Ruth Gikow Interview by Karl Fortress

RUTH GIKOW

Karl Fortress Audio Archive

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RUTH GIKOW INTERVIEWED BY KARL FORTRESS

FROM THE BU ARCHIVES

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Contents RUTH GIKOW BIOGRAPHY 13 INTERVIEW 19 CENTER SECTION - 11 FEMALE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW 61 OBITUARY 137

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Biography

RUTH GIKOW JANUARY 6, 1915 - APRIL 2, 1982

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Ruth Gikow with her husband, Jack Levine, and their daughter, Susanna Levine. c. 1950

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Ruth Gikow was a figurative painter whose works are in many private and permanent art collections, including murals at Rockefeller Center and for the Works Projects Administration (WPA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); the Philadelphia Museum of Art in, and the Whitney Museum.

Ruth Gikow was born in Ukraine to Boris, a photographer, and Lena Gikow.

The Gikow family fled Ukraine to escape persecution of Jewish people.

After wandering in Europe for a while — even spending a year outside Bucharest in a gypsy camp — they finally settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Gikows had been comfortably middle class in Ukraine; however, Gikow grew up in poverty in the United States.

It was in New York that Ruth discovered drawing and art. She attended Washington Irving High School, where she was encouraged to pursue a career in the arts by her teachers. Ruth’s original plan was to get a job in commercial art — design or fashion illustration — after high school to help support her family; however, the Depression created a scarcity of work. Unable to find a job in commercial art, Ruth took the exam for Cooper Union and enrolled there in 1932 at the age of 17.

At Cooper Union Ruth studied under American regionalist painter John Steuart Curry and Austin Purvis, Jr., director of the school. Slowly Ruth began to turn her postgraduate career plans away from commercial art and towards being a painter. Gikow focused on social realism, depicting the city, people, and life around her in New York. During her second year at Cooper Union, Gikow received a fellowship stipend which she used to take private courses with Raphael Soyer, a Russian-born American painter. Soyer greatly influenced Gikow’s work as they shared an interest in depicting men and women in contemporary settings — the streets, subways, salons and artists’ studios of New York City.

While Ruth was a student an informal exhibition of her social realist paintings was held at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. From that point forward Ruth’s paintings were always centered on the urban environment and the diversity of its inhabitants.

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Just out of school, as a fledgling artist with little means of income, Ruth joined the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration as a muralist.

During this time Ruth became fascinated with Mexican artists, particularly the mural and the fresco painters like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and became deeply inspired by them. Her first commission was in 1939 for the children’s ward of the Bronx Hospital and she also painted murals for a nurse’s home on Riker’s Island and Rockefeller Center. Ruth exhibited her work at the Golden Gate Exposition, San Francisco, California and demonstrated mural painting at the world’s fair. With some associates, she also helped found the American Serigraph Society.

During World War II, demand for Gikow’s work, and painting in general declined to the point where Gikow abandoned painting as a means of financially supporting herself and turned to free-lance commercial art and textile design. Eventually she stopped painting all together and became art director at an advertising agency. Gikow illustrated Crime and Punishment in 1946 and was a teacher at the American Artists School, Inc. in New York City.

In 1946, Ruth returned to painting depicting the human drama of life in abstract forms that carried a sense of movement. In 1946 Ruth married artist Jack Levine, who would continue to inspire and support her throughout their relationship. It was also in 1946 that Ruth had her first solo show, held at Weyhe Gallery in New York, which included experimental and stylized compositions, her style settling into Expressionism.

Ruth and Jack travelled all over Europe in 1947 and Gikow’s paintings, particularly those made after a visit to Italy, began to reflect the massive devastation across multiple European countries during the war.

As abstract expressionism began to dominate the painting scene of the 1950s Ruth remained committed to figurative art, reflecting the humanity of her subjects as a means to comment on society and urban life. However, both Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism seem to have influenced her compositions. ‘An artist must constantly refer to life to get a living, growing art,’ Ruth said.

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In the 1960s and 1970s her art became more political. Ruth continued to portray subjects in everyday life and made works based on her observations of the social and political life around her, often depicting scenes from the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

Among Gikow’s many awards were an Institute of Arts and Letters grant and a Childe Hassam Fund Award. Gikow’s work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, Hartford Arts Foundation, Connecticut, and the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio.

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Interview

KARL FORTRESS

& RUTH GIKOW

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Psychosis: Two Napoleon’s and a Josephine, 1935–43, serigraph, 13 1/4 × 10 in (33.7 × 25.4 cm)

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Ruth Gikow, as a painter you’ve selected for yourself an area of portraying and depicting the current hippies and the teenie-boppers, why have you assumed a responsibility like that?

I think responsibility is a rather strong word. I don’t think, I don’t look at it as a responsibility, it’s just that I look at the subject matter as rather interesting and so I do it. It isn’t even a question of the fact that the kids are in the news now or anything. First of all, they’re very colorful, they’re great to paint. And then the other thing is that

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there’s so many complexities about the situation and the attitudes towards the youth and the kind of role that the youngsters are playing today is also interesting, and philosophically I’m interested in them also.

Isn’t it also a continuation from your interest and activity in the society around you that you are not simply dealing with this as a separate thing, but as part of a total social phenomenon?

Yes, I guess so. Practically all my subject matter is related

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to life around me anyhow and this is just an additional part of it.

That’s what I meant, that you’re involved in life around you. So your working habits must come from direct observation. How do you work?

Yes. Mostly I wander around and I do most of these kids from memory, but lately I’ve been getting some of them up to the studio and I’ve been doing paintings of them. I’ve never worked from modeles before and I’ve started to

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again, I haven’t actually since art school. I don’t quite know why, but I look at it a little bit as kind of a refresher. I only work with the human figure and after a while you begin to know certain things about yourself, that you use the same kind of position of the hand, you turn a head a certain way and you have certain people you remember and you being to sort of repeat your types and I guess in a sense

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it’s like increasing your vocabulary by looking at different people and seeing different noses, different hands, different ways that people sit, stand, the way they hold their mouths open or closed, and so on.

Do you think that this could lead you to becoming very dependent on models?

Oh I doubt it. To me, this is kind of a novel way, a refresher. Actually it used to really bore me to work with

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models. I started working from models when I was very, very young. I actually started drawing from life when I was 13 or 14, I had worked with models all through art school and I never really had any kind of dependency on them in the past. I really doubt that this is going to change my pattern in any way. Most of these things I’ve been doing anyhow I’m not even sure if I’m going to show them, I’ll

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Flood 1960, Lithograph, 22 × 27 5/8 in (55.88 × 70.17cm)

Two Women and a Girl Year Unknown, Screenprint, image: 15 5/8 × 21 1/4 in (39.7 × 54 cm)

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probably use them in other paintings.

I see, so in other words, this is a direct form of sketching you’re involved in now, preliminary?

It’s like an exercise in a way I guess it’s more than an exercise in the sense it’s a way of learning actually.

This gets me back to the beginning, what got you into an art school in the first place?

Well it was just about the most natural thing for me to do. Ever since I was a child I liked to draw and

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I suppose that it’s the thing I could do best and the thing that attracted attention and I stuck to it because it was the thing I could do best. It wasn’t a question of encouragement or anything, it was just this is the way I stood out. I don’t know.

I don’t know what creative drive means, or anything like that. I think most beginnings of artists are rather impure anyhow, I don’t believe it’s just a straight creative drive

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because so many people have creative drive.

But there must be something that kicked this off in the immediate environment or the area you were around. Did this drawing come from preadolescent or baby scribbling to this particular point. Wasn’t there some contact with the world of art? When did that come?

Oh, as far as that’s concerned, yes, there was a contact because my father was a photographer. And dealing with pictures was not a new idea, but I hated photography anyhow, I always hated it.

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My father tried to make a photographer out of me and I fought.

So you did finally end up in an art school. Did you have any difficulty convincing him about going to an art school?

No, as a matter of fact I had taken a commercial art course when I was in high school, this was during the depression, and the idea was that I was supposed to go out and make a living. I wasn’t

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interested in being an artist anyhow because to me it meant a life of poverty and I’d had enough of that. I was interested in becoming very rich and living comfortably.

So did you work in commercial art?

No I tried to get a job and the only thing that was open to me was a kind of factory job where I would be painting eyes and mouths on rubber dolls and they wanted, the ad said, girls with art training.

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That was the only thing that was open. I worked in Woolworth’s nights, so I stuck to the Woolworth’s job at night and I took the exam for Cooper Union and I only entered Cooper Union because it was a way of keeping time until some good job came along. I wasn’t really serious about studying art. But then when I was in Cooper Union I got hooked.

Was there anybody, anything at Cooper Union, was there an instructor, was there, what was the first sympathetic contact you had made in the professional world of art? Did it happen at school?

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I WA INTERE IN BE AN A ANY 36

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Yes, there was one man in particular, Austin Purvis, who, he himself was a mural artist, not a particularly well known one, but he was a man with a lot of ideas and he used to make us get out, go to the markets to do drawings to depend on smell, on texture, and he in a sense opened up the pores, he was quite fascinating.

Was this what you would regard as one of the important stimuluses? What did it do to you, what kind of a student were you with that attitude that you had?

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Well, I was a difficult student.

One of the teachers, John Steuart Curry, although I liked him very much as a person, he was rather inarticulate and he was so sort of 100% American. I felt I couldn’t relate to anything that he had to say and he didn’t do anything to me, I used to avoid him. Purvis was very good, but he didn’t teach painting, he taught drawing composition and stuff like that.

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How much of this formal training, how much did it affect you? How much did you feel it was important to you in your own development as a painter?

I think it was terribly important because I got a lot of figure drawing and I am interested in the human drama and what it did was prepare me.

But with your own educational background and with your own changing attitudes, you have now gotten to the point where you do teaching yourself, you are now teaching other people. Do you have any kind of an attitude about the people that you’re dealing with, the people you’re teaching, your students?

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Well mostly I teach at the New School and mostly it’s out of education. The problem is a little different because most of the people you’re teaching there want immediate results. It isn’t as if you’re working with a young art student where you can really construct and you have a sense of ... time is different. But the other thing about it, the one thing I’m terribly interested in, and this is where it doesn’t make any difference to me

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how old they are, I really try to get them in a sense to find themselves. I try very hard not to influence them.

If you had a choice, would you rather deal with an art student rather than a mature adult?

Yes, I think so. I think I would rather work with some of the younger people, except that one part of it that I think it’s a little depressing working with the younger people is they take an awful lot out of you, I think they sort of drain

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you and you have a different sense of responsibility and I’m a little afraid that danger of that would be some of the drive towards painting might go into teaching and I think that’s a danger of working with talented youngsters might in a sense be a digression.

Dangerous I think.

Speaking of talented youngsters, and there are quite a number of them around, are you at all impressed by the preponderance of youngsters in art schools are women? And when you get to the preponderance in the world of the artist himself, that the women make a very tiny minority. The usual explanation is marriage, children, that sort of thing; is there something about that that you could say something?

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Girl with Butterfly 1946, Acrylic on canvas, 13 1/2 × 10 3/4 in (34.29 × 27.305 cm)

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I sure am impressed and I’m always puzzled about it and I think the fact that art schools avoid this subject and don’t, I think there’s a sort of responsibility they have to the girls and they somehow don’t follow through with it.

As to why there is such a high mortality rate among women artists I really don’t know. It’s very puzzling. Of course some of it has to do

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with pressures of society, maybe something, maybe that’s where the whole creative thing comes in, maybe they do become the whole kind of creative drive is directed towards having families. I’ve heard many people saying that, it’s a common notion, but I’m inclined to think it really isn’t so. I think that society doesn’t really somehow doesn’t encourage women to play that role.

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In the other fields, women writers are much more accepted, women who are in the theater are accepted, but of course where the body is the vehicle there’s nothing that can be done about it, but in the field of painting I think it’s really about the worst.

I’m sort of harping on this because there are so very few women art teachers, they generally shifted to teaching design or crafts or something.

That’s right.

And since they deal with a preponderance of girl students, I’ve always wondered. Of course we know the women who have survived and persevered in spite of society, in spite of family, you can name them

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ELEVEN FEMALE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW

Abstract Expressionism is largely remembered as a movement defined by the paint-slinging, harddrinking machismo of its poster boys, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. But the women who helped develop and push the style forward have largely fallen out of the art-historical spotlight.

Marginalized during their careers, these women are predominantly remembered, and now described in history books as students, disciples, or wives of their more-famous male counterparts, rather than pioneers in their own right. One exception is Helen Frankenthaler, whose transcendent oeuvre is often the only female practice referred to in scholarship and exhibitions around action painting.

Even when these artists were invited into the members-only and all male Eighth Street Club (The Club) to discuss abstraction and its ability to channel emotional states, their work still rarely sold as well or was written about as widely or favorably. These women also received far fewer solo exhibitions than their male contemporaries. Many even changed their names to more male or gender-neutral ones in an effort to combat the era’s sexism. They also often incorporated tacit challenges to the status quo into their work, as Elaine de Kooning did in her Faceless Men series.

This spread spotlights some of the most innovative practitioners of Abstract Expressionism who would have been contemporaries of Ruth Gikow, although she remained a figurative painter.

Content adapted from Alexxa Gotthardt’s June 2016 article on Artsy.

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PERLE

Early Morning Garden 1957, Oil paint and collage on canvas, 44 × 36 in (111.8 × 91.4 cm)

In the early 40s, when Fine was in her mid-30s, she rented a small studio on 8th Street in Manhattan and joined Hans Hofmann’s school.

Around the corner was The Club, an Abstract Expressionist, members-only haunt, where Fine was one of the first women ever allowed.

In East Hampton, where she lived with her photographer husband Maurice Berezov, Fine made some of her most ambitious paintings; compositions surging with deep passages of black paint and textured areas of collage.

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Despite her innovative exploration of Abstract Expressionism, which she fused with an interest in Neo-Plasticism, Fine was not included in the Whitney’s 1978 show Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years, which she contested in two letters to the museum.

Fine later became a professor at Hofstra University, but stated, ‘I never thought of myself as a student or teacher, but as a painter.‘

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MICHAEL

Cythera Shrine 1979, Oil on canvas, 74 1/2 × 48 in (189.2 × 121.9 cm)

Born Corinne Michelle West, Michael was an early adopter of Abstract Expressionism and one of the movement’s boldest artists. In the early 30s West made paintings that mingled elements of Cubism and Neo-Plasticism, but soon moved towards abstraction, a shift influenced by her intimate relationship with painter Arshile Gorky. Several times West refused Gorky’s proposals of marriage.

In the late 30s, Gorky and West concocted her new, masculine first name. In 1945 an

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exhibition in New York included her work alongside Milton Avery and Mark Rothko.

After WWII, West responded to the fear and frustration of the atomic age with angry lashings of pigment, often covering earlier paintings with new tangles of seething brushwork. West’s pieces became thick, turbid all-over abstractions, painted directly from the tube or with a palette knife and often embedded with sand and detritus, and imbued with existential titles like Nihilism.

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ALMA

Untitled c. 1958 1958, Acrylic on paper, 8 x 9 1/2 in (20.32 × 24.13 cm)

While Thomas is best known for her geometric compositions of blazing color, her early paintings from the 1950s are rooted in the AbEx style, which unlocked her nimble experiments with hue and form.

In 1924, she was the first graduate of Howard University’s fledgling Fine Art program, but she devoted the majority of her adult life to

teaching high school, until she focused on her practice once again in 1950.

Her all-over canvases evince a deep curiosity with color and its ability to convey emotion. Often inspired by landscapes, science, and the cosmos, they pulse with their deftly modulated palettes. Light blues bleed into darks with a sense of rushing, fluid movement.

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LEE

Burning Candles 1955, Oil, paper, and canvas on linen 58 1/8 × 39 in (147.6 × 99.1 cm)

Although Krasner was one of the earliest and most innovative Abstract Expressionist practitioners, man or worman, she would struggle against the marginalization of women artists her entire life. Like many others, she changed her first name from Lena to the gender-ambiguous Lee. In 1937, after several years studying with artist Hans Hofmann, Krasner painted a piece Hofmann described as ‘so good you would not know that it was done by a woman.’

Krasner introduced her husband, Jackson Pollock, to the ideas and key progenitors of the movement for which he would become the posterboy, her relationship with Pollock often superseded her own reputation as an artist.

Krasner is one of the few female artists of this era who had a retrospective of her work mounted during her lifetime, but her paintings have only recently begun to receive their credit as integral to shaping the legacy of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

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ELAINE

Bacchus #3 1978, Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 78 × 50 in (198.1 × 127 cm)

De Kooning was a fixture of New York’s tight-knit Abstract Expressionist cohort, which included her husband Willem de Kooning. Her compositions were edged with the movement’s high-octane gestures, as well as her own frustration with the marginalization of female artists. Her Faceless Men series, for instance, obscured the features of her more famous male contemporaries, like poet and art critic Frank O’Hara. They were unveiled at her first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1952.

A sense of quivering energy pervades all facets of de Kooning’s diverse body of work, which also includes ebullient abstractions inspired by landscapes, bullfights, and the Lascaux cave paintings. ‘I wanted a sense of surfaces being in motion,’ she explained. She was also a passionate and eloquent exponent of the Abstract Expressionist cause, expressing the movement’s animus succinctly, with phrases like: ‘A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.’

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JOAN

Untitled 1977 Oil on canvas, 102 1/4 × 70 3/4 in (259.7 × 179.7 cm)

After receiving her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1950, Mitchell settled in New York.

She immediately becoming a mainstay on the avant-garde scene, thanks to her fiery wit and exuberant abstractions that married writhing, lyrical lines with searing colors rendered like staccato notes. She was influenced by her contemporaries in painting, as well as writers and musicians of the time, like her friend, poet Frank O’Hara. Mitchell frequented a bar with Miles Davis and Tennessee Williams.

In 1951, Mitchell was one of a handful of women included in the history-making Ninth Street Show, which cemented Abstract Expressionism as a movement. It also established her place amongst notable painters like the de Koonings, Motherwell, Hofmann, Krasner, and Pollock. She became known as one of several Second Generation female Abstract Expressionists, along with Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan, earning a coveted place at The Club.

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MARY

Lucy 1956-1958, Oil on canvas, 71 × 75 in (180.3 × 190.5 cm)

In the early 1940s, while modeling for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Abbott began taking classes at New York’s Art Student League. After separating from her husband in 1946, she settled on 10th Street among the Abstract Expressionists and took classes at Subjects of the Artist School, founded by Robert Motherwell. Soon, Abbott was making towering canvases characterized by sweeping brushstrokes that often merged into dense swarms of torrid, sensuous color inspired by

annual trips to Haiti and the Virgin Islands.

Abbott’s broad brushstrokes were partly informed by her, then-nascent, dialogue with Willem de Kooning, who would be a lifelong sounding board and friend. She, like Mitchell, was also involved in the literary community and, in the late 50s, began embedding text into her Action paintings as part of a collaboration with the New York School poet Barbara Guest.

Abbott often described the objective of her work to ‘define the poetry of living space’.

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JAY

Untitled (Mountain series – Everest) 1955, Oil on canvas, 96 × 74 in (243.8 × 188 cm)

Born Mary Joan DeFeo, Jay began making art in junior high school in San Jose. DeFeo studied art at Berkeley, where she won a fellowship prompting a trip to Europe and her first important series, a group of abstract paintings that fused her interests in Abstract Expressionism, Italian architecture, and prehistoric art, as well as the use of a monochrome palette with all-over abstraction.

By 1953 she was a fixture on the San Francisco art scene and became friends with

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other artists like Joan Brown, Sonia Gechtoff, and David Getz.

Over the 50s, DeFeo’s work became thick with gesture, impasto, and mixed media, a shift that culminated in a terrifically imposing work that was as much her crucible as her magnum opus. DeFeo spent eight years working solely on The Rose, a painting-cum-sculpture measuring over 10-feet tall, almost one-foot thick, and weighing over 2,000 pounds.

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SONIA

Red Icon 1962, Oil on canvas, 68 × 42 in (172.72 × 106.68 cm)

In 1951, Gechtoff moved to San Francisco, where she installed her studio in ‘Painterland,’ a building on Fillmore Street that was home to a bevy of abstract painters with whom DeFeo developed friendships but also a rivalries.

In this new environment, Gechtoff developed a unique approach. She coated a palette knife with several colors and smeared them with swooping gestures onto the canvas.

Gechtoff’s lively paintings were celebrated, winning her a solo museum show at the de Young as early as 1957 and a spot in the Guggenheim’s seminal 1954 group exhibition Younger American Painters alongside other notable artists of the day, such as de Kooning, Pollock, and Franz Kline. However, it is only recently that the historical influence of her work has been recognized and revived.

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GRACE

New York City Rhapsody 1960, Oil on canvas, 67 3/4 × 91 5/8 in (172.1 × 231.9 cm)

A Second Generation Abstract Expressionist, Hartigan, who occasionally showed under the pseudonym, George, simultaneously assumed and challenged the non-objective style of her forebears, like de Kooning and Pollock. Though filled with shards of color and active gesture, her canvases never completely relinquished content. Often, her canvases were embedded with social commentary that questioned the traditional role of women.

Her 1954 series, Grand Street Brides, questioned the construct of marriage by abstracting bridal shop mannequins. Other serieses, like her Matador paintings, explored sexual identity or incorporated elements from urban life and popular culture.

Unlike most women of the time, her work sold well, especially after her inclusion as the only woman in MoMA’s 1956 Twelve Americans show, which resulted in the sale of her largest work to Nelson Rockefeller.

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JUDITH

Infidel 1979, Oil on canvas, 50 × 50 in (127 × 127 cm)

In 1950, Godwin, who was studying art in Virginia, befriended dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. That fateful run-in inspired Godwin to relocate to New York, where she began painting in an abstract and dynamic style influenced by Graham.

In some paintings, you can almost feel the arc of Godwin’s arm swooping across the canvas. Godwin once said of Graham ‘I can see her gestures in everything I do.’ Godwin fused this theatrical sense of movement with Hans

Hofmann’s color theories to produce rich tonal combinations on her canvases. A long-term dialogue with Japanese painter Kenzo Okada inspired her intuitive approach to painting and bolstered her interest in Zen Buddhism.

‘When I recognize an emerging form, I respond intuitively by evolving complimentary sub-forms in colors and applications which feel supportive and foster development,’ Godwin said, ‘in studying color and its behavior, I have learned to trust my intuition.’

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on the fingers of both hands - these women have pushed their way through. It’s tough, but is there something about that you would have something to say because you went through this entire business, you raised a family, and you’re painting, now what sort of drive pushed you through?

Well, I think I was pretty mature when I got married anyhow and I was pretty well launched, I wasn’t exactly a child bride and then the other thing about it. It was the most natural thing for me to do to continue painting and the other thing about it was I really saw the danger of it and I saw so many people

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I knew, and in some cases some very talented people, fall by the wayside and I was determined not to let that happen. So after my child was born, I established a pattern of work. I think the first, and most important thing, is to establish a pattern.

I’m going to get back to that because I’m going to ask you about your working habits. At the same time you spoke of getting married, you married a painter, what did this, did this make any change in your relationship or simply give you a more compatible company to be in? You had. I should go back a little bit and say that perhaps your professional debut, if you can call it that, was during the WPA when you worked as a muralist or an assistant muralist. Do you want to say something about that phase? Which I think is what brought you into the profession.

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Yes, well there was one teacher that did have an influence on me which I didn’t mention before because he wasn’t at Cooper Union and I studied with him and he had a tremendous influence on me and that’s Raphael Soyer. When I was going to Cooper Union and I was unhappy with what I was getting from John Steuart Curry I heard about an art school with a weekend class where

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Raphael Soyer was teaching and I also was getting some kind of a stipend from Cooper Union, a scholarship, because they were very interested in encouraging me they thought I had some kind of contribution to make, so I took that money and enrolled in Rahael Soyer’s class and what the interesting thing about working with Soyer was that the whole premise of humanism in painting was

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The Blind Musician 1957, Oil and tempera on composition board, 22 × 32 in (55.9 × 81.3 cm)

Street Scene 1940–1940, Oil on Canvas, 26 × 38 in (66 × 96.5 cm)

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opened up for me and this was something I was very interested in. But, after Cooper Union, and there was still the depression, we had many hard years. I got on the WPA and I got interested in mural painting and this was during the time when all of the mural painters of Mexico seemed so dynamic. They seemed much more fitting into the scene of the day, the very turbulent 30’s, and what I wanted to do was strong

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dynamic paintings and the kind of gentle humanism that Soyer offered was sort of put in the back pocket.

And I did murals, I did a mural for Bronx Hospital and I demonstrated mural painting for the World’s Fair, I did a mural for Nurses Home on Rikers Island, which was not passed by the committee because they thought the color was too Freudian.

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That’s, I think, the same problem Sean had with Rikers, was it Rikers Island?

I don’t remember, yeah.

Ah he had the same problem.

I don’t know what Freudian color is.

Have you ever found out?

Yes, I had the, one of the people from the committee, it was a committee that was from the city, I don’t remember his name, it was a mural artist by the name of...

Dean Cornwell

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Dean Cornwell, yes. Mr. Cornwell and I met and he said, ‘I felt that I had to explain this to you somehow because it sounds so odd.’

But he said, ‘your color is so Freudian.’ And I said, ‘Well what does that mean?’ He said, ‘Purples, reds even, we find it uncomfortable.’

That happened to me again because I got a job doing murals for Macy’s and I did a mural for their music department and I’d done the

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whole job and it was never hung because the buyers got together and they said the colors were ‘decadent’ and there was absolutely nothing decadent about it. I did just musicians and dancers. I have no notion exactly what it was, there was something there that made them uncomfortable.

One of the characteristics of your work is that you do use color, you are what we would call a colorful painter. You’re not, I’m trying to think, you’re not a tonalist, but color is an important element in your work, isn’t it?

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Yes. Yes, it’s very important, except for a while I got off it and worked in more somber colors because color can be a trap, especially if you’re interested in establishing a mood. Sometimes you have to sort of put color aside because it can destroy the mood. And, yeah.

How did you pick up this interest in color, is this something you had learned or is it something you had to devise on your own terms.

I think that’s the Ukranian in me. The Byzantine.

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Children 1960, Lithograph, 22 × 27 5/8 in (55.88 × 70.17 cm),

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Ukranian or gypsy or whatever it is?

Yeah.

But you never took a course in color theory

No, no.

So the development of color is a result of your own interest and your own drive toward the use of color?

Yes Well, As you said, you married a painter, and you kept on painting. Again, I want to bring you back compatible business of being with a painter is of course a help, it encourage.

Yes, it’s hard to get away from it, you can’t forget it.

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As a matter of fact, when our daughter, when she was little, used to think the song was ‘pop, goes the easel’. And we’re in it up to our ears.

Well that’s a good environment. Do you think the painter you married or do you think you had any effect on each other in terms of moving each other around to some extent.

Oh yes, first of all being married to Jack is an experience from many points of view and one of them is his dedication is enough to encourage anyone

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to continue in the same way.

He’s highly dedicated.

That’s Jack Levine. I mention this to establish the relationship. So you mention that this would be a great prop for anyone, to marry a painter.

You either survive or it kills you. It’s either a prop or it destroys you and you have to make up your mind how you’re going to use it.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the woman angle, but there are a number of situations where students marry other students, painters marry other painters, and there’s a kind of a great tradition of the male painter discouraging the woman painter very very gradually and sometimes you have a situation of a very talented woman with a less talented husband and the husband survives and the woman goes under.

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Yes, well I guess in some cases the marriage really can’t last if the woman, I guess if the husband feels insecure, but this is not Jack’s problem.

In other words it’s got to be a very strong woman as a painter.

I supposed, I guess it takes that. I, yes, I suppose so.

I don’t know. I don’t think of myself as being strong.

People have said that because Jack does come

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on like such a bulldozer. It’s just so natural for me, I can’t think of anything else to do.

Maybe if I find something very exciting to do I’d do it.

I can’t think of anything else that really interests me.

Well it isn’t likely that anything is going to come along.

These days.

Alright, enough of the business to try and forget you as a woman and to get back to you as your own artist.

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I want to mention one thing before you do forget the business about being a woman, you brought up a question of teaching - I’m one of the very few women in this country who are teaching creative painting and this really isn’t the fault of the women, there are women around, I’ve noticed that art schools really don’t hire them. As a matter of fact, I was offered a job, a teaching job at one of the

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The Circus 1961, oil on canvas, 20 × 16 in (50.8 × 40.64 cm)

Ballerinas year unknown, gouache, 11.5 × 15 in (29.2 × 38.1 cm)

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art schools, I won’t mention the name, and I am, I’m a painter, I’m an easel painter, they had and opening, they offered me a job as teaching design and I said, but I don’t teach design and the guy said, ‘oh come on, you can, teach what you want to teach, but it has to be design in the catalog.’ I didn’t take the job, I really felt that this was, it made me quite angry.

No, I don’t understand why they don’t hire more women

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to teach creative painting, it always seems to be applied arts, anything that verges on embroidery.

No, that’s a form of discrimination and

It is in a sense.

It is in a sense discrimination, but when you think of the labor market in terms of our teachers the prepnderance of men that are available - I don’t know if they specifically exclude women, I can’t answer that, but there are 100 men to pick from and 5 women to pick from.

There are galleries that won’t take women on their

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roster. There were a couple galleries that I was in that I was the only woman on the roster, and still, now, they won’t take women. Which is sort of strange when you think of so many women that are painting.

Yes

And it’s true that so many disappear, but maybe that’s because they’re really not encouraged, who knows. I really think this is something

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that should be investigated, looked into.

Well, tell me something, do you think that the encouragement, the motivation, the drive that it takes to become a painter can be assisted by outside encouragement or do you think, it demands a strength on the part of the individual to push through without encouragement?

Oh I think it needs both. You have to have inner resources naturally, and the drive, whatever that is, I don’t know what that is, some people are stronger than others, but it’s awfully hard

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to function without any kind of encouragement, without having a gallery, without having any, without any kind of recognition. I mean everyone needs it. I think it’s not only that. If you paint you are, in a sense, trying to communicate, you can’t constantly lock up your paintings in a closet, you want to say something to the world and not to have the outlets is really quite tragic. But this is true of both men painters

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and women painters, it’s not an exclusive problem of women.

No, but we’ve spent so much time on this because there are so many women students, so we... Well to get back again to you, in terms of your work, what kind of a worker are you? Do you have any pattern, any discipline that you…

Yes, yes I do, as a matter of fact I don’t do any house work until I’m finished painting. I don’t do anything when I get up in the morning, I have my breakfast and I go to work and I leave everything undone.

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Two Guys 1965, oil on canvas, 37 × 21 in (93.98 × 53.34 cm)

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Is this a regular schedule on your part?

This is a regular schedule, yes, because the moment I started straightening up or any of the little duties that besieges every woman, then I’m caught that’s it, an hour goes by, a day gets shot and then after I’m through painting then I go on to do my domestic chores, and I see to it that I get my hours in.

In other words, you function on two levels - you’re still a mother, you’re still a housewife, but you’ve set aside a very definite period of your time for that.

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I’m a housewife and a mother usually after four, sometimes after five. Until then I’m a painter.

Fair enough.

The house is very messy.

You ever get caught in any hang ups where you simply can’t work where you have periods of time where you flounder, this ever happen to you?

It happens to everybody.

I was asked, as a matter of fact I was talking with [inaudible] and I was talking about this and he said what

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he usually does is he changes mediums. He starts ... if painting is going badly he’ll change into drawing or do a lithograph. Usually he will sort of switch around ways of working, because it does happen to everyone.

And you?

This is incidentally one of the reasons Picasso got into doing ceramics and pottery, because he was at a standstill in his painting.

You then have a feeling that you work yourself out of this simply by doing?

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Absolutely. Simply doing, yes. And sometimes if you do something — especially if you use a new way of handling, or if you use a new material — you kind of lose your inhibition because you lose yourself in the material and then whatever happens you work though the work kink. I believe in working through it, I don’t believe in sitting around and waiting.

What do you do in terms of your averages? Do you consistently hit it, or do you have trouble. How does your work go as a rule?

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Oh I think it’s always trouble, sometimes every now and then something will happen that’s good, but that doesn’t happen very often.

So in spite of the constant preoccupation with this trouble, you persist?

Yes, yes. How do you mean trouble, like in the painting?

Yes, I’m talking about the problem in painting, yes.

Yes, they’re always trouble.

There are several ways of solving those problems

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again, like Picasso will switch canvasses if he gets tied up in knots. I don’t do it, I try to remember to do that. I’ve done it on occasion, handle the same thing on another canvas and try to work it out that way. But usually what I do is I put in and I take out, and I put in and I take out, and I put in and I take out.

Do you ever leave a lounge for a period of time and then pick up again on the same canvas?

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Three 60s Girls 1969, oil on canvas, 31 × 19 in (78.74 × 48.26 cm)

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Yes, that’s another way. I’ll work on several canvases at one time and if I find myself sort of droning on a canvas where I’m sort of working without, and I feel I’m not really being alert about it, I’ll take it off the easel and I’ll start on something else to have a kind of fresh feeling about it.

In the manner of techniques, are you very involved in materials itself or do you limit yourself to the materials you’re familiar with?

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Oh I deliberately limit myself to materials I’m familiar with and the materials that have been tested by time. I use gouache and I use oil. I’ve tried, I’ve fooled around with some of the new materials, but I don’t like them.

So you find in oil that you have all the flexibility that you need, or in gouache, or in drawing.

Well, no, I don’t think oil is the most flexible of mediums, but it’s, there are limitations, you can work

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your way into mud, there are a lot of things about it but for my… I don’t know, maybe I’m just accustomed to it, I don’t know, but for my purposes I find that it works out the best.

But to what degree are you concerned with experimenting, with trying every new solvent or new pigment that comes on the market? Does this at all interest you to some extent?

Just mildly, not very much.

I’m not particularly involved in that. I’m not interested in a lot of kookery anyhow,

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I’m not interested in experimenting. It’s not my drive.

How many shows have you had by now, do you know off hand?

Oh, I must’ve had about ten, maybe twelve.

And what do these shows do to you, what’s your reaction after you put up these shows after 2 or 3 years of work? How do you look at yourself?

The first reaction is depression. Always. I haven’t known a single artist that hasn’t had it. And I don’t

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know what that’s all about.

I’ve heard people comparing it to the postnatal period where, the postnatal blues.

And this is something that both male and female artists go through. Bur it’s a healthy thing to do and it’s necessary, but it’s painful. I don’t think having exhibitions are really enjoyable, they’re painful.

Every now and then there is a bit of an exhilaration about getting it out. This is one of the exciting things I love getting stuff out of the studio.

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And getting a sort of objective look at yourself.

Yes, you get a sense of ... everything looks unfinished in the studio, but very often then you get a different feeling. For instance you can be struggling with one area and end up painting for a long time and you make corrections and you still feel about one area in the painting for a long time and you make corrections and you still feel kind of obsessed by it and then after it’s framed and hung and up, on exhibition, not only does nobody else notice, the kind of effort that went into it, but

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Girl in the Kitchen c. 1970, color lithograph on paper, 19 × 26.5 in (48.26 × 67.31cm)

The Kitchen 1960, Oil on Canvas, 40 × 60 in (101.6 × 152.3 cm)

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you yourself wondered why you knocked yourself out that much.

Have you ever had the experience of coming in and being really objective about the whole thing, sort of looking at the show as if it were someone else’s show?

Yes, of course one gets that, yes, you get that very strongly. You do walk in as a stranger . This is another very valuable thing by having a show, there’s a kind of objectivity and you get outside of yourself.

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This brings us to another area, which is looking at shows. In the times that you have come out of the periods, the transitional of the different styles have changed the rather slowly. Social painting was with us for some 25 or 30 years and after 1945 and so things began popping real fast. In seeing these shows and seeing these shows and seeing what’s going on in present day trends, how do you react to that? Does that come into your studio at all?

Um, on a conscious level I would say no, It doesn’t.

And I ignore it pretty much.

On a subconscious level, I really don’t know what it is that happens. I think that it’s disturbing because you wonder why, especially when you see so many people

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getting such quick results and fame, and so forth and so on, it’s disturbing and that. But you sort of wonder why you work so hard, why you work so long, why knock yourself out and you also wonder why people’s eyes get kind of blunted and they don’t really see a kind of complexity in a painting anymore. I don’t know what’s going to happen to people that look at paintings, maybe they’ll demand less, I don’t know.

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So what would your attitude be about all these contemporaneous styles, do you think it’s maybe subconsciously good, that it affects your color or frees you or does anything to you. Do you have any attitude other than the one you’ve mentioned about these current trends - OP, Pop, funk, whatever they are, they keep changing so rapidly.

Well, the abstract expressionists I think made a contribution and I think the contribution they made was one of scale. And they really did, in a sense, sort of put a limelight on American painting, the large canvases, the daring, and the kind of freedom. I don’t think they

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Adoration of the Gadget 1969, oil on canvas 60 3/4 × 85 in (154.31 × 215.9 cm)

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made a contribution as far as color is concerned or any of the new concepts that they boast of having made, like space. I don’t believe that at all.I think that’s nonsense.

The pop artists in a sense are, well, they’ve of course rebelled against abstract expressionism, but they in a sense are social artists, but in a very mild degree. There’s a kind of very mild satire that has to do with satirizing this very commercial age,

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but they themselves are so much part of it that you sort of wonder exactly how long they’ll live or how lasting it will be. I think they’re rather amusing actually.

What about the non-art art?

How do you mean, like kinetic? How do you mean?

All of the mechanical contrivances, minimal sculpture, how do you react to that?

The Op people working with lights and all that, I

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Sewing Circile 1975, oil on canvas, 28 × 40 in (71.12 × 101.6 cm)

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think that is something that will sort of have to get itself straightened out eventually, maybe the museums will learn to relegate this to a room for experimentation and materials. The contributions that they make are mostly with the materials, it has nothing to do with any kind of philosophical, not for me at least. I don’t look at life as a series of boxes … Perhaps it will influence architecture,

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interiors, or city planning, but mostly it’s a way of looking at things.

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The Shawl 1979, oil on canvas, 24 × 18 in (60.96 × 45.72 cm)

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COLOPHON Karl Eugene Fortess (1907–1993) was a painter and printmaker who headed the School of Visual Arts printmaking department from 1956 to 1973. Beginning in the early 1960s, he undertook a major artist interview project, creating 269 “audio-portraits” (sound recording interviews) of prominent American artists. Fortess believed that art students needed and wanted to learn about the inner lives of artists in addition to their techniques and craftsmanship. His interviews focused on the artists’ career development, their sources of influence and inspiration, their selfunderstandings of purpose, and their reflections on teaching and learning.

The full list of interviews includes many prominent American artists of the twentieth century, among them Romare Bearden, Ruth Gikow, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Adolph Gottlieb, Barbara Swan, and Gyorgy Kepes. All original Fortess recordings are stored at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Fortess gave the School of Visual Arts cassette copies of his interviews, which were recently digitized for student access.

Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts Graphic Design Graduate Typography II Spring 2020 CFA AR 855 Design and interview transcription by Claire Bula.

Instructor: Mary Yang Teaching Assistant: Lily Chen Typeset in Whitney (Tobias Frere-Jones , Hoefler & Co., 2004), Ortica Bold (Benedetta Bovani, Collletttivo, 2019, and Graphik (Christian Schwartz Ilya Ruderman, & Panos Haratzopoulos, Commercial Type, 2009).

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