The Extreme of the Middle 9780300185812

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The Extreme of the Middle

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The Extreme of the Middle

Writings of Jack Tworkov

Edited by Mira Schor

Yale University Press | New Haven and London

Cover image: Jack Tworkov, early 19508. Copyright © 2009 by Hermine Ford and Helen Tworkov. Introduction copyright © 2009 by Mira Schor. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Unless otherwise indicated, all black-and-white illustrations are Courtesy of the Estate of Jack Tworkov. Designed and set in type by Chris Crochetiere, BW&A Books, Inc. Printed in China through World Print, Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tworkov, Jack. The extreme of the middle: writings of Jack Tworkov / edited by Mira Schor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-14102-3 (cloth : alk. paper) i. Tworkov, JackPhilosophy. 2. Art. 3. Art, Modern—2oth century. I. Schor, Mira. II. Title. ND237.T88A35 2OO9 759.13—dC22

2008041550 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents Acknowledgments Editor s Note ix Introduction xi Parti

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Identity and Identifications "I Was Born Yakov Tworkovsky" 3 "Notes on My Painting"

Part II

6

"Dear Pond Lilies" Letters to Wally Tworkov, 1936-37 17

Part III The Extreme of the Middle Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 31 Published Writings, 1948-78 152 Private Criticism 189 Part IV Tworkov as Teacher Pedagogical Theory 203 Lecture on Rhythm

208

Lecture Notes 218 Tworkov at Yale 221 Contemporary Voices in the Arts, 1967 235 PartV

Longings "The Search for Meaning"

249

Notes from New York Hospital, 1969 252 "The Subject Matter of My Recent Paintings" 255 Journal, July 1966-March 1975 257 Part VI Family "Dear Helen" 261 "Dear Hermine" 266 "Dear Erik" 277 "Dear Janice and Alain" 280

vi Contents

Part VII Work and Life, 1973-78 Diaries, 1973-75 349 "The Medium" 363 "The Critic" 365 Diaries, 1976 367 "Blind Mans Bluff" 372 Diaries, 1976-78 374 Part VI II Late Thoughts "I Have a Certain Inclination to the Monstrous": Undated Note, 19708 393 Diaries, 1979-80 395 "Art Saves My Life": Notes Made on the Train to Providence, RISD, April 22, 1980 405 "A Nature in Deep Contemplation": Diaries, 1980-81 408 "Withdrawal into Silence' 417 Prognosis: Diaries, 1981 418 Letter to Andrew Forge 420 Diaries, 1981-82

424

Notes 429 Archival Sources 462 Index 465 Color plates follow page 200

Acknowledgments Many people have worked on Jack Tworkov s papers over the years. Of particular note, his wife, Wally, transcribed and ordered his lectures and writing fragments during his lifetime and after his death. Tish Fila spent hundreds of hours painstakingly transcribing the journals and manuscripts. This phase of the project was made possible by generous grants from the Judith Rothschild Foundation. This created a basic text for me to work from and add to as new archival material became available. Catalogue essays on Tworkov, including those by Richard Armstrong, Kenneth Baker, Edward Bryant, Andrew Forge, Marcia Tucker, Harry Cooper, and Elizabeth Frank, were extremely informative guides. Elizabeth Frank was the first editor to work on these texts. Her preliminary notations and evaluations were invaluable. Jeri Coppola has been a devoted assistant for the Jack Tworkov Estate. This book could not have been completed without Jason Andrew, archivist for the Tworkov Estate: his assistance has been essential and his boundless enthusiasm for Tworkov a driving force. A number of artists, writers, curators, and art historians were kind enough to read an early draft of this collection. Their support and advice was most welcome: I wish to thank Richard Armstrong, Kenneth Baker, Debra Balken, Michael Brenson, Elizabeth Frank, Tom Knechtel, Jen Liese, Michael Mazur, Thomas Messer, Irving Sandier, Linda Shearer, John Skoyles, and Mark Stevens for their attentive reading. Friends, including Robert Moskowitz, Amanda Trager, Maureen Connor, Robin Mitchell, Susanna Heller, Susan Bee, Charles Bernstein, and Nancy Bowen, have been helpful in reading the pages of text I thrust at them and listening to me talk about the project with infinite patience over a period of years. It has been a special privilege to be entrusted by Hermine Ford and Helen Tworkov with the task of editing their father s writings. They have been exemplary heirs in their responsibility to his work and legacy, and that of his sister Biala and her husband, Daniel "Alain" Brustlein. Editing these writings is an expression of the long relationship I have had with the Tworkov family. This was founded on the brotherly bonds of friendship that existed between Tworkov and my father, the Polish-born artist Ilya Schor; cemented by the kindness and continued sense of family responsibility shown to my family by the Tworkovs after my father died in 1961; continued in my sister Naomi Schor s and my friendships with Hermine and Helen, and in my more recent friendship with Tworkov s grandson Erik Moskowitz, who, in a wonderful convergence of memorial practices, edited a film I made about my parents' artwork, The Tale of the Goldsmiths Floor. I have allowed

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Acknowledgments

myself the small indulgence of including such few references to me and my family that may contribute to understanding Tworkov and that have significance to my work on this project. All the representatives of the Estate of Jack Tworkov and I would like to thank Sique Spence and Nancy Hoffman, whose archival support and commitment to Tworkov continue to this day; Lucy Mitchell-Innes and MitchellInnes & Nash Gallery for their unwavering support for Jack Tworkov s work; and John Silberman, who has been a wonderful friend and instrumental advisor to the Tworkov family. Patricia J. Fidler at Yale University Press has been an astute editor, and I thank her and her staff for their care for this project. It has been a pleasure to work with John Long and Daniella Berman, and with Dan Heaton, whose spirited and scrupulous copyediting of this book was a gift.

Editor's Note Words omitted within a discrete text that is otherwise published in its entirety are indicated by elision marks in brackets [...]. Elements of style are generally faithful to the original handwritten text: for instance, I have retained Tworkov s use of which instead of that because it was consistent over five decades and because it was not changed by editors in published versions at the time. Tworkov s approach to punctuation was highly personal: he favored dashes and separated paragraphs with repetitions of the letter x. I have deleted these paragraph markers. I have dealt with his punctuation in an eclectic manner: I have added an occasional comma or period where this was essential for clarity, but also have left much of Tworkov s punctuation when most important to the spirit of the text. Only when it was central to the meaning of the writing have I indicated the source of the texts: otherwise information about the archival locations of the texts is indicated at the end of this volume. I have provided historical or biographical context within texts, but lightly enough not to step on the feet of the writing. Further cross-referencing and explanatory information can be found in the notes. To facilitate this crossreferencing, I have assigned a unique number to each piece of writing, keyed to the part number and the order of arrangement in that part. Thus the number 6.10, for example, refers to the tenth piece in Part VI, a March 2,1959, letter from Tworkov to his daughter Hermine. These reference numbers appear in the margin near the start of each piece. All archival material, including private journals, notes, and letters, was made available to me by the Estate of Jack Tworkov.

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Introduction Anyone who ever heard Jack Tworkov speak will remember his voice, with its slightly cracked timbre and its distinctive mixture of cadences and intonations. Surprisingly strong traces of an eastern European accent were overlaid with more American tones, including something indescribably like a southern accent, most notably exemplified in his pronunciation of the word vena—as in, "I find that verra interesting." Although he was a much soughtafter teacher and lecturer on modern painting, he was self-conscious enough about his speaking voice that he tried to improve it by reading Milton's Paradise Lost out loud alone in his studio.1 His private conversation was full of sharp and astutely critical observations, yet those who knew him also remember his lapses into profound and thoughtful silence, the absentminded emergence from which could occasionally provoke peals of affectionate laughter from his family and friends. One of the original members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Tworkov was the epitome of the "painters painter"—one who knows painting to the core of his being and who is devoted to its traditions, history, and practice above and beyond any personal ambition. But he was also a talented writer whose essays and journals offer the same rich and original mixture of intonations as his speech and the same combination of rigor and poetry as his paintings. His friend the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote in a memorial tribute that he delivered in 1985 at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, three years after Tworkov s death: "Among the tasks to which Jack assiduously applied himself was the keeping of a journal. He was highly literate, a devoted reader of fiction and poetry, and a trenchant writer, as his notebooks demonstrate. Portions of his journal have appeared in periodicals, but the entire work, from what I have seen, is an extraordinary testament that should be collected and published."2 This book brings together for the first time the full range of Tworkov s writings produced over a forty-six-year period. These include texts that were published in his lifetime in It Is, Art Digest, Art News, and Art in America, among other major art journals, and also many previously unpublished writings on art theory and studio practice, as well as personal diaries and letters. Tworkov studied English literature at Columbia University in the early 19208. Although he soon chose painting as his vocation, his interest in articulating his views about art in writing (and perhaps the idea that he might be able to make money writing) emerged long before he wrote most of the material collected in this book. In 1936 he began work on an untitled book about art for an independent publisher but decided that he could not com-

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plete it.3 Although the book was intended for a lay audience, the outline indicates an ambitious program, addressing the process of making art from the point of view of an artist and studying a sweep of art history from primitive and ancient art through the rise of capitalism and modernism. Tworkov insisted on the social and historical context for art and underlined his interest in abstraction. Tworkovs more enduring articulation of his views about art, culture, and philosophy coincides with his fully committed return to painting at the end of the Second World War. During the war he had put painting aside for a job as a tool designer in an engineering company doing defense work. The late 19408 were years of exceptional renewal and hope for Tworkov and the artists he had known since his years on the WPA Federal Art Project in the 19308. "The war was over; people were beginning to live again. Of all ideas, anything that spoke of life were the most meaningful to me."4 As he began to work at the border between representation and abstraction, his recommitment to painting was paralleled by a commitment to record his aesthetic investigations in writing. At midlife he brought experience and maturity to a unique moment in the history of American art. In 1947 he began to make journal notations in a standard schoolchilds notebook. The first sentence he wrote was "Style is the effect of pressure." The energy of these words embodies the moment when the preparation of a lifetime finally bore fruit and meshed with the Zeitgeist. Tworkov scrutinized his past, his private nature, and the major ideas and debates of his time: the nature of abstraction and the role of the artist in society. These writings were an integral part of his studio life and also surely in response to, and in preparation for, the vigorous debates that took place at the Eight Street Club. Through aesthetic and ideological affinities and a network of friendships dating to the WPA period, Tworkov found himself at the center of the birth of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism. He was one of the charter or founding members of the Club, a rented space at 39 East 8th Street where artists could meet for conversation and entertainment.5 Tworkov recalled this period: "We were looking for a place we could have coffee and talk.... A group of artists painted at night and then they would meet at the cafeteria late Someone got the idea of taking a loft and we cleaned it up, painted, and started heating it The Club was an exception for me. I'm not a group man. I never joined groups— But the Club, it was fun for us; we had no idea. The Abstract Expressionist movement was interesting in that something happened so unselfconsciously."6 According to Irving Sandier, "The Club was a social meeting place as well as a forum. All of its members recall fondly the camaraderie, the drinking, the fun, and above all, the dancing, at times until daybreak, to a brokendown record player that painter Georgio Cavallon was often called upon to

Introduction

xiii

fix."7 And, as Tworkov wrote in his journals, discussions at the Club provided an improvised but vital education: "I think that 39 East 8 is an unexcelled university for an artist, perhaps the greatest university for artists. Here we learn not only about all the possible ideas in art b u t . . . what we need to know about philosophy, physics, mathematics, mythology, religion, sociology, magic. I'm amazed at the eagerness of philosophers, priests, poets, musicians, mathematicians, dancers and necromancers to come to us, to talk to us, to educate and entertain us."8 Tworkov was on a number of early panels at the Club, including, on January 18,1952, "Expressionism," moderated by Harold Rosenberg and including William Baziotes, Philip Guston, Thomas Hess, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt. This was the first of a historic series of seven panels on Abstract Expressionism at the Club in 1952; the series helped to establish the popular name of an art movement with diverse and often passionately opposed aesthetics. On February 20,1952, Tworkov took part in a conversation with Guston, Kline, Willem de Kooning, and George McNeil, moderated by Mercedes Matter.9 Tworkov noted also that at the Club, "the important thing in the conversations then was to talk for yourself, not to quote other people. For a while in the Club people were telling you what they were thinking and not what they were reading. This made the Club exciting. People were giving their authentic ideas. They were speaking for themselves and this made the atmosphere intense and unique. In that sense a New York School did exist."10 We can trace some of the discussions through Tworkovs early journals, as direct continuations of the discussions just held at the Club and as his personal explorations of the issues of concern to him and his fellow artists. If each man spoke for himself, nevertheless this was clearly a rare moment of nonaloneness, where at least the general sense of what was at issue was shared, even if differences were sharply voiced. Writing in 1947, Tworkov confronted one of the major issues concerning painters at that time: "The crisis in my painting now is a crisis of subject." u This idea was echoed by Barnett Newman in a 1970 interview with Emile de Antonio, for the documentary film on the New York School, Painters Painting; Newman said, "I felt the issue in those years was: What can a painter do? The problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in paint The issue for me—for all the fellows, for Pollock, or Gottlieb—was: What are we going to paint?"12 Tworkovs early journal writings explored the salient questions of the time: What is the true subject of painting? How is the existential search for meaning articulated on the canvas? What is the proper relation between morality and aesthetics? What is American about American painting as it emerges from the social realism of the WPA years and the influence of Surrealism and other European art movements? Dominant critical forces of the Abstract Expressionist movement strictly

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Introduction

excluded the literary from the surface of painting, privileging abstract form and materiality over narrative. Similarly, the artist persona was at that time constructed as nonverbal—the myth of Jackson Pollock as "nature" joined seamlessly with other prevailing images in the general culture, such as the animalistic Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Yet many of the most significant of Tworkovs contemporaries, notably Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Motherwell, were extremely articulate writers. Also at that time, a number of artists were involved with the creation of influential periodicals. Motherwell coedited and published the unique issue of Possibilities in the winter of 1947-48; Instead was copublished by the painter Matta Echaurren in 1948; the Tigers Eye was published from 1947 to 1949 by the painter John Stephan and his wife, the writer Ruth Walgreen Stephan; Motherwell and Reinhardt were among the editors of the unique issue of Modern Artists in America in 1951; It Is was published between 1958 and 1965 by the sculptor Philip Pavia as an outgrowth of his central role in the Club.13 These journals included statements and critical texts by many artists, including Newman, Motherwell, William Baziotes, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko. Their writings are now considered important building blocks of our understanding of the artistic ideologies and theories of that time. In fact, even though ours is an image-driven culture, or perhaps because of that, it is also a culture in which painting literacy is a lost skill. Thus sometimes the words of these artists have more accessible currency to us now than do the original paintings. If Tworkovs writings focus on similar issues as do those of his fellow artist-writers, nevertheless he had a particular interest in describing the effect of these ideas on his studio practice and the interrelation between aesthetics and the individuals moral existence. Recurrent themes in his writings are also specific to his own tastes and experience. In terms of art, these included the foundational importance for him of the work of Cezanne above all other European masters and his admiration for Edwin Dickinson among American painters. On a more personal note, many of his writings explore the complex meaning of his identity as a Jew: he was conflicted about Judaism and yet preternaturally alert to any signs of anti-Semitism—one need look no further than the notation on his citizenship certificate, "Race: Hebrew." His journals include many idiosyncratic views about aristocracy, democracy, Nietzsche, and Judaism that emerged from the confluence of these concerns. He viewed American democracy as a precious cultural space where Jews might be safe, although this sometimes made his politics seem conservative, as he himself noted. Given the way the canonical history of the period has developed, it must be noted that sometimes Tworkov seems to fall on the "wrong" side of the

Introduction xv

consensus of the art history of that period. Indeed, the fixing of such judgments was one of his major concerns. Speaking to Irving Sandier in 1957, he stated that Clement Greenbergs views needed "exploring for they may be the basis of an interpretation of what happened. These ideas should be challenged and refuted. He had an idea that we were moving away from and destroying the easel picture. This is not true and was a leftover of his Marxist thinking where one considered easel pictures as bourgeois property. What he saw in Pollocks painting was the destruction of easel painting though I cant see it. What if they were dripped on the canvas on the floor; they were still not made for a specific place and were portable and this is easel painting."14 Tworkov was at odds with the views and works of artists who have become the iconic figures of the period. He decried the emptiness of Reinhardt s and Newmans canvases, warning against the monopoly of culture called for by Reinhardt s exclusionary dogmatism. He wrote, "I have no desire to be an air propelled machine on Ad Reinhardt s railroad track."15 He was repelled by the bad-boy, shock-the-bourgeoisie tactics of many of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, from Dada to punk: he disliked personal immodesty of any kind. But his relationship to some of the figures who have been singled out by art history was different from that of later art historians: to him, these were "the guys," fellow artists whom he knew well, had frequent discussions with, and competed with at a time before the history was fully written of who had won and who had lost the ideological territory of Abstract Expressionism. In fact, other artists in the group shared Tworkov s critical views of Newman and Reinhardt. 4g

The essence of romantic art is the disgust with civilization, with the distinctly human. A critic is abusive who calls a work civilized. On the contrary, evidence of savagery, of animality is admired and romanticized, is called strong. The more strongly the artist tugs at the human compound the more typically an artist he seems in romantic eyes. Yet should the artist succeed in really breaking out he ceases to exist as an artist.

T Notes JANUARY 18, 1954

3.5o

My conversation with [name crossed out] yesterday (sitting by the stove sipping the anisette George P. left me) was something of an event for me.301 spoke not only with unusual candor but without embarrassment. She encouraged me not only because she is candid herself but extraordinarily intelligent. What I said must have lain pent up in me for some time, because it was a great relief to me.

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 63

But the ground I built up for myself afterwards troubled me. Borrowing from art the idea that the true artist takes over the authority for his esthetics I held that a truly moral and responsible person takes over the authority over his morals. Since one can trust the truly moral person not to act so as to injure others. But since injury can be caused unintentionally by egotism and by misunderstanding a person needs to reserve to himself a private area closed to his heart intimate relations and friends. After I got home however that thought gave me much unquiet—the idea of reserving an area that is barred to those I love seemed monstrous and ungenerous. How can one conceal any part of one to those you love—and this applies to the children as much as to Wally. Yet how can one be free without reserving this area of privacy to one-self? I have to realize that I could never be free from guilt. Is this problem unique for myself in an environment that seems to have problems but no morals? Or does it secretly live in the hearts of others? Am I terribly old fashioned? Two things I have inherited from my childhood, a deep moral sense and responsibility, and timidity towards the outside world. Is my moral sense fed by timidity? Can I defend my timidity and retain that inner feeling of integrity? This last question I gag on. It's false the minute I say it. There is no feeling of integrity where such a doubt exists. Yet contact and freedom for contact is my most urgent longing. Notes 54-63 JANUARY 26,

1954

[. . .] In painting the neat area painters have an abhorrence for the organic and psychological. While the automatists have an abhorrence for "mind," for contemplation for anything that is reciprocally identifiable, therefore communicable. This is the imbalance of our time. The real content of its crisis—on its out come depends the health and existence of man. The relation of art to morals is of the whole to the part. Art includes morality, not as the sea includes an island, but as air includes one of its elements. The probity of art lies in the artist s experience. Not what I've learned but what I know. Not what I desire but what has actually happened to me the artist at work—the artist being not he who reserves an area of his life for painting, but one whose art is the stage of his whole life. It is an ideal to act on this stage as a whole man, not a lop-sided man.

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T Notes FEBRUARY 2, 1954

3.52

Lunch with Cage, for the purpose of talking.31 We moved into the conversation easily and without embarrassment. He is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. He is articulate and talks with great clarity and charm. He is the most intelligent observer of painting that I have met outside of

Fig. 12. This statement was originally written for and first printed inside the announcement for Jack Tworkov's first show at the Stable Gallery in April 1957; here it is reproduced on the announcement flyer for Paintings byjack Tworkov at the Walker Art Center in December 1957. It was later used as Tworkov's statement in the Museum of Modern Art's 1959 catalogue The New American Painting: As Shoum in Eight European Countries 1958-1959.

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63

65

painting. Although we were both most amicable, we each made our differences clear. He is for discontinuity rather than continuity of tradition (I take it not so much where content but where the formal means are concerned). If you say that such and such a painting derives from Mondrian, that thought stands between the eye and the picture (the pure sensation of the picture). He wants a picture "to appeal to his ignorance" (to what he doesn't know about painting, another way of saying the picture must be new to him. I said, "Since your eye is anything but ignorant, to appeal to its ignorance may now be impossible." He laughed mischievously). Concerning the abstract or the non-objective in painting his point was less original. We've all revolted from the religion and myths of our childhood. Anyway the cowboy is no material for a significant myth. Formerly art told in pictures the story of the religion and the myth. That is done with, it will never happen again. What art must do is to approach the metaphysical basics underlying religion and myth directly. This is what the picture without any reference to an object now accomplishes.

Fig. 13. Jack Tworkov and John Cage, early 19505. Photographer unknown.

66 The Extreme of the Middle

(I told him my own theory that painting most nearly expresses that part of us which still dreams of an existence shared not only with non-human beings, but with things in the universe. He agreed heartily. I then proceeded to say that while the introduction of the non-objective in painting is a great historic event, that I'm all for it, I still found that with reference to what I just said, that certain paintings of still life and landscape because it discarded the subject matter of the classic picture, gave me more of that feeling of universality than some of the non-objective pictures made now.) He stresses that he is interested in life-situations more than in art. "In the state in which I am now in, I feel I could give up making music and be content. But since I'm in that condition, why not make music (I interjected, "since now you are even more disinterested." He nodded approvingly). Here he made various references to his interest in Christian and Buddhist philosophy. He questioned me on my origin and [I] told him something of my childhood in an orthodox Jewish household. He feels that his activities are equal. When he makes music, he does that completely, whatever other thing he does he does just as completely, even washing dishes. (I disclaimed that. I do the best job of dishwashing, but it is not equal to me with painting. I said, I believed in art, not as a separate activity in life but as a way of life for myself. If I don t paint for any length of time I feel I'm decomposing.) I asked him why he was for revolution in art. He made the point about discontinuity as being a necessary in order to get a direct sensation of the picture or music, but also he added because Tm mischievous." (It was here I became conscious of his homosexuality.) I stressed my inability to be anything but responsible—and that after my experience with social revolution, how much I abhorred the revolutionary and pessimistic tendencies of the intellectuals for the past two hundred years. When he caught my meaning he seemed to agree with me. I'm naturally remembering my own phrasing and ideas better than his—still know him so little. But in these notes I miss the charm and sharpness of his way of expressing himself. In spite of differences, we agreed on many things. The most important was the change in climate. Even ten years ago, people still talked and worked as if seeking approval in a given group—that now it is taken for granted that one must sail under ones own orders. That's what distinguishes music and painting in New York. After I came back from lunch I found Esteban waiting for me and he took up the rest of the afternoon except for the time needed to write these notes. He suffers from the same anxieties about the art world I do. We re very much in a similar position. And he is just as irritable as I am. Cage said, "Picasso writes his signature too heavily." He is for more anonymity in art, less personality.

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Notes 54-63 FEBRUARY 12, 1954

I am against those who would legislate for art. I am against all no-dictums. I am against limiting the room for turning. I am against final positions— at least until my own final position which I hope comes not before the last breath. I would hate to live with my final position for ten years—ten years in prison. Or three. Or two. Mondrian is more interesting in all the stages of his approaching than in his final stage. His final state is beautiful, but boring. If you are an artist what is the difference between a final style and manufacturing? I'm not interested in making it better. I'm interested in development, not in variations. I move from picture to picture, not from set to set. I don't paint a show. I'm not against beauty. But beauty alone makes the picture into an object. And as an object it becomes confused with a wall, with a flower, with a sunset, with Marilyn. The picture is not merely an action, it is a reflective work. It represents a sharpened state of being. I am against standing at the mirror, arranging one's personality. Rehearsing a decisive action. I am against the artist aiming a blow at me. One should refuse to be a victim. I am against the masochistic worship of art. Those who can read pictures are peers in consciousness. There is no condescending between such and the artist. There is no immediate leap from life to art. This is the most ignorant if not insane of romantic illusions. Art is a fact in life. The artist is born in art. Van Gogh was a mediocrity until his violence came into touch with the civilized art of his day. Violence in art is formal—it has its history—it's civilized. Just as there is nothing so strange in life as non-life, so there is nothing so unique in art as non-art. Since the no-artist annihilates his (no-artist) status as soon as he submits any work, he can only approach that state and he does so by being as ignorant of art as possible. I am against criteria for achievement; ignorance and ham-handedness, to audacity. I am against no-art. I abhor the memory of dada.

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(

T Notes

MAY 29, 1954

3-54

Old, tame, civilized, yet a wild duck visited me. I smelled the wild air. I tasted another, an upper atmosphere. I'm land tied I cannot follow where wild ducks fly—blessed be the accident that landed a wild duck where I'm tied. I'm full of giddiness. Notes 54-63 MAY 29, 1954

3-55

I finished the standing figure for which Pat posed.32 To work from the figure now becomes absolutely fascinating to me. I begin to understand something. Suddenly Bills "women" seem to me ridiculous. Like Picasso he is on to the desire merely to create a sensation. Some horror image that passes for a psychological reflection. When I began the charcoal drawings of the figure earlier this year I set myself no problems, no images of a picture. I simply allowed the object to influence me to stir my eye and hand, and my feelings. Whatever came out I accepted. In the figure of Pat I realized the first real success of that process. The figure does not reflect the model, or any organized image of the imagination. The model stood there as a stimulus to a painting activity. I made no demands on the painting or the model, or my imagination. I reacted to a real stimulus, immediate, here, alive. Only Soutine presents a previous example of this kind of painting. But even he was not wholly free from interpreting, from trying to reflect. My picture looks like an image in moving water. If the water comes still the image will be clarified. But the image in my painting is like a thing that is happening not become. I love this painting. de Kooning s attempt to invent a figure makes him a primitive in painting. My working from the model using the method I'm now employing strikes me as immediately real, true, and necessary. I must continue in this direction. No one is to tell me now what is art and what is not art. I shall not live in anyone's prison if I refuse to live in my own. Discard! Discard! Discard! Discard your past. Discard what you ve learned from painting. Good pictures, bad pictures—nothing matters. Only to be sucked into the centerwhere it is alive, where it is intense—that s my desire. I care nothing now for the "look"—what kind of picture I make. Only to be "in it" in the thick of it where I'm breathless. Art lives on its own intensity not on reflecting what is intense. It is itself the life not a reflection of it. The picture is what happens when I'm living it.

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"I" Notes Tworkov taught as a visiting artist at Indiana University in Bloomington in the summer of 1954. He returned with his family the following summer. JUNE 24, 1954, BLOOMINGTON

Its of less importance whether or not there were miracles in the past, giants or witches than that man told about them. You either read the Iliad or you don t. If you do it exists for you now. If you don t read it, it doesn't exist. The artist would like to build a real fire, and without tricks or asbestos suits or previous training walk right through it and come out alive. It's definitely a proposition for angels. [...] A bird catches a tiny worm and alights on a branch in front of me. In one instant he swallows the worm and drops his dropping. What a fast digestion!

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Notes 54-63 BLOOMINGTON JUNE 27, 1954

What comparison is there between the intensities of art and the intensities of real living? Certainly all animal experience, like love, eating, fright, shock and hurt, are immediately more intense than anything in art. The attempt to achieve violence in art comparable to physical violence is vain and futile. Only erotics in art have an intensity comparable to actual experience because they are an accessory to real experience. But usually the intensities in art are only comparable to those unaccountable anxieties, depressions, or exaltations and euphorias which we experience in dreams and in moody waking states. There is a direct connection between these dreams and moods and the actual impulse to create. I had a bad night last night—in my dreams and in that uncontrollable current of vague thought, fancy, longing, hurt, disappointment, I suffered somehow diminution of ego. But this morning I worked remarkably well—a painting that had been going badly came to life. My ego position is restored.

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r Notes

JULY 26, 1954 3-58

I ran head I ran on into an argument with Roberta Alford (Pansier) over the Mies Van der Rohe chapel for the Illinois Institute.33 To her it was a spiritual place of perfect order. To me it was a twelve-car garage with a cross in it. To me it said. "Religion isn't so much. Factories and shops are the true realities. If you have to pray, damn you, pray in a shop." Bobby speaks mystically of order. I fear the order men impose. (Hitler & Stalin and the capitalists) I don't trust men enough. I am for the creative chaos out of which men more perfect may yet arise. What is there to admire in an order that left out at the beginning the thing to be ordered. "The honesty of the bare uncovered steel I Beams"— Bobby said—that goes back to a certain concept of reality in which the skeleton is more real than the flesh ephemeral. Simply judged from an ephemeral viewpoint bone endures. What a shallow notion of reality—that which I can sense is less real than that which is logically deducted—for I cant sensually experience the "endurance" of bone, only its hardness. Bobby likes Mies precisely for the reason that I'm hostile to him—because he leaves out the sensual. She speaks of the spirit within us, as if there was a cavity in us a housing for spirit. Spirit is body and inhabits matter even to the finger nail—or it is a fiction. Isn't that the meaning of "Corpus Christi"? What kind of church is it that leaves out the body? and the blood? Every kind of order disappoints me—only the possibility of order fascinates me. Mondrian on his way interests me. Mondrian arrived bores me—but more—arouses my hostility. JULY 29, 1954

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Had to dinner George Rickey, and Alton Pickens.34 Had to revise my ideas about Pickens. He lacks imagination, vivacity, and brightness. He is rather surly and hostile by instinct. He tried to ride me in the conversation until I lost patience with him, and he quieted down. We went over again the arguments of Mies Van der Rohe. Pickens kept interjecting that any opinions were necessarily subjective. Anybody who is entitled to an opinion must be a person deeply involved in his work, therefore in life—so that in the sense which Pickens used the word subjective, it would invalidate the opinions of precisely those who are most qualified to have one. We spoke much of the authority of the artist versus the art critic and historian. I am simply unable to believe that a non-painter however learned can read a painting the way the artist can. Mostly the art critics and historians base themselves on previous critics and historians. The art historians (at least those one encounters in universities) talk about art history as if it were

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a chicken and egg succession in a straight line. As if in History there was no accident, old age, corruption and death. "Cubism comes out of Cezanne." As if Cubism was just the most natural and logical consequence of Cezanne. But what of Cezanne was perverted, and what values unsuspected by Cezanne were developed, and whether it was a necessary development or merely a capricious one, are questions they never ask. If we had now to choose between Cubism and Cezanne, which should we choose and why? Are we not today in fact continuing one aspect of Cezanne, as if Cubism never existed? The truth is the most complete reading of pictures is impossible to any but artists, especially with reference to those pictures which formed the artists development—and those would be the only pictures an artist would have serious opinions about. [...]

Undated Note All programs represent future sorrows. The program of the De Stijl artists are today s "filing cabinet" skyscrapers.35 When the shape of things to come are here now.

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Notes 54-63 BLOOMINGTON AUGUST 1, 1954

It takes confidence and audacity to limit one s means. Kline limits himself to Black and White. Rothko to two colored rectangles. (He must logically proceed to only one.) Any ground to stand on any position is necessarily a limitation. Is that nevertheless what one must do, choose ones limits and pare away all that does not stick hard to them? The danger is in the motive. Because it is also the path of the attention-getting poster artist. [...]

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Tworkov taught at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, in the fall ofi954.

"I" Notes OXFORD, MISS., NOVEMBER 13, 1954

Those neighbors [. . .] Alabama— The girl with corn-gold hair— the clear transparent pink of the skin— the wide red mouth giving away the secret of all her tissue. The nurse upstairs who must have been in the navy the unvirgin spinster giving that description of the sunrise in the South Pacific aboard a

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naval vessel—describing that blending of an unrippled sea with sky when all things feel suspended—a sensation I have so often experienced. I asked her did she like flying did she dream of flying and she said not me I like my feet on the ground. The husband saw in my face what I saw or so I thought. She saw herself admired. The fundamental emotion of my life is erotic. I adore the body its tissues, its life its juices. I adore its aliveness, its quickness—the springiness, the flush of blood and the lightening of nerve. But I am a man condemned—behind bars—a prisoner. I cannot reach out and take. The weak man is full of virtues. Last night in Memphis at the party at Marjories—Betty Wiggs—the generals daughter—drunk—half acting—half unconsciousswaying over me—screaming I love you aloud like the conventional exclamation it is at a cocktail party—but grasping at my hand—pulling me away into corners—mumbling incoherently what was perfectly clear—that if there was a way to walk off with her then and there for that moment she was game. I placated her husband nearly as drunk as she as best I could—talking to him whenever I could, offering myself to him as a friend etc. The weak are full of virtue. So much desire so much yearning and so much frustration—why? Out of too scrupulous a sense of decorum mostly, fear to hurt, fear to be hurt, fear just plain fear—or just plain incompetence, or lack of real opportunity? Or inner scruples so great that before they are put to sleep the impulse is limp. We played out conventional roles—we said good bye and kissed on impulse and Betty to make it look right—kissed Regie, and little Sig Lowenstein and everybody—and Marjorie grabbed me by the neck and pulled me over for a kiss—acting like a woman she thought—poor thing. And at the party in Bloomington at Danny Robins' flat the girls going home June Sue Rachel all getting bussed as they left—and Sue writing soon after—writing to her teacher love Sue.36 And Lucretia nearly as tall as my neighbor—chestnut hair but the same essentially blond complexion looking with those incredible doe shaped eyes. Sue writing maliciously I am learning a new trick. How old am I to them—incredible they don't know themselves—What would my life have been had I been able to move freely among adorable women in my youth—the imbalance of my life came from the failure the complete and utter failure of my youth—all this caution this carefulness too is the need not to lose sight of my age not build on the illusion that I can make up now for lost time for lost youth. How grateful I was to Pat she treated me as one treats a child she indulged me without question without qualm. Only I have no idea how my pride finally came out with her—I still have to learn something about that—it s not all finished. The visit to Le Moyne was also prompted primarily by an Erotic impulse. Genuine as my sympathies are it is their life their aliveness that sparks me. I am a mad spectator—a voyeur. The way those boys and girls bent towards each other.

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That crazy student assembly—the pair telling moron jokes—what did he cut the hole in the floor for? He wanted to see the floor show. What did he cover it up for? Cause he wanted to see the hole (whole) show. Guffaws. The girls whispering the jokes to those who missed the punchline dying of laughter. In the drawing room "Can yuh draw profiles? Will yuh draw my picture? Mr. Dwokoh will you hep me with Mah Design?" I loved their nearness. In the class room too to watch Calahan paint with her mouth open her tongue on her lips, or the almost obsessed intensity of Mrs. Faulkner.37 Is it my age—is it stupid—is it hopeless—god I love all these women I love them as one loves oranges—as one loves sea water—as one loves blue. The emotion behind all my curiosity—why I am so excited about being in Mississippi is erotic. My concept of living is very simple now—it is to live to be alive to love aliveness—besides all this art bores me. Why did Maritain write this sentence in contempt? "Sincerity exacts that you should be only what you are in the lowest depth of your being; and purity requires you to show it."38 What s wrong with that? My painting today was a mess. Complete self-indulgence—inchoate, lost, abandoned, frantic and fruitless. I scraped the whole thing off—got back to the painting that I left last week—ruined of course—but in a state to work on again—maybe tomorrow. I must take the precaution to make it clear absolutely clear to the whole world that I am a Jew. How I hate all my evasion on this point. From now on I'll include the information on all replies to requests for biographies. Again my trouble here is too much scruple—part of my embarrassment is simply fear of embarrassing others. On the other hand I resent when Jews try to draw me into that obscene intimacy which some Jews reserve only for each other. I have the perverse desire to be completely known as a Jew to non Jews but deny that fact to Jews. I am overwhelmed by the affection shown me here, at Bloomington and in Memphis, and I am at a loss to deal with it. I need desperately to be alone again—to stop the endless verbalizing of all my thinking, and to paint. Lord how I have come to love painting—if only some grace was to descend on me there—if only that part of my life were touched with grace. Dear God guide me. Show me the way. NEW YORK, DECEMBER 24, 1954

I had a kind of elation in Mississippi which amounted to a slight disorder of my senses. The prayer at the end of the last entry astonishes me reading it now. I experience prayer often enough. In the plane trip to Memphis (my first flight) I thanked and praised God for allowing me that experience. But always these are inner waves of emotion. But to write or say aloud, "Dear God Guide me" is almost impossible for me, I have such strong inhibitions

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against such speech. Even though I move emotionally towards religion as a plant moves towards the sun. I cannot formulate in my mind any such concept as a deity that can guide me, or hear my prayer. These are vestiges of my childhood. I begin to wonder about these pages. What are they for? Why do I make these entries? Partly they satisfy my love of records—a manifestation of ego. Partly they constitute an effort—similar to free association—to discover my true emotions—partly they are a literary effort (I'm painfully conscious how inept that is most of the time) not without a desire that they sometime in the future be read—if only by those who knew me. There is a good deal of vanity in all this but it offers me something satisfying. Some place to be bare with myself—or at least try to. How difficult it is to look at ones self mercilessly. "Sincerity requires that you should be only what you are in the lowest depth of your being—" of course not—that is false. It requires merely to admit the lowest depth of your being, but not to exist at that level. Charles, Teresa, and Kevin coming to dinner and to help decorate the tree.39 The thought of being a Jewish Christian or a Christian Jew seems to grow on me. God I'm in great difficulty now with my feelings towards my family. My irritability and bad temper, even rage hurts every one cruelly. I suffer from a feeling of being too much surrounded. I need not only freedom but simply enough room to be serene. My temper is triggered easily. It's hopeless to try to control it. Ive tried too long without success. Yet I must try. Living alone for a spell had so much attraction for me that I begin to see the discomforts I suffer in the house. Physical yes! but even more what they deprive me as a person in the deepest sense. Is it useful to note that I love them when they cause me so much impatience?

Notes 54-63 DECEMBER 29, 1954

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My painting stops just short of coherence. Complete coherence would require the painting out of all the traces by which the picture in the process of becoming moves towards coherence. But these traces are the meaningful clues which give to coherence its necessity; it follows that the picture cannot be finished but must be left at some moment of precarious balance between coherence and simply the need for coherence. My attitude is well described in such a statement, and parallels my attitude in painting. It is described as follows: To whomever this statement is obscure, it was my intent that it shall be obscure. On the other hand to whomever it is clear it was my intent that it shall be clear. The similar attitude expressed in my painting produces a quality which the critic has called ambiguous. My reply is this: To the critic

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who regards its picture as finished but considers it vague, the ambiguity is intended. But the spectator who sees that the picture is of a character that it cannot be finished the ambiguity disappears. Furthermore for him the full meaning of the work (of any one work) is linked psychologically and formally to the works that lead up and lead away from it and to the works that are alternatives and variations. DECEMBER 30, 1954

The most creative moments in the painting of a picture occur when the "I" that's painting and the "I" that's watching merge into mutual obliteration, when you can say no "I" whatever exists. Its a toss up whether one can call that moment the purest consciousness or the most complete absence of consciousness. Certainly what disappears is "self" consciousness. Whatever then happens can perhaps be described as the picture taking over as if the painter had no will. The year is coming to an end. I made three meaningful pictures in 1954. The orange painting called Land. The standing figure of Pat. The red and orange painting called The Father, done in Mississippi in November. The reading that has moved me most deeply is Maritain. But I've done some reading in the existentialist philosophers—Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and I'm now reading Gabriel Marcel. As I become more familiar with the concepts and terminology of philosophy I begin to understand Whitehead better and I've been making progress with "creative process." And to balance the metaphysicists and religious philosophers I've been trying to read the empiricist, positivist philosophers, especially contemporaries. I read for corroboration. Anything I want to know truly I find in painting. What I read is mostly outside me—it simply tells me that others have experienced in another medium what I experience through painting. I'm grateful that I'm a painter. I'm grateful to painting. It's given me light and some wisdom, at least whatever I have. More I grow in courage my fear like ice is melting.

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JANUARY 4, 1955 Sensibility alone is not enough. And refinement is even dangerous. Superior energy released when the self is completely absorbed into channels formed by a lifetime's awareness and consciousness is the main element of genius. "Activity" alone is not a sign of energy—it is merely a trace left by the body's mechanism. The energy I mean is not a release of physical activity—though it is sometimes engendered by it—but it is a release of total cautiousness. It is not an expending process primarily but a filling up process. Hence its ability to sustain itself over a long period of time sometimes necessary for a work

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of some dimension which waits for completion not on expenditure of effort but on growth of consciousness. Maybe I'd best define energy as an accretion of consciousness—as distinct from activity which is a mechanical-physical discharge. Tworkov's painting Father was listed in the catalogue of the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Annual Exhibition: Paintings, Sculpture, Watercolors, Drawings," January 12-February 20,1955. However, Tworkov removed the painting before the opening. His letterto the director of the Whitney Museum, Hermon More, is included because Tworkov refers to it in his journal after sending it. JANUARY 12, 1955

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Dear Mr. More: I read with astonishment (in the catalogue forward) of the New Decade Show which "will comprise the work of 35 painters and sculptors who have come into prominence since 1945." Since my first one-man show was at Egans in 1947, since such standing I have as an artist I acquired in the last decade, you can imagine my being left out of that show is a very telling blow against me dealt out in a most conspicuous fashion. Although you are entirely right to act in the light of your best judgment I am in this case compelled to protest. Had I fully realized what you were about, self respect would have urged me to refuse to show in the annual, especially since for me the show is deliberately impoverished by leaving out nearly all the painters I am most associated with by reserving them for the later show. In this circumstance, the only avenue of protest open to me is to request, as I hereby do, that my painting be, immediately, returned to my gallery. With the same personal regard for you as ever, I am sincerely yours, Jack Tworkov

"I" Notes JANUARY 15, 1955

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Wrote last Wed. to Hermon More of the Whitney an angry letter asking the return of the painting The Father—its withdrawal from the annual.401 grow in arrogance too. Am calling the mate to the "Father," the other picture started in Mississippi, "The Son in Rebellion." (later changed to Pink Mississippi [Tworkov

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annotation, May 31,1960]) [plate 6]. Had this thought today: The son discovered by the father is crucified. My mother is ill and I search her face for an inkling of what one feels when death must be so near—she is in her eighties and ill. Maybe she puts thoughts of death further from her than I do. My coming to see her no matter how poorly she feels stimulates her in only one direction: she starts busying herself to prepare food for me. Probably all she ever experienced in life was feeding her children—certainly everything else in her life is decadent except the instinct to feed her children. She is the epitome of suffering in my imagination. How cruel we've been to her. We could not take her into our lives and we could not stay in hers. By separating ourselves from her we destroyed her. Nothing in her life prepared her for her children. Yet if the emotion of love stirs in me for her it's because despite the obliteration of nearly all that's human in her I detect a strain of great sweetness in her that must have been rich in her at one time but which her life all but drained. I have to make myself callous not to abandon myself to an unbearable pity for her. It is as much for her sake as for anyone I wish that there were a god in heaven to protect and keep her. JANUARY 26, 1955 Reread some of these notes. They are like fever charts. I almost never write when I feel normal. I've been idle ever since my return from Oxford, Missmore than two months now. I suffer two major moods—somnolence and irritability—and find no middle ground. I read constantly. Mostly in philosophy. But all jumbled up—whatever comes into my hands. Maritain, Jaspers, Marcel, Plato, Aristotle, Santayana, Mills, Berkeley, Hume, and texts from contemporary English and American writers. With my dreadful memory it all comes out as if I were reading one book by one author. Interrupted.

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Notes 54-63 NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 7, 1955

K. Give him a large enough brush and he'll paint out the sun. Then the whole world in terror will admire his brush stroke.41 R. He nourishes on the junk-heap of old paint cans, cheap curtain material, a whore's panties, the funny strips, pieces of toilet paper and wash rags— I'm supposed to laugh if I had enough energy to focus on the "picture." But what's so funny? I myself am expiring on the junk-heap. The absolute extreme is myself as if it were not in any world with others.

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T Notes

FEBRUARY 22, 1956 3-7i

I'm irritated with all ideas, ideologies, positions. I'm turned away from all points of the compass equally. I'm involuntarily squeezed back on myself. I'm trapped. MAY 15, 1956

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My mother died May 12 Saturday morning at 4:20 A.M. Her funeral was the next day. "Mothers Day." May 13 at 10:30 A.M. She is buried at Mt Hebron Cemetery. The date of her death corresponds to the 2nd day of Sivan on the Hebrew Calendar. The best thing I can think of her is that she carried the juice of love within her like a live wire. When you made the proper contact she lit up like an electric light. In her case her children were the second wires. Its impossible to grieve her passing for her sake. Death mercifully ended a year of suffering. I grieve for myself since her death ends the object of another and special kind of love. Where else does one take this kind of affection and love? For a year I sat with her and watched life and the world from where she sat. I could see with her how fugitive life is. I saw how darkness descends. I felt something of the terrors that must have seized her at dawn (that brought on the heartattacks, I think) [.] I saw that she became to herself another person—she refused to accept her face in the mirror. Yet she wanted to shield me, and my children from the full knowledge. Life is a dream, she said that most often with the simplicity of one who does not have to make an original phrase when an old one is exactly the truth. The whole year of her illness she never shed a tear. She was one of my vital connections with life, more than I realized. It is impossible to escape from the beginning as it is from the end. She drank up the affection I gave her this year as parched earth drinks water. Thus I was relieved of a great burden of guilt towards her, while she had briefly some measure of that of which she was deprived of most of her life. She did nothing in this world that one would call an accomplishment, yet she leaves with me, and all who knew her an idea of goodness that is very real, that ultimately dignifies her life, that was nearly a martyred life, so that you can say as one would like to say of every life that it is not in vain. My mothers tragedy: she was born in a world in which God was real and lived most of her life in a world in which at best God was a convention and often an outright hypocrisy. She dared not think towards the end of God and the "other world." She

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dared not put her faith to any test although it was transparent that she herself had only the form and not the faith in God. Towards the end she was capable of experiencing only one reality—the connection with her "flesh and blood." May God keep her soul in love forever. God is the only symbol I can think of that validates life: The only opposition to despair, the only symbol that creates love and responsibility to others. MAY 29, 1956

If in the quest for originality you deliberately side step the obvious you are well on the road to the ultimately stupid and perverse.

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JANUARY 24, 1957 Once more I began making entries. I've been trying to separate the more formal notes, from the more personal ones, the "I" notes. So in the other notebook, I entered a piece on what I finally think God means to me. I reread the note on my mother s death and I wept. Yesterday I finished the Blue Painting. I feel badly that I ruined the earlier version "The Cradle." Both paintings had in origin a connection to the image of Janice and myself, standing at my mothers bedside at the hospital. I am to show at the Stable April i5.42 And I feel relaxed since most of the pictures are finished. Maybe that's why I've resumed making notes. I feel well content with my life and wish I could go south some place where it's warm and relax.

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APRIL 23, 1957 I notice on the preceding page the note that I ruined "The Cradle." I afterwards worked on it again and finished it satisfactorily. The picture was bought by June and Bill Calfee. The blue painting is now called "Blue Cradle" and was bought by Don Blinken.43 My show is successful from several points of view. I think the show was received with real enthusiasm by artists and friends and general public. I had many unmistakable signs of that. I sold some paintings both before and so far during the show. I am curious to see what the remaining two weeks will bring. At any rate I've made the first three or four months of the year enough from painting to have supported my family for a year. The adverse sides of this show is that the art magazines still treat me casually, the museums in New York still cut me dead. Nevertheless again I have to record I feel well content with my life. I am painting again in spite of the show at the Stable. [...] I am beginning to think that maybe I'm one of the very best painters working today. At this moment I would acknowledge no superior.

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Notes 54-63 JANUARY 31, 1957

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From a letter to Joe Summerford I wrote today:44 When I got to Baltimore they showed me the three pictures they printed in one of the Baltimore papers: one made by a famous artist (de Kooning), one by a painting chimpanzee in Baltimore Zoo, one by a child of five. All pictures side by side in a row, all the same size. (Asked which was the one by the famous artist.) Damned if I could be sure which was which. While this is a cheap trick of photography—the originals would not have left a trace of doubt—still there is something disconcerting about it. It would have been impossible to do it to a painter of any other period. What is naturalistic and what is abstract ought to receive a lot of thought. A rubbing made from a muddy pavement would yield a naturalistic picture in the extreme. So is a painting by an ape or child. While to make a naturalistic figure drawing from the model requires a high degree of skill in abstracting, even if it's a skill it is merely ready-to-hand. That's why no ape however sophisticated can draw even a rudimentary figure. An ape can make only naturalistic painting. The key to de Kooning is his rejection of abstraction (all Abstract Expressionist action painting, McNeil for instance), of thought processes in his latest work.45 De Kooning has a choice of course, the ape doesn't. Why doesn't de Kooning exercise his choice, that s the question. The question is really asked of all modern painters, why do we reject the human condition? What hatred? APRIL 23, 1957

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Rothko over-accepts his forms. De Kooning destroys, paints out, scrapes out, wipes out, every form he arrives at. The most typical paint left on his surface is the scrapings which he gathers up and reapplies with paint scraper, four inch brush, his hands or rags. At one time his frenzied action on the canvas stood for something, his despair, frustration, his ambitions, egotism, his selfdestruction, and possibly the search for the non-existing form. Today I think his work is merely a style—as much on one accepted form as Rothko's. And not having Rothkos other virtues, it sometimes is no more than what the eye sees—dirty paint. At the same show where I saw the de Kooning and Rothko (Sidney Janis group show ended last Saturday) was a beautiful Motherwell painted in 1953.46 The first time I genuinely liked one of his paintings. I'm surprised I never saw it before. I will have to reconsider my attitude towards him. RS. I think Bill s tragedy is his hatred of contemporary painting. He was

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one with himself when [he] emulated Ingres, when he painted like a Dutch still life painter. Guston (also in the same show) shows that the pressure of de Koonings romantic nihilism is somewhat irresistible to him.

Undated Notes • To display the stigmata of genius, drunken brawling is the best way— especially if you are in good physical shape and can hand out more beatings than you take. But to be really avant-garde you must create the aroma of criminal life around you, cultivate the language of pimps and whores and throw out enigmatic hints of cannibal feasts. To be immortalized, to leave a name after you are gone you must commit suicide for you must sooner or later prove your distaste, for the way the present has a way of becoming the past you dont want to grow up to get fat and hold on to your scandals and live like a bourgeoisie? Besides in this way you are proving that this world is your father s excrement and you neatly avoid the accusation that tomorrows world is your excrement. You refuse to be next in line. What is mysterious is that you want the applause, the sales, the profiles, the honors of a world you have to despise in order to earn them? It is this discrepancy that finally makes you a real instead of a pretending alcoholic or criminal. [...] • The defenses of the ego are many and necessary. In art the ego relieves the tensions of over defensiveness by confession. (In art confession is one of the pivots of all subjects.) However, I have never read or heard a confession which does not attempt to increase the prestige of the ego. Try as you would you speak only to win attention, affection and respect. You can never speak with the intention of hurting yourself with the truth—when you speak to hurt, it is only to hurt others. Yet confession is a necessary element of all art—and what is disclosed (for the falseness is in what is held back and in the artfulness of the arrangement) must be as nearly as possible like the truth, although never the whole truth. It is the weariness of this struggle that leads me finally into a more and more abstract art; the sealing off of all confession. To act without memory, without apology but also (to compensate for such deprivation) without any artfully arranged attitude. But if it is true when the occasion arises (on individual level?) to act without memory, then similarly on the general level the occasion arises to act without history. For if confession is impossible because of our alienation from each other (the absence of community) for the same reason it is impossible to confess the historical not out of anger or rage but because of our alienation from tradition, because of our inability to resolve its multiple meanings.

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I do not mean that it is impossible to make any value judgments (privately as an example, I always prefer the neurotic but passionate integrity of Cezanne, to the sleek and trivial and arty exoticism of Gauguin) but it is simply not worth the effort the discrimination involves (I have to bury both) since history places us in the situation where we have to debate tradition—which means it is dead. The living reality of facts overwhelms all theory (when I was most theoretical I had theoretical objections to Rothkos paintings. But over the years the effect of the physical splendor of the canvases erased all my objections). History places us in the absurd situation where we debate tradition— which means it is dead. As Franz says, "Too bad, so sad." • It is necessary for an artist to conceal himself as deeply as possible in order to be able to speak with any kind of magic. The artist is renowned in the world as an instinctual man. The truth is he is painfully the opposite. He is painfully intellectual. It is the strategy of the artist, however, to appear as if he were purely intuitional. However, if he were truly so he would turn to lechery, gluttony or murder rather than art. But why is the intuitional so appreciated? Because it is credited with speaking in one voice, which the intellectual man finds so difficult to do. To speak with one voice is the strategy of the art of the artist. The exception whose strategy it is to reveal instead of concealing the true character of the artist. He speaks with divided voices—an esthetic sacrifice for the sake of the apparent truth. But that, too, is doomed to be a strategy—behind the frankness of the self confessed artist still is the self deeply concealed in layer within layer—the more concealed the more magical is the possible voice. The last for the well to do consumer who in art as in politics doesn't care what he gets as long as he gets the best.

Notes 54-63 MINNEAPOLIS, OCTOBER 4, 1957

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The European intellectual always addressed himself first of all to society, to objective, real situations. If anything went wrong in human life that was most likely because some situation in social life was bad and needed remedying. The European intellectual initiates, promulgates and leads the opposing forces of class struggle. First the bourgeois against the aristocracy, and then the embittered, and disinherited remnants of aristocracy against the bourgeois. Finally the sons of the bourgeois, against the bourgeois, speaking in identification with the always voiceless proletariat (always voiceless until it rises from and away from the proletariat). In sharp contrast, American intellectuals show very little interest in social dynamics, class, or situations. Instead the American addresses himself to life

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in general. Life as the world represents it and life as he intuitively feels seem to be different and in conflict. The American intellectual sees no remedy in the conflict and working out of social and class relationships. The American, therefore, lacks the "commitment" European intellectuals speak about. The conflict as the American sees it, leaves him pessimistic with regards to society (because he feels it generally is a situation that could be remedied by a development in the total human condition and not by a working out of conflicting forces between the righteous, and the evil, between the oppressed, and the oppressors) but optimistic as regards the individuals ability to perfect himself. OCTOBER 5, 1957 Divided loyalties break the heart. To be free means to be able to walk open eyed into calamity and disaster. There is no room for freedom and the comfort of the soul too. To be free is to be cruel and savage, even towards those one loves. Freedom and obedience are opposed to each other—even obedience to the inner promptings of the soul. Freedom raises a revolt even against oneself. [...]

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During extended periods of time, short entries in daily appointment books were the only daily journal notations Tworkov made. This was the case during 1958.

Daily Diary, 1958 JANUARY 9, 1958

Also read New Directions #16. Rexroth, Miller. How stupid. Williams something about poetry giving dignity to life.47 Horrors. If you can t respect life the way out is not poetry but suicide. The left has become the biggest cesspool.

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JANUARY 22, 1958

To a matinee with Eleanor Ward to see Look Back in Anger by the Englishman, Osborne.48 Very good but full of questioning about the meaning of that anger. Started class at studio.

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JANUARY 23, 1958 My pictures finally came back from the Walker show and I feel outraged that they bought nothing from the show.49

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84 The Extreme of the Middle

I have to be circumspect about making myself available as a teacher where they show no proper consideration for my painting. JANUARY 29, 1958

3.84

[. . .] About 8 o'clock, the most pitiful wailing and crying of Claire James. I thought Miiller was beating her up.50 As I learned the next night he had at that moment collapsed and died. The male voices were the guests at dinner, [...] and not Jans. FEBRUARY 1, 1958

3.85

Funeral for Jan Miiller, Grace Church. Organ music, decorous minister. Eulogy by Meyer Schapiro. After coffee at the cafeteria with Bill de K, Elaine, Sam Hunter. Contrast with Jewish Orthodox service which provides no gloss on death. The horror, the uninstigated character of death is completely unconcealed. FEBRUARY 3, 1958

3.86

Klement opening and Marcarelli. Party for Marca-Relli at Eleanors. [. . .] Michel Tapier, Paul Jenkins, Hultberg, de Kooning. The latter with girl who was in accident with Pollock. Bills long drunken harangue "I did a lot for America. Til break them (his vogue enemies). I hate the Anglo Saxons. Fuck them," etc. etc.51 FEBRUARY 28, 1958

3.87

Eleanor called up to say the Whitney's buying Duo I is official. Also to say Ben Heller asked for a ten percent discount, the swine.52 Always this request comes after the sale is made and the picture delivered. [...] MARCH 3, 1958

3.88

Openings to Ippolito, Schapiro, Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell.53 Ippolito, the weakest. Schapiro trying to get more abstract simply got more vacuous. Joan very hard and tough and larger than ever. Bob s work is beautiful, for the first time I not only admire the ingenuity but really enjoy and admire it. As for its being Dada, nothing is Dada nowadays. Our esthetics admits that everything is possible. MARCH 10, 1958

3.89

Afternoon. Reception at Warehouse. Santini with Eleanor and Wally.54 Everyone who is in very happy. The outs very in. Barr made friendly gesture of showing me my pictures. Everyone admired the crates. At least the pictures if not the artists travel deluxe.

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MARCH 14, 1958 Opening at Institute of Arts and Letters. Ed Dickinson in fine tweed jacket, silk grey cravat. Rosette in his buttonhole, magnificent beard, and Levis, stitched at the bottom with white cotton and a pair of sneakers. Dinner at Gustons with the Brooks.55 Talked. Had perhaps said too much against Newman, whom the Brooks like. Am definitely too opinionated, an old and terrible fault and poison in conversation. I care nothing for or against Newman: I simply think him pathetic.

3.90

MARCH 25, 1958 Got through with the day at Pratt. Home and very hot bath, and nap. Went with Wally to see End Game.56 Interesting, but emotionally I could not get involved. Essentially a farce, reveals some things more romantic theatre conceals. But in turn it ignores or conceals much of life that is not mean. Cedar Bar with Wally and Betty, everyone listening to Robinson and Basilio fight. Kline lost $150 to bartender. I several dollars to Brach.57

3.91

APRIL 5, 1958 Bad time at studio. Headache. Passover at Schors. [...] I'm embarrassed and ashamed to hear them babble in several languages, French, Polish, Russian.58

3.92

APRIL 6, 1958 Streams of rain. Depressed, discouraged, exhausted. Frightful lethargy.

3-93

Notes 54-63 SEPTEMBER 3, 1958

The absurd is an expression of a relationship between extremes. Start with birth and death is absurd. Start with death and birth is absurd. That is from the point of view of the self-interest of one individual. From the racial point of view nothing is absurd, since everything is necessary. Is it absurd that the log should be consumed by the fire? The will that opposes necessity renders nature absurd.

3-94

Undated Notes • Where memory played a role in my painting I was aware that confession was the pivot of my subject. (House of the Sun, House of Rocks, Water Game, Father, The Cradle).

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86 The Extreme of the Middle

To discover and confess (or conceal) the self is the painful load of art. With Red Lake as a beginning I am engaged in a more abstract painting, leaving behind memory and self-probing and moving towards meaningless where self-revelation is meant, to make a painting that is mute about the self. Such painting leaves behind psychological meaningfulness and looks forward to uncharted and undefined meanings based on the capacities of the medium. Because paint is extra sensitive to all subjective nuances I've become interested in the now. • On the other hand I experience no excitement about the ideal future. No Utopia excites my blood. The business of the world does not offend me. It is enough that my blood keep me in touch with all the universals. No limits. Certainly no esthetic limits. No purity. If the people are good there will be justice under any constitution. Nothing too merely to satisfy the logic. I'll have my God and eat him too. I intend to forget about those who are waiting for yesterday; or tomorrow, too. It isn't simply that I am in the middle—I am three persons and I rather enjoy them all. • Respectability is the death of art as it has been the death of religion. The respectable artist always dresses shabbily. I'd like to dress better than a gangster. [...]

"I" Notes NOVEMBER 12, 1958

3-96

Entered in the notes what was intended for these pages.159

Notes 54-63 NOVEMBER 12, 1958

3-97

I am just beginning to be aware of what has been bothering me in my painting for some time. This past summer in P'town was an effort to break away from "stroke" painting. I began looking for shape, for more somber colors. I have the deepest need for a simpler, stronger, profounder form. But I lacked the courage this summer to break with what is mostly my own invention. I wanted to continue the effect of Red Lake. I see now I have to round off my past work and have finished with it by my next show. But from then on I must turn all my efforts towards a new form which is beginning to crystallize in my mind and towards which the collages of last summer, and the dark brown painting were perhaps the first steps. I finally turned down the offer from Princeton to take a three-year teach-

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ing stint at a lovely salary for nine hours teaching a week ($9000). It depressed me to do it since I also plan to give up all Pratt teaching and risk for the first time to live entirely by painting. Eleanor offers to help. But it's a drop in the bucket. While my living expenses mount like fever.

Daily Diary, 1958 DECEMBER 8,

1958

Midnight. Interview on radio, Minna Citrons son interviewing Eleanor Ward and me.60 Eleanor was terribly nervous, but was fine. First snow of the year. Eleanor ecstatic about snow. She quickly got drunk after program, and was in a high state when I dropped her at her door. DECEMBER 14,

1958

Worked at home on sanding a dresser and giving Hermine's floor an additional coat of varnish. Evening after dinner, Schors, Weisses, Pinkersons. The apartment greatly admired. Wally very happy with apartment and Helen too. For us it stands for a great deal of luxury. DECEMBER 17,

3.98

3-9S

1958

[...] Went to visit Bob and Jap. Met Stockhausen, German composer on visit. De Antonio. Kay Harris. Photographer, Earl Brown and his wife Caroline, [. . . ] David Tudor. Some of Bobs drawings for Dante's Inferno.61 Jap's new pictures. One flag on flag on flag.

3.100

Journals and Notes, 1958-63 Notes 54-63 DECEMBER 21,

1958

I made a great effort to get "Painting since 1945," because I thought it would be nice to have the book around when Hermine came home for Christmas— but after I read what Hunter wrote about me, I felt like throwing the book into the trash.62 I'm too deep in my painting to be much moved by praise or criticism. I still have an enormous anxiety however about making enough from painting to be able to spend more time with painting. From this point of view Sam's piece is a disaster from which it takes years of exhibition to recover. Not that Sam is important, but the prestige of any art book with a public which has no foundations in taste is enormous. Even a good review in a newspaper like Dore's review of my drawing show this month attracts an inordinate amount of attention.63 People call me up to congratulate [me] on the review not on my work.

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Sams piece filled me with anger. To get rid of this anger somehow I wrote him the following letter: "Whose being in was contingent on my being out? Such a gratuitous screw! Didn t you get mixed up between Art Hysteria (who's in? whos out? Greenberg s tip shit) and art criticism? Or did you think you were doing my obituary, summing me up with a glance at my birthday. Man, between you and me, you can t know who s next? Had you left me out I'd have been out of your aim. Even so I'll gamble my pictures survive your piss. Yours, etc. ["] Revised the letter, as I tried to copy it. JANUARY 21, 1959 3-102

I never sent the above letter, and expect not to. As time goes on my disgust with Hunter does not diminish, but the damage does not look so big. Looked at some of the previous entries. I noticed the one under May 29, 1954.1 did only one more figure. I do not regard either one of them now as successful as I then thought. I still think the concept a good one and if I went back to figure painting or object painting generally I would still follow the same method. (

T Notes

JANUARY 15, 1959 3.103

My drawing show at the Stable (over Jan. 5) was successful in prestige and sales. "It Is" carried my statement and color reproduction of Games III also two black & white reproductions (Cape Light and Crest).64 This and Dores excellent review of the drawing show in the Times, and Schuyler s review in Art News, Hess s mention of the picture in Carnegie (Red Lake) all coming together somewhat softened the expected and brutal mention by Hunter in Painting since 1945.65 Everybody advises me to do nothing about it. I am eager to write to Hunter, at least to show my contempt for him. I'd of course rather have a public crack at him. [...]

Notes 54-63 JANUARY 28, 1959 3.104

I have a great desire once more to turn to life, still life, and landscape. Not merely to challenge but to comfort the innocent spectator. I have no desire to be an air-propelled machine on Ad Reinhardt s railroad track.

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JANUARY 28, 1959

I have a desire to make something for the innocent, for the sensitive but unknowing person. To make a gesture of love. To take a step towards. To paint something for others deliberately. Not down to. For! To challenge the unknowing on a level they can understand. Like something for children—the best possible thing they can comprehend. Something to do in Provincetown. The dunes and woods, in a way nobody has done them. Seen thru my abstract painting, like Red Lake, Cape Light, etc. The beach and its people. Still life of wood plants. [...]

3.105

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

In such paintings as Water Game, Pink Mississippi, Cradle, Transverse and others the mood is anything but lyrical if I take lyrical to mean singing, subjective, moody. The central image of these paintings [is] an action brought near by a telescope but out of earshot, silent and meaningless. In a thicket the actors might be lovers, or a murderer and his victim—the anxiety is that of silence of an action without sound, without meaning. When the spectator identifies himself as one of the actors he wakes up screaming and nothing is there. I see action as engendering an arresting action. Action leads to action leads to stand still. I see an opposition between action and time, as between life and death. I see action from a distance as action in stillness. The thing in flight is silent. The bang comes from the object hitting the target. My painting is a painting of motion before the collision, its anxiety comes from being before the collision. My painting is always a work of long progression of action absorbed by time. The scene of the pictures is artificially near as if brought close by a telescope—an action seen but out of earshot. There are two ways of dealing with silence. One way is not strike the keys at all (if you take the piano as an example). The other is to strike the keys then stop the vibration of the wires one by one. In my painting silence is imposed on action. I make the process visible. As I paint the picture I paint it out. The analogy is again to motion arrested by motion.

3.106

Daily Diary, 1959 TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1959

Nevelson Party. The whole world, we just walked in and walked out. Went to the Cedar.

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The Extreme of the Middle

Fig. 14. Left to right: Charlotte Brooks, Jack Tworkov, painter and later New York Studio School dean Mercedes Matter (1913-2001), painter James Brooks (1906-1992), and Italian-born painterGiorgioCavallon (1904-1989) sit and smoke and listen at a table in the Cedar Bar, Greenwich Village, New York, 1959. ©John Cohen/Getty Images.

"I" Notes FEBRUARY /, 1959

3.108

[...] Went to dinner to Priscilla Morgans last night. Richard Lindner, and a girl called Evelyn, the Coggeshalls, a girl called Carmen, Mary McCarthy and her husband, whom Wally disliked.66 Mary is used to turn on her full charm with great competence it is easy to see. She too holds artists ought not to write, that they are inarticulate as she said, "Artists can only point." [...]

Notes 54-63 FEBRUARY 7, 1959

3.109

[...] As a Jew I can survive only in a civilized society. All primitivism, all nostalgias work against me. I can only have a stake in a society that accepts the human completely. FEBRUARY 9, 1959

3.110

Finished the painting temporarily called "Day s End."67 The problem of being influenced is a double one. One has to pull away from those by whom one is influenced; not for formal reasons, but because of the difference in the way you look upon art, the world, because of the dif-

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ference in character and fundamental attitude. But one also has the equal problem of pulling away from those whom one has influenced. At first you suffer a pang of hurt when you see a painter, especially a friend, take over something you've been working on, all the more so if he gets the credit for it but soon you have to give up what they took over, because of the realization that only what is superficial to your work can be taken over. The work must stand without those devices, forms or attributes, which can be taken over.

"I" Notes FEBRUARY 12, 1959

On the way to studio met Mary Frank. She was furious. She was talking to some men in front of her house. Some bum had stolen her boys bicycle. Tm so fucking mad" she said to me. I am still unused to women using those words and she held her little girl Andrea by the hand, and made no effort to conceal her language from her. She asked me to stop at her studio, which I did for about twenty minutes. It was incredibly interesting. These huge blocks of wood that she carves, "hack" is the better word, with an ax. The whole floor is covered inches deep with wood chips. There are drawings on the wall, small bronzes, wax figures, and figures in plaster. On leaving one thought occurred to me. Whether seen in the impersonal surroundings of a gallery would these things have the same passion and vitality. I was thinking too of the difference, however minute, that might differentiate an interesting person from an artist. The artist finally surmounts the personal, to where the work has a meaning almost detached from the "color" (what is merely interesting), of the artist. It is something the same with beat literature. Its fascinating autobiography, but it does not reach that level of form or meaning which makes a work of art. Somebody's adventure makes me a voyeur, but somebody's art makes me a participant in some universal process. This speculation is apart from Mary s sculpture. She very definitely aims at art. I just wondered whether keeping her studio so interesting is the best way to judge critically her own work. There is no such thing as art for myself, it must always be art for others. For myself [is] indulgence only, but no art.

3.1H

Daily Diaryy 1959 SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1959

Party at the Rosenbergs. (The whole crowd.) Talked to Devon Meade, her husband, Bill Hardy, Martha Vivas (with Zog). Bills girl, Ruth Glickman, Guston—"I didn't do anything about it. They just gave it to me," about Ford award. [.. .I68

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The Extreme of the Middle

Notes 54-63 FEBRUARY l6, 1959 3.113

[. . .] The essence of our new art is that instead of being a representation of an experience, the painting is the experience itself. What is reflected in the painting are the lived hours of the painting itself as the climbing of a mountain represents nothing else than itself—the encounter of climber and mountain. Is it necessary that no object of the visible world should be reflected in such painting? No! Only, if there are no objects to be seen, more of the painting is seen. But for the truly sophisticated eye it should not make much difference, if the artist knows his way about. Draft of a letter to Dore Ashton in response to her Art News article "Some Lyricists in the New York School"69

MARCH 2, 1959 3.114

Dear Dore: My paintings for the April show are waiting to be picked up by Berkeley's so I am in a relaxed mood, in fact a writing mood. I recall that the last time I saw you I forgot to mention to you that I received the London Art News and read your article in it with interest. As always I am grateful to you for mentioning me with kindness. But I want to use the occasion of this article to disagree with you on one point. I don t think that the quality that relates me to such painters as Guston, Vicente, Yunkers is the lyrical aspect of my work. What we do have in common I should first like to express negatively—we all dissent from de Koonings example of defacing, of painting out the painting, of throwing the defiled scrapings back on to the surface, in a gesture of contempt and hatred. I shall abandon speaking for the other artists—I will say at least that s my attitude. My attitude was to abandon the angry gesture, to wear in this respect a neutral face again, to use McNeils painting as an example where he deliberately brutalizes the surface because he is against beauty—I take the attitude of neutrality neither deliberately striving for beauty nor deliberately avoiding it—certainly against the deliberate brutalizing of paint. When I think deeply of the paintings I made from 1952 to 1954 I think I can now discern two subjects buried in my painting that I was not too conscious of then—namely the orgiastic and the expiatory. House of the Sun, Water-Game, The Father, The Prophet, etc.

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After 1954 I gradually moved away from conceptual subject matter to a composition that expressed itself more and more in pure painting terms. The prevailing mood of these compositions suggest an action in a noiseless landscape, (an effect of an action that is soundless as if seen by a telescope from a great distance, the action always in a thicket, ambiguous, as if one could not tell if it were a murder or love scene). I think "lyrical" means singing but I think of my painting as a kind of deliberate, open eyed speaking, not song, not outcry. The rhythm and tone of my work neither protests life nor sings of it—it merely tries to be like it. My painting does not speak of the moment of crisis, but of any moment in an endless action. It is this last that makes it impossible to be lyrical. For the lyrical always deals with a special occasion. Perhaps it is not important to insist on this except that I feel the point strongly and since you have written of my work with so much kindness I feel I owe you any explanation that I can make. It is also perhaps not too late to say in writing as I have told you personally how much I appreciated your review of my drawing show. You touched on the nature of drawing with such sensitivity and depth that I was deeply complimented that the occasion was my drawing. With love to you and Adja. (

T Notes

MARCH 2, 1959

Re: the letter I wrote to Dore, I am thinking of L.G. who is dying of cancer. How sorry shall I be for L.G. if I think of myself, who is, from the doctor s point of view in good health, and bursting to live, as also dying, only more slowly. Is it a matter for rhapsody or anguish to notice that each one is in his soul a witness that the flesh is only a skinful of salt and water dipped up from the universal pool over which we have no authority? This leaves us if there is any task as author left to us, face to face only with the soul, with consciousness. This is the encounter I watch through painting. From where I stand no protest is possible, and no rhapsody. But neither is my view gloomy for the discovery of the soul is a sobering process, but not without its peculiar joys and intensities. [...]

3.115

Notes 54-63 MARCH 4, 1959 The hands (the body s) encounter with consciousness, that s what the painting process is.

3.116

94 The Extreme of the Middle Fig. i5.Willemde Kooning and Jack Tworkov, Robert Motherwel I opening at SidneyJanis Gallery, March 9, 1959. © Fred W. McDarragh

MARCH 9, 1959 3.117

The critic favors and understands best the artist whose work implies a manifesto. He coaxes the artist on to polemical ground. For on this ground the critic himself believes himself to play a creative role, in fact its on this ground he seeks his victory over the artist. When the artist denies the critic such a possibility, the critic, face to face with, to him, the incommunicable work, feels frustrated and excluded. MARCH 13, 1959

3.118 The direct reaching out for "life" is punished by the elusiveness of the goal. The "beat" think they know what life is. I wonder how many of them live as intensely as some of the squares. The gusto, the rush, the push, the appetite of the square strikes me as a great deal more alive than many beat goals. I have often watched the drinkers at a bar, and wondered who at that moment "lived," the bartender or the drinker. MARCH 15, 1959 3.11Q

I am against elite attitudes. Therefore against aristocratic (being on top of) nihilistic (being out of) attitudes. Against communism because its methods are impossible without a ruling elite. Against fashion for the same reason. Therefore I am for the democratic, that is for the awareness that society has real-

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ity like an individual, that if it is wrong to use persons as things, it is wrong to use society as if it were a thing. Since the individual owes his existence to the social group, he has responsibilities to the social group, [thus] hatred and disrespect for the group directs hatred and disrespect on individuals and on the self. The aristocrat wants society to serve his comfort, vanity and position. The nihilist wants to exercise his will on society as if it were a thing, as if no other people except his own existed in it as a criminal does. He takes what he can from society, and returns nothing but insults. I identify myself with society. As far as art goes, everything that happens in art, I believe, happens because society at that makes it possible. I underrate the part individuals have in innovation, I respect the individual genius and daring, but most of the important things that happen, happen on and within the society not on the level of the individual. That's why I find ridiculous the inflated egos of artists. At the moment, I am for the democratic society because I want to be free not to join an elite, and not become a victim of it. Only bourgeois society as we know it in America today, gives me the freedom to join nothing, no organization and protects me from its vengeance. In art then I am against the extremes, those that appeal to elite attitudes, and I am for the extreme of the middle, the creative middle.

Note, 1959 I don t try to accumulate the picture bit by bit—like pennies in a piggy bank. Whenever in the course of the painting the picture arrives at some concept I submit it to random unrelated activity, to chance, to the opposite of itself. I submit the picture to a bettering and if something of the original impulse survives all that, then it stands. Often all I've got out of months of painting is what one would salvage from a shipwreck. Not perfection but the nearly inevitable consequence of having preferred a certain kind of action to another. Not this way but that way and let s see what happens. Why all that? Out of less than satisfaction with ones self, to spring open the limits of self. Not out of greediness for experience, for release from suffocation. To get out. The opposite of integration—to break open and out. I have practically no need for esthetic experience, for the worship of beauty or the nuances of fine feeling. I envy the real world, the world in which real things are made. I mourn the fact that I am a stranger to real voyages, to factories, to the modern mysteries of machines, science and mathematics, warfare, all the things that make the world, hard, deep, impenetrable, and as a matter of fact, cruel. I am a foreigner to all these enormous energies. My painting represents me in my chagrin, my alienation, my laziness, my impotence. To have to paint with a brush instead of with horsepower. The

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96 The Extreme of the Middle

world of the ordinary man expands with the speed of light. Every schoolboy travels in space. The painter s fate deals with square feet. No wonder we are a vanishing race.

Undated Note 3.121

Anyone who speculates about what I am trying to express gets me wrong. I am not trying to express. This is not arrogance, it is a simple confession of ignorance. I am no prophet. I don t see the end. I am quite sure of what I pass through, but not of the point I arrive at. What I pass thru is the corporeal, sense-alive self. Here is where I gather all essential knowledge which carries over from painting to painting. Here, if anywhere, any hard core of reality can be touched. But I would be racked by guilt if here I stayed. It must be for me only a passage, a tunnel at the end of which a larger view is possible—and this, my hope is, not a view of the world / live in (I started from there) but a view of a world without conditions, which good or bad without time, which is the body, the self of all men alike. I am not able as yet to surrender, do not want to surrender to the fear that there is no larger view.

"I" Notes APRIL 8,

3.122

1959

My show opened at the Stable Monday April 6.70 We had dinner at an Italian restaurant and a party afterwards at Eleanor s new apartment.

Notes 54-63 PROVINCETOWN, AUGUST 29, 1959

3.123

At any point in time we are the sum of all of our experiences. At any one point a painting is the sum of everything that has happened on the surface. What the artist finally leaves on the surface was impossible without what went before from the first stroke to the last. Every passage scratched out or painted over however much overlaid with paint is still present in the final image of the painting. AUGUST 30, 1959

3.124

There may very well be only one road for us: namely, to put a stop to all the questions, social, philosophic, religious, which the world in all recorded history has been asking. It is simply impossible to encompass in any explicit form any of the big ideas. We suffer just as much from our strivings for perfection, good, truth and beauty, as from ignorance, evil, and chaos. What is

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simply a miracle is that things are as good as they are, that millions rightly or wrongly detect progress in human life, and that so many lives are admirable. Somehow or other neither the great evils nor the great goods that agitate the intellectuals ever come to pass. As in individual life the catastrophes come unexpectedly and suddenly, from quarters that we least suspected. Even when I read the most intelligent and the most sensitive writers of the past I feel they are gnawing the tails of questions the bodies of which are long past dead. We ought to learn to ask small questions, of things immediate to our real life, where there is reasonable chance of getting a reasonable answer. We must realize that some questions are themselves the things we suffer from. You choose what kind of questions to ask depending on whether you enjoy living in despair, or whether you enjoy living joyfully. In either case I suspect (as Dostoyevsky suspected) that you choose only enjoyment. The inability to formulate the big questions must be built into the facts of nature. Life to remain life, must be infinitely variable. If it were possible to formulate the one and only question and the one and only answer, life would cease to be life. It is the same in art. There is no formulation of what art is. It is infinitely variable and always new, and also always old. There is also in art as in life a constant, but it is experienced by the intuition and not empirically, and therefore cannot be described. When I look upon writing and look upon painting, I am happy in my choice. Painting has the quality of living in action (like the dance whose only shortcoming is that it lacks permanent form) which no other art form has. It is living in form. The important task for our teachers is to teach us to accept consciousness— mankind has never been able to accept open eyed the objects of consciousness. We cannot look death, age, disease, accident and catastrophe in the face. When we encounter a stink we hold our nose. When a subway train shrills to a stop we shut our ears. We cannot bear to look at the swollen, the maimed, the oozing wound. Its a shame that there are professional funeral parlors. We should be forced to prepare our own dead for burial, as it was in Polish villages in my father s time. We should open the wounds of living to view. We ought to stop protecting our sensibilities. We ought not leave it to specialists to look upon the brutal sides of life. Especially our women and children should not be spared. [...] The artists in America ought to spurn elite attitudes, and they ought to reject elite views of their art. There is always someone to flatter the artist by telling him he is the true aristocrat. Baloney. Art is a city thing and the city does not breed aristocrats. Those who have pretensions to aristocratic styles and manners can never be

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The Extreme of the Middle

artists. I like the story (attributed to Resnick) that when the chairman of an art department in California said in California artists live like kings, he replied, "They also paint like kings!" The Constitution of the USA is full of necessary fictions—like all men are created free and equal—it s not true, but its good to have it in the book, so that those who want to claim the freedom and equality have a fighting chance. Europe since the French Revolution has thought exclusively in sociological terms: commitment, there, has really always meant to class (to nation if my class ruled it), to party if it was the tool of my class. All Utopias lead to the elevation of the Utopians. All those who were not "us" had to be subjugated, exterminated, or brought up to "us." Violence is inherent in all European thought. Because of some historical accident we have been spared some of the embroilment in Europe's life. We had and still have in this country the chance to take a new turn towards humanity and human society. The essence of this turn is that we cannot use others as things, which is expressed in our constitution as all men are born free and equal. Not a perfect government, not a perfect social structure, perfect law, or perfect policemen, but a more magnanimous view of men gives our society its edge over Europe. Not Russia, not India, but America is the hope of the world. P'TOWN, AUGUST 31,1959 3.125

Interrupted. T Notes SEPTEMBER 1O, 1959, PROVINCETOWN

3.126

All this summers experiences are left out—and so much on my mind. The house the constant stream of guests—Janice, Celia, Helene, Vivie, Eleanor. All the new names and faces—the Prices, Eastmans guy Weils—the visit of Eckstrom and Michel Warren, the feeling about my whole new status and the increasing self searching, the effort to bring my identity into clear relief, the increasing insight, my difficulties with the children, with Wally—my hunger for isolation and freedom.711 must come back to it and write in great detail about this summer. Notes for It Is on being Jew, American, artist and Human.72 A Jew is out of his head if he is for "Dada." Like a hare running with the hounds. The other night (Tuesday Sept. 8) we had the Motherwells drop in after dinner. They really came to see the Rothkos who were to dinner (Stanley cooked).

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Mark told of his visit with Peter Langan the English painter in England. How Langan and his wife went skin diving and made love under water in front of the Rothkos. Helen told of the visit of Allan Davie to their house in New York. "Davie throughout his visit persisted in belching and farting in my living room, it made me very nervous." I associate this show of deliberate coarseness with aristocratic pretensions. This coarseness wants to prove two things. One: the autonomous character of the individual who is a law to himself. Two: the contempt the aristocratic personality feels for the striving of the bourgeoisie for refinement (Pathetically the bourgeoisie think that refinement is a way of climbing up to aristocratic status). The fact that Davie is far from having aristocratic blood only proves my point about the falseness of adopting aristocratic manners and attitudes. [...]

Notes 54-63 P'TOWN, SEPTEMBER 18, 1959 [. . .] The gangster is the only one in our society who exemplifies the figure on which originally aristocratic idealism was drawn. And there is no doubt Nietzsche would have had more rapport with the gangster than for those who more typically represent our society. And the true aristocrat today would not blanch at the idea that the founder of his house (provided he lived enough centuries back) was a figure very like a gangster—one who founded his domain by strength, cruelty, terror, deceit and bloodshed. The Nietzschean idea was that the genius, the great man, above all the philosopher king, as he conceived of himself (as Plato did also) was not only above, but the enemy of, society. He was the destroyer, he wreaked creative destruction, he was the nihilist—that s where Dada stems from. Flattering as Nietzsche s idea is to the genius, even if I thought of myself as the greatest genius, I would have to look on Nietzsche as my enemy. A Jew has to. Nietzsche cried that both his followers and his detractors misunderstood him and he jeered at both. There is a possibility he would have hated the Nazis but Hitler came close to his concept of the genius and Nietzsche would nowhere in his philosophy have had any weapon against the ideas that produced the Nazi execution furnaces. Primarily Nietzsche is an esthete who strained out of his esthetics that part which is the moral adulterate. Pure esthetics is something without a container, without limits, without the possibility of formulation hence it includes everything. It accounts for the story about Mussolini's son who participating in the bombing of a city could remember only one emotion, how beautiful the bombing and the bombed city in the night was. Pure esthetics, like pure sociologies (Utopias) lead to pure (without guilt) murder.

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The genius of the moment is Mr. K. now visiting us. He also is much closer to the aristocratic ideal than any blood worshipper, or any esthetic Nietzschean.

"I" Notes P'TOWN, SEPTEMBER 18, 1959 3.128

Wally and Helen left yesterday, and I'm alone. Got up early and fixed up an electric heater in the guest room and took a long hot shower and got into clean clothes and woolen socks. Made breakfast. Tony (Sissy) Silva came at eight and starting puttering around the house. Literally he is putting putty on all windows that need it. The first summer in the P'town house is coming to an end. Yesterday I spent the whole day making three stretchers. Will take back to New York six canvases more or less finished. For a hectic summer it's not too bad. It was not all this that made me want to write. Only I am having coffee and enjoy being alone. I picked up a book to read with the coffee and sat back. I self-consciously started to arrange the chair, the book the coffee so that I would get into a relaxed posture. I heard myself, my inner voice admonishing me to relax properly. That s what made me reach for the notebook. The thought came to me (by no means for the first time) how unfinished a person I am although my fiftyninth birthday is behind me. I am still trying to acquire good habits. Learn to relax. Take exercises in the morning. Improve my swimming, control my temper, learn not to scold Wally, to be cheerful with the children, to learn to work more, to exorcise my anxieties, to learn to wake up in the morning without the cloud of doom over my head. In contrast to the first part of the summer when the tension between Wally and me was so great that for the first time the possibility of a separation became so real even the children became aware of it and I had a tearful session with them. First Wally then I took trips to the city to get the bad taste out of the mouth, to relax. After that the summer took a turn for the better, and Wally and I were loath to part for these last two weeks. Nevertheless I enjoy being alone for a while. If only the house would have its heat installed. The newspapers quote the doctors as saying that heart failure is the nations number one killer. I should think so. Sooner or later everybody dies of heart failure. It's the final cause. SEPTEMBER 21, 1959

3.129

The man who is puttering around the house trying to fix things before I leave indirectly warned me that I will have a hard time getting anyone in town

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 101

to work for me if I get to be known as a hard man to work for. Naturally he meant that I am already getting such a reputation. Its a good warning. Its true. It's about time I learned to deal with people. It reveals a great weakness in my character. It shows up in another aspect when any number of people spot the fact that I am a worrier. I can spot a number of reasons for this. My laziness resulting in irritation when I am forced to concern myself with things because others neglected them. My suspiciousness—fear others will take advantage of my laziness. My frustrated desire to trust or depend on others to do what I ought to do myself. My love for perfection. The knowledge that I will be frustrated in my search for it. Altogether in dealing with workmen something childish comes out in my nature—feelings of dependency, inadequacy. I also lack guile and strategy in dealing with them. They will get away with as much as possiblemore so if they spot my weaknesses. They too are irritated and frustrated because they take me for easy mark and find to their surprise that I squawk like hell. No one likes to be fooled. Fantastic the images and legends built around famous names. At the dinner at the Pinkersons—I don't remember whether it was Miz Hofmann, Fritz or Franz who got talking about Jackson Pollock—what a wonderful pie maker he was. According to the story, the women in East Hampton had a pie sale for the church, and an award was given for the best pie to the housewife that made it. It was won by Jackson. Jean Bultman told that in Provincetown he made beach plum jelly.73 I speculate constantly on the nature of violence, of struggle generally. The mystery of man struggling through the ages towards moral values, enthroning the "Thou shalt not kill" on top of the moral Pyramid, yet the glorification of war, the secret admiration for the killer, the inevitable development of science in search for ever more powerful weapons. Violence and struggle have pruned the races of the weak, the unenterprising, the dead wood and have been the signs of vigor, of passion, of the fullness of life. Opposed to the ideas of violence, struggle, the governing of others by will is the idea of love. But the love of the weak is looked upon with contempt. I have not yet met a true artist, one at least I recognize as such, whose work I admire, who in life does not betray the whole catalog of weaknesses. What is the connection!?] There is nothing admirable in artists as men. This does not mean that I am incapable of liking or even loving them. I have a great fondness for Franz. I enjoy Fritzs company, I enormously enjoyed Bill's company—but they are all weak men, often just where the public thinks to admire them. Pollock was far from the raging torrent which his admirers thought he was—he was rather gentle, even dainty in his work, and I imagine in his nature. Franz is a deeply disturbed person but of all the people I know truly incredible in his ability to spend himself—whether it's drinking,

102 The Extreme of the Middle

Fig. 16. Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, Provincetown, Thanksgiving weekend, 1959. Photographer unknown.

talking, or house building—he s pouring thousands on the house he bought. He astonishes all the penny pinching rich men around, like the Pinkersons. He knows no caution—as if living and self-destruction were exactly synonymous. Is that the answer to the mystery of violence? DECEMBER 11,

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1959

Last night I spoke at Princeton to a group of students. Arthur Szathmary presided.741 came there at his invitation. He showed a group of slides of my pictures as an introduction then I spoke on "Elite attitudes in Avant Garde Art," voicing my prejudices against aristocratism in criticism. Wally who was present, however thought that some people in the audience thought I favored elite attitudes. I guess my audience was too naive then for the discussion or I failed to make myself clear. At any rate they seemed interested and the discussion was lively. It was the first time I saw the slides of my work shown. Some of them were bad misrepresentations of the color and of course slides provide no clue to the size of the picture, so that scale with relation to an observer is missing. I felt relaxed after the talk and the drive home with Wally was pleasant. Janice and Alain have been staying in the house for over a week. During that time Alain has been in the hospitable [sfcjfor a glaucoma

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103

Fig. 17. Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov, c. 1954. Photographer unknown.

operation on his eye. Since coming home from the hospital he visits his doctor in the office every day, hence their staying with us in the city until he can go home to Peapack.75 Al Bing died a little over a week ago.76 We had been to Provincetown for Thanksgiving. When we returned Sunday night Matilda called. He had died on Saturday. That terrible regret that I had not seen him enough before he died. If only one knew how close the end lies. Did not some one write recently that if one is not loved one has no identity. His company was never overly interesting to me, but he was a good man, and good to me, and in some way I really loved him. But I'm afraid I was never too tender or affectionate with him. Terrible. My living expenses have risen so stupendously, and the costs of the house in Provincetown are so threatening that Fve again taken nearly every invitation to talk or teach or jury a show especially since this is a no exhibition year for me and I expect few sales and Fve had none so far this fall. So that that trickle of money for the talks in Princeton, the criticisms at Yale, and the months job at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in the summer are all windfalls. Christmas and the end of the year are upon us again. The days are short and black. It takes a special will to work, the studio is gloomy and dark.

[...]

I've given Wally a rough time, in spite of taking resolutions to be more

104 The Extreme of the Middle

tender with her. It is the most urgent necessity of my private life to learn to live with Wally without hurting her and me in the process. I'm nearing sixty and I'm still trying to form habits, and fashion my character. Misery. Seeing my slides at Princeton made me realize how much of my work is based on linear energy becoming mass, from Christmas Morning, through "House of the Sun" series to such paintings as Red Lake, Crest, Offering and other [s]—also the abstract charcoal drawings. It is really what I have in common with so different a painter as Pollock. My origins though are in Cezanne who built up a mass through discrete patches of color. But the line is more like a voice. In "The House of the Sun" the linear energies in different primary colors (Red Yellow, Blue White) are like a piece of music in four voices [plate 5]. I was never really fully aware of this in my work. I must try this again more consciously, starting perhaps from "Christmas morning" and "House of the Sun" series.

Notes 54-63 JANUARY 3, 1960

3.131

The influence of Surrealism on our painting has been noted, but not enough has been said about that part of Surrealism which was influenced by Freud s theory that chance and actions are psychologically determined. This led to automatic painting out of which Abstract Expressionism really emerges. This face of the painting leads to futile searches for meaning, aggravated by the residue of naturalistic image that tends to cling to this painting at this phase. But the real significance of this painting is not the mysterious psychological core which undoubtedly remains hidden behind the spontaneous achievement of the surface but the capacity of the surface itself to be an immediate concrete experience to the eye, like wetness or roughness is to the touch without the possibility of verbal interpretation taking the place of experience. It is this quality of the painting that irritates the critic in search of meanings that can be verbally translated. One way to look at the painting is as an alphabet of color shapes. (Even a line is merely an extreme aspect of a color shape and the unpainted surface is another.) The development of painting from an alphabet of things (Dutch still life painting an extreme instance) to an alphabet of color shapes is first realized by Cezanne (although it appears in a generalized form in all Impressionist painting) and reaches its natural development with Abstract Expressionist paintings. It is comparable to development from hieroglyph to alphabet. Here the comparison ends, as there is no direct verbal meaning in a painting of color shapes except what a psychoanalyst might deduce by observing chance actions. The content of this painting lies simply in the development of thematic material—that is the kind of charac-

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 105

teristic color shapes that develop over a period of time and their characteristic rhythms and composition based on a voluntary ordering of chance and involuntary material.

Daily Diary, 1960 TUESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1960

[. . .] Made rounds of openings. Hofmann, Goodnough, Leslie, Chamberlain, Rice. Started by seeing Guston show. Met Philip who took the initiative in overcoming the estrangement bet. us.77 Came over and shook hands cordially and wanted to talk. Viv Rankin with us. Dinner with Vivie at home and afterwards to Bochi s on Thompson Street, where Leslie gave dinner party to huge crowd taking the whole restaurant for occasion. Bravo Leslie! Then to Bar—Kline and Guston again and all the younger bloods and Barney Rosset who said he was ready about book if Dave was ready.78 First direct confirmation that the book was in the works.

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T Notes

JANUARY 8, 1960

Recently in making the round of exhibitions, meeting the artists again, going to the bar, I realized one aspect of my life—namely if I stay away and am too much by myself I become full of resentment and suspicion and imagine that everyone is against me. By going out I overcome my own resentment, which is the core of my trouble with people. I resolve to suppress resentment and anger and suspicion. The only drawback is that as I am drawn into social life then of course I pay for it in less energy saved for work. At any rate the real significance of social life is to work away resentment and suspicion. I met and "made up" with Philip Guston—I say "made up" because I never quarreled with him, but I built up a lot of resentment against him because of the Hunter book. Now I feel better.

3.133

Daily Diary, 1960 MONDAY, JANUARY 11, 1960

Went with Janice, Alain and Wally to a cocktail party to meet Cartier-Bresson. Met Tom Hess there. Later in the evening after dinner, Janice and I went to the Rosenbergs, and met Tom and Audrey again. Long conversation, begun over Adjas pastels, continued on the question of doing the same form over and over again as in Rothko, and the disadvantages of change—view challenged by Harold.

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106 The Extreme of the Middle

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 1960 3-135

Worked yesterday on sectional picture and then on painting called The Nest. Changed the latter a lot—so that reference to the motion of figures is painted out. Received invitation to take part in a panel discussion in Philadelphia organized by Harold Rosenberg.79

'T Notes JANUARY 15, I960

3.136

Hess s mention of me in the current Art News makes me furious.80 Daily Diary, 1960 SATURDAY, JANUARY l6, 1960

3-137

Went last night to club. Paid dues to Littlefield.81 Heard discussion of artist as critic. Met Mercedes, went to O Henry Bar on Sixth Avenue. Stayed till three and went to Cedar bar and met Pat Hartman and Franz Kline, George Cook. Pat center of swarm of nuzzling men.82 Cook told story of two mice in Pentagon ist mouse (glum): They assigned me to Space work. 2nd mouse: That s better than being in Cancer. Franz told story: Fred Allen saw a couple waiting for bus. He helped on the woman got in himself when the Bus driver snapped shut the door. Woman: My God my husband is outside! Bus driver: So what, think this is the Titanic? SUNDAY, JANUARY I/, 1960

3.138

Last night: Paul Brach and Mimi for dinner. Also Peggy Burlin, alone, Paul teaching in Chicago.83 Paul talked about the ritualistic art of Rothko—of the "I am" attitude, of the Tablets. Last Monday Harold speaking of Rothko said his paintings were like prayers which are the same every day. A formularized prayer—a repetition. Reinhardt in current Art News defends Asian Art—for its repetitiveness. Is that where Tom got his idea?84 MONDAY, JANUARY l8,

3-139

1960

Tom called, asked for two drawings for Smithsonian. Not clear what they were for. Talked with Eleanor about a selection of paintings from the 508 for a show in spring. Ran into Resnick. He just signed a lease for a $350 a month studio. "Some artists are still living in the WPA days," he said. When I said what a lot of

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 107

money for a studio, I cant afford it, he said "I can afford it, whata hell!" Rumor has it he gets $20,000 a year from Wise. TUESDAY, JANUARY ip, 1960

Visited McNeils studio. Its rare I go to anybody's studio. He works with unquestionable force, integrity, and uncompromising attitude. I hope he finds what he is looking for. I like several paintings for their compact, solid, unalluring, uningratiating quality. A lot of his work is still too inchoate for my taste.

3.140

SUNDAY, JAN 17

We had for dinner the Rosenbergs, Bultmans and Ileana Castelli. She recently bought small version of Land from Stable. She is separated from Leo, looks forlorn and is eager to visit my studio. SATURDAY, JANUARY 23,

1960

Janice and Alain came over to the studio to look at my new work. Felt cheered up by their reaction. Went to see Eleanor at Stable. She said Offering had gone up to Albright for consideration. Saw Gustons show again (closing day) No more convinced than first time. Evening: to party at Coggs, Kate and Pleasances party too. Their boy friends etc, Helen & Eben there too. Suzy in Greek jacket & Ballet Tights. Marcel Duchamp, with whom I talked for about 10 minutes. Alfred Barr (mentioned to him my anti-elite theory he wants a brief description etc.) Talk with Saul Steinberg—first time in all these years. SATURDAY, JANUARY 30,

3.142

1960

Worked on two sectional picture, and messed up its virginal look. [...] SUNDAY, JANUARY 31,

3.141

3-H3

1960

Worked on two sectional picture and messed it up for real. Leave it now to dry. Worked on Mountain again—top section.

3.144

Notes 54-63 FEBRUARY 7, 1960

I am dreaming of a painting that is most unlike what is personal to me. Something that would represent some ideal vigor, strength, youthfulness that I never possessed. Something that represents ideal freedom. Again the main problem in working is to overcome all inhibitions, to probe all possibilities.

3-M5

io8 The Extreme of the Middle "I" Notes TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1960 3.146

The idea of changing again the style of my painting is much on my mind. I want to get away from the limits of my own personality. I want to make a painting that is stranger, more vigorous, more daring than myself. While this is on my mind I can t yet abandon the themes which I am working on now. The Blue paintings, the red and green ones etc. But I am looking for a clean stop and an absolutely fresh new search. [...] FEBRUARY 12, 1960

3-H7

Started square canvas 45 x 45. Reminds me of Air Game. Less austere than recent work. I stress the psychology of work and struggle perhaps too much in my painting. I exert my will perhaps too much. I ought to release the picture from the ties to my will and personality. [...]

Daily Diary, 1960 MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1960

3.148

[...] Opening of Jasper Johns' show at Castelli. Had started 45 x 45. Worked intensely on it for several days—a real search. Ended up nowhere. Working on red & Green again temporarily called The Nest. I finished picture originally called Nest. Much changed from its first form. I named the picture BOND 61 x 36. The new name is more in line with my desire to give less psychological names to pictures.

Notes 54-63 FEBRUARY 21, 1960

3.149

There are several ways of seeing the emperor s clothes. The typical failing of the determined sophisticates is their embarrassment with the obvious. That s how they failed the emperor and ever since the squares have gleefully reminded us that it took a little child, etc., etc. But imagine that the true story ran differently. The emperor was not a fool but a rebel intending a revolution of manners. He instructed his cloth weavers and his tailors who were all master craftsmen. The emperor appeared in the first diaphanous mantel of wondrous finesse. The nasty little boy would still have seen only the emperor s nakedness and would of course have had no inkling of the emperor s revolutionary intentions. The sophisticates would

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 109

have raved about the clothes, but they would politely refuse to notice the emperors nakedness, and so they too would have missed the emperors rebellion. The emperor, you see, was up against it. For a long time his metaphysicians had been talking about his immortal soul. No one was able to deny that the soul was lodged in the body, which is why the body is sacred. The emperor began thinking about the body this soul was lodged in and he thought it was queer the way it got to be all the more difficult to get to the wine the more you were concerned (because you were ashamed) with concealing the bottle. Nevertheless the emperor succeeded better than he had hoped. Unknown to him the passion to undress had been the secret desire of his subjects for the longest time. As his marvelous example was even better understood the revolutions against clothes are more positively for nakedness followed one after another. While the learned were discussing the nature of the soul the simple fact of the animal nature of the body was only clearly understood and openly stated in literature, art and the new sciences at the turn of our century. (Freud, Joyce, Lawrence, the Fauves and expressionists in art.) The twentieth century is marked by a progressive fever to disrobe. And we are quickly approaching the time when a poet stripping on the platform before reading his latest will not only not raise a howl, but not even a snicker. And the poets best friend of whatever gender will, of course, go about habitually stripped from the waist down, shaved, powdered, and manicured. Only weather, commerce, and fashion, but not morals, will dictate the clothing for the rest of the body. Of course the emperor will turn over in his grave. After all he was serious, he was interested in the wine in the bottles. He had not reckoned with the decorators who embellish mantle pieces with empty bottles and pulled champagne corks. Discard! Discard! FEBRUARY 21,

1960

Harold Rosenberg sees that the teachers, explainers, and art experts process the rebellious elements in modern art until they become fit for consumption in the wallpaper and textile industries. But they (the wallpaper designers, etc.) in spite of his indignation, do quite lay bare the essentials of the art they murder. Harold thinks that it was the designers that made of art an arrangement of color shapes. That is not true: art itself really evolved that way. Abstract art consists of a juxtaposition of color shapes. If that's a crime Cezanne is the culprit and not the designers. The designers can be blamed only for making the idea vapid. But do artists have to imitate designers? Architecture has such terrific standing in art history that we refuse to see

3.150

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The Extreme of the Middle

that what we call modern architecture today is just high-blown, high styled commercial art. When modern architecture is at its most serious, it is technological and sociological with emphasis on the logical, and quite as divorced from the concerns of art as bridge building. If such buildings were not judged as works of art some enlightenment about the subject might result. The question cant a bridge be designed so it is also beautiful is beside the point. For if it has also to be beautiful still the engineer not the artist is responsible. The same thought goes for furniture, pottery, knickknacks and whatever that goes into a "good design show" in art museums where they don t belong, precisely because of the confusion they create in our thinking. If we permit the confusion of art with "good design" objects, which is the breath of commercial and industrial art propaganda, we shall see the reciprocating movement when more and more commercial art objects hang as art in chic galleries and museums. We must resist the socializers of art which should remain a critical, searching, independent force untied to the immediate contingencies of social and domestic use. Art as the servant of something else is not art. Art as a free ally of other creative forces in life and society—yes. Art and beautiful bridges, not art in beautiful bridges. You can make bridges more beautiful perhaps by abolishing entrances and exits. But neither engineers nor artists would care for such bridges as bridges, neither are that much interested in beauty. There are no arguments between artists and engineers (and I hope no lack of sympathy). There ought not to be any between artists and architects.

Daily Diary, 1960 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 1960

3.151

[• • •] Saw Eleanor, she agreed to signed contract bearing 1000 a month minimum. Call Prager to draw up contract. Saw Castelli. Offering hanging there. He is pleased with deal with Eleanor to use his gallery as an additional outlet for my pictures. [...] {

T Notes

MARCH 6, 1960

3.152

I ran into Guston at Bluhms party for Goldberg on the occasion of Goldbergs opening at the Jackson Gallery.85 He turned to me with that peculiar anguished distraught gasping air of his which he puts on when he is most insincere. The subject: how he cannot

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 m

possibly participate in the symposium we are supposed to participate in at the month [sic] in Philadelphia. I said nothing but smiled and I am afraid he understood my thoughts only too well. To let yourself be announced and get all the benefit of the publicity and then arrogantly stand up whatever organization invited you is standard procedure for geniuses. You get the mundane prestige of publicity, and the arcane prestige of refusing to participate in vulgar, public discussion. Some shit!86 MARCH 6, 1960 I want to make paintings more vigorous, more courageous, more noble, more real, more truthful than myself. I want pictures that transcend me. Myself I am small. I want my art to be the mountain on which I stand. Only from there would I receive my vision. I dont want to speak of my world, or represent it, or interpret it, or reject it, or hate it, or judge it. I only want to bring something into the world, something that could attract to itself the gaze of poetic eyes, of insights, of thrills, of wonders. I don t want something that merely represents me. I want something I have made. Not an object like a table with multiple uses and pleasures but something irreducible, unexchangeable, for the soul only—otherwise dumb and useless. Because I am small, vulnerable, mortal, I want to make something that has resonance in the souls of my kindred in the souls of poets. [...]

3-153

MARCH 12, 1960 [...] Vivie Rankine came with me to the club to hear the young poets.87 It was curious to hear Diane Di Prima who looks seventeen (she is probably older) looking prim and severe.88 She tried to look nonchalant as she pronounced cunt, fuck, shit. These words although they are quickly entering the common language like, lousy, Jerk and others did a generation ago, are still nevertheless one of the main signs of defiance. In fact the young don t have enough ways to show their rebellion. The occasional efforts of the Post Office to deny them mailing privileges always ends in failure and since their magazines still have mostly a hand to hand distribution the repression of official authority is practically non-existent. Even the most obscene religious blasphemies—still the most dangerous public offense—hardly get any notice. And of course no one bothers with attacks on the government as that is altogether unnoticed. Besides no one is that political. In a word—at no time have would be rebels had so much freedom—and at no time has freedom been appreciated less. None of these poets give any indication to belong to any thing larger than their particular milieu. Except Jones—his self-consciousness as a Negro, his belonging to a people is obvious.89 And he was the strongest of the readers. The Jews—Oppenheimer, Einstein—have no such identifica-

3.154

112

The Extreme of the Middle

tion. No one in this group would think it strange if Jones joined in the protests now going in the South against restaurant segregation. Admitting the case with Jews is not so extreme yet with the memory of Nazi Germany and the recent outbreak of swastika writing on synagogues etc., how would this group look upon Einstein if he joined a movement to protest the ostracism of Jews in certain towns and neighborhoods clubs, vacation places etc. But what I have in mind more than identification with racial and minority groups is that none of these young poets and hardly any one in the audience would identify with the nation. It is this desire to tear away from any identification with any larger world that makes them use the forms and language that puts up barriers between themselves and such worlds. It will take a long time before artists and poets are united with a world again and draw from that unity the strength that the truly great had. Typically young is the horror all these young poets show when confronted with the images of their parents. They cannot find any resemblances between their own passions and the passions of their parents that generated them. They have a horror of age and they bring in the withered vaginas of their mothers as horror images. The old are a constant remonstrance to their youth. But for the old they could imagine their youth imperishable. When the young refuse to be heirs, when they are afraid to stand in the place of their forebears, society is sick. Now they think they have grievance—the wars, the atom bomb, the threat of new war. But since time began every generation of rebels had threats of doom. The invention of the wheel to such minds would rouse them to no smaller protest. Strangely they consider foreign cultures innocent. Buddhism, Zen—as if in those cultures there were no fathers. But reasonableness does not make a poet. The defamation of a god must rest on some other orthodoxy. Mostly these young poets limit their notions of reality, picking what they like for kicks.

Undated Note 3-155

Respectability is the death of art as it has been the death of religion. The respectable artist always dresses shabbily. I'd like to dress better than a gangster.

Daily Diaryy 1960 SUNDAY, MARCH 13, 1960

3.156

[...] Evening: Eleanor called. She talked to Tom Hess who said hed print a color reproduction of one of my paintings in the May issue, if we paid for it. I told Eleanor to refuse.

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 113

I took up with Eleanor the possibility of postponing the May show to next season.

T' Notes MARCH 14,

1960

[...]! don t know what definition being Jewish gives me. I know myself to be Jew—that s about all. I have no particular identification with Jews. I identify just as easily with others. In fact I resent the easy presumption by Jews who identify themselves with a Jewish people that since I am a Jew I identify myself in the same way they do. My Americanism amounts to a total conversion. I know myself to be Jewish, but my desire is for identification with those people and those forces that move towards making in this country a reality of the Bill of Rights. Such an identification does not exclude my sympathies for the struggles of other peoples towards dignity and freedom. How then could I be indifferent to the Jews in Israel, or to the problems of Jews anywhere wherever they meet with disgrace and dishonor. I simply mean that on the personal level I have no more identification with a Jew as a Jew than with a non-Jew. If the most important struggles of aristocratic societies was for land, then the most important struggles begun in our time and to mark this developing era is the struggle around ideas. As for the Jews in the past, so now for the whole world ideas and not land will be the magnet that unites and opposes.

[...]

What kind of revolution shall we hope for for America? a cultural revolution, to shake the very roots of the American mind. Who is the vanguard of such a revolution? The artists, the poets, the playwrights, the scientists, the musicians, the builders, the inventors. The old world, the world of aristocratic dreaming is shaken to bits, nothing but memories and pieces lie around like broken columns. It's a nuisance when we speak of culture, to speak of the pieces we have inherited, however noble the pieces. The noblest libraries, and museums, and the noblest memories do not make us cultured. Only our own making, our own artists, the present poets, the present thinkers. The present makers define our culture. Not the man who quotes but the man who speaks out of himself. Its useless to decry the present, to say we have no Homer, to compare the present art with the art of the past. The present good or bad is what defines our culture, ourselves not borrowed clothes. Nothing archaic can help us or set us an example. Everything new, like ourselves. Not new merely as an invention for newness sake but new because out of our own nerves, our own nerves vibrated by our world good or bad. [...]

3-157

114 The Extreme of the Middle Daily Diary, 1960 SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 1960 3.158

[.. .] Saw Resnick show again, better than I thought. Spoke to Wise a minute, still interested. Saw Marsicano show—it s getting better too.90 [...] Mike Goldberg—very good. It's beginning to reveal direction and order in spite of the extreme broadness of the painting. Saturday night. Dancing party at Bultmans, to Rock & Roll music. Party got frenzied. Danced and laughed and yipeed and wore myself out and home 4:30. [...] SUNDAY, MARCH 20, 1960

3-159

All day recovering from last night. Notes 54-63 MARCH 21, 1960

3.160

Speaking of color as it happens on canvas, any shape, anything with an edge, a boundary, has color. A line—that is a mark made by a pencil or brush, or a scratch from a knife—that has breadth, that is simple or involved, is an extreme case of a color shape just as at the opposite end the primed canvas is another. For the painter a black and white painting is as much a color painting as a red and green painting. Black and white are simply less naturalistic, the prismatic colors being closer to our experiences in the natural world. But if the primary mechanics of painting involves chiefly the articulation of the surface by color shapes then that which achieves this articulation is what I would call color. In other words there is no kind of painting that is not a color painting. Examine the idea that shape and color are two separate entities and can be discussed separately. Thus a canvas can be primed white or black without changing its shape. A canvas can be divided in two parts, one part painted red and the other blue. The resulting shapes would not be changed if instead of red we had orange, and instead of blue, green. What would change is the kind and degree of attention and satisfaction the eye would get. If the shapes remain constant, the effect will not only change with what colors they are painted but with the quality and intensity of any one color. We know how vastly different a series of reds, blues, yellows, whites, and blacks can be within any one of them. However, if you assume any two colors to remain constant the satisfaction they give will change according as by increasing one color you automatically decrease the other. If you imagine a

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 115

vertical dividing line as the line moves right or left, increasing one color and decreasing the other. A continuous change in relative tension, attention, and satisfaction takes place so that as far as the effect is on the beholder color and shape cannot be separated because black cannot be in the place of red, or white in the place of blue without completely changing the tension relation between the colors, the attention relation to the eye and the satisfaction or shock to the conditioned mind of the beholder. A rule however can be stated at this point: any two colors can go together if the size relation is right, and the reverse, any two colors can shock, depending on their size ratio. Light is an effect of the modulation of a color and space an effect of simulated light. Black on white does not produce light—it gives an effect of a contrast of two materials but white on white with the same small interval in intensity gives an effect of light. The same is true of all colors, recession has nothing to do with hue. You can organize your picture so that the front plane is blue and the receding plane yellow or the reverse. It is the intersection of planes (or strokes where they sometimes act like planes) that gives the effect of recession. The effect of recession is not the same as the effect of space. Space is felt where the light effect is strong so that as far as color goes they are produced in the same way, and the effect of one is almost identical with the effect of the other. Here another rule can be stated. If you insist on the reality of the surface there can be no modulation of the color for the modulation creates the fiction of light and space. The big difference in the use of color lies at the start with the intention of the artist. Max[imum] reality of surface and materials, avoiding as nearly as possible representation and fiction = minimum manipulation of surface, min. modulation of color, unequivocal colors (no greys) min. intersection of planes or elements like strokes, minimal number of shapes. Maximum reference beyond surface to the exterior realitymaximum modulation of each color—use of secondary and tertiary tonalities (greys and browns)—maximum use of planes and pieces. The lyrical or psychological aspects of colors are beyond questions of technique. Color can create the effects of harshness, or strength, bitterness and cruelty and also of tenderness, sensuality, weakness and fear, of sexuality, and aridity, of irrationality and logic, of cheerfulness and despair, of the normal and the perverse. But naturally it is not only a matter of the colors but the way pigment itself is put on canvas. This already involves all other matters of painting—choice of tools, ways of working the kind of shapes used, etc. In a word we come back again to the inability to separate color out of all other painting factors putting a severe limit on what you can say about color all by itself. The sensual abandon to a riot of color always means abandoning the hope

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of being able to think about and control the form of the picture. The contrary means to choose a strict limit of color within which to work. Color is the voice of painting.

Daily Diary, 1960 THURSDAY, MARCH 24, 1960 3.161

Went to see Merle Marsicano dance at Hunter auditorium. "The" audience was present. The whole art world at least what is called New York School. In spite of that the audience was ice cold and in spite of a few faithful who cheered and bravoed. It was really pitiful. All this Wednesday night. SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 1960

3.162

I wrote to Eleanor making it unmistakable that I will not show unless the contract is signed—that I would pull out. Worked on new Red & Green picture 67 x 50 and on two small sketches. Will also begin new blue one. I must put out twice as many pictures if I want to get anywhere. Without any income now except from painting, what choice have I except to adopt more professional discipline in my work and in my relation to Galleries and the art world generally. SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 1960

3.163

Bad news from the accountant: I have an enormous tax bill to pay and IVe used up whatever money I had. Worked on Blue painting. Took car out for Mondays drive to Philadelphia— the battery is dead.911 took the car to Garage for repairs. New Battery and spark plug job. Last night at Elises with Hermine. [. . .] Writers and Painters. Chasius, Phillips etc. Rothko, Ferber, Motherwell, Hofmann. Why is Motherwell so embarrassed? He strikes a great pose of sincerity yet his talk is fundamentally insincere. Ferber is a fool.92 THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 1960

3.164

Dinner at Okadas.93 Hardly got a chance to come to the studio and so no entries. I met Eleanor at Eastmans office Monday. David was there. Everything was ironed out and the only thing that prevented Eleanor from signing was the schedule of prices which I promised to lower somewhat and deliver Wednesday. But Wednesday Eleanor called up and said she cant bring herself to sign a contract and I said I would take my work out. I called Eastman who said he'll

Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 117

give me six thousand in return for work at gallery prices minus a third. Eleanor called back and said Vulcan was bought by Baker. So if one or two more pictures are sold I'll last thru the summer. Now what gallery to go to?94 WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 1960

Took most of my drawings out of the Stable and left them in the warehouse. Cleaned out my studio in preparation of going back to work after long interruption due to gallery trouble. FRIDAY, APRIL 22,

3.165

1960

Went to P'town Easter Sunday I got back from P'town last night. Went to studio this morning. I scraped and injured the right side of my car this morning after repairing it and putting it in condition. I called Alan Groh and asked him to send me receipt for paintings left at the Stable.95 I called Leo and made an appointment for lunch next Wednesday. I called and spoke to Ileana in Hospital.961 am depressed and can't work.

3.166

MONDAY, MAY 9, 1960

Meeting with Leo and that night reached decision to join Leo's Gallery. FRIDAY, MAY 13,

1960

Finished writing thing on color.97 Studio to clean up and to try to paint the few weeks before going away to Cape and Milwaukee. MONDAY, MAY 23,

3.167

3.168

1960

Dance party at the Cavallons for the Bultmans who were off to Europe. Lee Pollock a pain in the neck.98

3.169

"I" Notes MAY 30, 1960

[. . .] I've been writing a series of automatic papers, of the free association, confession type. For some reason it exhilarates me. I believe they are probably an attempt at self-analysis and self-therapy. But also I believe I'd love to cultivate it not merely as a style of writing but also as a style of living, of speaking, thinking, acting. These papers are sort of exercises in absolute reference to the inner self without blocks, without shame and embarrassment. Yet I still conceal them. Otherwise I'd use this book for it. But since I wish to preserve this book but I may not want to preserve the papers I cannot put

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them in the book. Should the papers serve my purpose of self-healing I see no reason to preserve them. At any rate by leaving [them] out of this journal, by having them separate—it will be easier for me to destroy them should I want to. I feel very good. The change to Leos has been good. I am assured of at least twenty, to seventy-five thousand this coming year. I am assured of better critical attention—an article by Hess with reference to the Chicago show in October, the book from the Grove Press due in '61." Annette Michelson impressed with my work and sure to write well. But perhaps the most important is the continuing vitality of my personal life—I feel healthy and very good. I think the time has now arrived for me to do the best work of my life. I feel like a confident boxer. Notes 54- #1, #2, #3), made some "Knight" sketches, finished one acrylic on paper, and am working on another [plate 13]. [...] On Saturday (4/5) Wally and I went to Yonkers to attend Antony Blinkens

7.i9

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Bar-Mitzvah at Congregation Emanu-El. Don had arranged for us to drive to Yonkers with a couple (Karp) who live on Gracie Square in an apartment overlooking the river. We got there shortly before ten and had a glimpse of what it means to be rich in America—it was one of the most luxurious apartments I've been in. There were an awful lot of expensive things in the apartment, among them a very fine Ingres drawing. When I praised the drawing to Mrs. Karp, she said she loved the lady, especially her face, "she has such a beautiful face." I admired the drawing, and Mrs. Karp the face. [...] THURSDAY, APRIL 1O, 1975

7.20

[...] Last night we gave an after-dinner party. It started as a project to introduce John Edwards to some young painters, but Wally used it to pay off some obligations and invited more people than I expected: [...] After the party last night I told Wally no more parties for youngs only— we must cultivate middle age and older friends and never to ask youngs unless we have at least a fifty-fifty mix with olds. ENTRY MADE MAY 1, 1975

7.21

Thursday night (April 29) we went to Helens for the dinner she was giving Wally. We arrived at 8 o'clock. Wally was really totally surprised. And although I had known about it I too was surprised to see all the people when we entered. [. . .] Wally was really delighted. The dinner was beautiful and wine, Birthday cake, and champagne, and many presents. Typical of Helen that when she does something she does it with an unexcelled generosity, munificence and taste. P'TOWN JUNE 23, 1975, MONDAY

7.22

[. . .] The workers are out of the house and Wally has been setting up the kitchen. Problems i The new refrigerator, a Westinghouse, whistles like a teakettle on fire. A Westinghouse man is supposed to come from Providence to see what can be done about it. 2 The new stove; we asked for one with a glass door which Arnolds got for us at $50 more. However the stove comes without an interior light. So we have to exchange the glass door for a regular door and get $50 back. 3 The skylight screen. The skylight, a plastic bubble opens and closes by electric motor control. But for some reason Adam installed the skylight so that the screen cannot be inserted, except by removing the skylight and inserting the screen from the roof. Also the screen which came with the skylight has to be shortened a V4 of inch to accommodate some other building deviation. In the meantime we cannot use the skylight without the screen to keep the bugs out. 4 The paint on the living room floor is flaking off. There are floor paint smears on the wall paneling, and generally the paint job is the most incompetent and amateurish job I've ever seen.

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Poor workmanship, the absence of conscience and moral responsibility, the lack of pride in craft that is typical of the whole country and is part of the dissolution that is eating away at the foundations of a viable society. [...] THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 1975

[...] Til be celebrating my seventy-fifth birthday next week. I feel neither depressed nor elated. I'm in good health and I've worked this summer as hard or harder than any summer I can remember. Last Sunday I went to Wellfleet Gallery to an opening and ran into Serge Chermayeff who shook my shoulder and cried "You look the same as ever damn you! Why don t you grow older? What's your secret?" I said, "I just took a nap." "With me", he said, "it's gin. Gin keeps me going." I didn't say, "You look it."11 Without speaking to any one about it, I do, inwardly, dwell on my age a lot. And I must sometime set my musings down with as little censorship as possible. SATURDAY, AUGUST l6,

7-23

1975

Helen spent most of the day taping everybody and everything in the house. She even took the video equipment to New Beach in the afternoon where we spent an hour. When we got back from the beach Helen made about an hour and a half interview with me in the studio. Hermine's present to me was a bottle of the finest champagne, which we popped open before dinner. We asked Erik to make the toast. "Where is the bread?" he cried. Finally he raised his champagne glass and everyone in the room raised theirs and he proclaimed solemnly "Grandpa!" in the most grown up way. We had cold spinach and clam soup, and broiled duck and rice with the mushrooms I recently picked on a walk and had dried. After dinner we gathered around the video machine and spent several hours watching the tapes Helen had made. Naturally much of it came out hysterically grotesque and funny at the same time we watched ourselves with some crazy fascination. Altogether it was a most beautiful day and it was largely Helens idea and drive that gave it a super holiday excitement. According to Hermine, Erik told her last night before going to sleep that he will never forget Grandpas Seventy-fifth birthday. [...]

7.24

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1975, P'TOWN

Helen came into the kitchen this morning smiling broadly, came over to me, put her arm around me and said "Congratulations." I looked mystified. Helen grinned and said, "I bet you don t know what the occasion is." I shook my head. "Guess!" she insisted. I couldn't think of a thing. "It's your fortieth wedding anniversary." I couldn't believe it. Wally stood by smiling. Are you sure, I asked? She had looked up the wedding certificate. Probably she just came

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across it packing the papers we lug back and forth between New York and Provincetown. We almost never celebrate the anniversary although five years ago I did buy Wally a gold chain as a memento. We had lived almost two years together before my divorce from Grace came thru before we married and it was not an event that had impressed itself on our memory.12 Helen was amused. I offered to take us to dinner in town, but Wally refused. Instead she is cooking a lobster for dinner. That takes care of the anniversary and Helens last night with us. She is leaving by the seven o'clock bus to-morrow morning. [...] UNIVERSITY INN, CORAL GABLES, MIAMI FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1975

7.26

[...] After Joe Nicastri picked me up this morning, after breakfast again with him and Bunny, we drove to the campus and I had another long day. [...] I noticed posters around the campus announcing the panel referred to Jack Tworkov, "a Quiet Giant in American art." At the opening of the panel after Sandy's introduction I referred to the poster and got a laugh from the audience. NEW YORK WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1975

7-27

[...] Last evening we went to see Merce Cunningham dance on 23rd Street. [...] It was the first evening of a weeks performances. It drew a notable but a standard crowd for a Cunningham event. Caught glimpses of Castelli, Jasper Johns, Geldzahler and others. Merce looked and danced like an old man—however gracefully. He seemed to emphasize himself and his young dancers. There was elegance and I thought a deliberate touch of pathos in his movements. He appeared only in solos, never joined any of his dancers. He merely summoned them on stage and then ruefully exited. THURSDAY, DECEMBER l8,

7.28

1975

Have been involved in a project to move my paintings from MorganManhattan uptown to Morgan-Manhattan downtown, to weed out paintings I no longer want, to roll up some paintings, to move others into the cellar. All in an effort to reduce the cost of storage and to make more room to move in. To roll up a canvas to put one in the cellar is only next to destroying it. I'm ambivalent about destroying work—they are memorabilia regardless of their merit. I also change my mind about canvases that I've condemned. We, Nancy Hoffman and I, visited Manhattan-Morgan uptown a week (December 11) ago. Nancy picked out six paintings to keep in the gallery, paintings from the 508 and 6os. I took six paintings to the studio. One I destroyed,

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Air Game. The others I'm still making up my mind about. In the studio I've picked out about a half dozen canvases to roll up and some small canvases to move into the cellar to provide more room in the studio storage racks. [...] DECEMBER 23,

1975

[. . .] The last few weeks [have] marked a very good period between Wally and me—a renewal of love and affection of great intensity. Such periods happen to us frequently—I could almost say cyclically. [...] If only I could muzzle my outbreaks of uncontrollable criticism. I find fault with minor things, minor acts of carelessness and thoughtlessness. For in the important things she is marvelous. Taking care of so much of my life and doing her share sometimes with great depth and sensitivity. My criticism comes from a nervous reflex that I find hard to analyze. Her lack of concern about minor aspects of the house sometime drive [s] me out of my mind. But if I take things in balance I should long ago have learned to overlook the small things. But to overlook that is so hard for me. The thing done well I take for granted, the thing done badly hits me in the face like an insult. I promise myself to discipline myself to act only with courtesy to her—but when the bad cycles come all my resolution comes to nothing.

7.29

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 19/5

[. . .] Last night I had this dream: A huge fish, large as a whale. It seemed washed ashore. Its head washed up into a rectangular space in which I perceived it. It was lying belly up. I was aware only of its upper part, the rest disappeared into an obscure horizontal space. There was a huge slit on its belly near the head. I avoided looking at it but when I did the fish, which seemed dead, seemed to breathe as if there was a trace of life in it. But I sensed a faint stink as if it were already in decay. I wondered if I had wounded the fish. I was in a corridor leading away from the dream scene. I leaned against a wall and bent over I wept. Last night in the studio I went into the toilet to urinate. There was a huge water beetle or roach nearly two inches long on the rim of the bowl. I swept it to the floor with the toilet brush that stood nearby and stomped it to its death. I felt revolted by my act. I wondered was it really necessary for me to kill it. Wondered at the intense revulsion against any insects that invade our living space. Sometime yesterday Wally told me that she had heard thru Helen that Mary Franks son was in the hospital with cancer in one of his shoulders. Last year Marys daughter died in an airplane crash. Mary herself has been treated for cancer. The first thing I thought about when I woke this morning was Mary s fate.

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How do people whose lives have been almost untouched by tragedy look upon life when confronted with Marys life? Its years since I've seen Mary. And my feelings about seeing her again, perhaps calling her, are very ambivalent. I want to and am also scared to face her. We seek out the well—are we not scared of the sick ones? Do they not remind us that we all stand on the edge of an abyss? Or is there something wrong with the way we look upon disasters?

'The Medium' NEW YORK MARCH 18, 1975

If you were an innovator in tennis and dropped the net, exchanged the rackets for clubs, and the rectangular field for a diamond, I'd say you were thinking of baseball. Or change the court to table size, raise it to waist level and you're getting into Ping-Pong. Radical innovation often merely crosses the border of one well-known game into another. We refer to all kinds of different things as "the arts," as we refer to all kinds of different things as games: tiddlywinks, hide and seek, chess. [...] People leaving painting for non-painting don t change the balance of the world. Non-painters already constitute very nearly the total population of the universe. Contemporary painting is not very good? What is? And one can think of a hundred activities and some in the arts (contemporary architecture, for instance) that are much worse. If you choose painting, the risk of being insignificant is no greater than in other pursuits—art criticism, museum slogan for instance, or being president now-a-days. [...] I don t have the confidence to defend present day painting. I look with a good deal of cynicism on much that the art journal and the museums have institutionalized as great art. Nevertheless I still prefer most painting to most everything else that goes under the name of art or anti-art or, at any rate, takes place in galleries. The amount of trivia that attracts our institutions is enormous and by far the disproportionate greater part of it exists outside of painting. Art tends to be either with our time or against it. Whichever course it takes it is likely to be futile. I don t celebrate art because it goes with our time. Too much of our time is foul. The art that would like to advance the apocalypse is impotent besides the [...] strokes of our scientists, politicians and sometimes even of our saviors. For the critic the significance of a work lies in its trend, for an artist, in its form. I paint because in the studio I find some kind of life and contentment. It would be rewarding to imagine that a little of that might pass on to the beholder. Some of the life in the studio might be represented by fragile but unbroken lines which, if they don't point vigorously to a conceivable future, clearly lead back to arts of the past that I have loved and envied. Without some nexus to the past I doubt that art has any significant projection of a future.

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P'TOWN, JULY 8, 1975 7-32

There's a difference between the emphasis on medium and the emphasis on materials. The medium is a means towards the artistic end. The material is a substantial part of the end itself. The medium is the base from which technique is cultivated. Material replaces technique. The artist has to respect the medium. The depth of understanding the medium is a measure of the depth of the artists technical wisdom but material is simply used. JULY 15, 1975

7-33

[...] The best way to work is to empty out your head, to aim at nothing, to become the medium of a process that is almost outside of one-self. I now use the word medium in another sense: I mean the painter is the medium—his desire his imagination lets the process take place: he unblocks the channels thru which the process flows.

'The Critic' UNDATED NOTES

• The flight of a wounded bird is touching only in contrast to the perfect flight of the healthy bird. Here it is the critics who confuse us. They will build an art theory on the basis of one wounded bird and demand that all flights should be by wounded birds—or they hold to the opposite view and do not allow the drama of the wounded. Thus Van Gogh was first hissed—and then only wounded art was considered art. • [...] Scandal is still, however, the unsurpassed road to fame. Only you must take along your own art critic. Look around you—see who is in—they are the ones astute enough to have invented their own experts, their own critic. You can no more go places without your own art critic than you can without a suitcase. [...] • There is no "truth" in art that however evident puts on an obligation on all artists to follow it. All criteria are not to be considered laws but merely descriptions. What makes an art culture is the possibility of many lives, many descriptions coexisting at a single time. If we could establish the best art practice, the best theories, the absolute truths, the situation would call for one artist, and all the rest craftsman and workman carrying out the will of the one artist. The only objective attitude towards art is that all art truths are subjective. That artists nevertheless resemble each other in a given time merely testifies to the existence of culture which educates and breeds individual wills and which is in turn fed by and transformed by individual wills. • I want to openly pray to the Guardian and Defender of my life to shield me and protect me from all the creepers and crawlers, manipulators and patronizers, from those who would detract from me and those who would praise me, from the sneerers, and tail riders. Please remember each artist must wear his own coat which is nevertheless not radically different from other coats. The coat must not be too large or too tight, too bleak or too bright. Remember whatever it is, it is the outcome of a long chain of activity, it is the product of a shared life, its virtues and faults are both individual and shared.

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JANUARY 5, 1976 7-35

The critic often acts like a weather vane: depending on wind he can turn to any point on the compass. Historically our grievance against the critic is more often based on what he rejected than on what he accepted. Yet the chances are that in the act of rejection the critic is more apt to act on true feeling than in the act of acceptance. In the latter case the critic is more likely to resort to rationalization that fulfills his need to accommodate to various temporal circumstance, not the least of which is the need to retain the respect of his contemporaries. But my belief is that the response to a work of art must first of all be visceral before any kind of logical judgment is relevant. But here I must myself accept a certain kind of caution about the use of the word "visceral." Because how does one explain the sudden tightening of the throat? The tears wetting the eyes while watching the unspeakably banal movie or TV show? Is that kind of visceral reaction a sign that we are watching something true, which is perhaps the most important sign of a high work of art. I think the answer is: No. In the case of the cheap movie or TV show what seemed like a visceral reaction is merely a reflex action set off by a sign that refers, not to what took place on the screen, but to something painful in our psyche fostered by our life. It is not the strength of the sign but the inherent soreness of our psyche that caused the tears. In any case I do not claim that a visceral reaction is the necessary precursor only to a favorable reaction to a work. I mean only that it is a necessary precursor to some kind of rational judgment. The work must first hook our attention on feelings before it is worth making an analysis of the process that shaped the hook. What I protest in the critic is a rationalization in favor of a work based on analogies to certain social or intellectual processes while the work itself has minimal or no obvious hooks. I am not now referring to work that emphasizes material being. I do not reject the possibility of "ideas" being ample enough as a work of art. What I reject is the work empty of ideas (or physical being) to which the critic brings a rationale as if it were water to an empty pitcher.

Diaries, 1976 MONDAY, JANUARY 5,

1976

I started working again, since I left Provincetown, two days ago. Have been working in charcoal on paper. My aim has been to work without reference to what Tve done before, to work freely without preconceptions. But inevitably my previous work intrudes. I've so far made six drawings. I plan to continue working on paper as my first priority. Although I have about a half a dozen canvases all stretched and sized, which I hope to work on this winter. As far as the canvases are concerned I imagine I will continue the themes I worked last summer. The series 3.5.8. And also the Knight move series. [...] TUESDAY, JANUARY 13,

1976

[...] Wally s operation, my visits to the hospital, has interfered with my work in the studio.1 Am determined to continue drawings and works on paper until some new themes emerge for my paintings. I would like to break from the adherence to geometric constructions and evolve freely conceived thematic material. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20,

7.38

1976

[...]! have been giving all my reading time to studying algebra and am making some progress. Tworkov had been appointed Andrew Carnegie Visiting Professor of Art at the Cooper Union School of Art. In February 1976 he received the Distinguished Teach ing of Art Award of the College Art Association and traveled to the CAA's Annual Conference held that year in Chicago.

7-37

1976

[...] Have been fighting off depression for weeks. Would like to write about it but this diary is chiefly my memory book. I need another kind of journal for clearing my mind or my soul. MONDAY, JANUARY 26,

7.36

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UNITED FLIGHT 911 TO CHICAGO TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1976 7.40

Began teaching at Cooper last Thursday afternoon. The first session was most un-stimulating. Am I beginning to feel bored with teaching? Ironic that my flight to Chicago is to receive an award for teaching. Should perhaps have turned the award down but could find the visit to Chicago useful as far as Bud Holland goes. [...] Jennifer [Bartlett] came to visit yesterday afternoon. I expounded to her all I learned about the Fibonacci series (and other series where one term is the sum of the preceding two). She gave me a sketch of what she was doing in her large piece with lines and asked me if I could suggest anything else. I showed her some small sketches pinned up on the studio wall and she said enthusiastically, "Thanks, I'm going to use them."2 UNITED FLIGHT 922 TO NEW YORK WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1976

7.41

[...] Bud [Holland] took me across the street to the Institute of Contemporary Art. We saw the drawing show of de Kooning, Kline, Pollock, Gorky, Guston, etc. Bills drawings, the early ones, stood out—terrific. All my old admiration for him comes back when I see his best drawings. But the later drawings, like his last paintings, show up the extent of his decline compared to these early drawings. Like Giacometti, the best of his drawings are better than most of his paintings. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1976

7.42

Went up this morning to see Jasper Johns' show at Castelli s uptown. Everyone had praised the show including Bob and Hermine. I expected to be overwhelmed but I was not. I'm getting tired of shows where in one minute one takes in all there is to the show and a one by one examination of the paintings adds little to the total perception of the show. I liked best two canvases where the strokes (arranged in patterns) are in primary reds, yellows, blues and whites. It reminded me of some early paintings of mine and two recent silk screens I made with Michael Kirk. In those paintings the strong presence of the color salvaged the paintings. [...] Leo walked into the gallery, called out, "Jack!" and rushed at me with an outstretched hand. I shook his hand and turned away without saying a word. MONDAY, FEBRUARY l6, 1976

7-43

[...] Jan Hashey was there and I told her about my experience in trying to reach Leo by phone and she told me that Leo had just had a pacemaker in-

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serted in his chest and [that] could have accounted for the difficulty in reaching him. [...] Saturday morning Al Held picked me up in his car and drove me to the Brooklyn Factory where he is doing his mural for a federal building in Philadelphia.3 The mural consists of two panels, thirteen feet by ninety-two feet each. He told me it cost him $6000 to build the wall on which the canvas for the mural is tacked. The floor is huge with windows running the entire length of the loft and looking out on the harbor and lower Manhattan, and on the Brooklyn docks where merchant ships load, come and go. After talking a while about his painting we both ran around the loft approximately a little under a quarter of a mile. Wanted to take Al to lunch but he wanted to work. He drove me to the subway and went back to the Factory. In the late 19705 Tworkov had an active schedule as a visiting artist and lectured as such in a number of university art departments, including the Mulvane Art Center, Washburn University, inTopeka, Kansas. He seems to have enjoyed the various mishaps that liberated him from having to give a traditional linear slide talk. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1976 TWA FLIGHT I$2 TO NEW YORK

[...] After dinner, to the hall for the lecture. Ed had fixed the slides in the carousel according to the order in which I arranged them. While waiting for the lecture to begin I was thinking of an apology about the inadequacy of slides and how reluctant I am to give what is called a "slide lecture" on my new work. Then we discovered that some information went wrong and the door to the projection room was locked, then there was no one to open it. Delighted, I explained all that to the audience and proceeded to talk for about an hour completely spontaneously on the development of abstract painting in the century. [...] The lecture at Lawrence was at eight and drew a large crowd. The person who was loading my slides dropped them and, although I was on hand to put them back in some kind of order, they got into the carousel quite mixed up. It seems as if my attitude towards slides is so negative that I sent forth some mental rays to sabotage the operation. But I was too tired to do what I had done the night before in Topeka and decided to go thru with the "slide lecture." It was a riot. After the talk about fifty faculty and students met at Peter Thompsons for a reception. And although it seemed to me I'd given them very little, they all treated me with great kindness.

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APRIL 5, 1976 7-45

If there is such a thing as "good and evil." If the distinction holds, then there is such a thing as good and bad art. It is pointless to strive for some kind of standards in art if one disowns all questions of values. What is implied is that it is impossible to read some kind of significance into an art without implying a moral content, if no other than a negative content, one that is at least not evil. True innovation in art develops historically. The implication of a genuine innovation is that a whole generation of artists can draw on a new illumination. But the emphasis on the extreme is merely expletive. The extreme gesture or statement has for its aim not a regeneration of art but merely (in Mailer s phrase) to get the artists name around. It is primarily a commercial strategy, to get your thing into the market place by hook or by crook. TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 1976

7.46

[...] Friday (April 23) I went to MoMA to see the Fauves show. Its a much praised show and interesting of course but if the curators were interested in art and not in Art History half the pictures could have been left out and a much better show presented. [...] Have worked on the Diptych and hope to be finished in about two weeks at the most. Have started getting the studio in shape for leaving for the summer. Have been busy getting ready for tomorrow nights birthday party for Wally. I was to hire a woman Jennifer had recommended to do the cooking and the service. At the last minute she pulled out and, of all things, recommended Douglas Crimp. We hired Douglas. FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1976

7-47

[. . .] A few weeks ago I was contacted by Gustave Harrow from the New York State Attorney Generals office. Harrow had prosecuted the Marlborough Galleries and the directors of the Mark Rothko Foundation for what amounted to the defrauding of the Foundation. Harrow had gotten an agreement from the members and directors of the Foundation that a new board was to be chosen. He approached me with a list of possible new members and directors, on which my name was also on. After several meetings with Harrow to discuss the Foundation and the proposed list of members he finally came back with a list which he felt sure would be acceptable. I was on this list and after a good deal of hesitation on my part, largely for fear I would not have the time to give to it, I decided to accept. Then on Monday evening (May 8 or May 17?) we met at Clinton Wilder s house, where we met Stanley

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Kunitz, Morton Feldman and Wilder. They, as a quorum of the old directors, elected us as new members and then the members elected ourselves as directors all this directed according to strict legal procedure by Gustave Harrow.4 Of the new members present besides myself: Dorothy Miller, Tom Messer and William Scharff. The legal business of the meeting lasted only a few minutes, but on the initiative of Stanley a discussion followed about the whole Rothko case, Stanley defending Rice and Stamos, Harrow continuing in the manner of his prosecution. I was careful not to be drawn into the conversation, since I thought that it was now not material, that I was asked to serve as a member of the Foundation whose purpose will have to be redefined and I thought it best to keep that part when the new directors meet alone and aside from the question of past guilts or roles. MAY 25, 1976, LAGUARDIA AIRPORT, TUESDAY

Left the house about 10:15 A.M. in perfect condition. Spent the few days since Wally left putting the studio in perfect order. I was sorry to leave and wished I could keep the studio in such order the year round. It makes for a more serene spirit. [. . .] Yesterday I went to visit Al Held in his Brooklyn studio in the afternoon. The mural is practically finished, but he and two assistants were making last minute changes and cleaning up small details. The nearly twohundred foot painting is really very impressive, even more when one stands up close to it and sees small sections and details of it than the view of the total. The painting is finished to perfection in hard edge style, nothing left to chance. Al rode back with me to New York. I'm very fond of him. He called this morning to thank me for the visit. We talked about his job at Yale, about which he is very ambivalent. I thought he made a lot of money on the mural. But he told me that the government pays him 120,000 for the mural, of which he thinks he'll be lucky if he makes as much as 20,000 for himself. I can well believe him. The space 250 feet long by about 100 wide must cost a fortune. It cost 10,000 to put up the wall on which the canvas is tacked. Al says it will cost 20,000 to mount the canvas in Philadelphia and he had two assistants working a year with him. However he is very pleased with the painting and the whole project.

7-4»

"Blind Mans Bluff" MAY 30, 1976

7-49

Great art surpasses its limits; but since our culture is too sick to set any, the artist must create his own. COPY OF A NOTE MADE IN THE NEW YORK HOSPITAL, NOVEMBER lp, 1976

7.50

The absence of a cohesive culture that attracts and holds the individual artist s loyalty compels him to contemplate, evaluate and judge all cultural phenomena by himself, freely. In that process the heritage of the past, classic or however recent are not much help. The artist is thrown entirely on his own sensibilities, perceptions and feelings. He is in fact one playing blind-mans bluff, hands outreaching, often reaching and touching nothing. When something is encountered he has only his own sensations to go by, his own sensations as a guide to any possible reality. The art he produces invariably are guesses. If the guesses point to a recurrent sensation he may form a partial idea of a possible reality. If one or two others playing the same game of blind-mans bluff come up with similar sensations some reinforcement takes place. Thus, occasionally, groups of artists are formed whose work at given moments in time seem to point towards a shared reality. This is sometimes the only confirmation for the artist that his work is not entirely inane that there is perhaps some reasonable motivation to it, aside from the sheer sensual pleasure involved in the game of painting. The discomfort of our time is that meaning is meaningless. The named thing is suddenly nameless. No, not this! No, not that! Confronted with the most every day thing, we are dazed. Our consciousness surges up with traits for which we have no names, sounds we cannot note, poignancies we cannot translate. What to do? We research old banalities. What have we not seen, what have we not heard? We babble (on the surface of the canvas).

"Blind Man's Bluff" 373

We ask ourselves: Why? We shake our dreams like loaded fruit trees. And walk dazed in the enflamed fall-out.1 We pray to our machines. They tell us we are nothing. The non-verbal tells us there is a world behind the world that strives to become visible. Part of that hidden world screens out our longings and part our terror. The abstract artist is concerned with what in visible nature is invisible unless the visible is reduced to a form freed from all irrelevancies. From this point of view we can see that two classic artists such as Cezanne and Mondrian occupy the two poles of the same art universe.

Diaries, 1976-78 NEW YORK, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 7-51

1976

This morning Wally and I called Erik to wish him a happy birthday. I asked him "how do you feel being ten." And he said something about having two numbers to his age. And I said I hope you live to have three numbers to your age. Wow, he said, that means I'll be 100 years old, I hope so, he said. And I said I hope I'll be around to wish you a happy birthday on your looth birthday, and we both laughed. I hope so, he said. And then I told him of the story I read yesterday in the New York Times of a farmer in Iran, 164 years old, who married his 13th wife, "isth wife!" Erik cried. Yes, I said, she is 15 years old. Wow! he cried and we both laughed, and we hung up. I repeated the story of the Iranian to Wally and she said of the 15 year old, "she must be a moron!" [...] SUNDAY, JANUARY 2, 1977

7-52

[...] My relationship with Wally remains sadly strained. We hardly ever talk since our experience has been that talk leads to anger and quarrel. Neither of us want to separate, and under all the surface irritations a good deal of love remains, and certainly very strong ties, yet I know our marriage cannot continue on the same basis as it has been. If we cannot find a basis for our life that provides more tolerance for each other, more freedom, more privacy in one sense, our marriage will simply be an agony. What we lack now is intimate friendship when we can talk to each in confidence as close friends, rousing sympathy and compassion in each other, rather than anger and feelings of rejection. During the spring of 1977, Tworkov pursued a hectic professional travel schedule including several trips between New York and California. He was a visiting artist at the University of California at Santa Barbara during the winter quarter and during those weeks also lectured at the Art Institute in San Francisco. He flew back to New York twice to participate on the jury for the Rome Prize of the American Academy, along with Andrew Forge and Jennifer Bartlett, and also to see Jan ice and Alain. Later he and Wally met for a trip to New Mexico.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1977

[...] Saturday night (Feb. 5) Arlene and I went to the auditorium of the music school to listen to a program of music by graduate student composers. It was extremely interesting, both the music and the level of performance. After the concert we went to a student cafe on the campus where Dick Dunlap and two other musicians, electronic flute, and electronic bass, played for several hours. I left about 11:30 as I got sleepy. Sitting with us at the cafe table in the cafe was a young composer, a friend of the Dunlaps, who was teaching in San Francisco and was down for a visit. He introduced me to the singularity of the number 9. To wit: 3 x 9 = 27 -> 2+7 = 9 9 x 9 = 81 -> 1+8 = 9 etc. I started playing with that day in the last few days and examined the regularities of other numbers and made graphs with the numbers 4 and 5, and was fascinated.

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SAN FRANCISCO INSTITUTE OF ART, MARCH 5, 1977

[ . . . ] ! was met in San Francisco by David Hannah and his wife Hannah Hannah. She is of German Jewish background who grew up in San Salvador, Central America. David is a Texan. They are both painters and David is chairman of the painting department here. They are both nice. We went from the airport on a tour of the city. About eleven o'clock we began to visit galleries. We stopped at Berggruens and I talked with Berggruen. I referred to the fact that my show had very little response in San Francisco. He shrugged and said "You gotta work at it." But I did not get the impression that he wanted to work at it.1 He had a show on by Friedel Dzubas which was embarrassingly influenced by Frankenthaler, and not very interesting. At another gallery we saw some real California crafty-funky art, of great technical skill and full of innovation and very trivial at the same time. In another gallery called Peace, there was the work of a young artist whom we met, a recent graduate of the Institute, Kent Roberts, influenced by Wylie, but very interesting, also California-oriented but more interesting and conceptual-oriented, but avoiding the "fun and games" look. In another gallery, Hanson and Fuller, I think, we saw some sculptures by di Suvero, some paintings/drawings by Wylie and a show of drawing by still another artist, very funny, full of writing, cartoons, etc., that falls into the "fun and games" category. I could not help thinking as I walked through the galleries that Cezanne probably was not very distinguished for his sense of humor. [...]

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The [visitors'] apartment reminds me of the visitors' apartment in the Rudolph building at Yale. Concrete wall with the imprint of the wooden boards grain, a bare concrete floor, an alcove for the bed, a kitchen and bathroom. The whole looks like a bomb shelter where safely rather than living was the main consideration. It has, however, large uncurtained plate glass windows looking down the hill on which the Institute stands. INSTITUTE OF ART, SAN FRANCISCO, MONDAY, MARCH 7, 1977 7-55

[...] At the museum we saw the usual, Morris Louis, Newman, Motherwell, Stella, Olitski, etc. all vast canvases. In another room a group of Stills which he donated to the museum. Each picture had a card describing when and where the picture was painted, where and when it was shown, and if it was repainted, the year and where it was repainted. One picture was repainted three times in three successive years, each time after it had been exhibited. Still is quoted as saying, "in order to purge the painting of its desecration through public exhibition." An odd statement to hang beside the picture which he donated to the museum for public exhibition. INSTITUTE OF ART, SAN FRANCISCO, TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 1977

7-5&

Q: What am I about? A: I'm fighting for my life. Fighting is not the right word exactly. Searching. NEW YORK, APRIL 8, 1977

7-57

[. . .] Yesterday I attended the Rothko Foundation meeting. Shortly after the meeting got under way Becky Reis and a lawyer Goldman walked into Blinkens office where the meeting was held. What made the incident more startling is that Kate Rothko had been invited to the meeting and was present. It turned out that Becky came as a proxy for her husband, and Goldman as a proxy for Stamos. They had received notices of the meeting and the agenda which contained as one of the items the adoption of new by-laws. They had assumed that part of the business of the meeting was to expel as members Reis and Stamos under the new provisions. They came to prevent, rather to dissuade the board from taking such action, an action which just previous to their entrance wed already agreed had best be postponed till all legal questions as to their status had been resolved. But Becky made a very tearful appeal. Don Blinken, all agreed afterwards, handled the whole thing well. Kate, who was unknown to several of the members, made a very good and appealing appearance. She is intelligent, calm, simple, and very explicit.

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Tworkov's diary for this period includes several entries in which he catches up with a week or more of travel: here he was writing a long catch-up entry in New York describing events from April 18 through

23NEW YORK, SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 19/7

[. . .] [Athens, Georgia] The next morning John [Sedgwick] took me to the campus. Before going off to meet his morning class he introduced me to a Johanson who gave me what he constantly referred to as "the nickel tour" of the art department. I got a rather poor impression of the students' work. About eleven we met Elaine de Kooning in the hallway. She let out a surprised scream when she saw me. We embraced and kissed. Joined by John we then went to Lamar Dodd s office. He too, surprised, gave me a hearty welcome and invited me, Elaine, and John to lunch. Elaine took me to her studio and showed me a whole series of drawings and paintings she was making of Kaldis. She also told me about the amputation of one of his legs. She told me he was fine and being wheeled about. I said, "The son-of-a-bitch must have been waiting all his life to have someone wheel him about." She cried out laughing, "I guess you are absolutely right." I made the same crack about Kaldis to Philip Pavia when he came to our party last Thursday, and he reacted exactly like Elaine.2 [...]

7.58

TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 1977

[...] The same night we went to the Skowhegan dinner at which the Awards went Jasper Johns, Isamu Noguchi and Roy Lichtenstein. They all showed up. I spoke to Jasper for the first time in years. He's put on a lot of weight. I told him I had seen Rauschenberg that same afternoon. (Helen and I had stopped to see Bobs show at Castelli and Sonnabend and we saw Bob as well as Leo, Michel and Ileana.) Jasper asked how is he. I said, "You don t see him?" Jasper said, "Never." "You don t speak to each other?" "No!" When I asked Jasper, "How have you been?" He said, "I don t know." When I asked where do you stay mostly, he said "I don t know where I am." But he said he had just come back from St. Martin. When during our brief talk he learned I was showing at Nancys he said he would call me Monday and arrange to see the show and have lunch. He was to leave for a few days to the graphic shop of Tatiana Grossman to work on a print. [...]

7-59

MONDAY, MAY l6, 1977

Spent most of Sunday, yesterday, reading the damned Times and got real depressed, the idleness getting to me.3 In the evening Wally and I went to a

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cocktail party given by Jody and George Rappe on Bank Street, my first visit to that house although I've known Jody for such a long time. A huge party, and I met nearly all the people I didn't want to meet. Guston, Rosenberg, and too many others too embarrassing for me even to mention it in this notebook. Only Phil and Natalie Pavia were the exception. At one point Natalie turned to me and said, "You like me don t you?" I nodded and she said, "I like you too." I was surprised at this unexpected exchange. PROVINCETOWN, SATURDAY, MAY 28,

7.61

1977

[...] Phyllis Tuchman came to interview (May 19) me for an article she was planning for Artforum about elderly artists. I felt a certain condescension (albeit unconscious) on Phyllis' part, and must have gotten pretty rough, because after an hour and a half of talk (I refused to let her use the recorder), she broke into uncontrollable sobbing. I did my best to reassure her that what anger I had against the "art world" was not directed at her. But she left unconsoled. I wrote her an apologetic letter next day.4 P'TOWN, SEPTEMBER 2, 1977

7.62

August has passed practically without any work. [...] Yet it is not correct to speak of it as idleness. I'd be relieved if I could spend a month enjoying idleness. But my mind is constantly engaged in the problems of my work, searching a way towards work and not content with anything I find. It's the problem that keeps me from work, not just idleness. But I have been spending less time in the studio because nothing seems to hold my interest with any intensity. Tve been drawing but mostly along old lines that I want to get away from, but hoping for a miracle that transforms an old form, shakes something new out of rattling an old bottle. [...] MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1977, P'TOWN

7.63

I got up Saturday morning in a state of deep depression. I felt as if I'd lost every trace of confidence in myself as a painter. Almost anybody's work seemed more interesting to me than mine. I could not keep it to myself and talked to Wally about it. I had a strong desire to call off my trip to Albuquerque. I felt as if I could not face a group of students in my present mood. Nor had I any desire to make a print at Tamarind. Then I went into the studio and started to work on a variation of the painting I just finished. I had already decided that I would work on the three 54" x 54" canvases, using the identical structure but make each one a totally different painting experience by experimenting with the color and the brushing. And this is exactly what I did. For the first time in years I used a totally different brushing style, and hit on two beautiful colors that were suggested by the black cherry outside

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our kitchen window, which was putting on its fall colors. I worked freely abandoning the taping out of edges, bringing out the structural line by leaving that much ground unpainted instead of superimposing the lines with straight edge and fine brush. So that, even though the drawing was identical with the preceding canvas, the look and feel was entirely different. I worked all day with great interest. As I worked all sorts of new possibilities developed, which I'm mentally filing away for future attempts. The main thing is to reflect consistency, for alternate ways of doing things until something new enters the work. Today I prepared another 54 x 54 that will be three all together. I also sized two more 25 x 25, to make variations on the one I finished last week. OCTOBER 21, 1977 I finished the 3rd of the 54 x 548 which I call Alternatives. I also made a new variation on one of 25 x 258 that I feel pretty good about. I started last week a 72 x 72, again, with the same drawing as the 54 x 54 and working entirely in grays. Hope to have the painting finished by tomorrow. This has to be the last painting before I leave P'town. I have to do the chores connected with closing the house. I'm slightly handicapped because the final weekend, next week, brings a slew of people to visit: the Perrys, the Forges, and Nancy Hoffman and Caroline. Although I'm pleased with the changes in the last few paintings I'm still too much involved in "making" pictures. I'm still not sufficiently in the frame of mind where the free play in the studio takes precedence over any possible result. I still have too much on my mind the need to "produce." I have to overcome any sense of guilt or anxiety when my time in the studio is not necessarily productive. When what I make are mere throwaways. Only that way will I raise myself to some new level of seeing. [...] NEW YORK, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4,

7.64

1977

I've been negligent about keeping this diary. [. . .] Thursday (12/1) I went in the morning to see the Jasper Johns show at the Whitney. [. . .] Jaspers show was interesting. I admired especially all the work on the third floor— the early work, especially the numbers series—more than the flags. Especially admired some of the drawings. Confirmed again my opinion that essentially his paintings not his subjects fascinate me. The 4th floor, the more recent work, lacked for me the reserve and reticence of his earlier work. As if he had gone into competition with Rauschenberg to make compelling images if not as raunchy as Bobs. The conscious effort to make a big bang reacts against the paintings. The last phase—work that I saw in his last show at Castelli s seemed to me uncharacteristically weak. While on the one hand I

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sympathized with his desire to return to straight painting, yet I felt the work was a tremendous comedown from the work of the 50 s. NEW YORK, DECEMBER 22, 19/7

7.66

A day or two ago a Roberta Smith from Art in America called me and asked me if I would be one of some seventeen artists and critics who would contribute some 500 words as comment of the Cezanne show (The Late Work) now at MoMA. I accepted.5 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29,

7.67

Have finished stretching six canvases and the studio is in order. I had a very good feeling yesterday seeing the studio in order, the canvases leaning against the wall—everything ready for work—a feeling of anticipation and pleasure, inner good feelings. I'm eager to get back to work again and waiting for the holidays to be over. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31,

7.68

1977

1977

Well, the last day of the year. Went to Flaxs this morning, bought eight ounces of ground rabbit skin glue. The price was $4.25! Spent the afternoon sizing canvas. Except [that] I'm curious to experiment with the best way to size, I should have gotten someone to size the canvases for me. Its such a chore and takes too much of my time. [...] Went with Helen to see the Cezanne show at the Modern yesterday. It was the fourth time for me, and the last, as the show closes on the third. We had to go up to the fifth floor where someone was to take us into the galleries so that we wouldn't have to stand on line. In the elevator we met Mrs. Rockefeller III. We told her why we were going to the fifth floor and she offered to take us through the lines, which she did saying, "I don t mind using my clout once in a while." [...] SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 1978

7.69

The first day of the year. I'm taking more notice of the ending and the beginning of the year than I have in the past. I'm astounded at my age. I'm now the oldest person in any gathering. I'm thinking of all the people I knew who have already died and at a much younger age. Among artists: Tomlin, Pollock, Gorky, David Smith, Reinhardt, Kline, Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb and others whose names just escape me now. Everyone is forever telling me how great I look, only reminding me of my age. No one, when I was younger, ever bothered to pay me that compliment. And of course I take satisfaction in my good health. And sometimes I think that "God willing" (as my parents would have said), if I avoid a disastrous accident I might indeed go on to a very old

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age. I remember a pact I made with Anton Van Dereck in Provincetown in the twenties that we would both live out the century. Anton committed suicide so it s up to me to carry out our pledge.6 There was a story in my family that my father told of his grandmother who lived to be a hundred and eight. That on holidays when the children were given hazel nuts and they had difficulty in cracking them with their teeth the grandmother would say "Here, Til crack your nuts for you," with her teeth. My dentist tells me my teeth will last me as long as I live. Except for two or three teeth that I lost way back due to neglect or poor dentistry in my childhood I still have all the rest of my teeth. I woke early this morning and then fell asleep again and had a dream which I remember only partially. It was late at night and I was either going home or just visiting the place my parents lived in on Ridge Street on the Lower East Side. I still remember the number: 78.1 had the impression that Wally had preceded me and that I was to meet her there. But in the dream I was the young man going home as from school. Instead of walking I was running as I used to at that age. I kept looking at the street signs, lit up by street lamps as I ran for Ridge Street. Finally I approached the corner where I was to turn into Ridge Street and where 78 was just around the corner. As I approached I began crying "Tatehle, Tatehle," and as I repeated the word again and again I burst into a fit of uncontrollable crying and woke up.7 SUNDAY, JANUARY 8,

1978

Helen came over this morning to see the piece I wrote on Cezanne for Art in America. Wally had seen it too yesterday. She criticized some phrases which she thought sounded angry and were not becoming to me. I toned it down a bit but saw no reason to write it at all if I didn t speak my mind. Helen said I used the word "punk" too often otherwise she liked the piece. [...]

7.70

FRIDAY, JANUARY 2O, 1978

Worked in the studio till i P.M. The snowfall that began yesterday continues today. There must have been two feet of snow by this afternoon. The telephone rang all morning with people calling to thank us for last night s party. Wally took one of my shoes to the shoe store on Sixth and Twenty-Second and came back with a pair of rubber boots for me to cope with the heavy snowfall. Wore them to go to Hermines this afternoon to see her new work. At Franklin Street there were powerful gusts of wind coming in from the bay. Where no attempt was made to clear the snow the streets were nearly impassable. I loved Hermines new painting. A large one (78 x 100) in deep cadmium reds and orange. Its a real breakthrough canvas for her—more inventive in color, brushing and canvas division than anything she has done

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before—elements of drawing that have crept into her recent paintings are becoming more integrated into her painting. The new painting is subtler and stronger than anything she has done before. Her work is beginning to take on an authoritative and mature look. If she keeps up this level of work she should be ready for a really good gallery connection soon. The party we gave for Cog last night was very good. I enjoyed it really which is a sure sign that it went very well. Wally outdid herself and prepared two fantastic dishes—one breast of veal dish with a fine stuffing and a chicken dish made of a sandwich of breast of chicken filled with slices of ham and cheese baked in the oven. Salad, a good wine and fruit and sweets with the coffee. There were twenty guests. [...] Susy Coggeshall astonished I. M. Pei by defending slavery—Td rather be a slave," she said "than a wage earner." I got Jennifer Bartlett to rescue Pei. [. . .] Al Held and Sylvia, Alex Katz and Ada. Alex said of Cezanne that he "had no style." I said "Terrific." But of course Alex could only have meant "self-conscious manner." If style is unique identity, who had more than Cezanne? SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 19/8, NEW YORK 7-72

Last Thursday (1/26) Jon Schueler called and invited me over to the loft to meet Richard de Marco who said he was eager to see me.81 went over at 8 P.M. It turned out to be a huge party. De Marco had been to the AFA conference and invited a slew of people especially a lot of attractive young women. He said something about some university gallery near Edinburgh that wants to put on a show of my work and that he would get in touch with me again in March. I listened politely but really without any interest. I met a lot of artists teaching in various parts of the country. Brian Wall an English sculptor who teaches at Berkeley and presented himself as a great admirer of my work and asked if I would come out to Berkeley for a visit. I was really astonished how many people sought me out to tell me how much they admired my work. One person whispered in my ear "You are one of my heroes." I stayed till midnight. On leaving a young woman introduced herself and asked my name. I asked her if she was a painter. She said she was a curator at the Houston Museum in Texas, so she was the only person there who had never heard of me. That describes my situation in the art world. I'm pretty well known and often admired by other artists but quite unknown to the museum world, the art magazines, the art historians and critics—at least I'm thoroughly ignored by them even if they had heard of me. MARCH 1, 1978, WEDNESDAY

7-73

[...] Haven t kept the journal because nothing much has happened to record. I could however write a volume on how I feel about my old age, the changing

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aspects of my work, the dreariness of my career, or rather the almost nonexistence of any career worth a damn, the anxiety about money, the various maneuvers to defeat or hold back depressions. NEW YORK, APRIL 1, 1978, SATURDAY

I went to Washington last Wednesday as a visitor at American University. [ . . . ] ! usually don't like to prepare for a talk because I do better when I talk spontaneously—but I had some quotations I wanted to use from articles in Art in America and The American Poetry Review and I had to select the quotes and connect them to the context of what I wanted to say. One of the themes I wanted to touch on was Cezanne's late work (seen in the recent show at MoMA) and the symposium that appeared in Art in America on Cezanne to which I contributed a piece. [...] Thursday morning I met with the students who assembled in the gallery where their work was shown and sat on the floor. Joe Summerford and Helene joined me. 9 1 decided against a crit of paintings painting by painting. Instead I took up general questions of art orientation, student problems, the goals of teaching etc. I drew as many students as possible into the discussion. The session lasted till lunch time and the students responded with much enthusiasm and appreciation. Some whispered to me on the way out that it was the first time in their life they got an inkling of what it was to want to be an artist. AMERICAN FLT 98—DALLAS TO NEW YORK, SUNDAY, APRIL 9,

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1978

[...] Saturday morning we visited the Kimbell Museum of Fine Art in Fort Worth. George arranged with David Robb to show us the building and an exhibition of drawings by Louis Kahn who designed the museum. David is the husband of the woman, an art historian, who got me into a long and rather tiresome discussion after my first discussion with the students. We were joined by Marshall Myers who was Lou Kahn's assistant and had worked with Kahn on the Kimbell. The building is one of the most beautiful modern buildings I've seen. I have never before had so strong a favorable reaction to a modern building. Every detail was exquisite. [...] After lunch Mrs. Robb drove us to the stockyard section of Fort Worth (a sticker on her car said "I luv Furt Wurth"). She gave us a true guided tour, a lecture on Texas past, on Fort Worth, its class divisions and styles and the whole history of the cattle trade in and around Fort Worth. I was tired from my two days talking. I had a slight headache and her ceaseless talk delivered in a typical classroom lecture style nearly drove me into a panic. I felt as if she didn't stop my head would split. During one pause I said to myself "she stopped, she stopped, she stopped" and before I could say she stopped a

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fourth time, off she went again and I just drew my head into myself and shut her out. We finally returned to [the] Kimbell where we said good-bye to her and thanked her for the tour. NEW YORK, MONDAY, MAY 1,

7.76

1978

[...] Fve neglected these notes—here goes a resume: April 14—A special meeting of the Rothko Foundation to consider the announcement by Kate of a deal with the Pace gallery to handle the sale of some of Rothko s paintings—of which the Foundation was not informed. Sunday, April 23—Kate Rothko had called and had made an appointment and she came Sunday at i. She came with her husband and Christopher—but they left. Kate stayed about an hour, explaining that lawyer fees and taxes had forced her to set aside certain works to be sold by Pace. She said she came to talk to me at Don Blinkens suggestion. She took up my suggestion at April 14 meeting of the Foundation that we proceed to divide the estate, leaving the estate under Kate, and the Foundation free to pursue their own aims without interference. Kate saw difficulties in a division now. I imagine she was trying to persuade members of the foundation not to put legal blocks in her arrangement with Pace until all the legal questions of division are determined. Of course I can now see that it may take the courts to decide what is to be divided and how. It would not surprise me if the foundation found itself in a legal wrangle with Kate and Christopher over the division. The whole thing is a nightmare and I wonder why I got into it. NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1O, 1978

7-77

[...] Yesterday (5/9) was a busy day and I never got into the studio. Wally and I went to Morgan-Manhattan to look over the space. We have two lockers now, one 500 cubic feet and one 650 cubic feet. Both are full up. We rented another 400 C.ft. The total rent per month will come to over $150. [...] At two o'clock I went to Blinkens office for the Rothko meeting. Kate and her lawyers were invited for the meeting. But the Foundation members, all of whom were present, met informally for about three quarters of an hour before we asked Kate into the meeting. The foundation in its discussion was not very sure how to deal with Kate and the contract she signed with Pace. Kate asked that we have faith in her goodwill—but the foundation members almost without exception felt ill at ease with the contract to sell work to meet estate taxes and lawyers' fees before the issue [s] of the estates division among its beneficiaries were resolved. After Kate left the discussion continued as to what action the foundation should take, DeSipio warning us that if we brought a litigation to divide the estate now it would take two years perhaps to resolve the issue.

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I left before the meeting adjourned to visit the Parsons Gallery's Lee Hall show. And then went on to the Gruenebaum gallery for Janices opening. Good turnout but the gallery stayed open till near eight. Wally and I were waiting to go with the Brustleins to Gruenebaum's apartment for the dinner party they gave for Janice. I got awfully tired waiting around. Wally and I left a little earlier, stopped in a coffeehouse for some tea and went on to Gruenebaums. Janices show is beautiful. The show opened with two paintings sold that cheered Janice up a lot. At the dinner party I talked with Nakian, whom I was really very happy to see after so many years.10 He's 81 and in pretty good shape. Hes joined Gruenebaum, and the gallery had on display in a glass case some of his small versions of Leda and the Swan in bronze and ceramic. They are delightful. Nakian: "God's the best artist. I look at a bird's wing and I feel like a nothing. I don t care what you call God—Buddha, Jesus or Holy Moses—all I know is that God is the greatest artist. To be religious is to love all of life." (To me) "Are you in good shape? No arthritis, no piles, no high blood pressure? Good, you'll live another thirty years. I make a pact with you we will both meet and celebrate the beginning of the twenty-first century." We clasped hands. NEW YORK, TUESDAY MAY 23,

1978

[. . .] Sunday, (5-21) afternoon [...]! went down to the Tibetan Center on Sixteenth Street to meet Helen. She and other members were painting the rooms in which the benefit show of paintings were to be held. I met Rimpoche, his daughter, who was also engaged in the painting, John Giorno who heads the center and a number of others. They all seemed interested in meeting Helens father. Helen briefly showed me some of the things that were contributed, among them a very beautiful drawing by Hermine, which, I heard today, was bought yesterday by Marjorie Kahn. What a pity that Marjorie does not have the sense to know how much the few hundred dollars would have meant to Hermine. I resent on the whole asking artists to contribute their work to good causes. I gave something too, for Helens sake, not because I'm at all involved with the center. I took Helen, on her suggestion, to the Chelsea Bar. I've passed the place many times but never went in there. We had an early dinner and had the talk I've been wanting to have for some time. It was a good talk, mostly an effort to bring down whatever curtains still hang between us, from her childhood, and that no longer should exist. It's only a beginning, we both seemed eager to continue.

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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 7, 1978, p'TOWN

7-79

[...] Have been working on the painting I brought with me unfinished from New York. I've been experimenting with surface and color, without too much success. Yesterday, I did not so much finish the painting as decided to give it up. I've been swinging back and forth between extra-structural effects (illusionistic-expressionistic) to strictly structural bases eliminating any ingratiating expression, and fell some place in between (not a glad position) in the last painting. JULY 4, TUESDAY

7.80

It is blowing hard and raining. The rain is welcome in itself after a long dry spell, but doubly welcome to me on weekends and holidays that brings out the tourist hordes, my revenge. A tourist town is without soul, grace, sympathy, pride, the tourists act as if there was nothing to respect, no dignity that they have to respond to. They know that they are welcome for only one thing, their cash. So they behave like in a whorehouse. Tve had more pleasure, even joy, swimming every day. I've had a sense of wellbeing this past month such as Ive not experienced in a long time. The water turned warmer yesterday and I had a 15-20 minute swim that was exhilarating. The water was still cool but bearable compared to the two preceding days. After the swim I took a very hot shower followed by a completely cold. [...] It's a temptation to try the water at high tide today, which is about noon, in spite of the weather to keep the ritual of a daily swim, or if too cold to swim, just a plunge, an immersion. TUESDAY, JULY 11, 1978

7.81

Went through several days of depression. Perhaps depression is not accurate enough. More like soda that stands around and loses its effervescence. Also a good deal of irritation with Wally. I more or less take the responsibility of keeping the kitchen in order. In all these years there are small irritations which endlessly repeated drive me up the wall. Perhaps these irritations are excessive, but it depresses me that Wally never yields this much to my peace by avoiding these petty irritations. I've made the kitchen one of my household chores because I could not bear to leave it to Wally s poor sense of order. Yet she discharges so many other chores important or unimportant in our lives with great care that I ought to balance that against the kitchen and be more tolerant. As a matter of fact I mostly am, but sometime her perception seems so dense to me. I lose all contact, or ability to speak, and go into a silence that lasts several days before I'm sufficiently cured of hurt.

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The studio too got me down. I work everyday but nothing happened so far to lift me out of this flatness. Today I prepared three small canvases and settled on some of the drawings I've been making, and will give up making more drawings until the 3 small paintings are finished. My whole struggle to play in the studio and give up the anxiety about producing, is so far a failure. The summer weeks run by like an express and I'm overcome with the feeling that nothing has been produced so far. P'TOWN, JULY 13, 1978 [...] On the back pages of the business section there was an obituary on Harold Rosenberg written by John Russell.11 He died last Tuesday, according to the Times from a stroke. I hardly spoke to Harold when I met him these last years, yet I feel I ought to write to May, but I'm at a loss at what to say. Harold is certainly no great loss in my life, but Fm deeply sorry for May. FRIDAY, JULY 14,

1978

[...] When we got out of the car coming home we were met by Elise who was in our yard. She told us that she had just heard that Tom Hess died. She had the news from Natalie Pavia who had just called her. Later in the afternoon Minnie came in with the Times that carried the obituary by John Russell.12 Two critics within two days of each other. So many people in my life have died that I feel as if my life is just hanging on to a past that's largely gone, as if I were already more in that past than in the present. That must be the feeling of anyone who reaches an advanced age. All of my father s family, except for Janice and I, are gone. Nearly all of my mothers relatives, all of Hindas children are gone.13 In Provincetown most of the neighbors who had lived around us when we bought the house in 1958 are gone. And among the artists the list is terribly long, Tomlin, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Newman, Hofmann and so many others. I sometimes have a desire to look up people I had been friends with in the Twenties or Thirties, just to see what has happened to them, also to bring back something of the past into the present. I'm thinking of Moe Posner, Eddie Hennefeld, Mark Baum, Elsie Livingston, of course I'll do nothing about it. But I should call Toni Willison, or write to her. SUNDAY, JULY l6,

7.82

7.83

1978

Yesterday Wally and I drove to Wellfleet and picked up Pat Dickinson and then drove to Orleans to see Dick. He is staying in nthe Orleans nursing home. He was in a wheel chair, slumped over and asleep. There were about a half dozen other patients sitting around in a pleasant enough large room with large windows looking out on a neatly landscaped exterior. Dick recognized us. "Hello Jack, hello Wally!" He said this demonstratively as if to show

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that he was still there. There wasn't much that we could say, and the silence angered him. "Get on with it," he cried. "Why are you here? Is this a wake? Am I dead?" Pat caressed him and reassured him, "You are not dead. You are all right. You are getting better." "I am Edwin Walter Dickinson. Are you Jack, are you Wally?" Silence. "Get on with it," he cried angrily. "Why are you here? Am I dead?" etc. Again and again. Also, "Where am I?" "You are in Orleans, near Wellfleet," Pat tried to assure him. But driving home Pat told us that the doctor at the home told her that when Dick asks that question, he means where is he between heaven and earth. When we said good-by to him I left the room with tears welling up in my eyes. We told Pat that we will visit him again, alone without her, as I felt that we deprived him of her company which is probably the only comfort and reassurance he has. P'TOWN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1978 7-85

Wally had visited Dickinson in the Orleans nursing home with Rosamond [Tirana] when I was in San Francisco. She asked Dick if he'd like to visit us in Provincetown and he said he'd love to. Wally told Pat shed love to have Dick visit and Pat called back later and suggested lunch on Dicks birthday which was yesterday. Pat advised us not to have any other visitors so it was only Dick, Pat, Wally, myself and Bob Roger, a young man who has been helping Pat where Dick is concerned. Bob helped him out of the car and into the wheel chair and I helped him carry it over the steps onto the lawn, and over the steps onto the porch and the house. We had a fire in the fireplace although the day was mild and Dick sat in his wheel chair and loved the fire and the house. The lunch was beautifully prepared by Wally, jellied beef broth, a favorite of Dicks, roast beef, baked potato, green beans, etc. Shelby had baked and sent a cake for the party and Wally decorated it with flowers. No candles, and no singing happy birthday. Although Dick occasionally reverted to his panicky cry "Where am I," he was on the whole very good, and affectionate towards Pat and Wally. We managed to keep a simple conversation going. Dick remained silent mostly except when names were mentioned. Mercedes' name came up and we tried to recall her fathers name. We finally remembered Carles, and Dick burst out with "Arthur B. Carles."14 Again and again his memory of names astonished me, who have no memory at all. After lunch we again had to carry Dick across the steps and into the car. It was on the whole a very touching visit, it went off very well. Pat was genuinely pleased, I think rather grateful. It was Dicks 87th birthday.

Diaries, 1976-78

NEW YORK, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15,

389

1978

We left Provincetown Saturday, December 2, the day Dick died. Hermine called us a day or two later to tell us she saw an obituary in the Times. We called Dicks daughter, Helen. Actually we called Pat but Helen came to the phone. She told us that Dicks body was cremated according to his request, and she mentioned a memorial meeting was to be held at the Provincetown Art Association. Neither Wally nor I, so bogged down in the trauma of reopening the house and studio, thought of returning to Provincetown for the memorial. Much as I would have wanted to be present I rather dreaded listening to the eulogies I imagined from the lips of the present denizens of Provincetown. I only today finished a letter I [sent] to Pat. This is an excerpt from the letter, "I could not to my sorrow claim that Dick influenced my painting. But no one had a greater influence on my perception of what the true artist is. Dick's work is classic in the very best sense. He was also intensely of our own time although his work stands aside from all that was negative, all that fractured and emptied our culture and its values."

7.86

DECEMBER 30, 1978

[. . .] The holiday season has given me no lift. I have suffered from depression and a feeling of alienation ever since I got back from Provincetown. It eases at moments and then I paint with some enthusiasm but more often I'm down and resist getting to work. The impending trip to Long Beach keeps me mentally unsettled, and except for the children there are very few people in New York that seeing them gives me pleasure. What going around I've done since I came back has been done dutifully and without much pleasure. I've been having horrible dreams, and the general trend of my thinking has been dreary. Wally accuses me of being withdrawn, and she imagines its withdrawn from herself, but my withdrawnness is inward, an inward malaise that has nothing to do with anyone. There's just no joy in me, and I'm like an empty vessel. Yet I worked well and with enthusiasm towards the end in Provincetown, so I must have felt better then, and so I comfort myself with the idea that my present mood is temporary, and due to the unsettled present moment of my life.

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Part VIII

Late Thoughts

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"I Have a Certain Inclination to the Monstrous" Undated Note, 19705

I have a certain inclination to the monstrous, to that exaggeration which the ego indulges in, in its desire for self-expansion. As an example, you do not merely want to roll, you want to roll like a horse. There is in my painting a constant mourning, as if living meant standing by ones own bier. Yet the bier is also the bed of all pleasure, all sensation, all mortality. I continually strive towards candor, to overcome the barriers of embarrassment. It is common to think of expression in connection with art and we miss how much is really suppression. I turned to Geometry perhaps to erect a thick glass wall through which I saw myself, but mercifully could not hear myself though I saw my mouth moving and often in anguish. I'm aware of alienation in myself, of my difficult background, of many painful life experiences, the unease I constantly experience with what is called civilization. Often all this mounts to a rock of anger, a passion to shatter the glass. Then I think of my age and impose calm on myself. Then again perhaps all that the geometries meant to me was to make some fiddle songs to ease my nerves, my pain. Ultimately my agony is the absence of faith, for what in our time could we have faith in? Nothing has so betrayed us, as the one thing that, in a postreligious age, should have retained our faith: civilization, now our terminal disease. For man is proving that he can equally use his best capacities and his worst to bring about his undoing. Art as well as science and technology can contribute to mans descent from grace. In my work I've drawn on the unconscious and Fve drawn on the order implied in geometric form but why, one could ask, leave out all images of things, people, landscape. The answer is I suppose I find little need or reason for description. And I find painting inadequate for that purpose by comparison with sophisticated technical means. But the more true answer lies in the

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absence in our world of a transcendent or supreme reality for which the images of the world served as metaphors. In the absence of such transcendence the abstract painting is more nearly the true icon of our time even if its only at times the icon of despair, of nothingness, and only occasionally a tranquilizing song. My predicament is that I'm essentially a religious man—a religious man without a religion and so abstract art is perhaps the nirvana towards which I reach. I admit to much failure in my work. Such pride as I have rests on the often conscious dismissal of many goals prized in a very materialist art world. Yet it would be futile to deny that like everyone elses my work is tainted by its time.

Diaries, 1979-80 NEW YORK JANUARY 2, 1979

Miraculously I cheered up the last day of the year, largely due to Wally whose affection and love that day changed my mood. She made a beautiful dinner party New Years Eve. Hermine and Bob came, Bob Kramer and Meg, Carol Ashley and Mike Webb, Georgio Cavallon and Zena, Betty Klavun, Elyn Zimmerman and a young painter from Los Angeles whom Bob brought along, John Miller. Somehow or other this disparate group of people just seemed right that night. Everyone stayed till midnight when we opened several bottles of champagne and toasted the New Year, everybody embracing and kissing. Nearly everyone then left for other parties, and we were asked to join them but refused and Wally and I went to bed soon after in a happy mood.

8.2

The even ing of January 11, Hermine Ford and Bob Moskowitz gave a birthday party for Helen Tworkov. NEW YORK THURSDAY, JANUARY 11,

1979

[...] The party was interesting because nearly everyone there had achieved some success and prominence in their field. The most successful in terms of fame and money were Richard Serra and Michael Herr. Also there were Philip Glass, Rudy Wurlitzer, Paula Cooper, Connie de Jong (Philip Glass friend), Michael Hurson. [...] Serra, who is aware that I'm no great admirer of his character or his work, nevertheless took the trouble to show a friendly side. [. . .] I've had so little contact with Serra since he left Yale that I have little reason for avoiding him, but I remember his extreme aggressiveness at Yale, and I see it in his work. His enormous success too is also part of the measure of the art world which alienates me. A dozen or so artists in fashion have put some truly fine artists in undeserved shadow and prevent the rising of numerous others all over the country, because the critics and the museums are busy with names rather than art, and they are searching for the birth of stars. Imagine that Dickinson

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Late Thoughts

on the one hand, and Cavallon on the other never became stars while not a few mediocre men did. SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1979

8.4

I went to the Rothko meeting in Blinkens office and was more disgusted than ever with the drawn out legal battles. We are no nearer the division of the estate between the foundation and the heirs now than we were a year ago. According to Don, Kate does not believe the division will take place for another year or so. In the meantime the only role for the foundation members is to listen to reports of the legal battles. After the Rothko meeting which ended at six I was to go on to the Century Club where I was to attend my first meeting. This meeting (January 11, 1979) was the annual meeting. David [Prager], who was at the Rothko meeting, did not warn me about the dress code for the meeting, so I was the only one in mufti, everyone else was dressed in "black tie." [...] Last night I went to a cocktail party at Louise and Morton Kaish on West End Avenue and 9oth Street. [...] One person, Fletcher Benton, sculptor in the San Francisco area, expressed such delight in meeting me, had followed my work since my early days with Castelli, and was familiar with my recent work, and so eager to establish a friendly relationship, that I was really flattered and expressed my hope that we will keep in touch, etc. and if I did not plan to leave so soon would have had him over the house. This experience with Benton I've gone through so often wherever I go, I've heard the remark on being introduced to a stranger, "I've followed and admired your work for years," so often, that I'm really puzzled. And again and again I'm introduced as "the famous artist..." etc. If a small part of it is true I cannot understand how this corresponds with the low esteem of the critics and museums, and my own feeling of disappointment in my career. Its as if there were two people, a public man of some renown, and another man in utter obscurity. Also I'm puzzled, which do I really court? Do I really want to be a public man, or do I subconsciously seek by every means to escape into privacy? Neither role gives me any joy and I don t know what the answer is to my question. My half dreaming is preoccupied with my old age, with at best the limited span of life left to me, and everything around me has little or no urgency. JANUARY 21, 1979, SUNDAY

8.5

[...] Last Monday night I took Helen to dinner to the Yale Club. I was a little afraid she would find the place too stuffy, but she liked it, since we could sit and talk around the table for a good two hours without being rushed by the waiters. We had a pleasant talk, but it did not reach the kind of open intimacy I keep hoping for. I'm constantly surprised that while it seems all right for

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us, her parents, to inquire into her personal life, neither Helen nor Hermine have ever directed a question to us as to our personal life, although I'm sure they have been aware of periods of severe crisis in our lives. They never asked for details. And sometimes I feel I would be relieved to confide in Helen as I would and sometimes do to a friend. During this time period Tworkov was a visiting artist at Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, and at California State-Long Beach, where he had an exhibition of his work from the 19705. In May 1979 he went to Scotland, where he had a one-person exhibition at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, then returned to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island School of Design on May 26, 1979. TUESDAY, MARCH 13, 1979, LONG BEACH

I visited Maurice Tuchman at the L.A. County Museum. I got there about 3 P.M. and we talked about forty-five minutes. For the first time I have been taking advantage of personal relations to advance something in favor of my career, taking a hint from Al Held who once scoffed at the importance of Emmerich as his dealer and said that whatever good had happened to him had been due to his efforts on his own behalf. Thus I wrote to Messer taking advantage of his friendly note to me, asking him for a show, before I die.

8.6

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, DEKALB, STUDENT UNION, APRIL 16, 1979

I've neglected the diary since I left Long Beach. [...] Since I came back from Long Beach so many things have happened connected to "career," that Wally and I have remarked on it that we are under the influence of some special benign phase. When Tom Messer sent me a note, which Wally forwarded to me in Long Beach, praising my painting in their collection which they had in an exhibition and inviting me to see the show and sending me a complimentary card to the museum for a year, I wrote to him, repeating what the gallery had already asked for, asking the museum to put on a show of the last decades work, pointing out I was seventy-eight, and if the museum is to show my work sooner or later why not before I die. I had a nice reply from Tom asking me to see him when I got back. I saw him a week or so after I got back, and he consented to the show in '81.

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NEW YORK, THURSDAY, MAY 3, 1979

8.8

[...]! attended the last Rothko meeting Thursday 4-6. Don made me a very complimentary little speech on my contribution to the Foundation, and everyone expressed regret at my resignation. [...] I've been packing and as usual I get caught reading old notes, old diaries, and looking through old sketchbooks. FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1979

8.9

Hermine and Erik came to say good-by and stayed for dinner. After dinner a woman, Edit de Ak, came to interview me for a piece she said was requested by Bridget Brown. She was supposed to leave the text with us today. But it never came. Somehow during the interview the subject of Punk Rock came up. She told me she was a rock groupie, that she knew Allen Suicide, and that they had seen my work at Nancy s and that Allen was an enthusiast for my work. That was a surprise especially in view of my piece on Punk Art in Art in America.11 promised to call her in the fall when I get back to New York and she is to take me around to rock concerts. In May 1979 Tworkov went to Scotland for the open ing ofJack Tworkov: Paintings 1950-1978 at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow. Waily Tworkov and Hermine Ford accompanied him. They continued on to Paris while he returned to New York alone because he was to receive an honorary doctorate at RISD on May 26. See 8.12. MAY 22, 1979, TUESDAY AT THE YALE CLUB

8.10

[...]! signed in at the Yale Club Monday at about 4 P.M. [...]! called Messer s office and made an appointment to see him this morning at 10:30. [...] I woke up somewhat depressed and found it hard to locate the cause. Seeing Messer did nothing to cheer me up. There was something in his manner that said we will hold the show but don t expect too much. His attitude was friendly, but there were reservations in his attitude that made me uneasy. On the way home I began to think that under certain circumstances I would not want the show after all. I mentioned my unease to Nancy when I saw her after Messer s visit. I also mentioned it to David Prager when I spoke to him on the phone. My intention now is to write all my doubts and fears down in a letter to Messer. But I must wait until Wally comes back, for I will need her advice.

Diaries, 1979-80 WEDNESDAY, MAY 23,

399

1979

YALE CLUB, NEW YORK

The Yale Club is made up of businessmen and lawyers. At breakfast I look around, see all these conservatively groomed men and wonder what brought me even tangentially into such environment. Thought a lot this morning when I lay sleepless in bed about my standing and career as an artist. I felt depressed and had an inner longing to quit the art world. Thought much about my age. Nearly everything that happens to me now are more like punctuation marks, periods, endings, rather than ongoing events. SATURDAY, JUNE l6,

8.11

1979

[...] Just to briefly recall what has happened the past few weeks: [. . .] Friday, May 26 I had to attend the commencement at RISD. I was to get an honorary doctorate. I also had promised to attend a dinner at Lee Halls house the night before Friday. I felt somewhat better and my fever had gone down but I felt unsure of myself to drive to Providence alone. I asked Bert Yarborough to drive me.2 We both attended the dinner, Lee very kindly insisting he stay for dinner. Although I and the photographer Callahan were the only guests (we were both honoraries) not in black tie, but otherwise quite conventionally dressed, Bert was in blue jeans, work shirt, etc. But I lent him a corduroy jacket and a tie for his shirt, which I had to tie for him since he had never worn one. Bert and I both stayed in a suite in Lees basement. Next morning I went up to Lees apartment where we were supposed to get coffee and to prepare for the commencement, but no coffee came, and I went through the exercises famished. Gil Franklin presented me on the platform for Lee s eulogy. The exercises lasted till after one. There was a reception afterwards. But right after disrobing at Lees, Bert and I left as my strength was giving out. In my rush I left my diploma. Bert and I found some awful place in Providence where we had some lunch, and drove back to P'town. PROVINCETOWN, SUNDAY, JULY 22,

8.12

1979

[ . . . ] ! finished the first good-sized painting (72 x 72) July 19. Although I spent these past two months (approximately) working on paper and looking for that evasive new direction I ended up (out of anxiety) by returning to the same 3,5,8 system. Yet there is something fresh in this painting, the way the paint goes on, the color (based entirely on mixtures of Cadmium red light, Thalo blue modified with Cobalt, and white) I plan to make a series of four including the one I finished all the same size, while I continue to look for the

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break through that so far has escaped me. Altogether besides the painting I've made about a dozen works on paper, some in pastel and some in oil on sized paper, and one or two in oil on Kindura. Have been swimming every day. Have also walked/jogged several times a week and I attend to my back exercises. THURSDAY, AUGUST l6, 19/9

8.14

[. . .] Notes to be worked on: Imagination in technical inventions; the lack of imagination in their social use; the individuality at the base of the daring invention also at the base of the selfish exploitation; the failure to use the imagination for group welfare; Picasso as inventor, Cubism (analytic) as an example. After Cubism the conscious effort at daring invention became a flaw in the work; by contrast Cezanne was never an inventor; the creative process in art in contrast to imaginative invention has an analogy to female child-bearing; the intellect fails because the most brilliant idea has limits; continued in a straight line endlessly it has to end in the stupid, in the absurd; what supreme intelligence or stupidity is involved in creating minds capable of everything except perceiving the limit beyond which lies failure, stupidity and self-destruction. The art of twentieth century and the atom bomb! P'TOWN, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1979

8.15

Took an hour s walk to Herring Cove and back. High tide about seven this morning. Wally and I took a swim after I got back from the walk. Early morning golden sun, the water clear, cool and refreshing. As I was dressing after the swim I suddenly had the illusion that I was seven, eight feet tall. Letter from Tom Messer yesterday in answer to my worried letter I sent him in July.3 "The questions that you raise in it are altogether legitimate ..." and "... we have no other wish than to produce an exhibition that would do you full justice..."[...] SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1979

8.16

[. . .] Friday (September 21) was the opening of the lower Cape Arts Festival. My show opened at the arts center in the evening. Bert Yarborough and Paul Bowen (Welsh sculptor whose wedding party we recently went to) came over in the morning in a pick-up truck to move my paintings to the center. But I thought the open truck was too dangerous for the move. Wally looked up an ad in The Advocate and got someone to come within an hour to move the paintings. They were three strapping young women in a pick-up pulling a horse trailer. We loaded the paintings in the horse trailer and they fitted perfectly. The trailer was clean, the floor covered with an old rug. No smell of horse manure as Wally feared. We followed the horse trailer in our car, and helped Bert arrange the hanging.

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My show at the center was the occasion for Barbara Baker to organize a good deal of publicity. I had interviews with reporters from the Boston Globe and Herald, and with Susan Brown of The Advocate.4 Wally said all this publicity has ruined our anonymity in the town. Amazing how not a single report in the paper fails to include several ludicrous distortions of facts. [. ..] Recently we got to know Ferol Sibley Warthen, a lady 89 years old, who rents a small studio on Commercial Street, really a sort of small shop with windows giving on to the street. We must have gone by there for years and never looking into the window, because there are other such shops nearby with artists displaying their pictures of typical Provincetown landscapes with signs inviting the tourist trade that we simply shut our eyes to. But someone had mentioned seeing an article on my work in her shop that was printed by the Christian Science Monitor, and he took me into the show to introduce me to the old lady who gave me the copy of the paper. But I was astonished at the beauty and expertise of the colored prints she had on the walls. She was a friend in the early days of Knaths, of Agnes Weinrich, of Blanche Lazzell, etc. I never heard of her before.5 She is charming, and her work, although the look is very definitely of Provincetown of the Twenties (semi Cubist) and quite reminiscent of Knaths, it has a sensitivity and an authentic quality that far surpasses most work of that genre I've seen. Wally and I stopped at her shop yesterday and wanted to buy one of the prints, but the dear lady had nothing for sale. I stopped last Friday to take a jacket to Ava Wolf to repair and saw on her wall a marvelous pencil drawing by a Janet Folsom, a lady in her seventies, one of the founders of the Art Association. Ava bought the drawing for $125. How many truly talented people exist on the distant edge of the art world when so many pretentious artists occupy the center. P'TOWN, OCTOBER 25, 1979 THURSDAY

[...] I've occupied myself this past month mostly with small chores—pruning around the house and yard, going to the dentist where I ran up a bill over four hundred dollars. Taking slides of the paintings and drawings, visiting fellows at the center in my role as a member of the staff—and generally idling away my time, reading and brooding. Am divided about my visit to Seattle and almost wish to abandon anything that comes as an obstacle between me and Wally and would like to order my life so as to give her the most emotional security.6 These trips are very disturbing to her. But they also divide me too—perhaps I need inner peace more than anything now in my life. I ought to accept my old age and my life as it is and discipline some of my more unrealistic longings. A letter from Janice all about the Picassos the French government ac-

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cepted in lieu of taxes and is exhibiting in Paris. It set me off thinking again about my deep prejudice against Picasso's work and the myths around him. Saw some reproductions from that show and a devotional article about it in Newsweek at the dentists office. Again the reproductions did not move me in the least and one or two represented all that I dislike in his work. He was to me the innovator of some disastrous trends in twentieth-century art as were other geniuses in art, politics and industry. He typifies for me all that's intolerable to me in Western civilization—superego, power, corruption, dominance, money, name above everything—name and substance being confused when one stands for the other. NEW YORK, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 23, 8.18

1979

I met Messer at the Yale Club for lunch last Wed. (12/19). We got on the subject of the show very quickly. I started by telling him that after thinking it over I had felt that I had put myself at a disadvantage by being the one who asked for the show. (I didn't mention in this context that in the back of my mind was always the regret that, being offered a retrospective by the Guggenheim and the Whitney in 1960,1 chose the Whitney because of my prejudice against the Guggenheim s exhibition space.) Tom reassured me. He quickly agreed with my rejection of a mini-retrospective and agreed that a show of about thirty paintings would be chosen from the last ten years1 work. Having settled the show (to take place in '81) we had a very interesting conversation [...] about Clifford Still (whom he dislikes personally) and about art in general. It was the first truly social and warm meeting between us. We parted in a very friendly spirit. SATURDAY, JANUARY 5, 1980

8.19

I took Erik yesterday to the Yale Club for lunch. I had promised to take him before, but now that he has turned thirteen it was time to keep my promise. We went to the roof dining room. I tried to draw him into conversation, but it was difficult. He has become either shy or is naturally uncommunicative. Or is it simply the natural distance the very young feel from the old. All the play that was so common between us when he was very little has gone out of him in my company. After lunch I showed him the gym, the library and the lounge. If he was impressed in any way he did not much express it. Later in the afternoon Hermine spoke to Wally and said Erik had had a great time—but if he did he did not show it. In the evening (1/4) Wally and I went to see the Epilogue to the series of plays Spalding Gray put on at the Performing Garage. Lois Long met us at the theatre and also Bob and Meg.

Diaries, 1979-80 403

The play was wild in everything and exciting even, but I couldn't make out its theme or motivation. After a time I stopped listening to the words, much of which I missed anyway, and just took in the performance visually. Bob was fascinated with [the] play but Wally and Lois were not. I found the mix of stage set, sound, the human voices, film and projected imagery quite fascinating. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1980

[...] Tuesday (1/22) we had dinner with the Pragers. We were the only guests. Before dinner I met David at the Met. David wanted to see the Still show again in my company. The second time around for me too, and I had the same impressions of the show as I had the first time. I had seen the show (Tues. 1/15) with Hermine and Meg Shore. There are a good many Stills I like, especially the black, monochromatic paintings, but the work after 54 is the most self-deluded that I have seen. If you delude yourself that you are a genius and that every fart is significant, then you can daub three or four strokes on a wall-sized canvas, and pass it on as one more example of the daring of a genius. I say daring because only a genius would pass on such a banality for a work of art. At the Kunitz party for Tommy Sills, Denise Hare told me that the Met personnel were driven crazy by the Still show and that they hated it.7 They honored a promise Tom Hess had made to Still before Hess died. [. . .] Friday (1/18) Gene Baro came to my studio and picked three life drawings for the Brooklyn Museum—my gift to the museum.8 I went to the opening of the British show at the Guggenheim organized by Diane Waldman. It was a pleasant and a very informally dressed crowd. I saw Messer who said he had just written to me. I got his letter a few days later expressing pleasure at our lunch and talk at the Yale Club and promised to send sample copies of catalogs. The catalogs came, among them de Koonings of the last show, and I believe that its too exaggerated a promise, because I'm planning a small show and I doubt well have such a luxurious catalog for it. But anyway it seems promising although somewhere within myself I also dread the show and [that] is perhaps the reason I raised so many obstacles, after having asked for it.

8.20

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1980

Nancy just called to say she just sold another of the oils on kindura in the Indian Red Series, and to say that Pei was in the gallery and looked at the earlier paintings and wants to buy one or two. I have been holding back these paintings and feel some regret about the ones already sold. Because even at 30,000, unless I had an immediate need for money, and at the moment I

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don t, having the paintings is a better guarantee for our future (thinking of Wally and the children) than having the money in the bank—and that's one reason people are now buying paintings. I'd rather sell to Pei than anybody I know—but I'm not sure I want to sell these few remaining paintings of the 5os and early 6os which are now so much in demand. In fact for a while, at least till after the Guggenheim show next year, I don t want to sell very much anyway, even, and especially the recent paintings. Nancy said Pei intends to call me, its going to be hard for me to say no to him. [...] MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11,

8.22

1980

I worked out in the gym this morning and came home feeling very well. I ran a mile and probably walked another half mile between running laps. I've cut the time from about a half hour to twenty minutes. I also swam eight laps. Came home invigorated. I worked hard all day Saturday and Sunday. I started yesterday at 11 and worked till 10 last night stopping for lunch and dinner. I am almost finished with the first 36" x 108" canvas. May call it "Progression in gray." NEW YORK, MONDAY APRIL 7, 1980

8.23

[...] Eriks Bar-Mitzvah took place at the synagogue of the Hebrew Theological Seminary. It went off very well. Erik was quite relaxed and made a rather amusing speech. There was evidently a lot of real good feeling between Erik and the young rabbinical student who had been his teacher, and who conducted the service. I was somewhat confused in my own mind about the whole thing. It came at a time when Fve moved further away from all religions than ever—and I had doubts about going thru with the ceremony knowing in all likelihood that Eriks allegiance to religious observance ended as well as it began with the Bar-Mitzvah ceremony. There was a beautifully prepared lunch at the house for about thirty guests after we came back from the synagogue. Wally does things like that heroically. We celebrated the Seder Tuesday night, April i—we are still doing this mostly for Erik. Janice and Alain sat at the Seder with us. And Helen, our Tibetan Buddhist.

"Art Saves My Life' Notes Made on the Train to Providence, RISD, April 22,1980 JackTworkov received an honorary degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in May 1979. He returned to RISD fora "Lecture for RISD and Brown," on April 22,1980, that he composed on the train trip to Providence.

[...]! have doubts, worries about my present work. Its true, system does not exclude spontaneity and fresh invention. But it does include an element of the mechanical, the predictable. My earlier work, although it also tended to resolve itself into a predictable style or method, nevertheless each painting was preceded (at least at the start) by a void, by the absence of any ascertainable direction. In contrast, the present paintings begin with exact drawings, almost equivalent to an architects drawing, and the paintings follow the exact surface divisions, proportions and the arrived shapes and forms. Only the actual painting, the work with the brush, and the development of the color and surface are left to the spontaneous decision of the moment. I have (especially in the last year or two) wanted to go back to the freer, more spontaneous methods of my earlier work without necessarily repeating the imagery and style of the '508. Last summer I made a series of oils on paper, trying to work without the systems that have dominated my work in the last ten years or so. But the work looked less interesting, less inspired than the systematic work I was simultaneously engaged in. Also, [looking at] the work that I've seen recently in the galleries by older artists who have continued to this day the free, gestural Abstract Expressionism of their earlier years, or the work of younger artists who have adopted this style and which is now quite prevalent in New York, I find, whether I like or dislike the work, that none of it does for me what work does that really captures me, that it starts off new feelings, new emotions in me that induces me to try new searches in the studio. So that work mostly leaves me indifferent. Nevertheless doubts and worries persist in my attitude towards my present work. What I said above is one example. The other is a very deep concern that lies perhaps in the back of my everyday consciousness. A subliminal worry. This concerns the relation, the meaning of my painting to the world at

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large, the world outside myself, outside my studio. I'm not ashamed to confess that I've seen my work primarily, not merely as a "way of life" but as a way to save my life. Although I believe that every art, regardless of the artists aims and conscious purpose, ultimately is a reflection, a mirror of the times in which it was created, I nevertheless feel some inner deprivation, some sorrowful regret that my art is not more explicitly some expression of existence outside and beyond myself as it was true of the greatest art of the past. It is only in our time, beginning with the Impressionists and more explicitly with the development of abstract art, that it became apparent that art has retreated, or been forced to retreat, to an isolated individualism. This aspect of art in the twentieth century requires much more than merely art historical notice. It is both an esthetic and sociological issue of the utmost importance. Because this trend towards the utmost individualism was not entirely an artist s choice, it was forced on the artist by the whole development in society of the technological, political and class revolutions of our time. Art, which had connections to social elements outside of itself, such as religion, national history, myth and class distinctions found itself expelled by the new developments in society. The growth of sociological, political and technical progress found art too insignificant a medium to influence events. The artists in turn turned to revolt, to negativism, to cynicism and bohemianism. It is the artists negativism, the conscious and unconscious protest that shaped art, especially abstract art and which became symbols of our age, the mark of its culture. So that abstract art became the icon of our time, the icon of its negativism. Today in spite of the vast number of artists in our society, the vast number of art schools, museums and the long lines at the museums, I feel with some despair, that the middle classes, the only classes even marginally concerned with art, merely use art as decoration, to decorate their houses and themselves. They are involved in preening themselves, in saying, "how cultured we are," while really and truly art plays no important role in the true center of their lives, even if they have such centers. Granting that there are significant exceptions, I believe what I have said is the prevalent truth. Art plays no significant role in the larger life of the nation, of the people. Measure the charitable and tax deductible contributions of the giant corporations to the arts against their economic and political roles in our society to get the view that supports my point. I have no idea what artists can individually do to change the situation. Individual efforts in that direction too often lead to anti-art strategies or otherwise compromise the esthetic elements too much. But I believe that it is important for every artist, every student, to at least become strongly aware of our present world even as we perceive it in the distorted forms in the news-

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papers, television and other media. If we cannot express our concern about the world directly, let alone influence it in the slightest degree, we can at least learn what not to paint. Two aspects of the world constantly stand before me. One, the genuine progress in science, even the miraculous progress, the incredibly imaginative inventions in technology, electronics and space exploration, and the democratization of the masses. And the other, the dissolution of spiritual values with the dissolution of cohesive cultural communities. Looking beyond the present to mans whole history, of wars, persecutions, exploitations, violence and oppressions, a feeling of despair overtakes me. Perhaps the creation of man was a mistake. I have often dreamt that I would rather be a creeping, crawling creature than man—to go back to the very beginning, to start again, to give evolution a second chance. Only in the studio I wake from this despair, only in the studio does my life take form. This is what I mean when I say "art saves my life."

"A Nature in Deep Contemplation' Diaries, 1980-81

P'TOWN, MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1980 8.25

[...]! haven't painted for a month. I have two unfinished paintings on the wall easels. I got into the studio for a few hours only to try to draw. I'm still not sure about standing. I'm again caught up trying to break out of the geometric systems I've been snared in and try a freer style. I even have difficulty in reviving my interest in the unfinished paintings. I might have decided to scrap them except for Wally who likes the paintings and urges me to finish them. P'TOWN, SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 1980

8.26

I spent the day in the most indolent way. Its a clear soft sunny day after so much unsettled weather. Spent the earlier part of the morning reading Arthur Rimbaud, a biography by Enid Starkie. (The book was given to me by Resia (for herself and Naomi) as a birthday present.) About 10:30 I went to the beach, sunned myself and took a swim, the weather was still cool but bearable. Lunch at 12, and then instead of attending to some letters I have to write, I fell asleep. Woke up at 3, my head cloudy and still unable to do any work. Again looked through some books and finally sat down to make the notes in this book. [...] My age is expressing itself in two ways: my inability to remember familiar names of friends, or of things, and the loss of energy. Every effort, such as a swim, or a walk, requires too much rest afterwards. It s also hard for me to judge whether my drowsiness is physical or mental. Am I falling mentally asleep? I've been thinking seriously of resorting to some stimulant. Perhaps more coffee or some chemical stimulant. I wonder how it will be if I travel. Usually my visits to teach or to make prints have revved me up, change of scene, environment, fresh contacts with people. Is my life itself drowsy, putting me to sleep? In early Septemben980 Jack Tworkov was hospitalized for an emergency intestinal operation. The following are excerpts from his diary entries written at the hospital.

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CAPE COD HOSPITAL, HYANNIS, SEPTEMBER 5, 1980, FRIDAY

Yesterday was just a week that I came here. Thursday, August 28, started as quite an ordinary day. I spent the morning in the studio putting away the paintings I had finished, making some order in the studio and setting up for a series of drawings I wanted to make which would attempt a breakaway from systematic styles, to start once more, if I could find a way to begin from the unconscious. For the time being I keep postponing any response to the intense desire that seizes me from time to time to draw from objects, people, landscape. At noon I went for a swim. This summer I have actually improved my stroke, fatigue less easily, and swim longer periods and distances. After lunch and short rest I returned to the studio, I had just sat down before a sheet of fresh paper mounted on board and sitting on the wall easel when I hesitated to touch the paper with the charcoal stick in my hand because of some discomfort and slight pain in my stomach. It was just 3 o'clock. I waited to see if the pain would go away, but it got worse. [...] Within an hour the pain began to be quite unbearable and Wally became concerned. [...] I spent a part of the morning in the small guest room in the rear of the corridor. There I discovered the man who has been greeting me in the corridor nearly every day is Wallace Bassford, a painter who lived for many years in Provincetown. He told me he had taken over an art school that had been run for years by Jerry Farnsworth in North Truro, and that he recently sold it.11 recalled seeing the school advertised in the Advocate by his name. I had taken him as a hospital volunteer, but he told me that his wife was a patient here, which accounts for his being here. I imagine it must have been he who gossiped to the nurses about my being a famous artist. He of course asked me, "Are you still with Yale?" How annoying how this brief phase of my life is blown up to such importance in this crazy world. As if without the Yale episode it would have been impossible to authenticate my existence. In the same room I picked up a small publication called "Guideposts" from the table full of "Literary Digest" copies and other such literature. I began reading the articles mostly by people who had by prayer and faith recovered from terminal cancer, faced life again with joy and vigor after serious loss, and other experiences leading to a fuller and deeper life. The entries had the sound of authenticity written by people some of whom were well known in public life, a TV actor, a basketball player for a professional team, a former model, etc. What interests me in all this? I find it difficult to disbelieve the testimony they give. And I believe that prayer as they testify was the source of their help, yet I don t believe in their god. In fact, the more I think of it, the more

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I conclude that I believe in belief, but not in god, another way of saying it, I believe in religion, but not in any religions gods. Man created the gods, and prayer to the gods is in fact prayer addressed to ones own deepest self. It is in the appeal to ones own faith, courage, that evokes the inner strength to overcome, sometimes, serious dangers, illness or loss. The help that comes to the supplicant, comes not from heaven, but from within himself. The god within is the self. If the history of religious communities from the beginning of time had not been so full of wars, persecutions, hatred for the adherents of other gods, and fostered so narrow a view of mankind, so much bigotry and superstition, I could actually believe in the religious community as a need and a support of mans existence in an often brutal, irrational, and spiritless world. But I cannot bring myself to trust a religious community based on tradition, church and priesthood. Since God manifested himself in different forms, to different groups in different parts of the world, in different stages of evolution, why can t a religious group learn from this? Why must they believe that their god is the only true god? Their belief the only true belief? Why must they think that only they are saved, and all other believers (indeed and disbelievers) are damned? In fact they do the damning, through their lack of compassion and understanding for anyone outside their religious group. But for the intolerance of all organized religious groups, a religion, perhaps a religion that embraces all mankind, could become an actual possibility. It is 12:15, and I expect the lunch tray any minute. [...] CAPE COD HOSPITAL, HYANNIS, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1980

8.28

[...] When I discovered that they had written Jewish after my name on my wrist tag and after my name on the door tag, I was a little apprehensive. Antipathy towards Jews is still not uncommon in the vast majority of Americans below a certain cultural level. Not only antipathy but a feeling of unease with what they still regard as an exotic race. I was therefore reassured when all nurses treated me with great consideration and kindness that went beyond their mere professional duties. The one book Wally brought me to read here was the Viking Portable edition: Romantic Poetsy Blake to Poe, edited by Auden and (Norman Holmes) Pearson. Although it does not specifically say so, I assume the introduction is largely by Auden. It begins: "What is man? How does he differ from the gods on one hand and from nature on the other? What is the divine element in man?" The introduction goes on to discuss how the way these questions were put and how they were answered in different periods: the heroic Interrupted when Hermine arrived to take me home.

"Deep Contemplation" 411 P.TOWN, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1980

[...]! want to continue the comment I started to make about the quotation from the introduction to "Romantic Poets" because it is also related to my notes on the reading of "Guideposts." "What is man? How does he differ from the gods on the one hand and from nature on the other? What is the divine element in man?" The introduction goes on to say how the way these questions were put and answered in different periods: the Heroic, the Middle Ages, the Neoclassical, the romantic (i9th century) "changes the style and subject matter of poetry . . . " But what strikes me is the question "how does man differ from the Gods?" because the question assumes that men knew the nature of God as well as they knew the nature of man so that their difference could be perceived. All this can only be put down to language. In that question both "God" and "man" are just words in a given language. God, the divine element, are classic ways of speaking about man. Every reference to God is a way of speaking about man, because about God, even as conceived by the traditional religions we know nothing. Every statement about God is a statement about man, about mans yearnings, his fears, his ecstasies. The word god merely sums up many ways of talking about man.

8.29

P'TOWN, OCTOBER 6, 1980, MONDAY [...] Short of a topnotch gallery with genuine prestige, I've got very little enthusiasm for showing just for the sake of showing. The truth is, the more I think about it, even the promise of more fame and prestige has also very little temptation for me. I'm weary of the whole art game. Fve accepted my fate, all I want is enough money to support ourselves and to be able to continue working as long as my strength holds out. If possible I'd like to convince myself more strongly, I've little hope of convincing the art world.

8.30

P J TOWN, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1980 [...] I've almost finished the variation on the X picture, the shapes are Ns. I had an experience with the painting that has occurred before. I was tempted to leave the painting as it was at the end of the first day's work. The relation of the tones was delicate and perfect, but I could not bring myself to leave the painting in that way. Firstly, I could not bring myself to accept as finished a painting that came off in one day. It was like preparing to lift a container with fifty pounds in it only to discover that it flew up empty. Secondly, although the surface gave off just the kind of light I would have wanted, it lacked body, because I had intended the first surface as underpainting. So I worked on it

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all week, its improved in some respects, but I wont regain that magic look of the first touch. Had I had another canvas prepared I would then have set about to paint it again and to call it finished on the first day if by chance the tonal relations came off again as magically as they did the first time. Perhaps when I get back to New York I'll take it up again. I've also worked on two small version variations on the "Circle in a square." In one of these I've reverted to the "stroke" the fluid stroke I used 10 years ago in the series called idling [plate 12]. Although I'm absorbed in the work I'm doing I have the urge from time to time to try a still life, a figure painting (especially a portrait) or a landscape. One of these days I'll give in to this urge. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1980, p'TOWN

8.32

[. . .] Last night I went to Bert and Cynthia's for a dinner given for Brice Marden. It was a communal dinner the fellows brought various dishes they cooked: lasagna, salads, a very beautiful spicy vegetable pie, and home-baked cheese cake. I enjoy going to these dinners, but it always puzzles me how everyone settles down, on chairs, on the floor, to eat from paper plates and a silence falls on the gathering and hardly any words are exchanged. I was introduced to Marden and said I don t think we ever met before and he said he was a student in my class at Yale, must have been '63, or maybe '61 when I was just a visiting artist. I had no recollection of it. He came with his wife who told me that Helen had visited them. They have two children: a two-year old and a newly born one. Mrs. Brice was breastfeeding the infant. There was another woman with them and I couldn't figure out whether she was a relative or a nurse. I did not find the slide presentation at the Center after dinner very exciting. I wonder whether his style, a sort of mumble, is natural or is following what is chic, namely the artist as an inarticulate person verbally as his reputation as an artist grows. Mardens work seems to me suitable for an architectural environment, that is, an exhibition of his work creates the architectural environment of the space. What happens when you look at one painting by itself? P'TOWN, NOVEMBER 20, 1980

8.33

[ . . . ] ! took some photographs of the harbor in twilight. I mean to photograph the landscape here much more thoroughly and frequently. I want to study these landscapes and perhaps make some paintings derived from them. This is really a new desire on my part, part of my long-standing wish to get out of the geometric systems into a new subject matter. I feel as if the paintings I'm now working may be the last in that line. Except for the Circle

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in the Square Theme, I may continue with that. I started my fourth canvas on that theme yesterday. And I would like to make a few larger canvases (72 x 72) on that theme. P'TOWN, DECEMBER 15, 1980, MONDAY

Last night we went to the Center for dinner given by the board. The weather turned cold. It was 20 degrees when we got back and a strong wind. Today was clear, cold (twenty degrees) but calm. I spent most of yesterday working on a new and the last canvas I'll be doing this fall in P'town. Size 26 x 78. Its the second canvas with three contiguous rectangles. The first to the left is in the proportion of the square divided by 9. Next is the square. Next to that is the square x 9. In area the rectangle to the left is to the square as the square is to the rectangle to the right. Each rectangle has the same figure, but since each rectangle, while it has the same height, differs in width, and the rectangle to the right is equal in space to the sum of the two rectangles to its left, the figure expands in width from left to right, but all vertical dimensions remain the same. Starting with the square, the figure contracts to the left of the square, and expands to the right of the square. I call the painting, like the earlier one, Expansion and Contraction.2 Today I started to finish two works on paper, one is the sketch for the "Exes" painting. The other is a version of the "rising sun" version of the "Circle in the Square." When these are finished I'll begin packing the studio. I've neglected this journal because I've been recording visitors and visits in the calendar for 1980. P'TOWN, MONDAY, DECEMBER 22,

8.34

1980

Our time here is running out. The chores of closing out the house and the studio and all the arrangements for our return to the city which loom ahead of us depress me. Aside from that I feel a kind of torment I cant account for. It's as if I were waiting for something and have no idea what for. I feel not lonely but terribly alone, disconnected. The studio engages me, but it also leaves me full of doubts. The thought of my old age is with me, but that's all, the thought. But what that is I can't get hold of. When I visited Carole Bolger Saturday morning, I asked her age, because I saw the remnants of a child genius in her work, or put another way, ingenious as her work appeared, it lacked a mature focus.3 She in turn asked me my age. When I told her, her astonishment was great and genuine. Such a reaction makes me feel lousy as if I were not normal, as if I were some kind of freak, as if I could not be real. But I experience my old age all right. Physically and otherwise. My lack of interest in people is perhaps the most damaging signal. I watch Wally, her relation to people, and I'm astonished at my own lack. As if I've resigned a large part

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of the world. If I thought I could achieve some height in my work, that would mean much to me. But I'm beginning to wonder if enough time is left to me. And aside from the actual doing of the work, I have no idea how much I care about what I leave for posterity. I once asked Al Held about that. He said he cared very much, but I was not sure then and I am not sure now. It's been unusually cold for this time of the year. Several times the temperature dipped below 10 degrees. The skeletal bareness of the trees, the grayness everywhere, the strange luminosities of the skies, especially early morning and evening have an extraordinary poetry of their own. Its some compensation for staying on here this late. The landscape now speaks of a nature in deep contemplation. And I am affected by it. P'TOWN, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1980

8.36

I can ruin perfectly good days by an outburst of rage and anger over really trifling things, trifles that reflect themselves like the Chinese torture: drop by drop. In the kitchen (cleaning up the kitchen, making the bed every morning, are the main chores that fall to me) the constant dislocation of things infuriate me. The cover rarely connects with the pot, things that should be kept dry left where they get soaked, nothing put back in the same place twice, as if a person without eyes or feelings moved about in the space. Yet it's not true. Wally does so many things for my life with great care and concern. She especially makes beautiful dinners when we have guests. Yet she can infuriate me and ruin days for me that could otherwise pass in contentment. Friday in preparation for a dinner for Susan Slocum and the Bowens, she asked me to debone a leg of lamb for the dinner. I took great care in the process. When the meat was deboned I carefully tied it so that it made a perfect roll for roasting and for the ease of carving when it came to the table. I had taken lots of time doing the chore, an hour perhaps, and felt pleased at how well it came out. Then as I was wiping the grease from my hands I caught Wally as she had just slit open the cord that I tied the lamb with. She slit it uselessly in order to cut off the printed seal on the lamb. I was furious. I seized the lamb from her hands and retied the cut parts, clumsily what had been done the first time neatly. My rage poisoned the whole day for me, especially because the incident with the lamb followed two others which provoked anger which I suppressed. I recognize my rage as a weakness, as an essential fault of mine. Tve tried to overcome it for years, but the repetition of the same irritation drives me out of my mind, and especially in spite of my reactions, Wally has never been able to change her ways, the ways that irritate me, in the slightest. It is perhaps precisely her indifference to this aspect of her behavior as it affects me that arouses my rage. Then when my anger subsides, I have dif-

"Deep Contemplation"

415

ficulty in re-establishing a normal spirit between us. And days pass with a chasm between us. And the triviality of the whole thing depresses me and I am angry to have to lose beautiful days to such dross. P'TOWN, FRIDAY, JANUARY 2,

1981

The first deep snow. About six inches now and still snowing heavily. The lawn, the bare trees, the roofs of the surrounding houses all blend into a grey white lighter than the deep grey sky. [...] Linda Shearer called a few days ago and offered me two choices for the opening of the Guggenheim show, one February and March, the other, if I remember right May and June. I chose the former, and we set the date January 28 [1982] to run through March.41 am relieved to have a definite date and I'll be more relieved when the whole thing is over. Perhaps then I can experiment in the painting more freely, devoid of all goals. I was looking through a Viking Portable of Greek Literature. It has a brilliant introduction by Auden which I read through. But I was amused to read in the outline of the Greek historical chronology that the year 1000 B.C. is given as the beginning of Geometric Art, and the year 700 B.C. as the end of Geometric Art. And here I am fooling around with a kind of geometric art. NEW YORK, MONDAY, JANUARY 12,

1981

Friday (1.9) we went to the opening of Jennifer Bartlett's drawing show at Paula Coopers.5 [...] The walls of the entire gallery from top to bottom were filled with drawings, like the enamel plates all one size hanging in rows about 5 or six rows to each wall. Hundreds of drawings. I found it too difficult to look at the drawings, the tendency was to look at the wall and to ignore the details composed of the drawings. At Jennifers I met [Jasper] Johns, also Leo who urged me to come to Johns' opening the next night. So Wally [...] and I went the next night (Sat. 1.10) to Leo's. Again a very large show of drawing, and again a big crowd. But this was the difference between the two shows: Johns' was an exhibition of drawings, Jennifer s was an exhibition of an exhibition. I really looked at Johns' drawings, and was surprised in how many instances I saw elements in his drawing not too unrelated to elements in my own work. MIDDLEBURY, TUESDAY, MARCH 24,

8.37

8.38

1981

It's some time since I made any entries in this notebook. The only satisfaction to me in these past months are the two paintings I made. Roman IX (95 x 50) and Roman XI (100 x 54). I should not have said the only satisfaction. My relations with Wally have been very affectionate and tender. [...]

8.39

416

Late Thoughts

Otherwise I have been somewhat apprehensive about my health. I am conscious of a considerable loss in energy and strength, loss of appetite, and my inability to regain some of the weight I lost last summer. I've also suffered guilt feelings, about what Wally refers to as my divided self, and suffered from inability to live without some concealment. APRIL 23, THURSDAY, NEW YORK HOSPITAL

8.40

Have been unable or indisposed to keep notes of my stay in the hospital. But Monday is my last day here. I'm going home tomorrow morning. But Dr. Lovengood this morning said it would take at least six more weeks for me to recover. The worst time here was the first week, the week following the biopsy, which took place the first day I arrived. The biopsy confirmed the existence of tumor, cancer cells in the bone and the bone marrow. The surgery took place Thursday, April 9. APRIL 30, THURSDAY

8.41

Yesterday was a terribly muggy day. To save myself for Wally s birthday party I stayed in bed most of the day. Late in the afternoon I bathed and showered and dressed for the evening. I cant get over the devotion and love of the children. They made a beautiful dinner, gave the house a cheerful holiday look, and the whole evening passed beautifully. Wally looked happy and pleased. By the time they cleaned up the kitchen and were ready to leave it was past eleven. Wally and I both slept well. Today has been so far the best day for me. Walked with Janice some fifteen blocks without getting fatigued.

"Withdrawal into Silence" NEW YORK, SUNDAY, MAY 3, 1981

... The withdrawal into silence because the explicit becomes trivial... [...] The exterior world becomes symbolic, achieves transcendent meaning, only in a cohesive culture in a bounded community. Individualism breaks down the boundaries and the bonds, achieves freedom but loses the largest meanings. In our social system individualism and freedom permit unlimited piracy in the economic realm but also in the art world, which has become part of the economic world, to exploit the individual will and ego to the irrational limit. What I would call spirit (I cannot find a substitute word) arises out of an acute awareness of what our senses tell us ... about our bodies, about the merging of body with body, about the air, the sky, the smells of earth, the feel of water, the seasons of flowering and winter, storms and sunlight, the mysterious cohabitants of the earth, from worms to the floating gulls in the sky... There are moments when this awareness rises from the senses like an interior eruption which can be felt as ecstasy. In painting I cannot give expression to any of this. I can only let the eruption take place, or the silence that follows upon it. There is a kind of spirituality (again for lack of a more precise word) that hovers about me but which I can t seize, hold and examine. I retreat into an apostasy: Man from the very beginning created god out of necessity, a power to draw upon greater than the power of any one individual; a power that rested in the unconscious identification with the group which, because its beginning and end were invisible and unthinkable, was immortal. The spirituality which hovers about me but which escapes me becomes a measure of my alienation, of my limited capacity to become a group member. Yet it is there, it represents my longings and my despair. Painting is best perceived as music, silent music if you wish, but in the making process it is more like dancing because the perception of the body (the body senses) is crucial. What I want to bring to my painting is not ego but that hovering spirit, the meaning of which I don t know. But those paintings have meaning for me which when looking back on them I catch a glimpse of that spirit which hovers and escapes me like silence on the verge of speech.

8.42

Prognosis Diaries, 1981

MAY 6, WEDNESDAY

8.43

Dr. Lovengood at 10:30 A.M. Lovengood s prognosis was very optimistic. Said I recovered two weeks earlier than expected, told me he would see me again in August, and about every 4 months thereafter. Wally was delighted with the news and called everyone to tell them the good news. After Lovengood we went to see Alains show. I loved the paintings. Asked Sacks why Alains paintings dont sell. He said people buy the worse art, unless the good art gets enormous publicity. MAY 27, WEDNESDAY

8.44

Andrew Forge came for lunch and interview for the Guggenheim catalog. We arranged to continue the interview by letter. I gave him some notebooks to read. At about 3 P.M. Linda Shearer and Susan Hirshfield came to go over the selection of the thirty paintings for the show. I promised to work on it. JUNE 22, MONDAY

8.45

Got into the studio early. Joined some stretchers and stretched one canvas. The hardest physical work and the longest duration since the operation.

[...]

P'TOWN, JUNE 23, 1981, TUESDAY

8.46

Saw Dr. O'Malley this morning. Mostly it was a question and answer session. What is meant by remission? It is hoped that the spreading of the cancer will be arrested. But there is no cure for it? No. Up to the present no one has come up with a cure. Why was only part of the prostate tumor removed? It was not possible to do more. (I did not press the point.) Do I need an oncologist to consult on the development of the cancer? He did not think so. There's nothing to worry about for at least two years, some patients can live with it much longer, six, ten years, etc. (Considering my age that's optimistic.) O'Malley said, sure I could die from the cancer but I could also die from an automobile accident. Or from (he refrained from saying it), old age. Dr. Perrone had indicated to me how serious my illness is. But today I got it straight. I had thought of my problem as simply a prostate tumor, some-

Prognosis

419

thing that could be removed by surgery. Now I understood more fully that my real disease is bone cancer, which accounts for my low blood count. O'Malley had me go to the outpatient clinic, where they took urine and blood samples. He called us back in P'town at 3 P.M. to say that the blood count was a bit low, but it did not call for another blood transfusion immediately. I am to see him again June 28, after another blood test. I came home pretty depressed. Wally was after me to talk about my depression. But I found it difficult. Later in the afternoon Hermine called. Wally was on the phone with her a long time and then called me to the phone. Hermine tried to cheer me up (and cheer herself up too) but by that time my depression was passing anyway. The Nelsons had come for their swim in the bay just as Wally and I had got into our bathing suits and started for the beach. I had my swim. The water was still a little cool, and I got out of breath a little too soon, but I felt better. We showered and had tea with the Nelsons on the terrace. When they left I napped for a short spell before dinner. And I began to feel more clearly the sources of my depression. The most serious one was the discomfort of not only being a sick man, a very hard concept of myself, but more difficult to be perceived as a sick man by my friends and acquaintances. I dread the rumor spreading, "Jack Tworkov is down with incurable bone cancer." I remember my own attitudes towards people with incurable disease. One tends to give them up long before they are ready to give up on themselves. I face the dilemma, shall I or shall I not talk about this openly to my friends. Yesterday Andrew Forges letter, which was the beginning of our correspondence to be used for the Guggenheim catalog, arrived. I had meant to start my reply. But this morning s experience drove my thinking away from the letter, the Guggenheim show, the whole preoccupation with it. Nevertheless, Fm definitely going back into the studio. And Fm sure I'll get around to the letter. Lisa also brought a book full of slides so I can work on the selection of paintings to propose to Linda Shearer. After all it is not death that I fear, but being sick. And so far I have had an almost normal life since the operation, and if it doesn't get much worse I may approach my ideal, even if I can no longer completely achieve it: to die in good health. Which means I must continue to work and to function in a better ratio to my physical health than I did before I knew of my illness.

Letter to Andrew Forge This letter, dated June 30,1981, was part of a dialogue between Tworkov and Andrew Forge, dean of the School of Art and Architecture, Yale University, from 1975 to 1983, to help Forge write a catalogue essay for Jack Tworkov: Fifteen Years of Painting, an exhibition held at the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York in early 1982. Forge's catalogue essay ultimately reflected earlier writings by Tworkov ratherthan directly echoing this correspondence. 8.47

About my thinking about the contrast between Cezanne and Picasso, I don t think of Cezanne as a saint withdrawn from the world. But for whatever reason, perhaps out of frustration, he did withdraw. And his passionate search for an intelligible form was utterly free from attention-getting devices. What I treasure in his work is that the passion which I feel in it is not an overt psychological expression but derives from the intense concentration on the work itself. Its grandeur parallels the severity and seriousness of his search. Nowhere does Cezanne indulge in humour as Picasso did so extravagantly. Picasso is unquestionably the genius. The man who could do anything. And he lived in the world with great vigor and sensuality. He was on stage at all times, and he knocked the world for a loop, and after a while he was convinced by the world itself that his signature was the work of art. And so he was the prototype of the twentieth century, its image, the ruthless, the conquering individual, the overweening ego. And it isn't as if I cant find Picassos to admire, but it is Cezanne who fills my heart with sympathy. My attitude towards the art in the modern world is complex and often contradictory. First of all, its our civilization itself that fills me with despair. For instance, no area in the modern world has been as imaginatively creative as events in the sciences and technology. The automobile, the airplane, the space exploration, the atomic sciences, the camera, the radio, the television, and the discoveries in biology, in physics, are all unsurpassed for imagination and creativity in any other area, certainly unmatched in the arts. Yet what a century it has produced. You can certainly credit it with democratizing large parts of the world, of increasing the material satisfactions of large numbers of people; but when I pick up a newspaper, enter a department store, a supermarket, look at TV, see the advertisements for fashion, soap, cosmetics, and factory food, I despair.

Letter to And rew Forge 421

I long to become an earthworm, a snail, a slug, and get away from humanity. What eats at me is the thought that every art ultimately is the product of its time, and I see that in our time every good leads to corruption. "All that is made perfect by progress perishes also by progress" (Pascal). It does not help me to reflect that thoughtful people in every age felt the same despair about their own time. But the effect of our time has been that the artist has run from the world, whether he reacted politically like the Dadaists and the surrealists or whether he simply hid out in his studio. It s true that in the past the artist was the workman, servant of the church, the king, the rich patron; but the artist believed, or was compelled to share, in the value of his patrons. Thus, he was not enslaved to his own ego. In our time, individualism is held up as the condition of freedom. But the freedom is simply to be spiritually homeless. I agree . . . [that] the audience of past ages ... saw art as icons rather than art, but to a large extent it is true today of the middle-class audience. The icon is "culture." I have sometimes longed for the past because I find so little besides alienation in the present. It is an illusion to believe one can find the spiritual within oneself—the spiritual flowers only in the identification with a world outside oneself—to be a leaf on a tree. The meaning of life: the nurturing of the tree. This is a consciousness that civilization deprives us of.... So for me geometries, however simple and elementary, is a connection with something that exists besides, outside, myself. It is a small comfort, perhaps, indeed; but it is less hypocritical at the moment than the apparent ecstatic self-expression that a more romantic art calls for. Geometries or any systemic order gives me a space for meditation, adumbrates my alienation. There was a period when I felt connected. It was in the late forties and early fifties, the time of the club. It coincided with that short period after World War II when I really believed that, after the sacrifices and horror the world went through, we were embarked on a better world. There were a few years of euphoria. America emerged as a world-saver in spite of the shadow the bomb on Hiroshima had cast on that image. The abstract-expressionist movement, although negative in its rejection of all tradition and especially of the French art of the first half of the century, did reflect this positive element, the postwar euphoria, the sudden feeling of strength both physically and spiritually. As we know, that spirit did not last long. Pop came along with two tongues in its cheek. On the one hand, it took, as the living symbols of American culture, the hot dog and the hamburger—it was hard to know whether in praise or disgust. On the other hand, it revived a form of Dada revolt against art as the dress-up culture of the fathers. Only by then, the middle class, more than ever, was beyond shock or outrage and was led

422

Late Thoughts

by the art market, which dealt primarily in names rather than esthetics. And name-making absorbed a good deal of the energies of the artists. I have sometimes dreamt of painting my hatreds. If I didn t, it was because of the fear that I would end up hating my painting. I've hated films that had the excuse that they were a true reflection of society but which I thought were themselves a contribution to the disease they were trying to depict. The spectator who in front of my paintings will ask, "What does it mean?" has foregone the chance of seeing it. For the only meaning in the painting is in the seeing of it. But that is true in looking at any painting. If you only see the landscape, you are not seeing the painting. If you only see the portrait, you miss the painting. There is an element in painting which I have often referred to as true, by which I mean not truth in a moral sense but the concern similar to that of a good carpenter who supports his eye with the try square and level, on which all other qualities base themselves. The spiritual essence we draw from art is the absence of falseness; it teaches us not only about art but how to judge anything in life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat, from what the preacher says to what the politician says and does. Art can become the true square and level of all things—provided it is itself not askew. It is not beauty that is the first concern of art and certainly not entertainment—but justness. Where justness exists in a work, the artist s personality disappears because the painting is the presence and not the painter. There is another quality in a painting that cannot be described: it is the residue reflected in the painting of the artist s pleasure in the making of it, especially the pleasure, the joy the artist experiences in the stages when the painting uncovers itself to his eyes. This is an internal experience of the artist which the attentive spectator can extract. It is something precious I get from a Cezanne, knowing very well he did not make it for me but it is there for me to have. Trueness and pleasure add up to the most fundamental quality in a painting. If the artist cannot paint himself out of the picture, if he is caught up in attention-getting devices, if he becomes concerned with his effects on the audience, he cannot achieve justness. You can admire his devices but you cannot live with them. You cannot draw joy from them. At their worst such artists exploit the same world as the advertising fabricators: clever, ingenious, eye grabbing, but false. Am I stressing an esthetic morality? I am. Its what I get from Bach, Velazquez, Blake, Cezanne, Mondrian—and is rare in our present. Am I too pessimistic? Not altogether. When I think of the overwhelming numbers of painters, poets, dancers, composers, musicians working in this

Letter to Andrew Forge 423

country and their audiences, I know there is an element that exists outside the sphere of exploiting corporations, bureaucratic politicians, war manufacturers, radio preachers, soap advertisers; and there is just the possibility that when the sharp edge of the crisis comes, they may form the core of an alternate way. For, by and large, the artists are the truth element in society; they are the least likely to use the flag and God falsely.

Diaries, 1981-82 AUGUST 20, THURSDAY, 1981 8.48

Wally and I went to the director of the cemetery. We bought a lot for two. Gave the guy a check for $400. The lot is just on the edge of what is the wellcared-for cemetery. But the director said they hoped to extend the watering lines, etc. Said we could plant a pine tree at the site. Got home glad that we got through with that. Got it off our minds. AUGUST 26, WEDNESDAY

8.49

Very clear day. Too much involved in the painting of the 72 x 72 to go swimming. Wally went before lunch. In the afternoon Wally and I walked on the flats in the direction of the lighthouse. It was least one and a half miles there and back. After all these years I'm still astonished how far out the flats go. After the walk I worked in the studio till dinnertime. AUGUST 27, THURSDAY

8.50

[...] The water has gotten quite cold but not too cold for a good swim, makes a hot shower immediately after a special pleasure. SEPTEMBER 5, SATURDAY

8.51

I picked up Resia and Mira and drove them to Hermines place on Highhead. We walked to the beach with Hermine, Bob and Erik. We watched the huge waves sweeping the shore. The park rangers put up signs to keep cars and people off the beach. We came back and had tea. I got in a talking mood and reminisced about my childhood, about school and college, about Janice and Ford. We saw Bobs drawings and drove home. [...] SEPTEMBER 28, MONDAY

8.52

[...] Worked on 64 x 112. Although up to this point I considered everything I painted as underpainting and the painting is far from what I had in mind for it. I am fascinated with its look now but don t have the courage to leave it like that.

Diaries, 1981-82 425 Fig. 45. Jack Tworkov, January 15,1981. ©Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

OZARK FLT. 533 TO ST. LOUIS (ON THE WAY TO DBS MOINES), DECEMBER 9, 1981

The medium (paint for instance) should have an organic unity with the ultimate appearance and expression of the painting. Yet the more flexible the medium, the more plastic it is, the greater the artists range of expression. A sculptor working with large masses of steel is subject to the medium, to the limits imposed on him by the material, to a much greater degree than a painter working with paint, or a sculptor working with clay. The difference is of course compensated by different possibilities. A proper and just regard and use of the material (which is the medium) is a major esthetic concern in painting.

8.53

SUNDAY, JANUARY 3, 1982

Yesterday Meg Shore came over to listen with us to the broadcast of John Cages Roaratorium to Joyces Finnegans Wake over the public radio at 3 P.M.1

8.54

426

Late Thoughts

It was interesting but not beguiling. In his talk Cage associates himself with Zen and the absence of ego, but an egoless Cage is unthinkable to me. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1982 8.55

[...] Meeting at Hermines to organize a committee to organize visual artists against nuclear armaments. The last six months of his life, Jack Tworkov continued to keep his diary, recording mainly his medical treatments for bone cancer but also his efforts to continue to work in the studio despite pain and weakness. The last entries are marked not only by the day but the minute.

Fig. 46. JackTworkov's studio and work table, Black Mountain College, summer 1952. Photo: Robert Rauschenberg© Robert Rauschenberg/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Diaries, 1981-82

427

APRIL 26

Namuth came with an assistant with trunks full of expensive equipment and cameras and spent about two hours setting up, taking hundreds of photographs of me, moving around the studio, never posing. THURSDAY, MAY 13,

8.56

1982

This has been one of the better days for me. No pain at all. More mentally awake. Spend much less time resting. Attended to various chores. At 4 P.M. Michael Jacobs came to interview me. He is doing a book on art colonies all over the world. He just returned from Provincetown. We talked about my first stay from 1923 to 1935. And my return in the middle 508.1 talked a lot about Dickinson. It's become a passion with me.

8.57

SUNDAY, JULY 11, 1982, 9:45 P.M.

I passed last night fairly free of pain and I had not taken any painkillers. [...] I dreamed weird dreams. But one dream that seemed to last most of the night consisted in going over exactly the moves in the studio that I had to go thru today working on the Expansion and Contraction of the Square. Only the same moves repeated themselves again and again to the point of exhaustion.

8.58

THURSDAY, AUGUST 5, 1982, 9:15 P.M.

[. . .] O'Malley prescribed a new drug, a mixture of Morphine and Cocaine in a pint bottle of liquid. Cant be much morphine or cocaine in it. Wally and Helen had to go to Orleans to get it. The prescription calls for two teaspoons every four hours during severe pain. So far the only pain I get is lying down. I get up before the pain gets severe and it goes away fairly soon after. [...] Worked in the studio an hour before and an hour after lunch, getting ready to start on the three Circle in the Square paintings, each 40 x 35. Jack Tworkov's last entry in his diary was dated Sunday, August 15,1982,8:30 P.M., his eighty-second birthday. He died at his home in Provincetown on September4,1982.

8.59

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Notes Introduction 1. Tve been self-conscious about the poverty of my speaking voice, and decided to practice reading aloud, and so came across a copy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' And I came to the passage which is introduced by these lines, Him God beholding from his prospect high, / Wherein past, present, future, he beholds, / Thus to his only Son foreseeing spake. / 'Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage / Transports our adversary? . . . ' I had only intended to exercise my voice but by the time I finished Gods speech, I caught the sense of the verse and tears were streaming from my eyes, and my voice broke in sobs." Tworkov, "T Notes," June 6,1957. The passage is from book III. 2. Stanley Kunitz, "Jack Tworkov," Provincetown Arts, August 1985, 5. 3. In a September 17, 1936, letter to Tworkov, the independent publisher Paul Grabbe (1902-1999), a Russian-born American writer, expresses his regret and his hope that Tworkov will be able to resume work on the manuscript later on. 4. Jack Tworkov, interview by Dorothy Seckler, August 17,1962, Provincetown, Mass., Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. 5. "The charter members of The Club . . . met informally at Ibram Lassaws studio for the purpose of finding a meeting place The artists who met at Lassaws studio included Giorgio Cavallon, Peter Grippe, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Landes Lewitin, Conrad Marca-Relli, Philip Pavia, Milton Resnick, Ad Reinhardt, James Rosati, Ludwig Sander, Joop Sanders, and Jack Tworkov (and the dealer Charles Egan). Elaine de Kooning and Mercedes Matter also attended but were not considered charter members because they were women; such was the masculine ethos of the time"; Irving Sandier, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 27-28. See also, Philip Pavia, Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007). 6. Jack Tworkov, interview with Jessie Gifford, November 1976. 7. Sandier, A Sweeper-Up, 31. 8. See 3.15 and 3.254. 9. Irving Sandier, "The Club," originally published in Artforum, September 1965, and reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5310. Jack Tworkov, interview with Irving Sandier, Provincetown, Mass., August 11,1957; quoted by Sandier in A Sweeper-Up, 32. Sandier also quotes Tworkov's writings on the Club, 35. 11. See 3.2. 12. Barnett Newman "Interview with Emile de Antonio," Burnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O'Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990), 303.

430

Notes to pages xiv-xxi ii

13. See Ann Eden Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1990). 14. Tworkov, interview with Sandier. 15. See 3.104. 16. Elaine de Kooning, The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: Braziller, 1994), 159-63. For his part, Reinhardt wrote in a chronology, "1949 Heckles Artists Club every Friday as the 'De Kooning Verein Klub"'; Pavia, Club Without Walls, 146. 17. See 3.220. 18. Ibid. 19. See 3.60. 20. Stephanie Terenzio, introduction to The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), v-vi. For more on how artists who write try to distance themselves from the identity writer, see Mira Schor, "Afterword: Painting and Language/Painting Language," Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 204-14 and nn. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 235-37. 21. Tworkov, undated note and 3.124. 22. Tworkov, interview with Gifford. 23. Tworkov, undated note. 24. See 3.214. 25. "By Jack Tworkov," Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 1928-1982 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1987), 127-45. 26. Jack Tworkov, "Letter to Andrew Forge" (see 8.47), quoted in Schor, "Preface," Wet, xiv; "Bonnards Ants," ibid., 140. 27. Mira Schor, "Modest Painting" appeared in an edited version in Art Issues 66 (January-February 2001); a longer version is included in Schor, A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2009). 28. Joseph Cornell to Jack Tworkov, April i, 1955. 29. Schor, "Introduction," Decade of Negative Thinking. 30. Louis Finkelstein, "Tworkov: Radical Pro," Art News 63 (April 1964), 32-35, 52-54; quotation on 54. 31. Tworkov, undated note. 32. Tworkov, undated note. 33. See 3.9534. Tworkov, undated typescript. 35. Kunitz, "Jack Tworkov." 36. See 3.13. 37. Tworkov, interview with Seckler. 38. See 3.39. 39. Edward Bryant concluded his catalogue essay on Tworkov with a quotation from Tworkov s conclusion to "The Wandering Soutine." Bryant, Jack Tworkov (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1964), exhibition catalogue, 20. The catalogue established a pattern followed in later catalogues of referencing Tworkovs writings and including a selection of excerpts, "Statements by the Artist," 48-49.

Notes to pages xxiv~5

431

40. Jack Tworkov, quoted in "WPA and After" Newsweek, August 5,1963, 66. 41. See 8.4. Ellipsis in original. 42. Elizabeth Frank, "Jack Tworkov" Jack Tworkov: Paintings 1930-1981 (New York: Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1991), exhibition catalogue, unpaginated. 43. Tworkov, interview with Seckler. 44. Richard Armstrong, "Jack Tworkov's Faith in Painting," Jack Tworkov Paintings, 1928-1982 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1987), exhibition catalogue, 21. See also "Jack Tworkovs Still Lifes," Charles Egan Gallery, New York, October 25-November 15, 1947; "Attractions in the Galleries," New York Times, October 24, 1947, 24; Margaret Breuning, "Fifty-seventh Street in Review: Tworkov at Egan," Art Digest 22 (November !> !947)> 2°; Carlyle Burrow, "Art of the Week: Jack Tworkov at Egan Gallery," New York Herald, November 2,1947, VI. 45. See, for example, Thomas Hess, "U.S. Art, Note from 1960," Art News 58 (January 1960), 24-29, 56-58; Dore Ashton, "Some Lyricists in the New York School," Art News and Review 10 (November 22,1958), 2-3; and 3.114. 46. See 3.106. 47. "If I thought of an artists work as your reviewer thinks of mine that it is based on nothing more than 'pleasant ambiguity' I wouldn't wrap that thought up in a vomit of sweet praise. I'd serve it straight. May I also suggest that the labors of reading titles (wrongly by the way—'Earth' for 'Land') and reading paintings, should be more differentiated. The latter requires a totally different kind of literacy, useful to those who hope to writing about painting"; unpublished and perhaps unsent letter to Art Digest, April 7,1954, in response to Martica Sawin, "Fortnight in Review: Jack Tworkov," Art Digest 28 (April i, 1954), 20-21. 48. See 6.44. 49. Sam Hunter, "USA," in Marcel Brion and others, Art Since 1945 (New York: Abrams, 1958), 325-26; see 3.101. 50. Hunter, "USA," 325. 51. See 6.38. 52. Jack Tworkov, from a statement for a self-titled exhibition of paintings at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in Detroit, April 25-May 19,1967. 53. Gerhard Richter, "Notes 1985," Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Cambridge: MIT Press, i995)> 121. 54. Fairfield Porter, "Communication and Moral Commitment," Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975, ed. Rackstraw Downes (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland, 1979), 144. 55. James Schuyler, "Reviews and Previews: Jack Tworkov," Art News 57 (January 1959), 10. 56. Kunitz, "Jack Tworkov." "I Was Born Yakov Tworkovsky" i. The last few words can be deciphered a number of ways: has meaning is crossed out; the following word could be read as is, in, or as.

432 Notes to pages 9-21 "Notes on My Painting" i. "As early as 1921, when the Brooklyn Museum staged an exhibition of French painting which included fourteen Cezanne canvases and twelve by Matisse, many local painters had been overwhelmed. Jack for one never forgot the impact of Cezanne, whose 'anxieties and difficulties' came to mean more to him than Matisse's liberty and sophistication"; Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 27. See also "The World of Art: More French Work," New York Times, April 10,1921. Given Tworkovs lifelong special admiration for Cezanne and that he was a self-confessed addict to the Times, he may have read this article as a young man: "Cezanne, with his planes of color, builds up a universe of his own which obeys the laws of the universe of which he is part. What the Gothic builders tried to do with the medieval cathedral, he is trying to do with the materials of the painter." Letters to Wally Tworkov, 1936-37 1. Harold Ickes (1874-1952) was secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1946 and was a prominent figure in the formulation, implementation, and defense of New Deal policies. In 1936 Alfred Landon was the Republican Party candidate for the presidency, an opponent of governmental regulations on industry and Wall Street. In the speech cited, Ickes lambasted Landon for having taken two sides of the major social issues of the time and for apologizing for his more progressive views earlier in his political career. See "Ickes Contrasts Views of Landon" and "Text of Secretary Ickes s Radio Reply to Governor Landon and Colonel Knox," New York Times, August 4,1936. See also "Landon Platform Assailed by Ickes," New York Times, June 19, 1936, and "Ickes Says Hearst Is Republican Boss and Landons Guide," and "Text of Ickess Address," New York Times, August 28,1936. 2. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), between the Second Spanish Republic and fascist elements of the Spanish army, led by future dictator Francisco Franco, deeply engaged the left in the United States and around the world. International brigades were sent from many countries, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which included many Americans. The Spanish Civil War was seen then and thereafter as a prelude to and rehearsal for the wider conflict waged in the Second World War between fascism and both communism and Enlightenment-based democratic ideals. See 2.4. 3. Wally Tworkovs bankbook (as Rachel Wolodofsky) from January 1937 to March 1938 indicates that her highest balance during that period was fiftythree dollars, the lowest one dollar. Mark Baum and his wife, Celia, were close friends of the Tworkovs in those years. Celia was a schoolteacher, Mark a furrier, a seasonal occupation that allowed him to work as an artist. The friendship ended abruptly one evening in an angry shouting match about politics. They never saw each other again. See 7.83. 4. WPA Federal Theater Project in New York, 1935-36, A Living Newspaper Production. Scenes from the newspapers were enacted in an agitprop style of theater. For images see the New Deal Network, http://www.newdeal.feri.org/ library/t5O.htm. The identity of Massa is unknown.

Notes to pages 21-24 433 5. Though Tate had only recently acquired Benfolly, he seems to have run it as a fantasy of decaying southern gentility. The reminiscences of several visitors that summer suggest a cross between a Lillian Hellman play of the postbellum South and a Frank Capra movie such as You Cant Take It With You. Tate described the hothouse atmosphere of that summer: "My wife Caroline Gordon, with one idiotic servant, ran the precariously balanced menage. Ford could eat French food only, but Ida, with the occasional assistance of her mother Electra, the washerwoman, could not even cook Tennessee, much less French. Ford was unhappy in the 95°F. but every morning he paced the columned gallery—which had nothing but the earth to support it—and dictated to Mrs. Tworkov several pages of The March of Literature'-, quoted in Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2, The After-War World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 508-10. Caroline Gordon described Wally Tworkov: "She is a pretty, modest child (one of those half-dozen typical Jewish faces you see so often in New York). A rabid Communist [,] she asked me shyly the other day 'How wise would it be to have the Daily Worker sent to me here? I cant live without it.' I think she thought she might be ridden off of Benfolly on a rail if caught with a copy of the Worker. It would be impossible if she were at all like Janice but she is really a sweet child and very agreeable. Wife of Janice's brother Jack, whom I can live a long time without meeting"; quoted ibid. Wally Tworkovs gentle reminiscences of that summer, when she was twenty-one years old, provide the final voice: "In the spring of 1937,1 accompanied Ford and Janice on their visit to the Tates in Clarksville, Tennessee, not so far from Vanderbilt University, where so many of the figures in the Agrarian and Fugitive movements were teaching, many of whom we met in the Tates' living room, usually on Sunday afternoons over mint juleps. . . . And I was to discover, after a week of lunches, when visitors were the most frequent, that the animated talk around the table was not about the Spanish Civil War which was then taking place and which was preoccupying most of my friends in New York, but about the Civil War between the States. But Ford and I went about our business for part of the day and Janice painted"; The Presence of Ford Madox Ford: A Memorial Volume of Essays, Poems, and Memoirs, ed. Sondra J. Stang (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 216. 6. In 1937 efforts to curtail the congressional budget included proposed cuts to the WPA. These were met by widespread protests from WPA organizations, worker groups, and unions. See "WPA Offices Here Picketed by 6000 Scoring Fund Cut," New York Times, May 23,1937. 7. Dance group created by Charles Weidman (1901-1975), dancer, choreographer, and teacher, a pioneer of modern American dance. 8. A conference of the American Artists' Congress was held at Town Hall and at the New School for Social Research in February 1936. This exhibition may have developed out of that conference. See Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 63-64.

434 Notes to Pages 34~45 Journals and Diaries, 1947-63 1. See Introduction, this volume, text at note 44. 2. The date of this entry would indicate that the reference is to the crisis in Palestine over partition and the creation of the State of Israel. 3. [Dorothy Sieberling], "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Life, August 8,1949,42-45. 4. See 3.65, 3.67, and 3.68, about Tworkovs work, The Father, 1954. See also dream related in 7.69. 5. Tworkovs interest in the Odyssey led to an important exhibition on the theme of "The Hero" at the Egan Gallery, March 3-31,1952. See Fairfield Porter, Review, Art News 51 (March 1952), 44: "Among the Abstract expressionists' Tworkov is one of the more deliberate and intellectual." See also James Fitzsimmons, "Fifty-Seventh Street in Review: Jack Tworkov," Art Digest 26 (March 15,1952), 22. 6. Panel as described in Irving Sandier, "The Club," originally published in Artforum, September 1965, and reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). In Philip Pavia, Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007), the panel is dated February 22, George McNeil is described as James McNeil, and the lead subject is "Conversation with Lionel Abel" (168). 7. Panel as described in Sandier, "The Club." In Pavia, Club Without Walls, Barnett Newman, Elaine de Kooning, and Ray Hendler are also mentioned as panelists and Cage is not included (170). The following excerpt is the first of four from Tworkovs early journals that were published in It Is, no. 4 (Autumn 1959), 12-13, as Cahier (contents page) and "Four Excerpts from a Journal"; see 3.254. The version of this section published in It Is ends slightly differently from the version in the journal: "These topics have not been touched upon yet at the Club." In Pavia, Club Without Walls this text is included as a "Letter to Editor" (181). This reference is inaccurate. 8. Herman Rose (1909-2007), a realist painter of cityscapes and still lifes but also associated with Abstract Expressionist painters. He showed at Charles Egan Gallery in the early 19508. Others at the dinner party are unidentifiable. 9. The identity of B. is unknown. 10. Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), German existentialist philosopher who contributed to the early development of psychiatry. His book Existentialism and Humanism: Three Essays, ed. Hanns E. Fischer, trans. E. B. Ashton, was published in 1952 (New York: R. F. Moore). Alfred H. Barr, Jr., quoted Jaspers to describe the work of the painters in The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958-1959 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), exhibition catalogue: "Confronting a blank canvas they attempt 'to grasp authentic being by action, decision, a leap of faith,' to use Karl Jaspers' Existentialist phrase" (16). 11. In his third exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1952 Tworkov exhibited paintings that carried the theme of the Hero in Homer s Odyssey. "Sacra"

Notes to pages 46-58 435 probably refers to the Via Sacra, the main street of ancient Rome, which lead to the Colosseum. This title is consistent with this group of paintings in this series. Other paintings in this series were titled House of the Sun, Nausica, Sirens, Girls on the Phaeadan Shore, and The Hero. Whether this painting retained the title Sacra is unknown, as is its current location. 12. The identity of L.R. is unknown. 13. This is the second of four excerpts published in It Is, no. 4. The published version has slightly differently wording and punctuation from the journal, and though dated correctly, this is presented in It Is as the last of the four selections. 14. This is the third of four excerpts published in It Is, no. 4. 15. This is the last of four excerpts published in It Is, no. 4. 16. This entry appears as a "Carrier Leaf," in the first issue of It Is, unnumbered on the cover or inside page, Spring 1958, 25. The initials R.P. are shortened to R. in the published version, among other small changes in wording and paragraph breaks. See 3.252. 17. R.P. is Raymond Parker (1922-1990), a New York School Abstract Expressionist painter. Parker was one of the artists who responded to the 1959 Art News survey "Is There a New Academy?" His response shared a page with Tworkovs; see 3.255. 18. In the published version "evade" was changed to "obey." In one of the copies of this issue of It Is in Tworkov s archive the word "obey" has been crossed out in ballpoint pen and the word "evade" written above it. 19. See 1.2 and fig. 2. 20. Aaron Ben-Shmuel (b. 1903 in New York, d. 1984 Jerusalem) trained and worked as a stone carver and sculptor in stone, but later changed to abstract painting. Jackson Pollock studied with him in his studio in Greenwich Village in 1933. He attended the first meeting of the Club but dropped out, according to Sandier, "The Club," 49. Tworkov states in this entry that he has started this new notebook in August 1953 in order to create a writing space that would be separate from his first journal and more appropriate for the record of experiences like his conversation with Ben Shmuel. I have chosen to redact the account of this conversation with the earthy Ben-Shmuel, a frank but rather rambling one about sex. 21. At a later time Tworkov annotated this entry in the margin with "Probably Harold Rosenberg s apt." This annotation was probably made on May 30, 1960, when Tworkov recorded going over his journals and papers and also annotated 3.50. See 3.170. 22. Helen Boyd (late nineteenth century-19708), a dear friend of the Tworkovs and of Biala. A suffragette who left her husband and small children in Ohio around 1920 and moved to Greenwich Village, where she lived a bohemian life. She returned to Ohio to run her family's farm, but she and Wally continued a long correspondence about literature, and Helen Tworkov was named after her. Other references in this entry are to Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989, nee Fried), a painter whom the Tworkovs had known since the late 19308—at some point Jack and Wally Tworkov shared a loft with friends, in the same building where Elaine Fried and Milton Resnick were living together, before

436 Notes to pages 59-62 Elaine married Willem de Kooning; Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999), a Swissborn photographer, filmmaker, and painter who took many renowned photographs of the work and studios of New York School artists, including for a 19508 series in Art News, " Paints a Picture" (see fig. 10); Thomas Hess (1920-1978), the longtime editor of Art News and a major champion of the New York School who wrote about Tworkov several times (see also 7.83 and notes); John Cage; the West Coast painter Morris Graves (1910-2001); the abstract painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976); and Franz Kline (1910-1962), the noted Abstract Expressionist painter and close friend of Tworkov. There is no record of Tworkov s having written the proposed catalogue essay he mentions. 23. As Tworkov indicates here, there seems to have been an aesthetic rather than a personal animus between Ad Reinhardt (1918-1967) and himself that reflected the often vigorously expressed ideological differences between the geometric and the expressionist abstract factions of the New York School. I discuss this in my introduction. See also 3.104,3.252,3.256, and 3.268. 24. Dayround, oil on canvas, 79" x 69" (1953), was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art 1953 Annual of Contemporary American Painting, October i5-December 6,1953. The catalogue, like others from the early and mid-1950s, is a modest pamphlet with a few black-and-white reproductions, a checklist, and all the artists' home or studio addresses listed in the back, including the addresses of Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston, among many others. It gives a touching reflection of a smaller and more provincial art world than developed in later years. Lawrence Campbell would revisit Dayround in his review of Tworkov s exhibit at Egan Gallery, March 16-April 10,1954, "Reviews and Previews: Jack Tworkov," Art News 53 (April 1954), 42. 25. Joseph Glasco (1929-1986), abstract artist, in later years based in Galveston, Texas, influenced a younger generation of artist including Julian Schnabel. 26. Esteban Vicente (1903-2001), Spanish-born abstract painter, was a close friend of Tworkov s in the 19508; they had many good friends in common, including Stanley Kunitz and Elise Asher; Wally Tworkov and Estebans then-wife Theresa were close friends. 27. "Bill" is Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), considered the central figure of the expressionist faction of the New York School, whose central meeting place was the Eighth Street Club, described in 3.15. Hess was a major supporter of de Kooning s work. 28. Tworkov is probably referring to the Picasso show in November 1953 at Curt Valentin Gallery, like the Bucholz Gallery, on 57th Street. See Howard Devree, "In Modern Veins: The Recent Variety of Work by Picasso—Miros Fantasy—Nordfelt," New York Times, November 29,1953. 29. Christian Wolff, American composer born in France in 1934, was associated with modern, experimental composers including John Cage and Morton Feldman. 30. The identities of George P. and the woman whose name is crossed out are unknown. In pencil Tworkov annotated this section, to the right of the first sentence, "85 - 4th Ave" and below that "May 31 - 60." This was the address

Notes to pages 64-76 437 where Tworkov and Willem de Kooning had adjoining studios between 1948 and 1954. 31. In the early 19508 Tworkov socialized a lot with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cage, and Merce Cunningham. Cage and Tworkov were later part of a group of artists in different media who participated as invited artists in a series of lectures and performances, "Contemporary Voices in the Arts," sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts in 1967; see "Contemporary Voices in the Arts" in Part IV, this volume. The February 2, 1954, meeting with Cage was significant enough to Tworkov that the journal entry was developed from a preliminary note written the same day, "Notes of a conversation with C." 32. Pat was a favorite model of Tworkov s; her last name is unknown. 33. Roberta "Bobby" Pansier Alford, after working in the Education Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, served at Rhode Island School of Design as the acting director of the RISD Museum from 1949 to 1952. Their conversation about Mies Van der Rohe was first recorded in a separate note with slightly different wording. 34. George Rickey (1907-2002), American abstract, kinetic sculptor. Rickey taught design at Indiana University from 1949 to 1955. Alton Pickens (19171991), American Surrealist-satirical genre painter, taught art at Indiana and later at Vassar College. 35. Tworkov may be establishing a link here between the aesthetic program of modernist artists' groups such as De Stijl and, by extension, the Bauhaus, and what he may have considered the overly stark or utilitarian nature of the more run-of-the-mill modernist skyscrapers being built in New York City in the postwar era. However, he was interested in modernist architecture and he greatly valued his friendship with I. M. Pei. 36. Danny Robins, June, Sue, and Rachel were all students of Tworkov s at Indiana University, where he had taught the previous summer. Most of the other names mentioned here cannot be identified. 37. Probably Estelle Faulkner (nee Oldham), wife of the novelist William Faulkner. The Faulkners lived in Oxford; their home was eventually sold to the University of Mississippi after their deaths. Tworkov s somewhat feverish reportage of the social scene during his stay in Oxford seems influenced by Faulkner, as if he felt that he had fallen into a Faulkner novel, with a comic twist. It is nice to think that Mrs. Faulkner took a painting course with Tworkov during his visit to Oxford. 38. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French philosopher and political thinker, an influential interpreter of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He taught philosophy at Princeton University from 1948 to 1952 and lived there until 1960. 39. Tworkov s dealer Charlie Egan, his beautiful young wife, Teresa, and their baby son Kevin. Tworkov dedicated his 1956 children's book, Tigers Dont Bite, to Kevin. See "Dear Erik," n. i. 40. Hermon More (1887-1968) was the director of the Whitney Museum from 1948 to 1958. Philip Guston also requested that his painting be removed from the 1955 Annual—but only two weeks before it closed—for the same reason

438 Notes to pages 77-80 as Tworkov, as evidenced by a February 10,1955, letter from More to Guston that clearly alludes to Tworkovs letter and gives some explanation for the oversight in the curating of the "New Decade": "Dear Mr. Guston: If your letter of January 2ist was the first of its kind you have written, it was the second received by the Museum during its 24 years of existence requesting the removal of a painting from an exhibition. The other letter was from a member of the same gallery group to which you belong. I mention this because it is evident that the proprietor of your gallery is not authorized to represent you. Mr. Egan understood that artists to be included in the New Decade show would not be included in the later exhibition because in our estimation your reputation was made before 1945. Knowing these circumstances if Egan had refused our invitation to the Annual, a great deal of embarrassment might have been avoided." Letters from the Hermon More folder in the Whitney Museum Library. See The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors, ed. John I. H. Bauer, with research by Rosalind Irvine (New York: Macmillan, 1955). 41. I do not want to take a guess at identifying K.: it could be Franz Kline, but it also sounds more like what Tworkov might have thought of de Kooning at that time. R. more clearly seems to refer to Rauschenberg. 42. "Jack Tworkov Painting," Stable Gallery, April 15-May 4,1957. 43. William Calfee (1909-1995) was a painter, muralist, and sculptor who taught at American University in Washington, D.C., where Tworkov taught during summers from 1948 through 1951 and returned as a visitor over the decades. In the 19508 Donald Blinken (b. 1925) was in the retail clothing business and was an arts patron. He studied in some of the private classes Tworkov taught in his studio. He later was the director of the board of trustees of the Mark Rothko Foundation at the same time as Tworkov. Blinken was named U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 1994 through 1997. His art collection includes some major works by Tworkov, including Blue Cradle. 44. Joe Summerford, a.k.a. Ben Summerford (b. 1924). An abstract painter, Summerford studied at American University with such artists as William Calfee, who later was his colleague. He was chairman of the AU Art Department and cofounder of the Jefferson Place Gallery in 1957, where Tworkov had a drawing exhibition in March-April 1957. Along with his colleagues and likeminded curators at the Phillips Collection, Summerford was instrumental in bringing modern art to Washington, D.C. He had studied with Karl Knaths, something he shared with Tworkov, who had been close to Knaths in the early 19308. "I have also worked with Jack Tworkov," Summerford told the Washington Post. "I was less influenced by his painting, but by him as an individual. He is a great intellectual. He taught me a great deal about painting and the nature and experience of art. He conditioned and formed my mind"; Ben Summerford, interview with Leslie Judd Ahlander, "An Artist Speaks: Joe Summerford," Washington Post, August 19,1962. 45. George McNeil (1908-1995), American abstract and neoexpressionist painter.

Notes to pages 83-85 439 46. Group Exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery. According to Howard Devree's article "Old East, New Art," New York Times, April 7, 1957, the Motherwell painting that Tworkov admired is an "Elegy to the Spanish Revolution." 47. New Directions in Prose and Poetry, no. 16 (New York: New Directions, 1957). Tworkov refers to this issue in 6.7. 48. Eleanor Ward (1912-1984), founder of the Stable Gallery. Its first location, in a converted stable on Seventh Avenue south of Central Park, was one of the first rough spaces turned into an art gallery, with a ground-floor ramp still in place, whitewashed brick walls, and a big space in the basement. Tworkov showed at the Stable Gallery from 1954 to 1958. 49. "Paintings by Jack Tworkov," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, December 1-29,1957. 50. Jan Muller (1922-1958), German-born painter who settled in New York in 1941; he studied with Hans Hofmann and moved toward a figuration informed by abstract expressionism in the years before his death. Claire James is the maiden name of Muller s wife; she, too, is an artist, better known as Dody Muller. 51. Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a founding member of the Eighth Street Club; "Michel Tapier" is probably Michel Tapie (1909-1987), a French critic, curator and art collector associated with Tachism; Paul Jenkins is an American Abstract Expressionist painter (b. 1913); John Hultberg (1922-2005) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter who showed at the Martha Jackson Gallery; Klement is unidentified. De Kooning was then involved with Ruth Kligman, who had been Pollocks girlfriend at the time of his death. 52. See The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). 53. Angelo Ippolito (1922-2001), Italian-born American Abstract Expressionist who exhibited that year at the Bertha Schaeffer Gallery; Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923), Canadian-born American artist associated with Abstract Expressionism and later, notably, with feminism, whose show Miriam Schapiro: New Work was at the Andre Emmerich Gallery; Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), noted American Abstract Expressionist painter. 54. For years Tworkov had work in storage at Santini Brothers, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This reception at the warehouse was to view Tworkovs paintings and their crates before they were shipped to Europe as part of The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958-1959. See n. 130. 55. The painter James Brooks (1906-1992) was one of the first generation of the New York School. Like Tworkov, in the mid- to late 19508 he exhibited his work at the Stable Gallery. Brooks was married to the artist Charlotte Park. See fig. 14. 56. Samuel Beckett's Endgame opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York on January 28,1958. 57. Paul Brach (1924-2007), American abstract artist, part of the younger gen-

440 Notes to pages 85-87 eration that joined the New York School social scene in the 19508. He was married to painter Miriam Schapiro. Brach was the dean of the School of Art at CalArts when I was a graduate student there: he could do an amazingly accurate imitation of Tworkov s distinctive voice and intonation. In fact, it was his vocal impression that made me fully aware of the unique and compelling subtleties of Tworkov s speech patterns, which I had up to that point naturalized. 58. My parents, Resia and Ilya Schor, were Polish artists who had managed to flee Europe and arrive in New York in 1941. Among their friends were highly accomplished European Jews, many of whom had been forced to leave a series of countries whose languages they spoke fluently: Russian, German, then French, finally English, which they spoke wittily and with charming accents. See 6.32 and note 20; 3.183. 59. Tworkovs comment here is a good example of the extent to which each notebook had a separate purpose and identity, with "Notes 54-63" generally meant to be more purely about aesthetics and philosophy, rather than about personal matters. 60. Casper Citron was a radio talk show host in New York City for four decades, working on WNYC, WQXR, and WOR, interviewing a wide variety of artists, writers, and politicians. His mother, Minna Citron (1896-1991), was a painter and graphic artist and an early feminist, whose work included social realist genre paintings from the Depression era and mural paintings for the WPA Mural Project. Tworkov was also interviewed on radio December i, 1958, on a broadcast of University Roundtable on WFUV-FM; he was joined by James Brooks to speak about "Looking at and Understanding Modern Painting." 61. Bob and Jap are Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Tworkov first met Rauschenberg around 1951, before the summer they were together at Black Mountain College in 1952. Hermine Ford recalls the first time Rauschenberg visited their home, with Cy Twombly. She writes, "They had just returned from a trip to North Africa and were wearing beautiful 'desert boots' They were both beautiful, charming, and charismatic beyond compare. We were all enchanted" (e-mail to Mira Schor, July 31, 2008). Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) was a German avant-garde electronic composer. Emile de Antonio (1919-1989) was a director and producer of several major film documentaries including Point of Order (1964) and Painters Painting (1972), a major film about the New York School. He had many artist friends. Kay Harris was a photographer who took important photos of Rauschenberg in his studio on Front Street in New York, with the goat in Monogram and other combines of the time. Earle Brown (1926-2002) was an American avant-garde composer; his wife, Carolyn Brown, was a major dancer with Merce Cunninghams company (see my introductory note to "Contemporary Voices in the Arts, 1967" in Part IV). David Tudor (1926-1996) was an American avantgarde pianist and composer. He performed works by Stockhausen, Brown, Cunningham, and John Cage, among others. Rauschenberg s series 34 Drawings/or Dantes Inferno is now in the collection of MoMA. 62. Sam Hunter, "USA," in Marcel Brion and others, Art Since 1945 (New York: Abrams, 1958), 325-26. Tworkov consistently refers to this book as "Painting

Notes to pages 87-92 441 since 1945." Hunter was then the acting director at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. See Introduction n. 49, this volume. 63. Dore Ashton, "Art: Tworkovs Drawings on Display; Stable Gallery Offers a One-Man show" New York Times, December 2,1958. 64. See 3.25365. "Tworkov: Exhibition of Drawings," Stable Gallery, November-December 1958. It Is, no. 2 (Autumn 1958), "Statement," 15, color reproduction of Games III, 17 (caption is "Untitled"). One black-and-white reproduction (captioned as "Untitled") appears on the same page as Philip Gustons The Clock (1957), 7; the second is a full-page reproduction, 38. See Ashton, "Art"; James Schuyler, "Reviews and Previews: Jack Tworkov," Art News 57 (January 1959), 10; Thomas Hess, "The Cultural-Gap Blues," Art News 57 (January 1959), 2225, 61-62. Hess, in this review of the Guggenheim International Award exhibition, the Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition of Sculpture, Painting, Watercolors, and Drawings, and the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie, praises a number of artists, including Tworkov and other luminaries of the New York art world; compared with artists from around the world who imitate the style of the New York school without the spirit, Hess writes, the New Yorkers stand out "like real actors in front of a fake cyclorama-sky" (24). Hess singles out Tworkovs Red Lake for praise (reproduction, 23). 66. Priscilla Morgan worked for a Hollywood public relations firm. She maintained friendships with a number of New York artists, including Tworkov and Biala. Evelyn Hofer (b. 1937), German-born photographer, a friend of Richard Lindner (1901-1978), German-born American painter. Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a noted social and literary critic and novelist, author of The Group, published in 1963. 67. Tworkov did not rename Days End, 1958-59. It was in the collection of Mrs. Rufus King and was sold at auction at Christies, New York, September 2003, sale 1269, lot 21. Current owner and location are unknown. 68. Wilfred Zogbaum (1915-1965) was an American sculptor, an early student of Hans Hofmann in the 19308, later a friend and neighbor at the Springs of de Kooning. Later he was part of the circle around the formation of Artforum in San Francisco. See Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974 (New York: Soho, 2000). Martha Vivas was his second wife. In 1959 Philip Guston "leaves teaching profession (until 1973) after receiving $10,000 Fellowship from Ford Foundation": Chronology, in Michael Auping and others, Philip Guston Retrospective (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth with Thames and Hudson, 2003), 249. According to Hermine Ford, Devon Meade was a painter and sculptor and women's activist. Bill Hardy was her husband. Ruth Kligman had been with Jackson Pollock when he died. 69. Dore Ashton, "Some Lyricists in the New York School," Art News and Review 10 (November 22,1958), 2-3. According to an annotation by Wally Tworkov on the typescript of this letter, the letter was unsent. Adja Yunkers (19001983), Latvian or Russian-born American abstract painter, was married to Dore Ashton.

442 Notes to pages 96-106 70. Jack Tworkov, Stable Gallery; see 6.11. 71. Vivie Rankine (or Vivi, or V. V. Rankine; b. 1924) was an American painter who lived for many years in Washington, D.C. In her early years she was married to a British diplomat. She had been to Black Mountain College in the 19408 and showed her work at Betty Parsons Gallery for many years. She was a collector of Tworkovs work. Tworkov spelled her first and last names differently in the many references to her over the years. Arne Eckstrom was a Swedish-born New York art dealer. The Cordier-Ekstrom Gallery (with partner Daniel Cordier) for many years was located in the same building as Parke Bernet (later Sotheby's) when it was on Madison Avenue. Michel Warren, of the Galerie Michel Warren, was a Paris-based art dealer. 72. There is no record of something on this subject appearing in It Is: the fifth issue in 1960 was followed by only one more issue, in 1965, focusing on sculpture. 73. The Pinkersons were neighbors of the Tworkovs' in Provincetown. Fritz Bultman (1919-1985), a New Orleans-born American abstract painter and student of Hans Hofmann, spent many years in a house on Miller Hill Road with his wife, Jean. "Franz" is Franz Kline, whom the Tworkovs saw a lot of, especially when he chose to buy a house in Provincetown rather than follow de Kooning and others to the Hamptons. 74. Arthur Szathmary, a philosophy professor who taught the philosophy of art, also chairman of the Creative Arts Program at Princeton University at the time, which was the precursor of three later programs in creative writing, theater and dance, and visual arts. 75. Between 1953 and the late 19608 Janice Biala and her husband, Daniel Brustlein (Alain), had a house in Peapack, New Jersey, where they spent several months a year, near the house of their dear friends Roger and Loulou Duvoisin. The remainder of their time was spent in Paris. A picture of their studio in Peapack taken by Rudolph Burckhardt appeared in Eleanor Munro, "Biala Paints a Picture," Art News 55 (April 1950), 32-34, 91. They still owned the house into the 19805. 76. Al Bing was a patron of Jack Tworkovs. A small sum that Bing advanced the Tworkovs in lieu of a testamentary bequest enabled them to put a down payment on their house at 30 Commercial Street in Provincetown. 77. The estrangement that Tworkov refers to was not specific to any one event but rather was a malaise that affected their generally cordial relationship; personality differences contributed to the rift, as did a critical environment in which their work was competitively evaluated by such figures as Dore Ashton, Sam Hunter, and Thomas Hess. 78. Barney Rosset (b. 1922) was the founder of Evergreen Review and publisher during its entire history; he was also the publisher of Grove Press from 1949 to 1985. The book project fell through. The identity of Dave is uncertain. 79. "The Philadelphia Panel," organized and moderated by Harold Rosenberg, took place at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in March 1960. See 3.256. 80. Thomas Hess, "U.S. Art, Note from 1960," Art News 58 (January 1960), 24-29, 56-58. Of the Whitney Annual he writes, "The Whitney deserves compliments for its eye for cultivated, meditative works. Exceptionally well-chosen

Notes to pages 106-17 443 paintings by Tworkov, Cavallon, and Yunkers make a lyrical little exhibition within the exhibition" (28). A reproduction of Tworkovs Wednesday (1959) is included, 26. See Introduction, this volume, for Tworkovs reaction to terms such as lyricism being associated with his work. See also 3.114, and Ashton, "Some Lyricists in the New York School." 81. William Littlefield (1902-1969), American genre painter. The dues were three dollars a month, or, later, about ten to twelve dollars a year, to help pay for rent and chairs. Irving Sandier, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 30. Contribution amounts are indicated in a handwritten 1952 membership list; Philip Pavia, Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007), 149-56. 82. Mercedes Matter (1913-2001), American-born painter, writer, and founder of the New York Studio School. Matter was an early student of Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League between 1932 and 1935, she worked for the WPA helping Fernand Leger on mural projects in New York, and she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. Pat seems to have been an artists model. The stories make you feel, that, as they say, you had to be there. 83. Paul Burlin (1886-1969), American semiabstract painter. 84. Ad Reinhardt, "Timeless in Asia," Art News 58 (January 1960), 32-35. Reinhardt used the context of a review of the new Asia Society to attack expressionism. 85. Michael Goldberg (1924-2008), American abstract painter, exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960. 86. Guston did attend. See 3.256. 87. I am fairly certain that Tworkov s reference here to "the club" is to the Eighth Street Club, but Pavia, Club Without Walls, stops at 1955 so I cannot confirm that there was a Beat poetry night at the Club in March 1960. 88. Diane di Prima (b. 1934) was a writer of the Beat movement, of which the best known poet was Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Di Prima has lived in northern California for many years, involved with poetry, photography and painting, and healing practices. 89. LeRoi Jones (b. 1934), initially associated with the Beat movement, became, as Amiri Baraka, a major African American author and activist. 90. Nicholas Marsicano (1908-1991), painter and Cooper Union teacher, married to Merle Marsicano, modern dancer and choreographer. 91. The trip was to participate in the Philadelphia Panel (3.256). 92. Herbert Ferber (1906-1991), American Surrealist-inspired abstract sculptor. 93. Kenzo Okada (1902-1982), Japanese-born abstract painter who trained in France and settled in 1950 in New York, where he exhibited his work, including in Whitney Annuals and Betty Parsons Gallery. 94. Tworkov exhibited with the Stable from 1957 through 59. His work was included in a group exhibition at Castelli in 1960 (May 3i-June 25). His first one-person show at Castelli opened February 28, 1961. Tworkov was loyal and deliberate in what was an important career decision to move out of Stable Gallery. It seems that during a transitional period, first Castelli had some paintings, then even after Tworkov was officially under the representation of Castelli Gallery, his affiliation with the Stable continued through a consign-

444 Notes to pages 117-29 ment arranged by Castelli. Letters from Wally Tworkov to Leo Castelli and to Castelli Gallery staff (October 14, 1960, and September 9,1961) refer to "paintings and drawings that were left at the Stable either on consignment or that were out on loan at the time he left" and request that Castelli "be responsible for the fate of paintings in other galleries." See also 6.23, 6.2831, 6.37, 6.39, 6.44. Lee Eastman (1910-1991), entertainment lawyer, friend of and lawyer to a number of artists, in particular de Kooning. See 3.200-203. David was David Prager, Tworkov s friend, lawyer, and a trusted adviser. See 1.2,3.211, 8.4, 8.10, 8.20. 95. Alan Groh (1923-1996) was Eleanor Wards assistant at the Stable Gallery and, until his death, the executor of her estate. 96. Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) was one of the major art dealers and collectors of the twentieth century. Tworkov met her when she and Leo Castelli were still married. They divorced in 1959. See 3.141 and 3.217. 97. "Color," It Is, no. 5 (1960), 4-6; see 3.258. 98. The Italian-born Giorgio Cavallon (1904-1989) and his wife, Linda Lindeberg (1915-1973), were abstract painters and good friends of the Tworkovs'. Cavallon was also a Charter member of the Club. I have included the offhand comment about Lee Krasner (1908-1984), major American Abstract Expressionist painter, because it is revealing of the eras gender norms that Tworkov still referred to Krasner by her married name of Pollock several years after Jackson Pollocks death in 1956. 99. This book with Grove Press is mentioned a number of times but seems to have fallen through. 100. Dore Ashton, "Philip Guston," Evergreen Reviewy September-October 1960, 88-91. 101. Jonathan Williams, American poet (b. 1929), associated with Beat poetry and gay poetry, was at Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. Amen/ Huzza/Selah was published in 1960. 102. Dore Ashton, "Perspectives de la peinture americaine," Cahiers cTArt 33-35 (1960), 203-20; see 6.27 and 6.30. 103. This is a reference to my father, Ilya Schor (1904-1961). A longer reflection on Jack Tworkovs friendship with my father is in 6.32 and note 20. 104. William Seitz and Bernard Karpel, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, distributed by Doubleday, 1961), exhibition catalogue. 105. Calvert Coggeshall (1908-1990), American abstract painter. Tworkov wrote a catalogue essay for a Coggeshall exhibition at Betty Parsons, May 2-20, 1967, and Coggeshall introduced Tworkov when he spoke at RISD April 22, 1980; see 8.24. Elise Asher (1912-2004), a painter and poet, had been married to the painter Nanno de Groot from 1949 to 1957 (see note 121 below). A year later she married the poet Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). They lived at Elises brownstone on West i2th Street and later in an apartment nearby. They hosted many New Year s Eve parties, enough of an annual ritual that when Elise missed one, Tworkov noted it in his diary: "January 5,1970, New York. Decade comes from the root meaning 10. Decadence comes from the root meaning decay. Too bad they don t have the same root, it would make a

Notes to pages 129-32 445

106. 107. 108.

109.

no.

in. 112.

113.

good pun. Elise did not give her New Year s Eve party. We tried to have some people at the house but everyone was engaged. Bob and Hermine had seen enough of us and they spent the evening at home with a few friends. Wally took sick anyway and we could not have gone out and had anyone here. Still it was the first time in many years we spent the evening alone." The Tworkovs and Kunitzes were close friends and also for many years neighbors in Provincetown, after the Kunitzes bought the house at 32 Commercial Street, next door to the Tworkovs at 30 Commercial. They are all buried near one another in the Provincetown cemetery. Beatrice Perry (also known as Beattie) had a gallery in Washington, D.C., where her husband was in government. They later lived in New York and were patrons and friends of many artists. Robert C. Scull (1917-1986) and Ethel Scull (1921-2001), major art collectors during the 19608, particularly of pop art. James Rosati (1912-1988), American abstract sculptor, early member of the Club. Rosati taught sculpture at Yale under Tworkovs chairmanship. His work Ideogram (stainless steel, 28' x 23', 1967) was installed in the World Trade Center Plaza and was one of the many public artworks destroyed on September 11, 2001. "Jack Tworkov," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 25May, 1964. Catalogue essay by Edward Bryant, associate curator. This exhibition traveled to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in D.C., the Pasadena Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and the Poses Institute of Fine Arts, Brandeis University. Jim Forsberg (1919-1991), American abstract painter. Forsberg was a Hofmann student and later lived in Provincetown, serving as chairman of the Visual Arts Program at the Fine Arts Work Center and running the Studio Shop, a wonderful art supply store in the cool basement of a beachfront house in the east end of the town. Michael Field (1915-1971) was a chef, cookbook author, and cooking teacher, predating Julia Child, and general editor of the landmark Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook series. He had been a concert pianist. According to Hermine Ford, his wife, Frances, had been a burlesque star on a Mississippi steamboat. See 4.41. Bertha Urdang was an Israeli dealer who was at the time interested in showing Janice Biala. See 6.35 and 6.36. Louise Eastman was the wife of the entertainment lawyer Lee Eastman and mother of four, including Linda Eastman McCartney. She was a passenger on American Airlines flight i to Los Angeles, which crashed on takeoff at Idlewild Airport, now JFK, March i, 1962. See "All 95 on Jetliner Killed in Crash Into Bay on Take-Off at Idlewild," New York Times, March 2, 1962: "Ninety-five persons were killed yesterday in a jet airliner crash in Jamaica Bay. It was the highest toll involving a single commercial airplane in the nations history." See 6.13. Tworkov exhibited his work at Holland-Goldowsky Gallery in Chicago in 1960 and 1963. The gallery was established in 1959; Bud Holland (1922-1994) bought out his partner Noah Goldowsky in 1961 and remained in business

446 Notes to pages 132-39

114. 115.

116. 117.

118.

119.

120.

as B. C. Holland Gallery until 1991. See 3.226,3.239, 6.13, 6.24, 6.25 and n. 9, 6.28,7.40, and 7.41. Vita Peterson (b. 1915), Berlin-born abstract artist; Tony Vevers (b. 1926) British-born painter, and his wife, the sculptor Elspeth Vevers. Hazel Hawthorne Werner (1901-2000), a writer who lived in Provincetown for many years. She was friendly with many important artists and writers in Greenwich Village and Provincetown. She owned dune shacks now in the Peaked Hill Trust and fought for the preservation of these historic structures. Antoinette Fraissex du Bost, "Toiny," was Leo Castellis second wife. They married in 1963. Tworkov miswrote or had written on one piece of paper on two of those dates. This is the only reference Tworkov makes to material that he decided to destroy to protect his family's feelings. See 3.170, where he considers the possibility that he might have to destroy such papers. Tworkov is now writing from Rome. Edith Schloss Burckhardt (b. 1919), American painter and writer living in Rome for many years. She had been married to the artist, filmmaker, and photographer Rudy Burckhardt (19141999), Swiss-born photographer, filmmaker, and painter. The Piazza del Popolo is a square on the north of Rome, not far from the Villa Giulia and its collection of Etruscan art. This entry has personal meaning to me as one of the few records of an early point in my life, but may perhaps also add a layer of meaning to my role as editor of Tworkovs writings. The Tworkovs generously welcomed my mother and me into their house for a month in the summer of 1961, after my father, Ilya Schor, had died and my sister Naomi had gone to France. The summer of 1962 my mother rented the studio attached to the second floor of the Tworkovs' house at 30 Commercial Street in Provincetown. I slept in a tiny front bedroom with a complete collection of Charles Dickens by the bedside. I loved that house and always thought of its interior as another physical embodiment of Jacks aesthetic: the walls and the old wide-board floors of the small New England rooms were painted in delicate shades of gray or off-white, fog, mist, and sand colors, white curtains in the old windows, and on the walls were many small artworks by friends, beautiful in a mysteriously modest manner. When I read this diary entry I regretted that I couldn't call and apologize to Wally for whatever rudeness I might ever have displayed, since it was a lifelong pleasure to sit in her kitchen and talk to her—she had the gift of talking to children as if they were people. At the same time, I was filled with pleasure at the confirmation that Jack had "adored" me when I was a younger child. (Having now read all his diaries, I know that he loved small children but had a bit more trouble when they began to grow up into awkward unpleasant phases.) James Beck, "Biala," Art News 61 (January 1963), 38, 60. The notes on Rauschenberg may be those in 3.265. Tworkov could also be thinking of another undated note he wrote on Rauschenberg: "He defends putting everything he finds into the picture on the grounds that life is more interesting than art. This sounds as if his attitude is more

Notes to pages 140-42 447 positive than it is. Actually I read his work differently. Everything is the same as every other thing: a pair of pants, a clock, a shirt, a fan, or a stuffed goat are all equally material. They are all matter and color, just like paint. This attitude discounts a world of order in which things rank themselves according to hierarchies of values. "In ordinary life we distinguish between junk and things. But this attitude towards things is symbolic or attitudes to spiritual things. In a life of ordered values the precincts of poetry, philosophy and religion might rank higher than other human activities. But Rauschenberg's attitude abolishes criteria of value, it abolishes hierarchies of rank: everything is the same as everything, therefore everything goes. It is essentially the philosophy of libertinism." 121. Nanno de Groot (1913-1963), a handsome Dutch artist who immigrated to the United States in 1946. A strongly gestural, often representation-based painter with a distinctive use of impasto, de Groot exhibited his work at the Hansa Gallery and Bertha Schaefer Galleries in the 19508. A wonderful fullsize double portrait of Janice and Alain is in the collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He had been married to Elise Asher (see note 105 above). He moved to Provincetown and had just built a house on the bay near the old icehouse when he died of cancer at age fifty. 122. Tworkov had an exhibition at Castelli Gallery in 1963 (February 2-March 2). The next article that Dore Ashton wrote about Tworkov was a review of his 1964 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, "New York Commentary: Moderns on the Move," Studio International 167 (June 1964), 256-57. 123. Robert Beauchamp (1923-1995), American expressionist painter. In the early 19608 he exhibited at the Green Gallery, run by Richard Bellamy. 124. Louis Finkelstein, "Tworkov: Radical Pro," Art News 63 (April 1964), 32-35, 52-54. See "Introduction," text at note 30. 125. John Canaday, "Big Art Exhibitions Enshrine Tested Tastes," New York Times, January 21,1963. Tworkov wrote to some members of the jury, which included Conrad Marca-Relli and Ben Shahn, to Gordon Smith, director of the Albright-Knox, and other concerned people. His attorney David Prager did write a letter dated January 24,1963, to the Times that was published in the Western Edition on February 7,1963, to correct some of Canaday s remarks. See Sandier, A Sweeper-Up, 47, 241-42. Prager was one of the signatories of the February 26,1961, letter to the Times (Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism, 124). Sandier also recalls that, in 1961, in his first article as art critic for the New York Post, he "took aim at John Canaday, the senior critic of The New York Times, as exemplar of critics who yearn for the death of abstract art [and therefore are unable] to treat it or its traditions seriously.'" Sandier concluded "that Canaday was 'reduced to assassinating the character of Abstract Expressionists'" (A Sweeper-Up, 208). 126. Warren Forma (b. New York, 1923), director of documentaries on artists and musicians, including The Americans: Three East Coast Artists at Work (Jack Tworkov, Hans Hofmann, Milton Avery), New York: Contemporary Films, 1963,16 mm, sound, color, 19 minutes. 127. Sylvia Wald (b. 1915), American artist who was an innovator in screen-

448 Notes to pages 142-45

128. 129.

130.

131.

132.

133. 134.

printing in New York in the 1950$. At the time she was married to Alter Weiss, a physician, who died of a heart attack the day after this studio visit. Adelyn Breeskin (1896-1986), director of Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Lois Dodd (b. 1927), American landscape painter working in a relaxed, modest style bridging realism and abstraction related to that of Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and other New York and Maine artists. Nick Carone (b. 1917), American abstract painter; Carone studied with Hans Hofmann in the 19408. He worked for Eleanor Ward in the first years of the Stable Gallery, and later showed there. Reference to works by Lee Gatch (1902-1968), American abstract painter working from nature in a manner influenced by Cubism and expressionism. Gatch was a friend of Tworkovs, and Biala was briefly married to him in the late 19208. Dorothy Miller (1904-2003) worked with Alfred H. Barr at the Museum of Modern Art from the early 19308, first as his assistant then as curator. Her American exhibitions, from 1942 to 1963, introduced and gave the museums imprimatur to many important artists of the period. She curated the New American Painting exhibition, which toured Europe in 1958 and 1959, introducing Abstract Expressionism to the European art scene and marking the shift of art influence from Europe to America. Tworkov was included in this exhibition, represented by five major works. Lane Slate (d. 1990), with producer Curtis Davis, made a series of television films on contemporary New York artists, including Barnett Newman, Larry Poons, and Andy Warhol. The series USA: Artists was produced for the National Educational Television network, the forerunner of the Public Broadcast System and its flagship station WNET. For an analysis of these films, see Caroline A. Jones, "Filming the Artist/Suturing the Spectator," Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 80-98. Jones's analysis centers on work done for NET only. Tworkovs diary entry for Sunday, February 24,1963, is: "10 AM in the studio to do a TV film for CBS with someone called Lane Slate." In another handwriting, possibly Slates: "CBS Lane Slate PLi2345/x7895, Program: March 10, Sunday 4-5 Channel 2, CBS." Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was an internationally known theologian, civil rights activist, and author. From a family that traced its roots back to the Baal Shem, the founder of Hasidism, he had left Poland shortly before the Second World War and settled in New York, where he was professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was a close friend of my father, Ilya Schor, who illustrated two of Heschels most beloved books on the religious life of Eastern European Jewry, The Earth Is the Lords and The Sabbath. Heschel and Tworkov were among a group of friends who sought to help my family after my father s death in 1961 through the formation of the Ilya Schor Foundation. Gibson Danes was the dean of the Art and Architecture School at Yale University in the 19608. Miz Hofmann (1885-1963), nee Maria Wolfegg, wife of Hans Hofmann. A delightful person who nurtured Hofmann and all his students. See 6.69.

Notes to pages 145-50 449 135. Whitney Griswold (1906-1963), historian and educator, was president of Yale University from 1950 to 1963. Tworkov had recently received a telegram from Griswold: "Absolutely delighted at news of your acceptance this gives me at Yale and the Fine Arts cause for great rejoicing." Griswolds widow wrote to Tworkov on June 6,1963, "You were Whits last appointment to the Yale Faculty and one of the choices he was most proud of." 136. Tworkov was named William C. Leffingwell Professor of Painting at Yale University and appointed chairman of the Art Department of the Yale School of Art and Architecture in April 1963, to begin serving the following academic year. 137. Jack Tworkov, one-person exhibition show at Leo Castelli. A favorable review by Eleanor C. Munro, "Tworkov: The Central Image," appeared in Art News 62 (March 1963), 29, 64. 138. Herbert Blau, "Red Eric and the Arms of Venus: Reflections on the Artist in America," Arts in Society 2 (Fall-Winter 1962-63), 30-46. Blau discusses some of the issues of concern in Tworkov s journals, such as alternating views of the American artist as demonic demiurge or as moral crusader. 139. This entry is in dark blue ink but "or you are in their power" was added sometime later in ballpoint pen. 140. In 1963 the roads on and just off the Cape were local roads, he was a careful driver and didn't speed. In 2008 it still can take that long, depending on traffic. Tworkov had a red Chevy V8 station wagon that Stanley Kunitz referred to as "Jack's beloved car" at a memorial for Tworkov held at the New York Studio School the year after his death. It was the one and only car he ever had, he was very attached to it, and he took very good care of it: he purchased it around the time he bought the house in Provincetown, thus around 1958 or 1959. After his death Helen Tworkov had it. Eventually she gave it to a family near her summer home in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Helen and Hermine would see it around for years, a real wreck by then. The family was friends with Rudy Wurlitzer, and when he and Robert Frank made Candy Mountain in Cape Breton with Tom Waits, in 1988, they used Tworkov s old car! We don t know when the car was finally laid to rest but it had a very long life. Email from Hermine Ford to Mira Schor, July 31, 2008. 141. Bernard Chaet (1924-2003), American painter who taught at Yale University from 1951 to 1979, eventually becoming William Leffingwell Professor of Painting, the same endowed professorship Tworkov held at Yale in the sixties. Gabor Peterdi (1915-2001), Hungarian-born painter and printmaker. Robert Engman (b. 1927), sculptor who later taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Kingman Brewster (1919-1988) was president of Yale University from 1963 to 1977. 142. Paul Rudolph (1918-1997), American modernist architect, chairman of Yale University's architecture program from 1958 to 1964. His concrete-clad Yale Art and Architecture Building opened in 1963. It was the subject of great admiration and also criticism, including for its lack of functionality. It was damaged in a fire of unknown origin in 1969, and the renovations further damaged Rudolph's vision.

450

Notes to pages 158-66

Published Writings, 1948-78 1. In The Triumph of American Painting Irving Sandier notes the importance of Soutine, in contradistinction to Kandinsky in the development of what he refers to as the "gesture painters." He ends the chapter "The Gesture Painters" with two long quotations from Tworkovs essay, beginning with " [Soutine s] passion is not for the picture as a thing, but for the creative process itself," and concludes that "Tworkovs assessment of Soutine s style could also be applied to most gesture painters. Indeed, it is the best summary of their aims"; Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970; New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 99-100. There was consistent interest in Soutine among members of the New York School: in the early 19308 "De Kooning himself was also passionate'... about the graphic, highly expressionistic painting of Chaim Soutine, the shtetl Jew then living in Paris. Soutine was best known for roiling landscapes, depictions of bloody beef carcasses, and his astonishingly, paint-laden brush; the impasto and surfaces were like nothing else in art. De Kooning told friends that he wished he could paint a picture that was like both Soutine and Ingres." The MoMA Soutine retrospective in 1950 was contemporaneous with and influential on de Koonings work on his Women series in 1950; Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, De Kooning: An American Master (New York: Knopf, 2004), 108, 312-13. While de Kooning was able to adapt the violence of Soutine s approach to figuration, Tworkov is more taken with the nature of Soutine s struggle within the process of painting the picture. Edward Bryant ended his 1964 Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue essay with reflections on Tworkov s writing on Soutine: "In his 1950 essay on Soutine, Tworkov contrasts Soutine with Cezanne. One is tempted to interpret the differences he establishes between the two artists as an unconscious statement of the polarities existing in his own creative temperament"; Bryant, Jack Tworkov (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1964), 19. 2. Motive is used here in the unusual but correct sense of motif. 3. "Manhattans abstract expressionists have a new forum in the shape of a magazine with a softly assertive title: It is. Editor and Publisher: Philip G. Pavia, a Greenwich Village sculptor blessed with a private income, who loads his $2 magazine with full-page reproductions, offers ample space to the artist to explain, defend and expand on their own efforts"; "What Is?" Time, August 10,1959. In Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974 (New York: Soho, 2000), Chuck Close reminisces about his early exposure to contemporary art through art magazines, when he was an art major at the University of Washington in Seattle: "I would pore over art magazines. In fact magazines, for a regional situation, were really the lifeline to the outside world. And you have to remember that at that time, in the '508, almost all reproductions were black and white. I think when It Is came out, it was the first time I'd ever really seen a lot of art in color. It published wonderful panel discussions with Guston and Motherwell and all those people. So you could hear the voice of an artist" (36).

Notes to pages 168-92 451

4. In Tworkovs copy of this issue of It Is, he crossed out obey in ballpoint pen and wrote the word evade above it. 5. Barnett Newman, "Statement," The New American Painting (New York: MoMA, 1959), exhibition catalogue, rpt. in Barnett Newman, Selected Writing and Interviews (New York: Knopf, 1990), 179. 6. A small piece of yellow notepaper exists with these words scribbled on it, so it would seem that Tworkov indeed composed his remarks on the spot, in response to his fellow panelists. 7. This comment may be taken at face value, as an expression of Tworkovs true reticence about taking anything that might seem like an arrogant, extreme position, but may also be a sly comment on Reinhardt s characteristic tone in such situations, all attitude. 8. John Canaday, "Word of Mouth: Four Abstract Painters Make a Brave Try at Explaining Their Ideas," New York Times, April 3,1960; Canaday misquoted Tworkovs statement "The idea of the new seems to me to experience for myself, and I would like to see it sweep the country: I would like to see every little jerk town in America swept by the desire to experience and think for itself" as "I'd like to see every little jerk think things out for himself." He misattributed a number of statements, according to Tworkovs letter. The letter was edited so that the correction of this particular misquotation was redacted. Tworkov and other artists voiced their disagreements with Canaday on other occasions, see 3.227ni25. 9. William H. Littlefield, "Rejoinder to Hans Hofmanris Article," "Letters and Rejoinders," It Is, no. 5 (Spring 1960), 80. Littlefield responded to Hofmanris "Space and Pictorial Life," It Is, no. 4 (Autumn 1959), 10, with very technical remarks about color. This letter is followed by Hofmanris "rejoinder," describing Littlefields prescriptions about color as technical, commercial, and academic. 10. There was only one more issue of It Is, no. 6 (Autumn 1965). 11. "The Late Cezanne: A Symposium," Art in America 66 (March-April 1978), 93-94. The symposium is introduced by the editors as a response to the 1977 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Cezanne: The Late Work, a show that "seemed almost as controversial and topical as an exhibition of a living artist" (83). Schjeldahl quotations, 93. Private Criticism 1. Tworkov refers here to Landes Lewitin (1892-1966), painter and contrarian member of the Club. For references to Studio 35, see Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Bernard Karpel (New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1951); Irving Sandier, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 26-27, and Abstract Expressionists: Studio 35/downtown (New York: Stux Gallery, 1990). I leave the reader to decipher the clefs of "Barr Miller," "Purearse," and "Mummysink." 2. Rothko and Newman had been very close. See, for example, Gerald Silk, interview with Betty Parsons, May 11,1981, "Mark Rothko and His Times" oral history project, Smithsonian Archives of American Art: "GS: Well, you called I

452 Notes to pages 193-238 guess it was Still, Rothko, Newman, and Pollock the Tour horsemen.' BP: Yes. GS: How did the four horsemen get along? BP: They got on ... they'd hang each others shows." The full interviews are at the Archives of American Art. Parsons s interview is available online, Tworkov's on microfilm reel 4937. 3. Clement Greenberg, "Introduction to an Exhibition of Barnett Newman," Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition, Bennington College Vermont, May 1958, rpt. in Barnett Newman: A Selection, 1946-52 (New York: French, 1959), exhibition catalogue, 3-4, and in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 54-55. The brief catalogue essay begins: "Barnett Newman is part of the splendor of American painting in the past decade and a half. In his case it is a particularly noble and candid splendor. His art is all statement, all content; and fullness of content can be attained through an execution that calls the least possible attention to itself." Lecture on Rhythm i. Matila Ghyka, The Geometry of Art and Life (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1946); Irma Anne Richter, Rhythmic Forms in Art: An Investigation of the Principles of Composition in the Works of the Great Masters (London: John Lane, 1932); Jay Hambidge (1867-1924), The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (1926; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948). Tworkov at Yale 1. Earlier in the same journal entry, Tworkov mentioned reading Frank Kermode, "Modernism Again," Encounter, April 1966: "Kermode correctly lists all the words of the new formalism: 'no responsibility,' 'Blankness' + 'indifference,' 'impersonality,' 'objectivity,'... indeed dehumanization has always been ... the apotheosis of the culte du moi.'" The reference of the "culte de moi" stayed with Andrew Forge, who mentioned it in his catalogue essay for Tworkov's 1982 Guggenheim Museum exhibition. 2. Tworkov owned an early Jasper Johns flag painting, which hung in the Tworkov living room for many years, see fig. 44. Contemporary Voices in the Arts, 1967 1. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 488. 2. Robert Creeley, "Feedback: Contemporary Voices in the Arts," A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970), 358. 3. See Grace Glueck, "Single-Channeled You Mustn't Be," New York Times, February 5,1967: "And in a nearby Humanities class, Jack Tworkov was telling the students how he worked. 'The most important thing a painter does is experience the painting as he paints it. There's a sort of flow back and forth, and at some point the painting simply says, "Get out of here!" You know it's finished.' The students laughed and a shaggy-haired boy in a green velour sweater raised his hand. 'When you're actively painting are you more aware

Notes to pages 239-67 453 of your feelings?' he asked. 'Less,' the artist replied, drawing a nod of agreement from teammate Cunningham." 4. The reference to Toni Willison's son is a strange one: Willison had been Tworkov's first wife, in the 19205. To say that her son from a later marriage could have been his would seem to indicate some fantasy about having a son. He remained on cordial terms with Willison, whom he sometimes ran into in Provincetown. 5. Walter Plate (1925-1972), American abstract painter. 6. The cover of Life magazine, February 17,1967, was "Happenings: The Worldwide Underground of the Arts Creates the Other Culture." The article, by Barry Farrell, "The Other Culture: An Explorer of the Worldwide Underground of Art Finds, Behind Its Orgiastic Happenings and Brutality, a Wild Utopian Dream" (86-102), focused on underground music and art happenings in London, Paris, Tokyo, and the East Village in New York, but with no reference to any of the serious art manifestations in New York at the time. 7. A five-course dinner was prepared by chef Michael Field—an arrangement suggested by Tworkov—and the performers' voices and the silverware were miked and electronically amplified. Films by Stan VanDerBeek and closecircuit television filming of the actual performance were projected on the walls and ceiling of the auditorium. Brown characterized the evening as "an unmitigated disaster. New York City was presented with a most unorthodox, not to say maddening, performance, where once again technology failed and enraged the audience"; Chance and Circumstance, 488. The Fluxus artist and poet Dick Higgins gave a lively description of the evening, including the technical problems that plagued the event—no one could hear what was going on onstage, making the audience restless; Dick Higgins, "Can Art Be Far Behind?" East Village Other, March 15,1967. The Village Voice reported, "The audience could not hear a word of the rather subdued dinner conversation. Through the use of TV cameras it could enjoy close-ups of Jack Tworkov enjoying Twin Tornedos [sic] au poivre," March 9-15,1967. "Dear Helen" 1. Giovanni Verga, Mastro-don Gesualdo, trans. D. H. Lawrence (1889; New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923). 2. Tworkov said of Kline: "One of the most interesting people in that group was Kline. Actually he was an adorable person,... of all the people, personally you could become fond of, was Kline. He was a marvelous person When he would get high he would go off and talk, as spontaneously as Abstract Expressionist painters painted. He was wonderful really, a great gift of the gab. He was terrific"; interview with Jessie Gifford, November 1976. 3. See 4.16. "DearHermine" 1. See 3.81 and note 47. 2. See 2.2n3. This conversation may have taken place after the falling-out between Mark Baum and Jack Tworkov over politics, with Baum retaining sympathies with the Communist Party.

454 Notes to pages 267-77 3. Emanuel Navaretta (1917-1977), artist, member of the Club. 4. Tworkov worked in Donald Coles studios nights, when Cole wasn't there, until he could afford his own, in the years immediately after World War II. 5. Jack Tworkov opened at the Stable Gallery on April 6,1959; see 3.122. 6. Selden Rodman (1909-2002), poet, art critic, and promoter of Haitian and other folk art. Tworkov, daily diary, April 7 1959: "Met Selden Rodman, on his invitation. Made a show of frankness of saying he didn't 'get* my painting. Wanted me to explain, etc. Looking for an education. He is hopelessly without talent for seeing painting." 7. Tworkov was Visiting Artist at Yale University College of Art and Architecture the year before he was named William Leffingwell Professor of Painting and chairman of the Art Department. 8. These paintings included Oh Columbia (1962), plate 9. See Jack Tworkov, Red, White and Blue (New York: Mitchell-Innes and Nash and Ameringer/ Howard/Yohe, 2002), exhibition catalogue, with catalogue essay, Harry Cooper, "A Compound Eye: Thoughts on Tworkov's Flags." 9. Mercedes Matter. It was common for artists to form groups to hire a model together and work in someone's studio. 10. Homage to Stefan Wolpe is in the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art (formerly the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery), University of Texas at Austin. It was the gift of James and Mari Michener. Friday (1960) is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Gift of S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc., acquisition no. 1969.47.44). The book referred to may be Lee Nordness, ed., Art USA Now (New York: Viking, 1962); see the essay by Joan Ley Thompson, 1:90-93, and color plate, 1:93. 11. Bertha Urdang, see 6.35 and 6.36. 12. See 3.201-3. 13. Warren Forma, see 3.227ni26. 14. Harrison Salisbury (1908-1993), Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and expert on the Soviet Union. See Salisbury, "Soviet 'Liberals' fighting Neo-Stalinists for Power," New York Times, February 6,1962. 15. Attack by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Maalot, Israel, on May 15,1974, during which twenty-two religious high school students were massacred and many more wounded. "Dear Erik" 1. Jack Tworkov, illus. Roger Duvoisin, The Camel Who Took a Walk (New York: Dutton, 1951); Jack Tworkov, illus. Roger Duvoisin, Tigers Don't Bite (New York: Dutton, 1957). See also Janice Biala and Daniel Brustlein, Its Spring, Its Spring (New York: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1956); Janice Biala, Minette, illustrated by Alain Brustlein (New York: Whittlesey, 1959-60); Alain [Daniel Brustlein], The Elephant and the Flea (New York: Whittlesey/McGraw-Hill, 1956). 2. Roger Duvoisin (1904-1980) was born in Geneva and educated in Switzerland and France. He was awarded the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children in 1948.

Notes to pages 284-95 455 "Dear Janice and Alain" 1. Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York: Viking, 1951), 111-12; black-and-white reproductions include Flowering White (1949), 119, and Green Landscape (1950), 120. 2. American Vanguard Art for Paris Exhibition first opened at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, December 26, i95i-January 5,1952, then moved to Galerie de France, Paris, February 26-March 15,1952. 3. Matisse, His Art, and His Public, Museum of Modern Art, 1951; cf. Alfred Barr, Matisse, His Art, and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951). 4. See Howard Devree, "Abstract Export: Controversial 'Vanguard' Work to Go to Paris," New York Times, December 30,1951. Biala took exception to Tworkovs comments on Mclver: "You must have been blind or have become very anti-feminist, because what the hell is the difference in quality of shit between her and Baziotes or Goodnough for instance, who were the pendents to your picture?" Biala to Tworkov, March 12,1952. 5. Georges Keller (1899-1981) was a French dealer who owned Bignou Gallery (Paris and New York) and then Carstairs Gallery in New York. Biala had exhibitions at Bignou Gallery in New York in 1942,1943,1944,1945, and 1947, and exhibitions at Carstairs Gallery in 1948,1950, and 1953. 6. James Joyces Stephen Hero, a fragment of which was published posthumously, was an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, becomes Stephen Dedalus in Portrait and Ulysses. Tworkov read Portrait in the 19205. 7. See "Dear Erik" n2. 8. Tworkov, John Ciardi, and Alvin Etler were artists in residence for four weeks of the 1960 summer session of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. See "UWM to Have Poet, Painter, Composer as Artists in Residence in the Summer," Milwaukee Journal, February 17,1960. 9. Thomas B. Hess, with a statement by Jack Tworkov, Tworkov, 1950/1960 (Chicago: Holland-Goldowsky Gallery, 1960), exhibition catalogue. 10. Daniel Brustlein, Self-Portrait, Art News 59 (October 1960), cover; the painting was purchased for inclusion in the Fifth International Hallmark Art Award Show, Wildenstein Gallery, New York, October 4-22,1960. 11. Dore Ashton, "Perspective de la peinture americaine," Cahiers d'Art 33-35 (1960), 203-20. 12. Kermit Lansner, "The Hallmark Awards: Premises, Promises," Art News 59 (October 1960), 29-31. Lansner was the editor of Newsweek in the 19608 and early 19708. His wife, Fay Lansner, was a painter. 13. Lee Bontecou (b. 1931), American sculptor who exhibited her work at Leo Castelli Gallery from 1960 through 1972. When she joined Castelli, she was the only woman artist represented by the gallery. 14. Edwin Dickinson, Retrospective Exhibition at the Graham Gallery, February 1961. 15. In fact, Dickinsons exhibition received a glowing review in the New York Times: Stuart Preston, "Art: Dickinsons Work Displayed," February 4,1961.

456 Notes to pages 295-99 16. Edwin Dickinson, Portrait of Eileen Lake. 17. Alain had serious eye problems and endured many eye operations throughout his adult life. 18. Stuart Preston, "Contemporary Art Excursions," New York Times, March 5, 1961. Preston (1916-2005) was for many years culture critic at the New York Times. 19. According to Hermine Ford and Helen Tworkov, neither of whom recalled his last name, Micky, a doctor, and his wife, who were sponsors of Janice Biala, had thrown out a Dickinson painting, which Janice found and pulled out of the trash. Years later they tried to get it back, but Janice refused, and she died with it still in her possession. Helen Tworkov also remembers the event described in the letter, in which Jack took paintings off the wall of the Dickinson show at Graham that evidently had been put up for sale even though they belonged to Janice: this may have included a beautiful portrait of Janice from the 19208, mentioned in Preston's review. Santini s was the storage company where Tworkov and Biala kept their paintings. 20. This letter, written shortly after the death of my father, Ilya Schor, on June 7, 1961, was a tremendously moving and important gift to me personally since it offered an eyewitness account of what I would call ground zero of my life, the loss of my father when I was just eleven years old. It confirmed and informed, from the point of view of an adult observer, what would otherwise seem like a generic memory of the happiness of my early childhood. "Yom tov" is the spirit of holiday. I have held in my mind the memory of a gesture of grief at my father s death: the evening Jack and Wally arrived back to New York from Provincetown to see us, I saw through the half-opened door of my darkened bedroom Wally and Jack meet in the hallway, flinging their arms around each other in a tight and sorrowful embrace as Wally had just left my mother, prostrate with grief in my parents' bedroom at the end of the hall. Their private grief in some sense enacted my own inexpressible grief and served to fix them ever further in my affection. The Tworkovs did include us in their lives as family. To complete the picture painted by Tworkov from that week: my mother, Resia Schor, did find her way, applying her painterly skills to my father s materials and subjects. She made sculptural jewelry and Judaica in silver and gold, as well as sculpture, until shortly before her death in 2006 in her ninety-sixth year. My sister Naomi s "coolness" was deceptive: she was devastated by my fathers death and later by the characterization of her in Tworkovs letter. She had a very distinguished career as a professor of French Literature and feminist theory. She died in 2001, only a year older than my father at his death. However, I have included this letter in this collection because it offers another facet of one of the themes of Tworkovs writing, that of his ambivalence toward his identity as a Jew. He speaks to the same point about my father in another letter to Janice (see 6.60). My father was born in 1904 in the shtetl of Zloczow, a town in Galicia, not very distant and perhaps not very different from the town of Biala, where Tworkov and his sister spent their early years. But he had spent his entire youth immersed in the Hasidic village life of

Notes to pages 300-323 457 Eastern Europe. He retained in his spirit and expressed in his paintings, silver work, and liturgical objects the ineffably modest qualities of Hasidic culture. Although he also had a traditional art academy education and had lived in Paris before the war, there was some sense in which my father did not participate in the worldliness of Tworkov s other art world connections. Thus he could, through his personal warmth, create for Tworkov an unmediated human connection to his otherwise fraught Jewish identity. See also 3.183. See Ilya Schor (New York: Jewish Museum, 1965), exhibition catalogue. 21. Jack Tworkov, "Religious Art Without God," Art News 63 (November 1964); see 3.260. 22. Both Tworkov and Biala had paintings exhibited in the Annual Exhibition 1961: Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 13, i96i-February 4,1962. 23. Urdang had an active gallery in New York City from the 19605 to the 19808. Biala did not show with her. 24. See 3.195. 25. Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), Swiss artist best known for his kinetic sculptures, and Yves Klein (1928-1962), French multimedia, neo-Dada artist who occasionally collaborated with Tinguely in the late 19508. Klein had an exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1961 that was considered a failure. He sold no work from the exhibition. 26. See 3.216. 27. Erica Brausen founded the influential Hanover Art Gallery in London, giving Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon their first one-man shows. There is no record of Biala showing her work with Brausen. 28. Biala had several exhibitions at the Stable Gallery between 1953 and 1963, Tworkov between 1954 and 1958. Both artists had their business differences with Ward while enjoying her friendship. 29. Jack Tworkov (New York: Whitney Museum, 1964); Louis Finkelstein, "Tworkov: Radical Pro," Art News 63 (April 1964), 32-35, 52-54. 30. Celia Ferber was Jack and Janice's older half-sister; George Ferber was her husband. Jack was very fond of them. See 6.60. 31. The Cape Cod National Seashore was designated in 1961, preserving Atlantic coastline beaches, wetlands, dunes, and woods. There is no record of what film of Tworkov was made that summer. 32. Helen Tworkov had been traveling in Asia since autumn 1964 and by July 1966 was living in Katmandu. See 6.4. 33. The artist and art historian Gibson Danes was chairman of the Art Department at UCLA and later dean of the Yale University School of Art and Architecture; Use Getz (1917-1992), abstract artist. 34. Biala responded December 22,1966, "Jack, I always thought we were at the end of a movement rather than the beginning of one (I am naturally reactionary of course)." She continued by praising artists such as Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Franz Hals. 35. Jack Tworkov, Dana Creative Arts Center, Colgate University, Hamilton, N.Y., March 2-16,1968.

458 Notes to pages 330-56 36. See 1.3 and 6.401130. 37. Another reference to an exhibition possibility that does not seem to have taken place. 38. The family show that Tworkov envisioned finally took place in 1994: "A Family: Biala, Daniel Brustlein, Hermine Ford, E. Moskowitz, Robert Moskowitz, Jack Tworkov," Kouros Gallery, New York, March lo-April 9. 39. Jack Tworkov, French and Co., New York, February i3-March 11,1972; see John Canaday, "In 2 Shows, a Thumbnail Summary," New York Times, April 22,1972. 40. See 7.1 and 7.2. 41. See 7.82 and 7.83 and notes 11 and 12. 42. In a letter to Wally Tworkov, dated August 16,1988, six years after Tworkovs death, Biala wrote of finding a few of his letters, which Wally had asked her to look for, "you should know that in one of them he says after 40 or 50 years of marriage I have fallen in love with my wife.'" 43. Paul Rebeyrolle (1926-2005), French neoexpressionist painter. 44. Tworkov continued to make diary notes until a few days before he died. His statement here reflects the distinctions he made between types of diary and journal notations, between the personal and the aesthetic or philosophical. Diaries, 1973-75 1. A few days later, Tworkov notes, "After Friday nights conversation with the students, of which Watergate was one of them, I was struck by Helen Sirica's name which I learned only when she left. Since that's the name of the judge in the Watergate trial." 2. See Kasha Linville Gula, "The Indian Summer of Jack Tworkov," Art in America 61 (September-October 1973), 62-65. The reference is probably to Agnes Martin, "On the Perfection Underlying Life," lecture given at the Institute for Contemporary Art on February 14,1973, and reproduced in facsimile in Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1973), unpaginated. 3. Alan Blizzard (b. 1929), California-based painter and educator. 4. I remember this long walk during which Tworkov reminisced about walking Wally all the way home to Brooklyn early in their courtship. I had forgotten the crazy street scene until I read Jacks description. As compulsive a selfdocumenter and diarist as Tworkov, I looked up the date in my 1974 diary and found the following (tiny pages account for the telegraphic style): "lovely day. Went to Tworkovs. Warhol scene in front (lady with knife on transvestite). Walked all the way uptown, very impersonal." 5. A program for the Skowhegan award dinner exists, timed to the minute: "9:32 Betty Parsons says a few words and presents the Medal to Jack Tworkov, 9:34 Response from Jack Tworkov, 9:36 Mr. Lee presents the Hon. William A. M. Burden," and so on. 6. Harvey Lichtenstein, the long-time director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was Wally Tworkov s first cousin on her father s side. 7. Beginning in the late 19605, Tworkov began titling his works according to the time of year they were completed. Qi-75 refers to first quarter of the year

Notes to pages 357-77 459 1975. The last number refers to the order of the series. Thus Q4-74-#i was the first painting finished in a series of paintings completed in the fourth quarter of 1974. 8. Helen Tworkov was married at the time to Jim Strahs, a playwright. 9. Hermine Ford recalls that her father found the plagues particularly barbaric, and the Seder would grind to a halt when they would get to that point in the service. 10. Apparently this was not true. In the late 19608 and early 19708 Wally Tworkov flirted with the idea of converting to Catholicism. She talked about it with her son-in-law Jim Strahs but otherwise kept it secret. She kept a copy of Saint Augustine by her bedside and greatly admired Simone Weil. 11. Serge Chermayeff (1900-1996), Chechen-born British modernist architect who lived for many years in Wellfleet, Mass. 12. Tworkov had a brief second marriage to Grace Bell, nee PfeifTer (c. 19072004), a Provincetown-based painter. Diaries, 1976 1. Wally Tworkov had a thyroid operation January 8,1976. 2. See 8.38. 3. Al Held completed Order/Disorder/Ascension/Descension, a i8o-foot blackand-white mural in two 9O-foot panels each measuring 13 x 90 feet, for the lobby of the Social Security Administration Mid-Atlantic Program Center Building in Philadelphia, 1976. 4. The story of the Mark Rothko Foundation is told in Lee Seldes, The Legacy of Mark Rothko (New York: DaCapo, 1996); see also Magda Salvesen and Diana Cousineau, "Kate and Christopher Rothko, Daughter and Son of Mark Rothko," Artists' Estates: Reputations in Trust (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Grace Glueck, "Rothko Art Dispute Ends Quietly After 15 Years," New York Times, August 20, 1986, among many other texts and articles. Gustave Harrow (1930-1990) was assistant New York State attorney general from 1965 to 1982. He also represented Richard Serra in the case of the Tilted Arc and worked on other cases involving artists' rights. See Grace Glueck, "Gustave Harrow Is Dead at 60; Assistant State Attorney General," New York Times, July 4,1990. Clinton Wilder (1920-1986) was a noted theatrical producer. "Blind Man's Bluff" i. The handwriting is unclear, the word looks like enfumed more than it does enflamed, but the latter would make more sense contextually. Diaries, 1976-78 1. Jack Tworkov, Recent Paintings and Drawings, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, April 12-May 8,1976. 2. Aristodemos Kaldis (1899-1979), Greek-born painter. Elaine de Kooning painted a major full-length portrait of Kaldis (1978). The anecdote sounds callous, but evidently Kaldis was quite a character. Irving Sandier wrote of him, "He loomed so large that he seemed to be imprinted in my memory

460 Notes to pages 377-99 from my earliest days in the art world. Kaldis was the exemplary bohemian. He was a bulk of a man with a full head of unkempt black hair and a growth of hair on his nose, wearing a rumpled dark suit or great black coat and a flowing red scarf. . . . A nonstop talker, Kaldiss booming Greek-accented voice filled any space, indoors or outdoors" ("More First Generation Artists Who Inspired Me," A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir [New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003], 100). "Kaldis was not a member of the Club but attended regularly, and had the last say at every panel he attended, booming his opinions at great length with a heavy Greek accent, stopping only when he sensed that the assembled audience, waiting impatiently for the drinking and dancing, would physically throttle him" (36). Philip Pavia also recalled with affection Kaldiss conversation and imposing manner: Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts, 2007), 4-5, 14-18. Hermine Ford has a wonderful memory of coming home from high school with her best friend one afternoon to find Jack, Wally, and Kaldis drinking retsina and dancing around the living room. 3. By "idleness" Tworkov meant not working in the studio, because he had many professional and social engagements during this period. 4. An earlier interview of Tworkov by Phyllis Tuchman was published in Artforum 9 (January 1971), 62-68. There is no record of a 1977 piece. 5. See 3.59,3.261,7.70, and 7.74. 6. Anton Van Dereck (1901-1943), Provincetown-based artist and craftsman who first came to Provincetown in the 19208, around the time Jack Tworkov did. In 1938 Van Dereck was appointed director of the Provincetown Art Association, succeeding Ross Moffett. 7. Tatehle is a Yiddish affectionate diminutive for "daddy." See 3.10. 8. Jon Schueler (1916-1992) American painter, exhibited at the Stable Gallery in the 19508 and taught at Yale in the 19608. Richard de Marco is a Scottish artist and art impresario. 9. Helene McKinsey (Herzbrun), taught at American University in Washington, D.C. 10. Reuben Nakian (1897-1986), American sculptor. 11. John Russell, "Harold Rosenberg Is Dead at 72; Art Critic for the New Yorker," New York Times, July 13,1978. See 3.12 and 6.74. 12. John Russell. "Thomas Hess, Art Expert, Dies; Writer and Met Official Was 57," New York Times, July 14,1978. See 6.74. 13. Hinda was a relative or friend of one of Tworkov s parents; see 6.60. 14. Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952), American painter, father of Mercedes Matter. Diaries, 1979-80 1. This is a curious wording since the reference is to Tworkovs text for "The Late Cezanne: A Symposium," see 3.261. 2. Bert Yarborough is a painter living in New Hampshire. He was a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the mid-1970s and remains affiliated with FAWC.

Notes to pages 400-425 461 3. In his July 3, 1979, letter to Thomas Messer, Tworkov expressed "serious doubts about a show that amounted to a mini-retrospective. That would divert the attention I sought for the newer work and would instead lead to a sort of art-historical comparison between the earlier and later periods. I would by all means want to avoid such a comparison, given such a limited show, whether such a comparison was favorable or not." He also was concerned that the museum might be limiting its commitment the show: "I trust your friendship enough to believe that you would not undertake something that could end in a dreary disappointment for me." 4. The Provincetown Advocate was the newspaper of record for Provincetown, Mass., from 1869 until 2000, when it was sold to the current paper, the Provincetown Banner. 5. Ferol Sibley Warthen (1890-1986), a noted Provincetown printmaker working with the Provincetown white line technique of woodblock color printmaking; Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), also a significant printmaker in the same technique; Agnes Weinrich (1873-1946), a modernist painter who, like Lazzell, had studied with Albert Gleizes. She was Karl Knaths sister-in-law. 6. Tworkov went to Seattle and Spokane in early November 1979 as a visiting artist at Spokane Falls Community College. 7. Thomas Sills (b. 1914), African American abstract painter; Denise Hare, photographer. 8. Gene Baro (1924-1982), American poet and writer who in later life worked as an art writer and museum and exhibition curator. He was a consultant for the Brooklyn Museum. "A Nature in Deep Contemplation" 1. Wallace Bassford, American painter and illustrator (1900-1998). Jerry Farnsworth (1895-1983) had been a student of Charles Hawthorne; he ran the Farnsworth School of Art, specializing in figure and portrait painting. 2. The series of paintings that Tworkov is discussing in this journal entry is called Progression or Progressions. There were as many as nine in this series, most measuring 26 x 78 inches, all from late 1980. The idea originated from the compression and expansion of a square/rectangle. One of the last paintings based on the idea of this series carried the title of Compression and Expansion of the Square, 1982, which is the work illustrated in plate 14. This was one of Tworkov s last major completed works. 3. Carole Bolger was a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1980-81. 4. Linda Shearer was the curator of Jack Tworkov: Fifteen Years of Painting, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1982. 5. Jennifer Bartlett was a student of Tworkov s at Yale and he had been influential and supportive of her work. See 7.40. Diaries, 1981-82 i. John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), voice, tape, Irish musicians.

Archival Sources Journal entries from 1947 to 1953 are in a 10" x 7%" composition notebook with "Jan. 21-47 To Dec. 12-53" on the cover. The unpublished fiction dated July 31,1952 is written in black India ink on narrow scraps of lo1^" x 5" white drawing paper. Entries from August 15,1953, to August 9,1963, are from a black 8%" x