few questions about your childhood.
JOSEF ALBERS: Yes,
SEVIM FESCI: I think your parents were artists themselves? Or --
JOSEF ALBERS: I started once also at the request of some writer to write about my youth. And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything. I was in the workshop and watched him. So as a child so-called art was not my view. That was, in my opinion, my father's job. But I liked to watch him; he comes, as my mother also, from a very craftsman's background. My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know. On my mother's side there was much more heavy craft. They were blacksmiths. They made a speciality horse shoes and nails for them. So, as a child, my main fun was to watch others working. I loved to walk to the neighboring carpenter's place and up to the neighboring shoemaker in my home town.
SEVIM FESCI: Your home town is Bottrop?
JOSEF ALBERS: Bottrop, yes. That is in the Ruhr district. Do you know what the Ruhr is?
SEVIM FESCI: Yes. Very industrial.
JOSEF ALBERS: That is the Pittsburgh of Westphalia, of Germany. But a hundred times bigger; a hundred Pittsburghs all together. One never sees a boundary between the cities. And everywhere there are mines and furnaces and metal melting there. It was loud and very dirty, and unpleasantly ugly. The whole region is. Except at night when you go on the train through that country the fireworks are just incredible. So that's where I came from.
SEVIM FESCI: And you didn't feel at all the urge to draw or to paint as a child?
JOSEF ALBERS: Well, not to produce, as I said, so-called art. That was not my idea. My father painted all those stage sets, you see. I found in the woods little mushrooms. And I learned very early how to make imitation of wood grain. This is something I have in common with Braque. Braque also learned very early from his father how to imitate marble or wood grain. So I could easily make the appearance of oak or walnut on pine. That is very easy; a very simple technique. And I learned how to imitate marble. I never made such a good joke as Braque died. When he was in the Mediterranean he fooled his friends. He painted a rowboat that had wood on one side and marble on the other side. You see, when he'd row out of the city it looked as if he were in a boat of a different material than when he came back, you see, one side was imitation wood and the other side was imitation marble.
Frank Stella & Donald Judd - interviewed by Bruce Glaser (1966)
This discussion was broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, February, 1964, as “New Nihilism or New Art?” It was one of a series of programs produced by Bruce Glaser. Glaser has lectured on art at Hunter College and Pratt Institute, and is now the director of the Art Gallery of the America Israel Cultural Foundation in New York City.
The material of the broadcast was subsequently edited by Lucy R. Lippard, and was published in Art News, September, 1966. In her introduction to the text, Miss Lippard wrote that it contains “the first extensive published statement by Frank Stella, a widely acknowledged source of much current structural painting, and Donald Judd, one of the earliest exponents of the sculptural primary structure, in which the artists themselves challenge and clarify the numerous prevailing generalizations about their work.”
BRUCE GLASER: There are characteristics in your work that bring to mind styles from the early part of this century. Is it fair to say that the relative simplicity of Malevich, the Constructivists, Mondrian, the Neo-Plasticists, and the Purists is a precedent for your painting and sculpture, or are you really departing from these earlier movements?
FRANK STELLA: There’s always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or Surrealism, there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify.
GLASER: But all through the twentieth century this simple approach has paralleled more complicated styles.
STELLA: That’s right, but it’s not continuous. When I first showed, Coates in The New Yorker said how sad it was to find somebody so young right back where Mondrian was thirty years ago. And I really didn't feel that way.
GLASER: You feel there’s no connection between you and Mondrian?
STELLA: There are obvious connections. You’re always related to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can’t think of anything I like less.
GLASER: Vasarely?
STELLA: Well, mine has less illusionism than Vasarely’s, but the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel actually painted all the patterns before I did - all the basic designs that are in my painting - not the way I did it, but you can find the schemes of the sketches I made for my own paintings in work by Vasarely and that group in France over the last seven or eight years. I didn't even know about it, and in spite f the fact that they used those ideas, those basic schemes, it till doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting - sort of post-Max Bill school - a kind of curiosity - very dreary.
DONALD JUDD: There’s an enormous break between that work and other present work in the U.S., despite similarity in patterns or anything. The scale itself is just one thing to pin down. Vasarely’s work has a smaller scale and a great deal of composition and qualities that European geometric painting of the 20’s and 30’s had. He is part of a continuous development from the 30’s, and he was doing it himself then.
The material of the broadcast was subsequently edited by Lucy R. Lippard, and was published in Art News, September, 1966. In her introduction to the text, Miss Lippard wrote that it contains “the first extensive published statement by Frank Stella, a widely acknowledged source of much current structural painting, and Donald Judd, one of the earliest exponents of the sculptural primary structure, in which the artists themselves challenge and clarify the numerous prevailing generalizations about their work.”
BRUCE GLASER: There are characteristics in your work that bring to mind styles from the early part of this century. Is it fair to say that the relative simplicity of Malevich, the Constructivists, Mondrian, the Neo-Plasticists, and the Purists is a precedent for your painting and sculpture, or are you really departing from these earlier movements?
FRANK STELLA: There’s always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or Surrealism, there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify.
GLASER: But all through the twentieth century this simple approach has paralleled more complicated styles.
STELLA: That’s right, but it’s not continuous. When I first showed, Coates in The New Yorker said how sad it was to find somebody so young right back where Mondrian was thirty years ago. And I really didn't feel that way.
GLASER: You feel there’s no connection between you and Mondrian?
STELLA: There are obvious connections. You’re always related to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can’t think of anything I like less.
GLASER: Vasarely?
STELLA: Well, mine has less illusionism than Vasarely’s, but the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel actually painted all the patterns before I did - all the basic designs that are in my painting - not the way I did it, but you can find the schemes of the sketches I made for my own paintings in work by Vasarely and that group in France over the last seven or eight years. I didn't even know about it, and in spite f the fact that they used those ideas, those basic schemes, it till doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting - sort of post-Max Bill school - a kind of curiosity - very dreary.
DONALD JUDD: There’s an enormous break between that work and other present work in the U.S., despite similarity in patterns or anything. The scale itself is just one thing to pin down. Vasarely’s work has a smaller scale and a great deal of composition and qualities that European geometric painting of the 20’s and 30’s had. He is part of a continuous development from the 30’s, and he was doing it himself then.
Sunday, 14 December 2014
Kenneth Noland (About the Arts, 1977)
Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel interviews Noland and Diane Waldman, the curator at the Guggenheim Museum 1977 exhibition of Noland's paintings, life, and career.
From the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive in the Duke University Libraries.
Saturday, 13 December 2014
Frank Stella (Painters Painting, 1972)
An extract from the 1972 documentary Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio
Friday, 12 December 2014
Interview with Kenneth Noland (March 1989)
Paul Cummings: What kind of painting did you do at Black Mountain? How would you describe it?
Kenneth Noland: Well, it was abstract painting I guess of the Mondrian-Bauhaus type of painting but coming from the influence of Bolotowsky and Albers. Bolotowsky had closer affinities with Mondrian so we had the advantage of his experience. So my original education really had to do with abstract art right from the first ... at that time Bolotowsky and Albers were in the A.A.A. (American Abstract Artists) ... They were a small group of artists but a group dedicated to the principles of abstract art. And at that time it wasn't a very popular activity. And so they had to be committed men. They did a great service for later generations.
PC: ...What was Paris like in those days? You had a studio there so you could work. Did you see lots of Americans? Did you get involved with French life?
KN: No, for some reason — I guess that was so close after the war that most of the American kind of stayed together. There wasn't very much communication back and forth with the French art students. I'm not sure exactly why but we didn't really get involved in French cultural life so much. Mostly we stayed together, most of the Americans did. And to me it was just that we had a different idea about art. I think we were willing to find out more about how art had been in Europe than being interested in like getting into it, as it were. We wanted to find out about the past more. We'd had the advantage of having had a lot of the best European artists that came to the United States. It was true at Black Mountain and it was also true in New York. Mondrian had been over here. We already knew that there had been work done by another generation of artists such as Pollock or even, say, the American Abstract Artists that somehow had absorbed a lot that had developed in Europe. So we weren't even that interested in, let's say, Picasso. We felt that it had been absorbed by an older generation, brought over here, and then picked up by the I generation abstract expressionists. We were aware of that. . . .
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