Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 24, 1975
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 24, 1975 and DECEMBER 8, 1975
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 8, 1975
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 12, 1976
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 12, 1976
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 19, 1976
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 19, 1976
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 25, 1976
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 25, 1976
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO MARCH 4, 1976
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE MARCH 4, 1976
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO MARCH 4, 1976
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 24, 1975
-
COREY
- You were born in 1904, October . . .
-
BIBERMAN
- . . . twenty-third.
-
COREY
- Twenty-third. In Philadelphia. Your father owned a factory?
-
BIBERMAN
- That's right.
-
COREY
- What kind of factory was it?
-
BIBERMAN
- A dress factory. As you probably know, a great deal of manufacturing in
the garment industry came into the hands of first-generation immigrants,
of whom my father was one. He and his three brothers operated what
became a very successful business.
-
COREY
- Is it a business that they started?
-
BIBERMAN
- They started it; and until very recently, when it went public, it was a
very important firm. None of the original four brothers, with the
exception of a surviving brother who is no longer active, participate.
They went public many years ago and, I understand, did very badly from
that time on. [laughter] But my father and three brothers were the
active owners, and they started it.
-
COREY
- Your mother was also from Russia?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Do you know where in Russia?
-
BIBERMAN
- Both my mother and father came from an area near Kiev. I know that the
little town in which my father was born was called Granov. I don't know
the name of the town in which my mother was born. She was very young
when she was brought to this country; she was, I think, eight years old.
My father was sixteen when he came, and he came alone. He was a very
adventurous young man and made the trip alone. But my mother, who was
younger, was brought by her family. The town in which my mother was born
was somewhere in the Kiev area, because I know that at a certain point
both families went to Odessa, which, as you know, is an important
seaport on the Black Sea.
-
COREY
- You were the youngest of three children?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- You had a brother Herbert, and a sister . . .
-
BIBERMAN
- . . . Rebecca.
-
COREY
- Rebecca. Now at the age of eleven you moved from the city out into what
you called in your book an "upper-middle-class suburb. " Did that move
affect you in any way?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, it did. You see, although you would not know it to look at me now,
I was not a very healthy child. I was rather sickly. I also had the
either fortune or misfortune of having been a very precocious student as
a child, so that when we moved to the upper-middle-class suburb, it
affected me in several ways. First of all, this was a very definite WASP
community. I know that when I went to my last year of grammar school, I
was the only Jewish child in the school. I was victimized—and I use that
word advisedly--by a very, very open anti-Semitism. Also, having been
precocious, I had skipped several terms in school, so that I was two
years younger than my classmates. The combination of being two years
younger and considered to be a very smart kid and also being Jewish had
a very traumatic effect on me at that time. I know that I look back at
that period with, oh--certainly with no sense of the usual euphoric
quality that many children associate with childhood. For me, it was a
very difficult and a very unhappy period.
-
COREY
- Did you do any painting when you were a child?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let me say this: I'd always drawn and painted. I had an uncle,
Mother's youngest brother, who was only a few months older than I was.
We were very close friends, and he was always very embarrassed at the
fact that he was my uncle. He used to insist, whenever we went out, that
I'd be careful to introduce him as my cousin. Anyway, both of us liked
to draw, as children. And in those days, the popular magazines used to
reproduce a little caricature — I think it was of Uncle Sam--and the
caption said, "Copy this drawing of Uncle Sam and send it to us, and we
will tell you if you have any talent." You know, this mail-order
business! So we used to get all of the magazines that we could, copy the
caricature, and mail it in. They would always send you the first lesson
free, and of course they would also assure you that you had tremendous
talent and that if you would send them whatever the tuition was, you
would then receive the correspondence course. We early discovered that
since we got the first lesson free, we would collect all of the
magazines that we could lay our hands on and copy the caricature of
Uncle Sam--which was very simple to copy, actually—and send them out and
get our free lessons. But in answer to your question, the fact is that
although all children draw, I suppose I drew more than most children.
And I kept it up, which most children do not do.
-
COREY
- You finished high school at sixteen?
-
BIBERMAN
- I finished high school at sixteen, and I finished college when I was
nineteen.
-
COREY
- Nineteen. Was it [at age] seventeen that you were thrown from a horse
and did the portrait of your sister?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Was that the first time you worked in oils?
-
BIBERMAN
- The very first time. As a matter of fact, it was my brother Herbert who
bought me the set of oils. Up until that time, I'd worked in watercolor,
and, of course, I drew with pencils, and crayons and so forth. But that
was the first time I'd worked in oils.
-
COREY
- And it was Robert Susan--is it Susan or Suzanne?-- who had seen that
picture . . . ?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, it was Robert Susan. Jacqueline Susann, the recently deceased
author, was his daughter. Robert Susan was a very well known portrait
painter in Philadelphia, working in the tradition of [John Singer]
Sargent and [Eugene] Speicher. [He was a] very talented portrait painter
who never achieved national recognition, but was very well known in
Philadelphia. He was a family friend, so that when I began to think
seriously about continuing painting in a more disciplined fashion, we
naturally turned to him. He was the first professional to say, "Well,
maybe we should do something about your interest."
-
COREY
- When was it that you entered the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce?
-
BIBERMAN
- I went there from 1921 to 1924.
-
COREY
- So that was during the time that you had been laid up with . . . ?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, as a matter of fact, it was about halfway through college that I
broke my leg, an incident that we will discuss later. I'd gone into
college when I was sixteen, so in the summer of my seventeenth year I
was about halfway through college.
-
COREY
- Why economics?
-
BIBERMAN
- The plan was that both my brother and I were to go into my father's
business, so that we both attended the Wharton School of Finance and
Commerce, which was a general preparatory school for anyone who was
interested in a business career. And we were both considered very bright
students, and were both elected to the honor fraternity, Beta Gamma
Sigma. Since this was a business school, they were not permitted to
elect to Phi Beta Kappa, but Beta Gamma Sigma corresponded to that. We
were both A students all the way through college — not that we cared
particularly about the courses, but we both had, I suppose, very good
memories. And you know the usual academic situation: if you study for an
examination and you've got a good memory, you get an A. And if you
forget it the next day, that's unimportant! So this was pretty much our
history, although my brother actually went into my father's business for
about three years after school, while I did not.
-
COREY
- You never worked there at all?
-
BIBERMAN
- No.
-
COREY
- You were offered a teaching position at Wharton?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Did you ever consider accepting it?
-
BIBERMAN
- Not at all. [laughter] I think I mention in the book on my paintings
that by the time I was about to finish college, I had pretty much
decided — and my family was pretty well reconciled to the fact — that I
was not going into business. Since I'd had a very good scholastic
record, and nobody knew of my hidden art vices — that is, nobody in the
academic community- -the head of the economics department, before
graduation, called me into his office one day and said, "Biberman, what
are you going to do when you get out of school?" I said, "I'm going to
paint." And he said, "Paint? Paint what?" [laughter] I said, "Paint
pictures." He said, "Well, I mean what are you going to do with your
life? What do you plan to do?" I said, "I'd like to study art." He said,
"Well, I wanted to offer you a teaching job here, but of course if you
have other plans then there's no point to that." But I was actually
offered a junior instructor's post. It was not a TA. They didn't have
TAs in those days. But the last thing in the world that I wanted to do
was to accept.
-
COREY
- It never occurred to you as a child to be an artist?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it didn't, simply because this was pretty much out of the experience
of our family. No people in our family were in any of the arts. Since my
parents were first- generation people who had achieved success in their
own way, with great difficulty, and since all of their friends and
family and peers were people who had done the same, we were not in
direct touch with anything in the professional cultural field. My mother
and father both enjoyed the good things in life. They went to the opera
in Philadelphia; they went to the theater, we had a nice library. As I
recall it, when I was a child, we had one of the first phonographs on
our street. And you know, we grew up with records of opera and good
books. But the idea of any of us becoming a professional artist in any
field was simply not even considered.
-
COREY
- And then both you and Herbert went into the arts?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Herbert went into the 47 Workshop at Yale? Was that something that you
and he talked about? Or were your decisions to go into the arts fairly
independent of each other?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see, my brother had always been interested in writing. He had
collected a very good library of his own when he was a very young man
and used to work with little- theater groups while he was in school. As
a matter of fact, he was in a very famous student theatrical group
called the Mask and Wig Club at the University of Pennsylvania, where he
twice played the lead. He was always interested in the theater, and
there were several little-theater groups in Philadelphia, so that both
during the time that he was in college and after, he worked with them.
But he never thought of it professionally until, after three years in
business, he decided that business was not for him and he made the
break. Once he made the decision, when it came my turn to make the
break, it was much easier because--what shall I say?--the initial heresy
had already been established.
-
COREY
- And in 1924 you enrolled full time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Arts?
-
BIBERMAN
- The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In Philadelphia.
-
COREY
- Why that particular place?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, as a matter of fact, the Pennsylvania Academy is the oldest art
school in America—Philadelphia, as you know, being an old colonial city.
Many of the cultural activities of that period had their beginnings
either in Philadelphia or in New York. The Pennsylvania Academy, as the
oldest art school in America, was also a very good school, so that
although I had previously, before becoming a full-time student, gone to
night classes at another art school in Philadelphia called the School of
Industrial Art because they offered both night classes and summer
classes—when it came time to enroll as a full-time student, it was very
natural to go to the Pennsylvania Academy.
-
COREY
- Was it a fairly traditional training?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. It was an academic school, with the usual classic training in
portraiture, landscape painting, life drawing, and so forth.
-
COREY
- Was there any one person in particular there that you had wanted to
study with, or was it just to go to the academy for itself?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, when I went there, I was not too familiar with the faculty. But
once there, I found two men with whom I preferred to work. One was a
very colorful painter named Arthur Carles, who never reached great
national stature, although he did have a couple of one-man shows in New
York. He was a very strange, very gifted painter, but a very strange
personality in the Philadelphia community. He had a long black beard,
and in those days not even the bohemians sported beards. He was a very
colorful, slightly obscene man, who was, strangely enough, taken up by
the socialites in Philadelphia. He was a good friend of Leopold
Stokowski's, who already was a great figure in the music world in
Philadelphia as conductor of the Philadelphia orchestra. Carles was a
very charismatic person, a very interesting man. I worked with him and
also with another painter by the name of Henry McCarter, who was also on
the faculty. Henry McCarter, although known particularly as an
illustrator, also had a great influence on many students. He, too, was a
very interesting person. I spent the final summer before I went to
Europe with him, working in a school that he conducted in Longport, New
Jersey, just down the Island from Atlantic City. He had a group of
students there who paid, you know, for board and tuition and so forth.
But this was a very rewarding experience for me. These, then, were the
two men at the academy who influenced me the most.
-
COREY
- And in 1926 you went to Europe?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Why Europe?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, by now you know the lore of expatriation in the twenties. The
twenties were a very strange period in American history. This was the
time of Sinclair Lewis and Babbitt and Main Street, and most of the people who were
interested in the arts were convinced that the United States was a
cultural desert and that the only artistic salvation was to go where the
action was. And at that time, the action was Paris. In the literary
field, as you know, it was the whole Gertrude Stein, Joyce, Hemingway,
F. Scott Fitzgerald attraction. In the field of music, young Americans
also—like Marc Blitzstein, a friend of mine in those days--went to
Europe. And of course, since Paris was the undisputed center of painting
activity, all the young painters wanted to go to Paris. So I went, too,
with a modest subsidy from my father, who at that time was able to
afford it.
-
COREY
- Did you know anyone there, or did you just go and discover whatever you
could?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, strangely enough, the wife of an uncle, my father's youngest
brother, was related to a painter named Louis Kronberg, from Boston.
Now, when I said a few moments ago that our family had no relation to
the art field, this [relationship with Louis Kronberg] was very
tangential. Louis Kronberg had quite a reputation at that time, and he
was called the American Degas because he also painted ballet dancers.
When I went to Europe on my first trip, in 1924-- this was my college
graduation present, a summer trip to Europe--I went to see Louis
Kronberg [in Paris]. We went to some exhibitions together, and when I
decided to go to Paris in 1926, I got in touch with him and found that I
could rent his studio, which was a very inexpensive rental. So I knew
Louis Kronberg when I went to Paris, and then very quickly, I found that
there were a number of Americans, both in the field of art and in the
field of music, whom I knew or soon met, so that very quickly, I found
that I was not alone there.
-
COREY
- [Were there] people [there] that you had previously known in America?
-
BIBERMAN
- Some whom I'd known previously, like Marc Blitzstein and a couple of
fellow students from the academy in Philadelphia, who in turn had
certain contacts. So that we had a pretty immediate circle of American
friends. I say we--people like myself, in Paris.
-
COREY
- When you went to Paris, did you plan to study in any particular school,
or just to live there and paint?
-
BIBERMAN
- I had decided at that point not to study, formally, in Paris. The
strange thing is that outside of the very classic schools, like the
[Ecole des] Beaux-Arts in Paris, there were no other very good art
schools. There was no counterpart, let me say, to a school like the
Pennsylvania Academy. There were places where one could study, but they
were semiprivate. There was a painter named Andre Lhote, who was very
fashionable as a teacher. And there was the Academie Colarossi, which
was very informal, as was the Grande Chaumiere, which was also a very
informal school. I suppose I was arrogant enough at that point in my
budding career to feel that what I wanted to do was to work on my own,
which I did, and to go to schools only to draw from the model, but no
formal schooling. In that three-year period in Paris, it was all
self-study, and as I look back on it, this was the best way to do it in
Paris at that time. The art experience was so varied and so enormous
that a young painter, if he had any ability at all, could really learn
much more by looking than he could by enrolling in an art school.
-
COREY
- When you say the experiences were varied, do you mean in terms of
traditional things that had happened in Paris, or contemporary things
that were beginning to happen?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, it was both. After all, you had the Louvre in Paris, and you had
the tremendous number of galleries and large exhibitions. You had a
coterie of painters from all over the world working there with whom you
could converse in the common language--French. So, the experience of
being in an international milieu, with all of the people interested in
the same things you were interested in, plus the fact that the theater
was marvelous, and the experimental cinema, too: there was a total art
experience which was unlike anything, certainly, that I'd ever
encountered before or that I've known since.
-
COREY
- Did you find that you tended to generate towards artists from a
particular country, let's say, England, or Italy, Germany?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, unfortunately, [for] most of us, it was largely a kind of an
introverted existence, because of the language barrier—although this was
not true in my case because I spoke pretty good French even before I
went there. This was one of the subjects that I liked best in college. I
was reading novels in French in my university classes, so the language
problem was no great barrier for me. Nonetheless, most of the Americans
tended to stay with each other. We had some friends from other
countries, but by and large, most of the foreigners tended to almost
ghettoize themselves in terms of their contacts. The Scandinavians
stayed pretty much within their own circle. The Middle Europeans stayed
pretty much with their own groups. There was a certain amount of
crossing over, but in general, the foreign groups tended to remain
fairly intact socially.
-
COREY
- What about artistically? Was there any exchange of views?
-
BIBERMAN
- Artistically, there was a great exchange. This occurred because the
possibilities of seeing exhibitions and of showing our work was very
much on everybody's agenda. But socially, the contacts were a little bit
more isolated.
-
COREY
- Artistically, who were your main contacts in Paris? The people that you
spent most of your time with?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I had a very good friend, a Scotch painter named George Owen, who,
so far as I know, never achieved any great stature, but I saw a great
deal of him when I was in Paris. A very close friend of mine in Paris
was Isamu Noguchi, the sculptor, who of course has become very well
known. Man Ray was already a prominent figure in the art world. Some of
the other American painters — like Marsden Hartley, Adolf Dehn, Ernest
Fiene, Stuart Davis, Emil Gauso, and others— were in and out of Paris
then. I saw a great deal of Alexander Calder, then doing wire sculpture,
only later making his mobiles, his stabiles, and all of the other things
that he does these days. Marc Blitzstein, I've already said, was a
friend of mine. He was also from Philadelphia. George Antheil, who was
very well known, of course, as an enfant terrible in the field of music,
was a friend. Hilaire Hiler, the painter who later wrote some very
definitive books on painting techniques, was a friend. Also, the English
graphic artist, Bill Hayter, whose school, Atelier, later became
world-famous. It was a large group of people with whom we were
associated.
-
COREY
- In 1927 you sent two paintings to the Salon d'Automne?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- How did that come about? Were you encouraged to do that, or was it your
own decision?
-
BIBERMAN
- Both. In the summer of 1927, I was in the fishing village of Concarneau,
painting. My brother was with me that summer. He was preparing to go to
Moscow to study with [Vsevolod] Meyerhold, and he came to Europe, and we
spent the summer together in this little fishing village. In our hotel,
there was a French critic-writer named Charles Fegdal, and Charles
Fegdal was interested in me as a young American painter and wanted to
see what I was doing. So I took him to the little studio that I'd rented
in the village, and he expressed great interest in my work and said,
"You should, of course, send some of your paintings to the Autumn Salon
this fall." And it was largely at his suggestion that I did, and to my
great surprise and pleasure, the two paintings that I sent were both
accepted. This then became my first public exhibition. Every day I would
go there as soon as the exhibition opened — I think this was in either
the Grand Palais or Petit Palais--and I would stand within earshot of my
painting all day long [laughter] to try to find out what people were
saying when they saw these two works of mine.
-
COREY
- What was the response?
-
BIBERMAN
- Oh, it was varied, obviously. You know, the first time a young painter
exhibits his work, he's terribly concerned about how it's going to be
received. So I eavesdropped.
-
COREY
- One of those paintings was The White Gladiola?
-
BIBERMAN
-
The White Gladiola, and a portrait that I had
painted of the daughter of an English artist who was in that little
fishing village with his family at the same time. The English artist had
a name which was fantastic. His name was Sir Frank Spenlove-Spenlove ,
R.A. Sir Frank Spenlove-Spenlove, R.A. looked like a Peter Arno cartoon.
He was very big, florid, [with a] great white mustache. A charming man.
The painting of his daughter, incidentally — I don't know where it is,
or what happened to it. Somewhere in my moving, that painting has been
lost. It just disappeared, and I have no sense of what happened to it.
-
COREY
- You spent the summers of 1926 and 1927 in Concarneau. Why there?
-
BIBERMAN
- I mentioned a little while ago one of my instructors at the academy in
Philadelphia, Henry McCarter. As a young painter [he] had spent a lot of
time in France and had gone to Concarneau. That whole part of Brittany,
including Concarneau and another little town called Pont- Aven, were the
places to which many of the early French impressionists went. There was
a great school of painting called the Pont-Aven School. Gauguin, among
others, worked in that area. So the little fishing villages and the town
of Pont-Aven — which is inland--had, for many years, a great reputation
as the area to which painters went in the summer. And it was a very
beautiful part of Brittany. The little fishing villages were very
colorful--the boats and the sails and the sailors. So I went to
Concarneau, primarily on the recommendation of my old instructor. And I
loved the place, so much so that I went back again the following summer.
-
COREY
- With all the colorful environment, why did you choose primarily to paint
human figures? It seems that the majority of the works that you did then
were of people.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see my first and greatest interest was then in portraiture. At
a very early age, I had a certain facility in getting likenesses. Some
people have to work hard to do it, and some people don't. I happened to
have that knack, and I became interested, very early, in painting
people. Furthermore, the early association with Robert Susan, the
portrait painter, reinforced this desire. When I went to Brittany, most
of the artists were painting the boats and the sails and the water,
although some also painted the sailors and the fisherwomen. I did a few
things that had to do with the sea, but most of my time was spent on
canvases of the people because my work was going in that direction.
-
COREY
- Was there a large group of artists who were also in that general area?
And was everyone following the same tradition?
-
BIBERMAN
- You mean, were there a lot of people in Concarneau painting?
-
COREY
- In Concarneau painting, or people who left Paris for the summer to go to
Brittany.
-
BIBERMAN
- Oh, yes, and again, a very international group. I mentioned a Scotch
painter, George Owen. I first met him in Concarneau. He had come to this
village from Edinburgh. There was also a young French painter, whose
name escapes me at the moment, and a few Norwegians. The town was quite
small, and everyone knew everyone else very quickly. Since there was
very little to do in the evening, one night we decided to play cards.
The group that sat down consisted of myself, an American; George Owen,
who was Scotch; a young painter from Austria, whose name I don't
remember; one Frenchman; and two Norwegians. The problem was, what game
did we all know? Interestingly enough, everybody knew how to play poker.
So we all played poker! But actually, there were a great many people,
both tourists and artists, from all over the world. There were several
art schools, summer schools, transplanted from other places, too. There
was an American painter named Sigurd Skou, who took a group of students
there and ran his summer school.
-
COREY
- Getting back to Paris, what was the atmosphere in Paris when you were
there?
-
BIBERMAN
- I'm sure you're speaking now of the cultural atmosphere. Fascinating —
frenetic but fascinating. This was the period when cubism had already
been pretty firmly established as the avant-garde mode. Surrealism was
just beginning to become an important force. The Surrealist Manifesto
was written, I believe, in 1924.
-
COREY
- Who wrote that?
-
BIBERMAN
- Andre Breton, I believe. The surrealist movement in the art field and
also the field of the cinema was very important. Musically, there was
great ferment. This was the period of Darius Milhaud, Ravel, Stravinsky.
An American, Edgar Varese, was also in Paris at that time. [There was] a
great deal of experimental work being done in the theater--not the
Comedie Franchise or the other established, old, classic theaters, but
the avant-garde theaters. So that in general, there was a tremendous
amount of ferment in all of the arts, and it was a very heady atmosphere
to be in. You always felt that you were in the froth, on top of
something which was bubbling, and very exciting. It was a tremendously
stimulating atmosphere for anybody, in any of the arts. Which is why all
of us flocked to Paris.
-
COREY
- Your portrait of Betty--she was the daughter of an American family
living in Paris. In one of your books you said it was through her that
you became familiar with many French artists and writers.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. Let me tell you how that happened. The family was from Cincinnati.
They were quite wealthy, and I think the father stayed home to make the
money while the mother and two daughters decided to lead a literary,
bohemian kind of life in Paris. The mother had been very close to French
literary circles. She had been a friend, and still was, I believe ... I
don't remember whether Anatole France was still living at that time, but
in any case, she was a friend of Anatole France and knew many other
literary people, so that the whole family grew up close to the literary
circles in Paris and also to the art circles. And since they were
completely bilingual at this point, they had no language barriers. It
was through the daughter, Betty--her name was Van Ness Lippelman — that
I first met some of the then very well known French painters. Well, they
weren't really French, all of them. For example, [Moise] Kisling, who
was a member of the so-called school of Paris, was a Pole, a Polish Jew.
But he traveled in a circle of some of the better-known painters at the
Ecole de Paris. So this friendship was interesting for me because it
threw me into contact with a group of people whom I might not otherwise
have encountered.
-
COREY
- Such as?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, such as [Moise] Kisling, whom I've just mentioned, a group of
young French architects, and some musicians whom I met through that
family also. There was a Hungarian painter--Tihanyi was his name—whom I
met, the art critic Eugene Teriade, a few Czech painters, Andre Cenes,
the cartoonist, for one. But in substance, the fact is that this contact
opened certain avenues which otherwise simply would not have existed.
-
COREY
- You returned to Philadelphia in 1928?
-
BIBERMAN
- For the summer.
-
COREY
- For a visit, or any particular reason?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. I'd been away for two years. I hadn't seen my family--they wanted
to see me, and I wanted to see them--so I came back to spend the summer.
[I] painted all through that summer. I did a portrait of my niece,
Anne-- Anne Strick at that time. She was then a child of almost four. I did some landscapes and a few other paintings during that summer
period, but I was terribly anxious to get back to Paris. I had the
feeling that Paris was going to be a continuing part of my life, that I
just, somehow or other, had to stay there. But when I went back for the
third year, I began to have a sense of dislocation, even though I had
the good fortune to have had in that year [my] first one-man exhibitions
in Paris and Berlin. My work attracted the attention of a very important
French critic, and I was advised to stay in Paris and told that if I
stayed there, I would be guaranteed an international reputation in ten
years. This was the promise held out to me by Eugene Teriade, of the Cahiers d' Art, a very important French art
journal. But I began to have the uneasy feeling that I was enjoying the
cream of a situation, but that the base really did not belong to me,
that I could never really be totally assimilated- that I could never
really belong to Paris, although the temptation was great,
opportunistically, to stay there and see if the promise of an
international reputation in ten years was valid. But the feeling
persisted that I had to go back to a place where I felt my roots lay and
where I could honestly spend whatever creative energies I had, rather
than to remain in a very pleasant but ephemeral and unstable situation.
-
COREY
- Did it frighten you at all to think that you were going back to America,
the great cultural desert?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes and no. It frightened me because, number one, I decided I wanted to
go to New York, where I had very few contacts, so it was again going
into a new atmosphere. It frightened me also because I had no sense of
what I would encounter as a young painter in a new area. On the other
hand, I did have the advantage of having already had two one-man
exhibitions in Europe--not only at the Galerie Zak in Paris, which you
asked about, but also in Berlin. Therefore, I had a certain trepidation, but at the same time, I was
bolstered by the fact that there had already been a little bit of
recognition and, hopefully, there would be some more when I came into
another situation.
-
COREY
- How strong was the decision to move back to America connected to your
concept of where you wanted your art to go? Did you feel that you could
not do what you wanted to do in Paris, that you would not develop in the
manner that you . . . ?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it wasn't really a matter of my development as a painter, because I
was torn, feeling that maybe my development as a painter might be
speeded up by being in Paris. It really wasn't that. It was a sense of
sociologically not being able to see myself as a part of what I then
realized, no matter how beautiful, was really an alien culture. It was a
question of my place as a human being in a given time in history. And I
decided that it had to be America and not Europe.
-
COREY
- Well, saying that, then how strongly do you think one's physical
environment affects what they paint or how they paint?
-
BIBERMAN
- I think it depends on the individual. For example, [Alexander] Calder,
whom I mentioned a few moments ago, still spends most of his time in
Europe. Well, it's apparently fine for him. But I have found as I've
looked not only at painters but people in the other cultural fields-
who, at a certain point, threw up their hands in horror at what they
considered the philistine quality in this country and who went off to
Europe or to Mexico, or some other place--that after x-number of years,
with few exceptions, returned to this country, feeling that, for better
or worse, this is where they had to be. Now, there are exceptions. I
mean, Henry James lived very happily in Europe for a long time, as did
John Singer Sargent. Bernard Berenson lived very happily in Italy. There
are exceptions. But I think that in general, most Americans in the
cultural fields, at a given point, have felt a kind of compulsion — I
can put it in no other terms--a compulsion to, you know, be the salmon
that swims upstream. But you gotta go home, even though Thomas Wolfe
says that you can never go home again.
-
COREY
- Do you think your art would have been any different had you stayed in
Paris?
-
BIBERMAN
- It probably would have. I don't know whether that's good or bad, but I
think that it would have been different. I think that it would have been
more closely influenced by an international attitude had I remained
there. Now this becomes one of those iffy questions. You can't have it
both ways. You don't know whether it would have been better or worse. It
would have been different, I think, because the atmosphere out of which
it came would have been different. But there's no way, in retrospect, of
wondering whether it would have been better, worse,
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 24, 1975 and DECEMBER 8, 1975
-
COREY
- You were talking about how it would have been different. How much do you
think you were affected by what went on in Paris?
-
BIBERMAN
- I was affected a great deal by it, I think, both positively and
negatively, in finding some of the things that I did want and also
finding about some of the things that I did not want. I indicated a
moment ago that cubism was then the current mode in the avant-garde
field and that surrealism was becoming increasingly important. Most of
the young painters embarked on one of these directions or both. I did a
little experimental work for a short time in a cubist idiom, and a
little bit also in a kind of surrealist tradition. When I say that I
found both, what I did want to do and what I did not want to do, I very
quickly decided for myself that abstraction was not for me. I just
didn't like it. On the other hand, I would have to say in all honesty
that some of the structural aspects of nonobjective painting were very
important to me then and have remained very important for me. I'm
talking now about the purely formal, structural elements of design,
which are, of course, very important in the whole cubist approach.
However, the absence of associative content became something that I
could not accept. In terms of surrealism, I appreciated the fact that
the basis of surrealism, of course, is the antithesis of nonobjective
art. Surrealism deals with situations, associations, ideas,
personalities, persons, although it places them in unfamiliar context:
the subconscious, the unconscious, the associative. So in surrealism, I
liked the idea of considering relationships which were not necessarily
optical truth; it could be emotional, subjective, or psychological
truth. That I appreciated, and that, again, I have stayed with up into
my present work. Although the Freudian aspects of surrealism, which were
a very important part of the initial impulse, had very little validity
in terms of my own work, I had no objection to Dali or anybody else
doing whatever they wanted with the Freudian concepts. But I rejected
them, just as for me, the absence of associations or concepts or ideas
in non- objective painting became something which I did not accept. So
as I say, there were pluses and minuses in the situation; but being
exposed to the ferment and the discussions, both verbal and visual,
became very important at that time and is one of the things for which,
as I have indicated, I feel nothing but great gratitude. Even if one
rejects a concept, the fact that one talks about it leads to a more firm
crystallization of one's own ideas and concepts. If you have to talk
about it and argue and either accept or refute, then your own position
is bolstered. And this is what happened. This is, I think in general,
true of the entire period, to get us back to your question about what
was the atmosphere in Paris. This was the atmosphere. It was frenetic,
but it was also very exciting because it made you declare your
allegiances.
-
COREY
- Were there serious factions?
-
BIBERMAN
- Oh, of course. You know the story of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps
causing a riot when it was first played in Paris. Now we hear Sacre du
Printemps , and, you know, it's exciting, but nobody would consider
tearing up the seats in a concert hall. But this was part of the
atmosphere. This is part of the thing that, as I say, made it very
exciting.
-
COREY
- When you returned to Paris in 1929, you had a one- man show at the
Galerie Zak?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, the Galerie Zak. [Eugene] Zak was a painter, and the gallery was
run by his widow, Madame Zak. Zak was, oh, I would say, [a]
middle-echelon, accepted artist at that time. Everybody knew his work,
but he was never one of the more important in the school of Paris. The
gallery was run by his widow, Madame Zak, and that's where I had the
first one-man show in the spring of '29, just before I came back to the
States. At that time, I had some American friends who had been living in
Germany, a woman named Mrs. Stella Simon and her son Louis Simon (with
whom I'd gone to school at the University of Pennsylvania) . They were
in Berlin during that period making a film. They would come down to
Paris periodically, and a friend of theirs, a German named Max Dungert,
who was a cinematographer , came to Paris just at the time that I had my
exhibition in Paris. He saw the show and said, "Why don't you have an
exhibition in Berlin?" I said, "Well, I don't know anybody in Berlin,
and I don't know how I would even go about doing it." And he said,
"Well, I can arrange it for you if you would like." So he did. He went
back to Berlin, arranged the exhibition for me. I had the exhibition in
Berlin, at the Neue Kunsthandlung , which means, as I recall it, the
"new attitudes about art"— Kunst being "art" and neue of course being
"new." Kunsthandlung : the new dealership or new relations in art--I
guess that would be a general translation.
-
COREY
- It was the same show that had been at Galerie Zak?
-
BIBERMAN
- It went intact from Paris to Berlin. That experience in Berlin was very
interesting. I stayed at a little German pension with Sandy Calder. He
was having an exhibition at another gallery in Berlin at the time — the
Nierendorf Gallery, I believe it was — so we went to Berlin together and
stayed at the same pension. And I later discovered — I spoke very little
German, so that I got along very badly that way in Germany--but I found
out many years later that the pension in which we stayed was a Nazi
stronghold. And this, in retrospect, always amuses me. I used to see
these strange scar-faced men in the pension and sort of hatchet-faced
women. I didn't know what they were talking about, but I learned later
that this was a real Nazi nest, into which we, as a couple of innocents,
happened to fall. We just didn't know what was going on there. But
Germany was — Berlin, rather, because I didn't see anything else in
Germany. Berlin at that period in 1929 was unbelievable. I would say
that its overt decadence made Paris--which, you know, had the reputation
of being a very decadent city- made Paris look like a little country
village. And in retrospect again, I can see how some of the beginnings
of the Nazi movement came out of not only the frustrations of the German
people and their terrible economic condition, but also showed up in the
strangely perverted quality of life in Berlin--strange city! For
example, in 1929, the amount of homosexuality and lesbianism which was
just all over the place--and not covert, not concealed, not the closet
kind of living but all around. That, coupled with the fact that very
recently they'd gone through a terrible period of inflation plus the
disgruntled attitude of the militarists in Germany after the defeat of
the First World War, the whole city, to me, was absolutely macabre. And
I didn't like it at all. I didn't know why I didn't like it, really,
because, although I did not understand the political situation, I just
had the sense that something strange was happening. Interestingly
enough, the motion picture Cabaret - -which I'm
sure you've seen— very closely paralleled the feeling of Berlin at that
time and showed a very canny understanding of all of that growing
horror. For example, I went to nightclubs in Berlin, and they were very
much like the Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli Cabaret
settings. It was fascinating for me, but I can't say that I was
comfortable with it. I am glad to have experienced it because, again, in
retrospect, I think I can understand the growth of what happened only a
few years later in Germany.
-
COREY
- Paris decadence was not quite as destructive?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, Paris was sort of frivolous. For me there was, oh, a kind of more
simplistic decadence in Paris, if you like. [laughter] I don't know, it
was just there. It was obvious and accepted. But in Germany, in Berlin,
it had a different quality. I can only use the word "macabre" again--it
was creepy. It was not a healthy decadence; it was an unhealthy
decadence. But it was an interesting experience.
-
COREY
- In terms of that, what was the response to your show?
-
BIBERMAN
- In Germany? Nobody paid very much attention to it. There were a few
critical reviews, but I was a completely unknown young painter. I had
the show there, and it got a couple of middling-to-fair reviews. But
that was all. Nothing happened.
-
COREY
- What about the response in Paris?
-
BIBERMAN
- In Paris it was better, I think largely due to the fact that I had
already had a couple of things exhibited in Paris. Although it didn't
get a great deal of attention, it was better received, I would say, on
the whole, in Paris than it was in Berlin. But it was important for me
to have had both shows. It was a very good experience for a young
painter.
-
COREY
- How would the organization of a show like that develop? Would you go to
a gallery and say, "I'd like to exhibit," or would someone come to you?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, this was an overture that I had to make. There were certain
galleries where a young painter could exhibit, and there were certain
galleries where a young painter could not, so there was a choice of a
rather limited number of galleries. The procedure was that I went to the
Galerie Zak and discussed the possibility of an exhibition with them.
The arrangement was that I had to undertake the cost of the catalogs and
whatever little advertising we did, and I had to guarantee a certain
revenue from the show. If there were no sales out of the show, then that
was my prob- lem — I had to pony up whatever the guarantee was. And
since there were in fact no sales out of the show, I ultimately had to
make up the guarantee. However, it did not involve any great amount. But
I'd like to establish the fact that you simply couldn't buy a show. It
was not a vanity gallery. You couldn't walk off the street and say, "I
want to have a show here. How much will it cost?" The point is, the
gallery did have a professional reputation which it wished to uphold. It
had to also, from its own point of view, be sure that when it undertook
to show the work of a new person, that it [was able] to pay its rent. I
felt that this was eminently fair. They would not take on an exhibition
by a new artist unless they felt a certain confidence in the competence
of the work, so the fact that they were willing to put on the show, I
thought, was a point in my favor. The fact that I had to guarantee them
at least their rent if there were no sales, I felt, was certainly a
perfectly fair situation, since they knew that I was going back to
America and there would be no chance of their recouping out of my
subsequent exhibitions.
-
COREY
- What about art dealers in Paris in the twenties? Were there any people
who were particularly helpful to young, unknown artists?
-
BIBERMAN
- I'm sure that there were. I had no first- hand experience of that sort.
The more established galleries, of course, were dealing--as they do
anyplace else--with the accepted people. Whether you're talking about
Madison Avenue in New York, or La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, the
more accepted galleries handle the work of those people whom they feel
they can successfully sell. There are also, in all of these cities,
galleries that are willing to [take a] chance with a relative unknown.
The situation in Paris, in that direction, is one that I had no
firsthand experience with. [There had been,] for example, the phenomenon
of the dealers who first began to show French artists before they became
well known — like, for example, a Cezanne, or van Gogh, or other early
impressionists and postimpressionists . That kind of dealer
relationship, vis-a-vis American artists particularly, did not exist. As
a matter of fact, one of the reasons, I think--as I look at it in
retrospect--why Teriade was anxious to foster me and why he wanted me to
stay in Paris was the fact that, at that time, there was no well-known
American painter other than Man Ray who had any great reputation in
Paris. Apparently, he felt that I could be groomed for this position.
But he was a critic and not a dealer.
-
COREY
- And there were no collectors, either?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the collectors were actually buying the French School. For
example, Gertrude Stein was not collecting the work of Americans. As you
know from all the things that you've read about Gertrude Stein and her
coterie of friends, she was the great collector of Picasso and Matisse
and others of the French School. So far as I know, she was either
unaware of, or uninterested in, any of the American painters in Paris,
young or old. I know of no American painter of that period who was in
Gertrude Stein's collection. Similarly, I know of no French collector who was interested in the work
of Americans. That probably came later--I'm sure it did — but long after
I left Paris. For example, at the present time, as you know, there is a
great vogue for American painters all over Europe. People like Jackson
Pollock and [Willem] de Kooning and the whole New York School are
eagerly sought out by French collectors and dealers--and by Swiss and
Scandinavians. This was not true in the period of the twenties.
-
COREY
- Within that context, then, did you have to find most of your support
from fellow artists?
-
BIBERMAN
- Support in what terms?
-
COREY
- Support in terms of believing that what you were doing would eventually
be accepted.
-
BIBERMAN
- I would say yes. But of course, once we came back to the States, the
situation was entirely different because then we were on our own turf,
so to speak. But at that time, in Europe, the American painters largely
had to bolster each other's egos, because we didn't get it from the
outside.
DECEMBER 8, 1975
-
BIBERMAN
- This is a digression. When I was painting in New Mexico, 1930, a lot of
Texans used to come there. There was one family of Texans who had a
little girl of about ten, who apparently developed a great crush on me.
She used to follow me all around and really became quite a nuisance. One
day she said to me, "Mr. Biberman, will you talk to me?" So I said,
"Fine, what would you like me to talk about?" She said, "Well, it really
doesn't matter. I just like to hear your voice." [laughter] She was ten
years of age.
-
COREY
- Were you ever going to act?
-
BIBERMAN
- I used to do a lot of amateur theatricals.
-
COREY
- Prepainting or postpainting?
-
BIBERMAN
- Both. As a matter of fact, in high school I belonged to the dramatic
club; in college I played Shakespeare with the college dramatic club;
and after college, when I was in art school, there was a little theater
outside of Philadelphia, in a place called Rose Valley — a very
beautiful suburb of Philadelphia. There was a little theater [there]
which was run by a man named Jasper Deeter, who was of the old
Provincetown group. In college I had done a play called The Yellow Jacket --I don't know whether you're
familiar with it or not — by Hazelton and Benrimo. I had done the part
of the property man, which is a lush part because it's all pantomime and
no speaking. They were going to do it at Rose Valley, and somehow or
other, they got wind of the fact that I had played this part in college.
They asked me to come out there to do it, so I did. That began an
association of about two years. As a matter of fact, that was where I
first met Paul Robeson.
-
COREY
- At Provincetown?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, at the little theater in Rose Valley. He had come down to do The Emperor Jones. In that particular play, I
played the part of one of the supernumeraries who, after the emperor is
shot with a silver bullet--if you remember the play--has to carry Jones
on stage and then dump him down in front of the footlights. I was a
grown young man and pretty strong. I had one end of Paul Robeson, and
another young man, of about my same build, had the other end, and we
could barely carry this man in and dump him on the stage. But I never
thought of doing acting seriously. I enjoyed it, but with all deference
to your own family's background, [laughter] the last thing in the world
I ever wanted to be, professionally, was an actor, so that was the end
of my acting career.
-
COREY
- To get back to your painting career, I was reading through the reviews
of your show at the Galerie Zak in Paris, and one of the reviews had
mentioned that there was something sculptural in your earlier works. Had
you ever thought of sculpting?
-
BIBERMAN
- Not at that time, but I did one piece of sculpture in my career — and
this is kind of an amusing story. As a matter of fact, the sculpture,
although it won't record on your tape, is sitting right out there in the
hallway. In 1929, after I came back to the States, from Europe, I had a
studio on Fifty-seventh Street. Isamu Noguchi, who had been a close
friend of mine in Paris, had a studio in the same building. One day I
knocked on his door, and I said, "Isamu, I'm tired of painting. I want
to do some sculpture." And I said, "I've never done it before, so I want
a modeling stand and an armature and some clay, and show me how you get
started." So he gave me the modeling stand and an armature, and he
showed me how you coil the clay around the armature so that you can
build on it. I took all of that stuff back into my own studio, and the
first day, I made five complete pieces of sculpture. I said, "It can't
be that easy. [laughter] There's something silly about this." Each time
I would make a piece of sculpture — and there was only a certain amount
of clay--I would mash it all together and do another. The first day I
did five. And I thought to myself, "This is really ridiculous." I said,
"Tomorrow, I'm going to get up nice and early, and by dint of great
self-control, I'm going to force myself to spend an entire day on one
piece of sculpture." So the next day, I got up, and by really stretching
it out, I spent the entire day doing a head. Along about late afternoon,
when I thought that I had done all that I could to it, I took it to
Noguchi, and I said, "Well, Isamu, what do you think of it?" He looked
at it and said, "Well, it's not good, but it's not bad." He said, "I'll
tell you what. I'm casting some of my own stuff tomorrow, and I'll cast
your piece also." So he cast it, and that was 1929, and I've not touched
a piece of sculpture since--because I have enough respect for every
discipline to know that nothing is easy. If something seems to be easy,
it's usually a kind of a surface facility, and I distrusted that in
myself. So I decided that if, at some future time, I wanted to be really
serious about sculpture, I might try it. But I've become too engrossed,
continuously, with painting, so that is the only extant Biberman
sculpture.
-
COREY
- Was it very much different from the five you did the first day?
-
BIBERMAN
- I really don't remember. It was probably different in the sense that I
spent a little more time on it, and it was more carefully considered.
But as I recall it, at least two of those five pieces were heads. I
don't remember what the others were. They were probably small figures,
because I was working with just a limited amount of clay. But the point
is that I found working in a three-dimensional medium just
fantastically--I won't say easy, but fantastically different than trying
to create the illusion of three dimensions in a two-dimensional medium.
And since it seemed so simple--because one didn't have to create the
third dimension; it was already there--I decided that I was not being
very serious about it and said, "That's the end of my career as a
sculptor." I have, on occasion, sort of toyed with the idea of doing
something again, but if I were, I would probably not work with clay. I
would probably want to carve, and that requires all kinds of equipment
and so forth and so on. I just never got going.
-
COREY
- I have a question that I almost hesitate to ask you, but it was
something that also came up in the review from the show at the Galerie
Zak. One of the reviewers said that Edward Biberman was the logical
outcome of Aubrey Beardsley .
-
BIBERMAN
- Good Lord, I don't remember that.
-
COREY
- It's in your scrapbook.
-
BIBERMAN
- That I am the logical outcome of Aubrey Beardsley? Well. [laughter] That
kind of stops me. First of all, I don't remember it. Secondly, I don't
know what the reviewer could have meant. I've never thought of myself
as— you know, I admire Aubrey Beardsley 's line and so forth, but the
kind of fin-de-siecle decadence of Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book and all of that whole atmosphere--I
just don't know what they're talking about.
-
COREY
- It sort of stopped me, too.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, it stops me. I'm going to have to reread that and see in what
context that occurs. I have no recollection of that at all.
-
COREY
- In 1929, you returned to the United States and spent the summer with
your family on the island of Mount Desert.
-
BIBERMAN
- Mount Desert Island — we were near Bar Harbor, in Maine. I went there
for two reasons. First of all, having been away from my family for
almost three years, with the exception of a time the summer before that,
I felt that I wanted to spend the summer with them. And they wanted to
spend the summer with me. I had heard through friends of mine, some
painters, about the area around Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor, at that time,
was a big social center. But the islands around Bar Harbor, and the
country near there, I was told, was extremely beautiful--very rocky
coast and a very dramatic confluence of water and terrain. I drove up
with my mother to sort of look the area over, and we found a little
farmhouse, several miles out of the town of Bar Harbor itself, which we
rented for the summer. Through that summer, my sister spent a lot of
time with us; my father and my sister's husband would usually come up
from Philadelphia on weekends. It was a very beautiful summer in the
sense that it was the kind of landscape with which I was not very
familiar. My recollection of coast had mostly to do with the part of the
Jersey coast which is very sandy, [with] scrub pines, and [is] not at
all rocky. I found the whole quality of the New England coastline very
exciting. I painted quite a few landscapes that summer. I also painted
the portrait of my mother which is reproduced in my book, Time and Circumstance. And in all, it was a nice
transition from Paris to going to New York, which I'd planned to do at
the end of the summer. Also, at the end of that summer, my mother and I
drove up to Quebec, which proved to be very interesting for me— I'd
never been in Canada before. Nothing came out of that trip so far as my
painting was concerned, but it was simply, again, another pleasant
interlude before returning to New York.
-
COREY
- How did your mother feel about your painting?
-
BIBERMAN
- She was very partial to my decision not to become a businessman and to
continue painting. She was always a very supportive person, in terms of
my work--not that my father wasn't, but there was, in his case, a great
sense of disappointment, in the fact that I had not gone into his
business, nor had my brother. So that I think that his role was more
tolerant than supportive.
-
COREY
- And you went back to Paris at the end of that summer?
-
BIBERMAN
- No.
-
COREY
- You stayed?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, the end of that summer was the end of three years in Paris, and I
went back to New York.
-
COREY
- You went back to New York . . .
-
BIBERMAN
- I say "back to New York"; I went to New York, because I had never lived
there prior to that. As I may have indicated, the problem of being a
young painter in Philadelphia was very difficult. It was just too close
to New York, and all of the young painters felt the strong attraction of
New York and wanted to leave. So anybody that could possibly manage to
leave Philadelphia and get to New York did so.
-
COREY
- What was the attraction to New York?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the fact of the matter was that the art activity in the United
States, at that time, centered in New York. The galleries were there,
the art publications, the major museums, and, of course, the
Metropolitan was there. And Philadelphia, by contrast, in terms of the
art field, was very provincial. Unlike the music scene— where
Philadelphia ranked very high with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the
Curtis Institute — in terms of visual art, Philadelphia suffered from
being only ninety miles from New York, and had, in comparison, a much
more, again, provincial quality.
-
COREY
- Had the art scene in New York changed very much in the three years you
were in Paris, or had your attitudes changed so that New York felt more
comfortable?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see, I had never lived in New York before, but I was fairly
familiar with what was going on there. You know, I'd make occasional
trips and so forth. And I would say that a great change did occur for a
two- fold reason. First of all, by the period of 1929, the great return
of all the expatriates had already started when the stock market crash
brought back all of us who were living on little stipends from our
families, and the whole expatriate scene, in terms of art, changed. Most
of the American painters whom I knew in Paris were back in America, and
most of them were from New York. In addition to that, there was the fact
that we were embarking on the whole period of the Great Depression after
the crash. In 1929, it hadn't yet manifested itself to the degree that
it would in a few years, but already there was a great sense of unease
because of the changed economic picture. So in answer to your question,
I had the feeling that New York artists, for purely economic reasons,
had to divorce themselves physically from Paris. [They had to] look
around and try to assess their position of no longer being expatriates,
try to locate themselves, both physically and emotionally, in the
American scene.
-
COREY
- When you say "economically," what exactly do you mean?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, of course, you know that the fact of the matter is that certainly,
in this country, art is, and always has been, a luxury item. It's the
last acquisition in most people's budgetary outlook and, therefore, the
first casualty when a need for economy comes in. So that although it
hadn't manifested itself as stringently as it did in a few years,
already there was a sense that the galleries were not going to be
selling paintings as they had in the period prior to that, which as you
know, historically, was a great boom period. In a boom period, people go
to nightclubs, they buy expensive cars and luxury items, and if there's
anything left over, they buy art. So that art became a casualty of the
period.
-
COREY
- How did you live in New York?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, since my family hadn't as yet suffered too much from the effects
of the crash, I still had a small subsidy from my family. I also began
to sell my work, and although the sales were not spectacular, there was
a certain income that I derived from these sales. So that between what I
had from selling my work and the fact that I never was cut off
completely from family help, I managed to get through that early period.
-
COREY
- How did the sales of your works occur?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, in what was for me a rather interesting — and, as I look back on
it, a very strange — fashion. When I was in Paris, I'd met a number of
the American painters who were already established on the New York scene
— or in the scene, I should say.
-
COREY
- Such as?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, people like Adolph Dehn, for example, who had come to Paris to
work. And Mahonri Young, who was a painter and sculptor. And [Yasuo]
Kuniyoshi, and Stuart Davis--I could go on. But these were people who
were already pretty well established in New York. In addition to that,
in Paris I had met a woman named Ruth Green Harris, who was the second
art critic on the New York Times. She was very
interested in the work of mine that she saw, and when I came to New
York--I don't recall whether it was through Ruth Harris or through
another woman whom I had met-- I was introduced to a man named George
Hellman. George Hellman had been the owner and the director of an art
gallery called the New Gallery in New York. He was no longer in business
when I first met him, but he still had very firm and solid connections
with the New York art dealer community. Hellman became very interested
in my work and bought several things from me. We had a very involved
exchange deal at one point which involved my taking over a painting by
Kisling in exchange for a painting of mine. But in any case, he
introduced me to the director of the Montross Gallery. The Montross
Gallery was a very old and established gallery in New York, and the old
[N.E.] Montross — I say "old" because he was a man who I would say was
in his late seventies — also became very interested in me and in my
work. I had two exhibitions at his gallery, and I also, at that time,
through someone — I can't quite recall the connection— met Jere Abbott
and Alfred Barr, who were just at that time beginning to start the
Museum of Modern Art. They too saw and liked my work, so that I very
suddenly found myself-- as I look back on it, it's kind of strange, but
at that time I simply took this as a matter of course — taken up by a
very good gallery, in contact with the people who were directors of the
Museum of Modern Art, and also [in] contact with the Whitney Museum. I
very quickly, by these rather fortuitous circumstances, found myself
very closely involved with the New York exhibition scene, so that
through these contacts, I began to make sales. Not spectacularly, but I
was getting exhibitions, and I was beginning to sell my work.
-
COREY
- You were part of the "Forty-six under Thirty-five" at the Museum of
Modern Art?
-
BIBERMAN
- That's right.
-
COREY
- Was that one of its first shows?
-
BIBERMAN
- It was an early show. I don't recall the exact date of the founding of
the Museum of Modern Art--I think it was about 1929, 1930. But one of
its early shows was the show called "Forty-six under Thirty-five"--the
title simply had to do with the museum's choice of forty-six artists
whose work it felt showed promise and who were not yet thirty-five years
of age. I was very fortunate to have been chosen for that exhibition
because already the Museum of Modern Art was, even in its beginnings, a
very prestigious New York gallery, so that my inclusion in that show
meant that very early in my career, I was getting a lot of exposure, I
look back on it now with a kind of amazement because there were so many
friends of mine who had been on the art scene a great deal longer than I
had — and who, I must say, were certainly as talented as I was--who did
not happen on this series of, as I would characterize them, fortuitous
encounters and I would like to think that the encounters were not only
fortuitous but [that] they were based on some sense of empathy with the
things that I did. Nonetheless, in retrospect, I'm quite astonished at
the speed with which I suddenly became involved in the New York art
scene.
-
COREY
- Do you feel that the move to New York affected your painting?
-
BIBERMAN
- Not so much the move to New York as the mood which began to develop, not
only in New York but all over the country in that period. This was the
period which, as you know and as I've already indicated, was the start
of the Depression, and I don't think it was so much the move to New York
as it was my acute awareness of what was happening all over the country
that made me reconsider, reassess, and question a lot of what was going
on in art. In particular, there was the phenomenon of the great mural
movement in Mexico, which we were all very, very conscious of. In that
whole period of the early thirties — although this is kind of jumping
your question a bit — but in that period of the early thirties, [Diego]
Rivera was in New York for a long time, [Jose] Orozco was in New York,
[David] Siqueiros was in New York, in addition to which, we knew of the
work of all of these people in Mexico. The fact that Mexico, a very poor
country, was subsidizing what had already become and proved to be one of
the world's really great mural movements made many of us question, in
this particular period, the role of the easel painter who, after all,
was dependent upon the largesse of those people who had enough money to
buy paintings, which — let's face it--were usually considered to be
items of decoration for their homes.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 8, 1975
-
BIBERMAN
- In answer to your question, I don't think it was the move to New York
that occasioned a great change in my work, but it was, rather, the mood
of the whole country that made me begin a very critical period in my
examination of my own work. A lot of that, as I've said, had to do with
the presence and the awareness of the Mexican movement. In terms of the
things that I was painting, I was still continuing what I had been doing
during this period of gestation. I was still painting portraits. I
painted Martha Graham in that period, I painted Katharine Cornell, [and]
I painted views of the city. I began what has become a long love affair
with architectural thematic material, which meant that I was painting
some of the architecture of the city and the George Washington Bridge.
So that although I kept going through the motions--and I say that
advisedly--of what I had been doing, I was in a very critical period of
self-examination. And this culminated, in a little time, in the fact
that I joined a kind of a cooperative group of young painters, all of
whom, because of their fascination with the Mexican movement, started to
study the fresco techniques. There was young Italian-American painter
named Conrad Albrizio, who had been trained in fresco in the American
Academy at Fontainebleau, who was our mentor. We didn't pay him, but he
worked along with us because I think he was anxious to develop a school
of fresco painting. A group of about a dozen painters, none of whom had
a particular reputation but all of whom were anxious to study the
technique, began to work in fresco. We had no idea as to where this
would lead us in terms of commissions, but at least my own feeling was
that this was a technique that I wanted to learn, hoping that sometime,
somewhere it might be applied. It never was, incidentally, as a
technique. [I] never had occasion to use it because, jumping in time,
when I painted the murals that came to me many years later, I was not
permitted to paint them in fresco. However, I enjoyed the fact that I
was studying a new technique.
-
COREY
- What was it about the Mexican movement, simply the technique?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, fresco, as you know, has a long, honorable history as a technique.
But it was the combination of a technique which was hallowed by time
and, most importantly, the uses to which the technique was being put. As
you know, the entire Mexican mural movement was predicated on the fact
that this was a public art. Going into public locales. It had to speak
directly to the people [and to] the country. Therefore, its language
could not be esoteric, since the audience was a totally new audience.
And I think the best example of what I mean is the history of Diego
Rivera, who, living in Paris, before the overthrow of the [Porfirio]
Diaz regime in Mexico, was a very talented abstract and cubist painter.
[He was] a friend of Picasso's, and of Juan Gris and of the whole group
that was investigating the cubist and the abstract premise. And Rivera
was then a very able abstract painter--you may know some of his work of
that period. But when he found out about what was happening in Mexico
and returned to Mexico, he, in a very short time, it seems to me,
abandoned his abstract style and began the historic, narrative painting
style for which he is best known. There was no point in being a cubist
painter on the walls of Mexico because this was not the way to speak to
the Mexican people. And since art became a very direct means of
communication, not only the technique but the motivation changed. This
was less true of a man like Orozco, who had never been attracted to the
abstract idiom, and a little less true of Siqueiros, who had only a
small flirtation with the abstract concept, and as the youngest of the
three never had to break with a crystallized past aesthetic attitude. So
that, to come back after this rather circuitous route that I've taken, I
had enormous admiration, particularly in this period, for the motivation
that drove these artists to do the work they did. And although I had no
sense of how this might happen in our own country--because this was
prior to the whole New Deal art period — I had the feeling that
something had to give, that the premise upon which we had all been
operating in the past was no longer valid.
-
COREY
- What do you mean by "no longer valid"?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the business of being an easel painter and producing what the
economists call a "commodity" in the hope that somewhere, sometime,
someone would buy it. This is what I mean by the premise. The premise of
public art is totally different. You don't paint an enormous wall in the
hope that someday, someone will build a building for it. In public art,
you have a building, you have a premise, you have an opportunity, and
the opportunity and the audience are both public. Therefore, it seemed
to me at that time, and I still feel [it is true], that given a
different premise, one arrives at a different conclusion--in art as well
as in logic.
-
COREY
- Did the development of the idea of the mural have anything to do with
what was happening architecturally in New York, with skyscrapers or
large buildings?
-
BIBERMAN
- No. No relation at all. There was the hope that this would occur. One of
the other exhibitions in which I participated under the aegis of the
Museum of Modern Art was based on this hope, which proved to be false.
The argument was that since we were in a new architectural period in the
United States, a period with the development of the skyscraper, a new
mural movement, which would be housed in the new architecture, would
emerge. The Museum of Modern Art invited artists and staged an
exhibition of mural solutions to hypothetical problems, which was
designed to induce architects and builders to think about incorporating
murals into their new buildings. The idea was very good and pious, but
it really never bore fruit, although the exhibition itself was
interesting, and there were some rather good theoretical solutions made.
But all of us were designing for nonexistent conditions, which is kind
of a contradiction in mural art. In mural art, the whole premise is that
you're working with a given set of architectural conditions, and if you
have to invent both the condition and the solution, it becomes a kind of
strange pursuit. Nonetheless, this is what happened at that exhibition
in the museum. It was good for me, because I received good reviews, and
it led to other things, but the hope which is at the heart of your
question was never really fulfilled. The murals that now decorate the
big skyscrapers in the East and here, and the sculptural works that
embellish them, came about under different circumstances entirely.
Nothing happened in that early period to parallel the Mexican movement.
The parallel came later with the development of the various art projects
under [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt.
-
COREY
- How did you become aware of what was happening in Mexico?
-
BIBERMAN
- Two ways. First of all, the movement was very well publicized in all of
the art magazines. A lot of Americans had gone to Mexico, and some of
the Mexicans themselves, as I indicated, came to the United States. So
there was a kind of cross-fertilization. We could not be unaware of the
Mexican movement when Diego Rivera was painting his big
mural--subsequently destroyed—in Radio City, when Orozco was painting
the murals in the New School for Social Research, and when Siqueiros was
in New York lecturing at the New School for Social Research. We all met
these people, so that it would have been almost impossible to have been
unaware of the Mexican phenomenon. Incidentally, as you may also
remember, the first major exhibition of Diego Rivera's in the United
States was held in the then-new Museum of Modern Art. I don't know
whether you're aware of that or not.
-
COREY
- No, I wasn't.
-
BIBERMAN
- So, as I say, you could not be unaware of this phenomenon. It was the
big, hot thing after the school of Paris and, for many people, carried
much more validity.
-
COREY
- You were doing murals and portraits at the same time?
-
BIBERMAN
- Mural projects, not murals.
-
COREY
- Right, mural projects, but you were also painting cityscapes and
painting portraits. You mentioned before that you and Noguchi were good
friends in Paris and in New York.
-
BIBERMAN
- That's right.
-
COREY
- You did a portrait of his sister?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. He had a very beautiful sister who was a member of Martha Graham's
dance company--her name was Ailes, Ailes Gilmour. Both, you see, were of
mixed parentage, The mother was Scotch-Irish and the father was of pure
Japanese ancestry, so that, as very often happens with two racial
strains, the result was quite phenomenal. Noguchi himself was a handsome
young man, and his sister was a beauty. I still have the painting which
I did of her, which is one of my most cherished paintings of that
period. I have no idea what happened to Ailes; I've lost contact with
her completely. But it was through Noguchi and through Ailes Gilmour
that I first met Martha Graham. I became very enamored of her work, and
it was because of that interest that I painted a large portrait of her.
[It] got a great deal of favorable publicity at the time. She was
beginning to be the most talked-of figure in the dance world, and the
portrait that I did of her, I exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in
Philadelphia. It received a great deal of attention and was reproduced
full-page in the Theatre Arts magazine. Later it
was again reproduced in Merle Armitage's book on Martha Graham.
-
COREY
- Was that a portrait that she requested?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, no. She had the graciousness to allow me to come to her studio while
she was working. I did the painting from a great many drawings and
sketches and notes that I made. She didn't pose, in the formal sense.
What I did, or at least what I tried to do, was to distill the quality
of her early work. It was very severe, very geometric, very--I don't
know how to best describe it in words: very contained, very precise,
very evocative. It was this quality which I tried to instill in the pose
in which I finally painted her. There was a kind of tautness in her body
which was very much like the way she held herself in those early dance
numbers. The portrait is not a pose from any one dance but rather an
attempt to crystallize the quality of her figure in the dances that she
was doing at that time. The more lyric quality came into her dances much
later, when she was doing things like Appalachian
Spring, and so forth. It was a totally different idiom. I found
it very moving. I was very excited by it. I tried to go to all of her
concerts in addition to making drawings of her in her studio while she
was teaching, working.
-
COREY
- Do you think you would have gotten a very different type of portrait if
she had sat for you?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, I don't think so, but frankly, I felt no need to ask her to pose. I
had a pretty good idea of what I wanted her to do. I would not have
asked her to, you know, sit, because I wanted a standing pose.
[laughter] I would not have asked her to pose for me simply because this
would have been, from my point of view, an imposition.
-
COREY
- About that time, you also did the portrait of Gale Sondergaard .
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes.
-
COREY
- Had she and Herbert been married by that time?
-
BIBERMAN
- They married just before I returned from Europe in 1929. It was really
very interesting because Herbert used to write to me, saying, "In a lot
of the figures that you have been painting"--and those were the invented
figures that I had been painting in Paris--"although you don't know it,
you have really been painting Gale, whom you will meet." And later I
knew what he meant because one of the last paintings that I had done in
Paris was that of a Canadian woman whom I knew in Paris. It's a painting
that I had exhibited at the Salon des Independants . (Incidentally, it
was slashed in that exhibition. We never knew why or how or by whom, but
while it was on exhibition, somebody walked past it and carried either a
knife or a razor blade and, at about hip height, put a long gash through
the canvas.) Anyway, there was a great similarity, I found, between the
way I had painted this Canadian woman and what I saw in Gale, and I then
found out what Herbert was talking about. I was very interested in Gale,
both as a person and as a potential sitter. And she actually sat,
because this is a sitting portrait. [laughter]
-
COREY
- Was Herbert writing or directing?
-
BIBERMAN
- He had begun to direct at that point. He did a series of directorial
stints for the Theatre Guild, and he was already well embarked on his
career. Gale, of course, was already an actress, and had appeared in one
of the plays in which Herbert played a small part. He also did a
directorial stint, or a co-directorial stint— I don't quite remember
what the circumstances were. But Gale was already embarked. She had no
schizophrenic problem. She was an actress then, and she's remained an
actress. Herbert had done a lot of acting at Yale, but he really wanted
to go into direction, which he did very shortly after that. To get back
to Gale's portrait, I've always had a great love for portraiture, all
through my painting career. There were times when the accent was heavy
on portraiture, and there were times when the accent was light. But
there has been no period in my career in which I completely stopped
painting portraits. This has always been too important a part of my
impulse as a painter. In New York at that time, through the fact that Herbert and Gale were in
the theater, I had the opportunity to meet and paint Katharine Cornell.
I met her through Lee Simonson, who was with the Theatre Guild and who
convinced Katharine Cornell that she should sit for me, which she did. This kind of contact into the world of the theater started then and, of
course, continued many years later, when we all found ourselves in
California.
-
COREY
- From the reviews, the portrait of Katharine Cornell created quite a
stir.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, and I, again, [laughter] in looking back on it--well, let's say
that sensibilities change. I remember an incident when I was hanging the
exhibition in which this painting was first shown in the Reinhardt
Gallery. My first dealer, Montross, had died, and I changed over to the
Reinhardt Gallery. I was hanging the exhibition, and the door was
open--the exhibition was not theoretically open, but the door to the
gallery was open — and a rather elderly gentleman walked in and looked
around and saw the portrait of Katharine Cornell. He snorted and said,
"The man who painted that picture ought to be hung." He thought I was
the handyman, just taking things off the floor and putting them up. But
the portrait did create kind of a furore, which rather surprised me
because I didn't feel at the time, and I don't feel now, that it should
have evoked quite the kind of outraged cries that it did in certain
circles. A lot of people considered it a caricature of Katharine
Cornell, which certainly was the farthest thing in the world from my
mind. Other people liked it enormously. John Mason Brown, for example,
who was then one of the top New York theatrical critics, wrote me a
very, very beautiful note after he'd seen the portrait, in which he went
out of his way to compliment me on what he thought was a splendid
characterization of someone whom he considered a great actress. And
Katharine Cornell's secretary, a woman named Gertrude Macy, came up to
my studio to see the portrait when it was finished and came up with a
classic line. After she looked at the portrait, she said, "You know,
that portrait of Katharine Cornell is more like Katharine Cornell than
Katharine Cornell is like Katharine Cornell." Which I thought was a
great comment. I thought of it in those terms, but some people felt that
it was a caricature. So that when Gertrude Macy said it was more like
Katharine Cornell than Katharine Cornell was like Katharine Cornell, a
lot of people carried that thought one step farther, and said, "It's a
caricature." A couple of the New York art critics got very exercised
about it but, from my point of view, for no very good reason. Now, for
example, many, many years later, this reaction would not occur. But
apparently at that time the portrait raised the hackles of a few people. During that exhibition, a rather interesting thing happened which
relates to something which bore fruit a little time later. I went into
the gallery one day after the exhibition had opened, and the young man
who worked in the gallery, named Freddie Lake, said, "Oh, by the way,
Joan Crawford came in here, and she saw your portrait of Katharine
Cornell, and she absolutely flipped. And she wanted me to tell you that
if you ever came to California, she would love to have you paint her
portrait." So I said, "Well, that's nice. Maybe someday, if I am in
California, we'll do something about it." So, a few years later, when I
came to California, I got in touch with her. And I painted her portrait,
which she subsequently bought. But anyway, this all relates to some of
the brouhaha that occurred around that Cornell portrait.
-
COREY
- The Crawford portrait created some of that itself, didn't it?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, but in a different sense. The Crawford portrait elicited a lot of
comment from a press agent type of publicity. I suddenly found that a
very innocuous comment that I had made, saying that there was a very
Egyptian quality about her, was given to the press as a story that I was
painting Joan Crawford as an "Egyptian goddess." This was pure press
agentry! No, the reaction to the Joan Crawford portrait was quite
different from the Cornell reactions. Nobody was outraged — let me put
it that way-- by the Crawford portrait, but a lot of people were
outraged by what they thought was a caricature of Katharine Cornell.
-
COREY
- Is it outrage because of her, or outrage because of style?
-
BIBERMAN
- I really don't know because I never quite understood it. The color,
although I didn't feel it was particularly daring — I painted her in a
very intense kind of a claret-colored dress which I made up for her
because I just felt that with her black hair, and the pallor of her
skin, and the very red makeup that she used on a very generous mouth,
that I wanted this kind of deep claret- colored costume. So I invented
the costume. It was probably a combination of the fact that some people
sensed caricature in the features, and others felt that there was an
overemphasis on the color approach that occasioned this.
-
COREY
- Previous to the Cornell portrait, you had spent the summer in Taos, New
Mexico?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. The summer of 1930, I had gone to Taos. And again, I went there
because, number one, I had never been West; number two, I had heard a
great deal about the quality of Western landscape; and, very frankly, I
was very curious about the Indians. I had the sense that this was a
piece of the country which would appeal to me enormously, and it
certainly did, in truth, have that quality. Fabulous.
-
COREY
- In what way?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the country was fantastic beyond my fondest expectations. The
Indians were there, and they were very paintable, and the other people
who were there were very exciting. The landscape appealed to me
enormously. I found the Indians very exciting, [and] the company,
particularly of people like John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul
Strand, Lady Brett, and the whole body of D.H. Lawrence legends — and in
1930, the legends were still very fresh. All of that made it a very
memorable summer. I came back with a lot of paintings and a great love
for the Southwest, which has persisted to this day. I returned to the
Southwest the next summer, not to Taos but to Monument Valley. At the
end of my stay in Taos, two painter friends of mine, two young ladies
from the East, came through Taos and by pure chance came to the hotel in
which I was stopping. They were very anxious to go into an area called
Monument Valley, which at that time was very, very little known. They
were rather timid about going themselves and wanted to know if I would
consider teaming up with them and taking the trip. I was most anxious to
do so. I had a little Model T Ford which I wouldn't dare to have taken
more than ten miles out of the town. They had a very serviceable car, so
we used theirs, and we went to Monument Valley together. One of the
young women was not well known as a painter, but the other was very well
known. She was a painter by the name of Marian Greenwood who had already
begun to make quite a reputation for herself in New York and who later
went to Mexico and painted murals. So I saw Monument Valley at the end
of the summer in Taos and found this even more exciting than Taos
itself. The following summer, I went directly to Monument Valley, where
I spent, oh, better than two months. I did a great deal of work that
summer.
-
COREY
- When you say "exciting," in what ways?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, again, two of the three components were very exciting. I eliminate
the third because there was no Marin, there was no Strand, there was no
O'Keeffe. There were only Indians and traders. But the country was the
most dramatic that I have ever seen. It's become popularized since
because it's been the location for so many Western movies. But to see
these fantastic red stone monoliths, and to be in the middle of a very
active Navajo Indian culture! The Taos Indians, as you know, are a
Pueblo tribe. They're an agricultural people, and as an agricultural
Indian community, they grow corn and squash and they live sedentary
lives in still-existing pueblos. The Navajos, on the contrary, are a
sheepherding people [and] are nomadic. They have no fixed abodes. They
live in temporary houses called hogans, which they live in while the
sheep are grazing, and then they move to another location. They are a
much more dynamic people and, visually, very fierce looking. They almost
live on horseback. They are very colorful in their costumes — not that
the Pueblo Indians are not colorful, but the Navajos seemed to me to be
even more handsome in their dress, and their nomadic life gave them,
physically even, a different look entirely than the Pueblo Indians, who
were more likely to be shorter and heavyset. The Navajos, particularly
the young men, are very lean and very wiry. They practically live on
horses. I found them very, very wonderful, visually, and I painted many
of them. The country, too--it was fabulous.
-
COREY
- Did you find that you needed to make any adjustments in your painting of
the Southwest, as opposed to New York or Paris?
-
BIBERMAN
- It was a totally different kind of painting idiom. I'd never had the
experience, for example, of having to cope with country which was
semi-arid and, in the case of Monument Valley, red ochre. I remember a
very amusing story that relates to John Marin, who one day, when we were
talking, said, "You know, this country really frustrates me." He said,
"You know, all this pink and green. I never know whether to paint
everything pink and put in green spots or to put in the green spots and
paint pink around them! " [laughter] Well, it didn't frustrate me, since
I'd never really been a devoted landscape painter; but it certainly
posed entirely different considerations than, let's say, the kind of
country that I painted the summer before in Bar Harbor, which was
Eastern, lush, green, cool in tonality. To suddenly find myself in red
sandstone country, with great rocky promontories and monoliths, with
wiry, beautiful dark-skinned Indians, was very exciting, very
provocative. And I had to lay out a new palette because I'd never had
this particular visual challenge before. But it didn't present any
insurmountable problems. It was simply a change- over from one color key
to another color key. But it didn't pose the kind of trauma that Marin
apparently faced when he didn't know which to put in first, the dots or
the foreground.
-
COREY
- You did some very literal paintings at that time, and then there's Desert Light, which is much — well, I don't want
to define it, but ....
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, I think that's a fair characterization. Most of the landscapes I
did were literal in that they related to very recognizable formations
even though the treatment could not be considered literal. Nonetheless,
they were figurative in the sense that if you could see the particular
buttes and if you saw my paintings, you would say, yes, that's this
particular spot. A couple of the paintings that I did-- the Desert Light, which you mentioned particularly,
was much more of a mood painting. There was no such optical phenomenon
as a sky with horizontal slits of light. Nonetheless, the feeling of the
desert at night was powerful, and it raised a kind of a need, at a given
point, for me to create a mood painting which was not figurative. Stars
do not look like horizontal blips on a radar screen, yet, in a sense, I
feel that that painting probably carries the feel of the desert, as I
look back on it, more than the literal paintings. That particular
canvas, I have not seen for better than thirty years. It was purchased
in the middle thirties and is somewhere in the East — I don't know quite
where.
-
COREY
- Do you feel that the choice of painting Indians in the Southwest is in
any way attached to the development of your idea about the mural? It's
very different than painting a Katharine Cornell or a Gale Sondergaard.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let me put it this way: I have often thought about the fact that,
well, you know they say that a painter always paints, and this is true.
I mean, a painter always paints. When I found myself in New York, I
painted the things that related to that setting. When I went into
another atmosphere, the desert, I painted that particular setting. When
I found that instead of figures out of the New York theater, I was
painting Indians on horseback, I painted them. I've always found that I
can usually relate to the place that I happen to find myself in, and if
I am happy in that place, I paint my reactions to whatever the visual
stimuli may be. Therefore, again, I had no mental gymnastics that I had
to exercise in order to turn off New York and turn on the Southwest.
However, the following year in New York, I did paint a proposed mural
composition based on my experience with the Navajo Indians. This
composition was shown in another big exhibition directed toward a mural
program for the city, which, like the previous one, did not take place.
Again, we're leading up to — and I'm sure that we're going to be talking
about-- the whole public arts program, but all of this is prior to that
period.
-
COREY
- There was a traveling show with the College Art Association. What
exactly was that? In some of the catalogs and newspaper interviews, it
mentions the Blue Four. What was that?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. Well, number one, the College Art Association was — and has since
remained — a very important part of the art scene in this country. As
you know, they organize important traveling exhibitions, and they hold
art conferences. In this earlier period, they were less well known.
Nonethe- less, they were an important part of the art scene,
particularly in New York. I had met, and I don't remember through what
circumstances, two of the ladies who were very important in selecting
the exhibition material. One was Mrs. Fran Pollack, and the other was
Mrs. Audrey MacMahon. Mrs. Pollack was a devoted art lover, as was Mrs.
MacMahon, the wife of Professor Philip MacMahon, who was, I believe, on
the faculty of NYU. I had met them and they had become interested in my
paintings and included my work in many of their exhibitions. The other exhibition which you mentioned, having to do with the Blue
Four, had no relation to the College Art Association. That was an
exhibition in which I found my work cheek by jowl in Chicago with an
exhibition by the Blue Four. This exhibition was staged by the Arts Club
of Chicago, which had large quarters in the Wrigley Building. I didn't
go to Chicago to see the exhibition, but apparently their gallery space
was large enough so that in one room there was the work of the Blue
Four, and in another room an exhibition of my work. The reviews, many of
them, contrasted the Blue Four exhibition with my exhibition, but this
was pure happenstance.
-
COREY
- It wasn't intentional?
-
BIBERMAN
- No.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
FEBRUARY 12, 1976
-
COREY
- Specifically, I'd like to start with the time right after Monument
Valley, when you came to California, and how that came about.
-
BIBERMAN
- I had never been to California. I had great curiosity about it, and I
had friends who lived in California- as a matter of fact, they lived
very close to where we are now. They lived down off of Cheremoya
[Avenue] . They knew that I was in Arizona [and] Utah, and they
suggested that before I returned East, I might visit them. So I did. I
had a car — a new little Ford--and I drove and spent about a week with
them here in California and was fascinated by the country. Then I
decided that before I returned East, I would drive up the coast. I was
particularly eager to see San Francisco. I took Route 1, which at that
time bore no relation to what it is today. It was a very difficult,
winding dirt road in many places. I stopped over in Carmel and met
Edward Weston there. I'd known his photographs, and I saw a shingle
outside of a little frame house one day, and I took the liberty of
knocking at his door. We spent a very delightful time together. I stayed
in Carmel for a couple of days and then went on to San Francisco, which
I found fascinating. I was there for about a week, I believe, and then
sold my car and took the train East. But I really fell very hard for
California. I remember particularly one experience on the drive up the
coast which, for me, was so fascinating that I remember it even today
very vividly. At that time, as is true now, if you want to make a stop
on the drive north, the logical place to do so is San Luis Obispo. I had
driven north, and of course in those days you didn't drive as fast, both
because of the cars and the roads. I reached San Luis Obispo late in the
afternoon — this was in September—and I remember the fantastic
experience of driving up a steep grade and seeing the fog rolling in
from the Pacific and the sun still shining down on the hills. The
combination of the fog rolling in and the sun and the Pacific and the
mountains—it was just a shattering visual experience, one that I'll
never forget. But in general, the whole Southwest and California was a
really provocative experience in relation to my feeling about where I
wanted to live from that time on. So, although I returned to New York
after leaving San Francisco, the memory of California stayed with me as
a very, very rich experience.
-
COREY
- You said both the Southwest and California had a certain appeal to you.
Why, then, California over New Mexico or Arizona?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the point is that being by then a city-based person, I found— and
this is still true — that I liked to spend time in isolated areas if
there are things there that attract me professionally. But the sense of
being completely isolated from all the things that I enjoy in an urban
center weighed against my staying permanently in a place like New
Mexico.
-
COREY
- Even with the appeal of the Taos artists like Georgia O'Keeffe?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, but that's seasonal, you know. These are mostly summer people. It
was fine for a couple of months, but I could not see myself "holing up"
for a longer period of time, even in a slightly more urban setting like
Santa Fe. Taos, you must remember, was a village then. Santa Fe had a
little bit more of a general cultural allure, but even that, I felt, was
not sufficient to hold me. Plus the fact that from a purely practical
point of view, the associations that I found necessary for the
presentation and furthering of my work were not present in those places.
I had to have a more urban setting.
-
COREY
- Were they more present for you in California than in New York?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, much less. But at that time, it was for me a question of drawing up
a balance sheet. There were certain things that I very definitely missed
when away from New York, and there were certain definite things when I
was in New York that I missed in recalling the Western experience
-
COREY
- Such as?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let's take each one in turn. New York in the thirties was
obviously a much more active area for the art experience than
California. So there were certain things lacking in my relation to the
art community in California. On the other hand, New York obviously did
not have the thousand-foot sandstone bluffs, painted red, and it didn't
have the great spaces of the West which I dearly loved. And it didn't
have the other special visual qualities that so excited me. I had
therefore to decide where the greater virtues lay, and I found that, for
me, the decision was that they lay heavier in California. And, quite
honestly, I've never regretted that choice.
-
COREY
- This is a time when your interest in mural painting was very intense,
and it seems as if New York, as a city environment, would somehow be
more appealing than California. Los Angeles, although being a
metropolitan city, still didn't have the environment of the great bluffs
and the ocean, and all you mentioned about the natural environment being
appealing.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, there's no question of the fact that in the early thirties--this
was before the period of the government art projects — the general
interest in mural painting and my own was very much in evidence in New
York, I frankly didn't know whether at that time it was or was not
important here in Los Angeles because I hadn't been here long enough to
find out. Certainly my original interest and essays into the field of
mural painting took place in New York. However, by the time I left New
York and came to California, a totally new factor had entered, and that
was the federal sponsorship of the arts. This meant that the
possibilities in California were just as good as the possibilities in
New York.
-
COREY
- Possibilities, but what about the artistic environment in California,
the artists who were here, and the ideas about art that were here? How
were they different from New York?
-
BIBERMAN
- Much more provincial. And as I said, this was one of the minus factors
in the balance sheet. [It was] much more provincial in the sense that:
(a) there were fewer artists, (b) there were fewer galleries, (c) there
were fewer museums, and (d) there was less interest generally in the
field of the visual arts. This was then a movie- oriented community. But
again--and this is skipping several years--by the time I decided to move
to California, the very absence of what I had begun to feel as a kind of
incestuous quality pervading the art scene in New York--the very absence
of that in California became a plus factor, so that minus turned into
plus.
-
COREY
- Was there anybody here in the art world that was particularly appealing
to you, of the few "provincial" artists that there were?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, as a matter of fact, when I first came here, the only two names that
I had heard of in the East who were working in California were Millard
Sheets, who had already begun to show in New York; and Stanton
MacDonald- Wright, who was kind of a cosmopolitan figure--but at that
time, at least, he was based in California. Outside of Mac Donald-Wright
and Millard Sheets, I had not known of any California painters. However,
I was, very frankly, not interested in whether or not there were
California painters whose work I admired. I was really much more
interested in my feeling that this was for me a time of stocktaking, a
period of gestation and the presence or absence of a large body of
spectacular talents really didn't enter into my thinking. There was a
very interesting group of younger painters whom I met when I came here
to live in '36, but that, again, is jumping several years — I don't know
how much continuity you want to follow in your questioning. I'm talking
now about a span of five years — from 1931, when I first saw California,
to 1936, when I came here to live.
-
COREY
- What happened in the interim of those years? You went back to New York?
-
BIBERMAN
- I went back to New York in the autumn of 1931 and continued my easel
painting. I also continued a very active exhibition career. In that
period I first began my practical interest in mural painting and my
actual efforts to study the fresco technique. Studying the fresco
technique came about because of the great interest in this country in
the Mexican mural movement and the fact that in the period that we're
talking about now, the years in New York between my California visit and
my final settling in California, the big names in Mexican art had come,
at various times, to New York. This was where I first met Rivera, where
I first met Siqueiros, where I first met Orozco. As a matter of fact, I
spent a weekend with Orozco in Dartmouth when he was painting his
frescoes for the university library. This was a period when, as I say, I
was very active as an easel painter, both in exhibitions and in
productivity. I also began to experiment with fresco techniques and also
entered what few competitions were open in the commercial mural-painting
field prior to the entrance of the government into this area.
-
COREY
- What kind of competitions were these?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, there was one which was sponsored by a commercial ... it wasn't a
paper company; I think they manufactured labeling devices and logos and
material for the visual field. They sponsored a competition which I
didn't win, but my sketches got a great deal of attention. It was
largely on the basis of the sketches which I made for that exhibition
and for two exhibitions sponsored by the city of New York and the
Municipal Art Gallery of New York and also those for the Museum of
Modern Art. They were reproduced, and critics talked about a "budding
new mural talent." I don't remember exactly what the phrase was. So,
although I entered actively into competitions, none of which I won, it
was on the basis of those competitions, even though I had never painted
a mural, that I was elected a member of the National Society of Mural
Painters, which was then a very prestigious organization. And strangely
enough, on the basis of this kind of accumulation of critical acclaim, I
became a guest critic of mural painting at the Beaux-Arts Institute in
New York, which was strange, since I found myself in the anomalous
position of being invited to be a critic of the work of aspiring mural
painters without myself ever having painted a mural! This was the kind
of mixed-up situation in which I found myself in that period in New
York.
-
COREY
- How do you think the interest in mural painting affected, if at all,
your easel paintings?
-
BIBERMAN
- Not directly. I would say only indirectly. The interesting point, of
course, is that there's a great philosophic difference between easel
painting, which is a very private kind of endeavor, and mural painting,
which is basically a public endeavor. In easel painting, you are
painting the things that you want to paint, and you exhibit them, and
there's no way of knowing whether they will ever find another location
other than the walls of your studio-- and if they do, under what
circumstances. The entire procedure is completely individualistic, both
in terms of production, as well as the painting's relation to an
ultimate- if one wants to use the word—consumer of the product. Mural
painting poses a totally different set of problems. You are designing
for a specific wall in a specific place for, presumably, a specific
purpose. One's thinking about the material undergoes, I think of
necessity, a very drastic change. [For me, it was] the first time I
considered factors other than my own desire to paint a rather small area
directed into an unknown void. [It was] the difference between this very
private world versus a public place, a public audience and a given
sponsor. The knowledge of what this had done to the thinking of the
Mexican muralists began to bring a subtle change in my own work, leading
me to a consideration of social factors in my work. In that sense, the
mural influence was indirect because, although it didn't manifest itself
overnight and wasn't as yet a major factor, it raised questions that
easel painting did not pose.
-
COREY
- Then in 1936 you made the final move to California. Did you intend that
to be a permanent move?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, I had come to California again in 1935 but just for the summer. My
brother and his wife had moved here the previous winter, and my mother —
who was then living — and I wished to see them. They had a large house
and suggested that we come and spend the summer with them, which we did.
I took that occasion to have my first one-man exhibition in Los Angeles.
I shipped out a number of paintings that I'd exhibited in the East, and
I had my show at the old Stendahl Gallery. Also at that time, I painted
the portrait of Joan Crawford. It was not done as a commission, but when
it was completed, she purchased the painting. She, at that time, had
either just separated, or was about to separate, from Franchot Tone.
With the exhibition that I had here, and the fact that I was a young,
fairly well known Eastern painter exhibiting in Los Angeles, plus the
fact that the portrait of Joan Crawford received a great deal of
publicity gave me a bit of an entree into the art scene in California.
However, 1935 was simply a summer visit. I went back to New York, the
year between the summer of '35 and the spring of '36 became the period
when I really had to weigh the question: did I want to live in New York,
or did I want to live in California? I finally came to California with
the feeling that I would probably want to stay here, but there was no
complete commitment. I was not married at the time, so I had relative
flexibility, and it was an open-ended decision. However, obviously it
became, in forty years, a closed- end decision. The fact is, I never
returned to live in New York.
-
COREY
- When you came to California, you continued portrait painting. Was that
by choice or a need for livelihood?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, it was a combination of several factors. You see, I had already,
before leaving New York, started to enter the mural competitions that
the government had instituted. They had started in New York around 1934,
as I recall it. In any case, prior to moving to California, I entered a
competition for a mural for a courthouse in Newark which, I found out
later, got me a runner-up position. When I came to California, I
immediately started following up on other mural competitions. I
continued, however, to paint portraits for a couple of reasons. First of
all, I always enjoyed portraiture — and I still do--so that it was quite
natural for me to continue; but I also painted landscapes. And at this
period — this was the transitional period which goes back to your
question on the influence of mural painting on my easel painting-- my
work began to reflect a concern with topical [and] social problems. The
early period of my painting in California had four facets. I was working
on mural competitions, I was painting portraits, I was painting the
California landscape which I loved, and I was also doing paintings which
had a very pointed reference to social considerations. This was
obviously a very varied but very fruitful period in my work.
-
COREY
- Did the concern or the interest in the social aspect of the painting
stem from the Depression?
-
BIBERMAN
- It stemmed from several factors: the Depression, number one; the very
obvious worsening political situation all over the world. This was the
beginning of the Hitler phenomenon. The Mussolini adventure was already
a little bit older, and very shortly, by 1937, came the Civil War in
Spain. It was pretty difficult in that period to exist on the economic,
the political, or the sociological level without being very aware of
these conditions, and I became very aware of all of them. There was the
very personal tragedy in our own family. The suicide of my father in
1933 in the bottom of the Depression was a shattering blow. All of these
factors combined to begin to turn my work increasingly into the social
areas, in which I felt a deep concern and out of which I felt I wanted
to make some kind of a statement in my painting.
-
COREY
- In 1937 you did your first mural. Was this with the WPA?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, these were Section of Fine Arts programs. The WPA was a relief
program, and we — I'm talking about my whole family--we were not in the
position of either qualifying or wishing to qualify for a relief status.
The competitions which I entered were not competitions conducted on the
basis of relief qualifications. They were competitions conducted by the
government and paid on the going mural scale. They were open
competitions, juried by professionals, with the competitors masking out
their signatures on their sketches, in order to rule out any possible
favoritism. Incidentally, there was a provision in the WPA setup--that
is, the relief setup--which entitled them to hire, I believe, personnel
up to 10 percent of nonrelief artists. This, very frankly, was done in
order to enlist the talents of recognized painters to help beef up the
quality of the work which it was felt might suffer since the only
qualification to be an artist on WPA was to be broke. I did not
investigate that area, but several friends of mine who were very
talented artists and had already arrived at a certain status did enlist
in this particular part of the program.
-
COREY
- Let's go back briefly to the portrait painting. It's interesting that
you talk about California and the murals, with a feeling of social
responsibility, and at the same time, you are in the middle of Hollywood
and its almost unrealistic star-infested--I mean, it was the peak of
Hollywood and there were the Joan Crawfords, and you did a portrait of
Dashiell Hammett.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see, the interesting fact is — if I may interrupt--most of the
people whom I painted at that time were people who, although members of
the so-called "glamour industry," were also people who had a very strong
social conscience. Let's look at the people whom I painted at that time:
Dashiell Hammett, whose obvious interests in what was going on at that
period we are all familiar with; Luise Rainer, who had just broken up
with Clifford Odets, who was certainly no stranger to social concerns; I
painted the wife of Claude Rains, who was just a mildly socially
interested man, but he was a friend of my family's. I wasn't just
painting glamour pusses, so to speak. This area at that time had the
happy combination of very talented and very interesting people who were
also deeply concerned with what was happening in the world. There was no
compromise necessary for me. I could still indulge my interest in
portrait painting and not have the feeling that I was simply becoming a
movie-society portrait painter. There were indeed several artists in
this area who were simply looking for the lucrative portrait fees, but
most of the portraits that I painted at that time were not painted on
commission. They were painted because I was interested in the sitters
and wanted to paint them, which made a difference.
-
COREY
- What about the Spanish Civil War? As an artist in Hollywood--and
Hollywood certainly had a reaction to Spain-- what happened among the
artists living in Hollywood at that time?
-
BIBERMAN
- There was a great deal of interest in the political scene. There was an
organization called the American Artists Congress against War and
Fascism in that period. I was associated [with that,] in terms of
helping to sponsor art exhibitions, art auctions, benefits, and so
forth. This organization attracted many of the younger artists and a few
of the older artists of a liberal political persuasion, so that there
was a great deal of activity.
-
COREY
- Was this national or just in California?
-
BIBERMAN
- It was national. This was the California branch of a national
organization. There were also a number of organizations that sprang up
about that time which had a very liberal, progressive political
orientation, like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. A number of
organizations grew up during the period of the Civil War in Spain. In
all of these, the fund-raising activities and the social activities in
many cases oriented themselves around certain art activities in which I
participated. There was ample opportunity to pursue both a point of view
based on a sympathy with what were then considered to be the more
forward-looking aspects of the political scene and one's own art
activities as well. I did a drawing which was later turned into a
poster, which was printed in Mexico and helped raise funds for medical
aid to the Spanish Loyalist cause. So this kind of relationship was
possible, and I participated as fully as I could during this period. And
this, incidentally, lasted right up to and into the outbreak of the
Second World War.
-
COREY
- I would like to go back to murals for a moment. The first mural that you
painted was for the Federal Building in downtown L.A. In your book, you
said that you had to do a lot of alterations on your original sketches.
What kinds of alterations were these? And did the government look at
mural painting in a similar way that you did?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, to take the questions one at a time: the commission came about,
first of all, because I had been runner-up in several very important
competitions. The government's practice at that time .... It was rather
expensive to conduct a competition-- jurors had to be hired, and there
was a great deal of administrative work--so that it became the
established custom to run several rather large competitions and, in
addition to the award of the commission for that particular project, to
make smaller awards to people who placed high in the competition. On the
basis of the very good showing that I'd had in several competitions, I
was awarded the mural for the then-new Federal Building, in Los Angeles.
The building was constructed so that there were two opposite walls on
either side of a rather large lobby. I received the commission to paint
one wall, and a San Francisco painter named Lucien Labaudt (who is no
longer living) received the commission to do the opposite wall. The
government suggested, and quite correctly from their point of view, that
since the two murals were to be visible--not simultaneously, because you
couldn't look both ways at once, but certainly visible at the same time
and place--that they have a certain coherence. And they requested--this
was not a demand, it was a request — that Mr. Labaudt and I try to
coordinate our material. They indicated that they would like me to
incorporate into my mural some reference to the founding of the city of
Los Angeles, some reference to the fact that this was a very rich,
Paleolithic fossil area, and the inclusion of the first map that was
made of the city by an army engineer in 1849. The question of how to
incorporate these three completely disparate requested subjects in one
mural really stumped me. In researching the problem and thinking about
it and trying to develop some sense of how they might be related, I felt
that the only way in which I could use these three elements was to
include them with some other elements. So what I did, in a sense, was to
sketch a panoramic survey of Los Angeles from Paleolithic times up to
contemporary times. I therefore interjected two other elements. One was
the position California took in the Civil War, which was a very
interesting period, [and the other was] the emergence of Southern
California as a new industrial area. My sketches went to Washington, and
Labaudt also sent his sketches — he had been asked to do something based
upon the mission-building story of California. When the two sets of
sketches arrived in Washington, they apparently were, for whatever the
reasons, uncomfortable with my sketches and very comfortable with
Labaudt's. They suggested that perhaps we could meet and discuss the
problem. I went to San Francisco and met with Labaudt, who turned out to
be a very nice man. He was of French birth, although he was an American
citizen and had lived in San Francisco many years. I soon realized, on
the basis of my talks with him and also the correspondence with
Washington, that all the compromises would have to be made by me . So I was faced with a decision. Did I wish to make all of these
compromises or didn't I? Well, all through this period, you must
remember, I had been haunted by the fact that as someone who had been
touted as a "budding mural talent," I had never actually painted a
mural! And I thought, well, this is really kind of ridiculous. This will
be at least a technical exercise for me, and I will have, at long last,
completed a mural. So I decided that discretion was the better part of
principle in this particular case, and I agreed and painted the mural.
Technically, I was pleased with the completed work, although I always
felt that what I had originally planned to do would have made for a much
more interesting mural. However, I think that my decision proved to have
been correct, because after having proved my competence, the two
subsequent jobs that I received were given to me carte blanche. I did,
in them, precisely what I wanted to do, and I think the people in
Washington had confidence in the fact that I could carry out my
intentions, and since there was no problem in my two subsequent murals
of dovetailing two differing points of view, the problem never came up
again. In the long run, I suppose my decision was a wise one, although
at that time it was a very unhappy choice.
-
COREY
- Who was it in Washington that was making the decision? Were they artists
or government people?
-
BIBERMAN
- The Section of Fine Arts had a very interesting staff. The head was an
amateur Sunday painter named Ned Bruce, a man of wealthy background, of
independent means, and a pretty talented nonprofessional painter. I say
non- professional because he never attempted to gain his livelihood from
his work. He had a good background in art. His second-in-command was a
man named Ed Rowan, who I think-- although I'm not certain--probably had
an art-history background. He was certainly conversant with the art
field in general, and he and Bruce were the two major administrators.
Whether anyone else was consulted when they had to make decisions such
as the one that I fell heir to or not, I don't know. I do know, as I
found out later, that they had as consultants a group of very learned
and capable people. Whether they were brought in on decisions of this
sort, I frankly do not know.
-
COREY
- Capable in that they were artists?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, one was the director of the Newark Museum, named Holger Cahill, a
very erudite man. Another was a ranking art critic named Forbes Watson.
And [another was] George Biddle, of the well-known Biddle family, who
was himself a very talented painter and also a fine muralist. He painted
an important mural in Mexico, incidentally, and was a very close friend
of Roosevelt's and of Rowan's. I think that Biddle probably came into
some of these judgmental areas, unofficially. He was never officially a
part of the administrative staff, but I'm sure that his opinions were
sought and probably valued. This was the very interesting group of
people whom I met a year or so later when I went to Washington as a
juror on one of the very large competitions. I was very impressed with
the caliber of this group.
-
COREY
- What do you think the government's intent was with the murals
themselves? Was it merely to create jobs?
-
BIBERMAN
- I think its intention was dual. First of all, the relief part of the
program was definitely a job-creating program. However, the nonrelief
part of the program, in the areas in which I participated, was based on
a genuine desire on the part of the government to reassess its basic
approach to the whole cultural scene. For the first time this concern
had to do not only with the visual arts but with the theater, with
music, and with writers. Basically, a totally new point of view
motivated governmental thinking in that Roosevelt era. It was much more
European in that like Europe, which always subsidized the arts--even the
poorest countries of Europe, as a matter of course, subsidized opera and
music and so forth .... This had never been done in this country. Art
activities in this country up until then had generally been pork-barrel
projects. If you knew a senator and if you were a painter, the
probability was that when the ceiling of some state capitol had to be
painted, you had the inside track. These were pure pork- barrel jobs.
However, now a totally new point of view originated with the highest
levels of government thinking. In answer to your question then, part of
the Rooseveltian thinking stemmed from the need to do something about
the thousands of impoverished artists in all areas of culture, and part
had to do with a new outlook on the relation between government and
culture.
-
COREY
- Why then murals? Is it [that] the government in the thirties wanted to
present to the American public a people's art and art which was
available to everyone? They could have, in a sense, just as easily
subsidized you to continue your own painting, for yourself.
-
BIBERMAN
- Again, one would have to assume that the influence of Mexico was very,
very important in this decision, although easel painting was carried on
in the relief projects .
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
FEBRUARY 12, 1976
-
COREY
- You were talking about the influence of Mexico on the government's
presentation of murals.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let's see; I think that I was talking about the difference between
the decision of the Mexican government to have murals painted on its
walls and the way in which that decision occurred in this country. In
Mexico, the problem of illiteracy, as I think I started to say, made it
almost incumbent on the government, if it wished to talk about the
history of the country to the illiterate population, to do so in visual
terms. This is very much the same thing that happened in Europe, as you
know, in the Renaissance. In the United States, however, the problem was
not the problem of prevalent illiteracy. The effect of the Mexican mural
movement was so strong that our government probably thought, "Well, we
have all sorts of governmental buildings which have wall space and
which, therefore, are available for mural presentation; and the question
of literacy aside, wouldn't it be a fine idea to try to do the kind of
thing that was done in Mexico and has been done historically in the
entire history of art--that is, to use existing walls for visual art
purposes?" So that although I do not think the question of literacy was
a factor, I do think the example of Mexico was very strong. However, do
keep in mind that I've said that the relief projects also continued to
sponsor work in easel painting and in printmaking, in addition to mural
painting. However, since the existing walls on government property were
already there, there was no particular reason why the government should
have emphasized the subsidizing of easel paintings when they could use
artists' talents to embellish the walls of post offices, official
buildings, administrative buildings, etc., which is precisely what they
did. As a matter of fact, the mood for carrying out this type of mural
activity was so strong that legislation was introduced that every time a
new building was erected, 2 percent of the cost of the building had to
be earmarked for painting and sculpture. Even buildings that were not
yet in existence were so programmed.
-
COREY
- You did two murals for the Federal Building downtown?
-
BIBERMAN
- That's correct. And one for the post office in Venice .
-
COREY
- With the second and the third murals, you had a completely free hand?
-
BIBERMAN
- A completely free hand, in this sense: I was given a ceiling .... I
think I made a slight misstatement a while back when I said that the
problem of adjusting my point of view to someone else's point of view
never did arise. The interesting thing is that it did arise when, in the
very same building which housed my first mural, Labaudt and I were each
given a ceiling to paint. In this case, again, you could not look at the
two ceilings at the same time. Nonetheless, the government again
suggested that we dovetail our thinking. This time, I apparently found
myself in the driver's seat because my sketches were accepted with no
revisions whatsoever; and Labaudt, not thematically but structurally,
tailored his presentation to the compositional format that I decided to
use. The third mural, the one in Venice, I was again given a wall to
paint. I decided on a project; I sent the sketches to Washington. I had
in a very minor area of the work part of what was a recognizable
Coca-Cola ad, and I was asked to eliminate it because one couldn't
advertise in a public building! The characteristic C-o-c-a, which was
about all you would have seen in my mural, was eliminated, and as I say,
this was a very minor change. It had nothing to do with the total idea
that I wanted to follow.
-
COREY
- Everything in those murals, from what I have been able to see in them,
is directly related to California.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. On the ceiling mural, one of the interesting things is that,
compositionally , certain factors entered which were architecturally
predetermined. You have a wall which is of a certain size, and you
cannot make it any wider or higher or eliminate any architectural
incidents that occur in the space. When I did the ceiling, the
architectural considerations almost demanded thinking in terms of four.
It had to do with the fact that there was a circle inscribed within a
square. This leaves four sections in the corners, and you then have four
elements that you must work with. Since there was also a pendant
chandelier coming from the center of the inscribed circle, I felt that
what I had to do compositionally would be something that involved four
factors. I began to think of concepts which might have to do with
four--earth, air, fire, water, or anything else in terms of fours. Then,
I began to think of the fact that although the rest of the United States
had the indigenous Indian and later the black man and the white man,
California, unlike the other parts of the country, had a very unique
factor in the inclusion of Orientals, mostly the Chinese at first and
later the Japanese. Immediately, I felt that a very interesting concept
lay in the fact that in California four racial groups were important in
the development of the state. From that point on, it became a question
of trying to visualize the special contributions of each one of these
racial groups; so, basically, this was the motif that went into the
final version of the mural. There, there were no changes asked of me at
all. Washington accepted my proposed solution with great pleasure. Also,
architecturally, there was a band which bordered the circle, so actually
the ceiling had three levels. The four corners were one level, the inner
circle was the second, and the third was the circular band. The thin
circular band, from my point of view, could contain only one thing, and
that was some kind of an inscription. So as usual, when I'm looking for
something very special, I brought out my very well worn copy of Leaves
of Grass and went through it. I found what I thought was the absolutely
perfect quotation to go with the entire concept of the mural. So as I
said, Washington was very pleased with the solution that I offered, and
the mural remained in place until the building was remodeled twenty-
five years later, when it had to be taken down, as was the original
sidewall mural that I did. Both of them are, at present, rolled up,
although in varying states of damage, due to the problems of removal.
Nonetheless, they are presumably waiting for installation in some other
location. Interestingly enough, the current exhibition of New Deal art
at the University of Santa Clara has full-size details of two or three
of the figures that I used in the ceiling mural and also the full-size
cartoon of the Venice mural.
-
COREY
- Is the Venice mural based on what you felt about Venice, or what you saw
around Venice?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, for me this was a very interesting sociological study. I knew very
little about Venice, other than the fact that it was a town on the
beach. When I began to research the project, I found that the story of
Venice was just fascinating. The town of Venice was founded by the scion
of a very wealthy tobacco family, a man named Abbott Kinney, who had
great cultural aspirations. As a young man, he had studied in Europe and
had fallen passionately in love with Venice, Italy. When he came back to
the United States, he decided that what he most wanted to do was to
build a cultural metropolis on the West Coast. Through very devious
circumstances--which would take much too long to go into at this
point--he acquired a stretch of land on what is now Venice, California,
where he proceeded to build his dream. He invited Italian architects to
come here and make a replica--at least in one portion of the area--of
the architecture of Venice, Italy. He laid out canals, and for the
opening of the city, he imported gondolas and gondoliers from Venice,
Italy. He opened his theater with Sarah Bernhardt and with the finest
symphony orchestra of his day. The dream proved to be short-lived. In a
couple of years, the cultural aspects of the project did not
materialize, and shortly after that, they discovered oil in the area. A
very quick transformation occurred from what had been the dream of
Abbott Kinney. The cultural metropolis of the West Coast turned into (a)
an oil town, and (b) a kind of a honky-tonk amusement center, which it
was for a number of years. The canals fell into disuse. They became
filled with refuse, the water became stagnant, and the bridges, I think,
collapsed. I don't know what happened to the original convention hall,
but the story of a man's dream and what the dream turned into was so
fascinating that I decided that this would be a very interesting
sociological study. I made the sketches not knowing whether they would
be acceptable or not; but I sent [them in] , and to my great delight,
the proposal was accepted completely. And the mural is there to this day
[and] has received a great deal of notice over the years. As a matter of
fact, I once told this story to Lion Feuchtwanger when he was still
living, and he became so excited about it that he wanted to do an
American operetta based on the story of Venice, California. So I offer
the idea to you, and you can take it on from there. If you feel like
writing a musical operetta based on the story of Venice, California,
it's all yours .
-
COREY
- What was your association with Feuchtwanger?
-
BIBERMAN
- No real association. Again this goes back to the character of California
in the late thirties. As you know, with the advent of Hitler, a great
many German — particularly German Jews, but not exclusively German
Jews-- refugees came to California. This seemed to be a mecca. There was
a large colony of Germans, particularly out toward the Santa Monica
area. And non-Jews, like Thomas Mann and Karl With, the art historian,
came to California, [and] a great many Jewish writers, playwrights,
musicians, and so forth came here. During that whole period, there was a
great deal of social interchange with these people. I met
Feuchtwanger--I don't remember where I met him first, but this
particular evening's discussion took place at my brother's home one
night when there was a rather large party or social gathering. I don't
know quite what the occasion was. But this was the only association. I
still see Madame Feuchtwanger and some of the others now, but Lion
Feuchtwanger died many years ago. So, as I say, there were a great many
very interesting German refugees [in California] in that whole period
between the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War.
-
COREY
- In 1938 you started to teach in California. Had you taught before?
-
BIBERMAN
- I hadn't actually taught before, but, as I think I indicated, I had been
invited to be a guest critic at the Beaux-Arts Institute in New York. I
had also done some radio broadcasting in New York for the College Art
Association. This was not teaching; this was lecturing. I started to
teach in '38. The incident started in the fact that a friend of mine,
one of the younger California painters, named Fletcher Martin, had been
teaching at a school called the Art Center School. He got a commission,
or a series of commissions--I forget just what it was--and he found that
he was running too many classes, and he just couldn't get enough work
done with the amount of teaching that he was doing. He asked me if I
would take over one of his Saturday classes in life drawing, which I
did, and I found it very interesting. Apparently I did a good job
because they immediately asked me to take on more classes, and that
started an association with that school which lasted twelve years. I
taught there until 1950.
-
COREY
- Also in that year you married Sonja Dahl.
-
BIBERMAN
- That's correct, in December of '38.
-
COREY
- Had you known her long before you were married?
-
BIBERMAN
- We had met in the early summer of '37, so that I had known her for a
year and almost six months before we were married. She, as you know, had
very interesting background, both in terms of her ethnic or racial
background and in terms of her geographic background. Her father was
Swedish, and her mother was Russian Jewish. She was born and grew up and
went to school in Shanghai but went to British schools, so that her
speech today is quite British. It's not an affectation; it's just the
way that she learned to speak. She learned to speak the King's English,
unlike the Americans. She lived in Shanghai until she was a young woman.
She made a few trips back and forth and, interestingly enough, had gone
back to China on one of her trips with an American documentary film
company. When she first came here she did a little bit of acting--she
was a bit player in motion pictures--and she did a little bit of drawing
and painting, and she did some composing. I always say about her that
she is the true amateur. The "amateur" means someone who loves what he
or she does. In that sense, she has been the true amateur, although it
is interesting that now she is again doing public relations work in the
film area, and she has gone back to ceramics, which she loves, where she
has, I think, a very interesting talent. But all in all, [she is] a very
lovely and a very lovely, loving woman. I'm a very fortunate man.
-
COREY
- All of this time--late thirties, prewar--you were obviously aware of
what was going on in Europe, and by 1941, you and your brother Herbert
had enlisted in the California State Guard in, almost, preparation of
what was to come. How did that affect what you were doing with your art?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, as I think I indicated, the whole period in the later thirties,
leading up to the period of the Second World War, [was] when a great
deal of my work assumed a topical character. I painted a scene of a
concentration camp, for example. I painted a canvas that had to do with
a burgeoning hope for world peace at that time; I also did a lithograph
on the same subject. A great many of the topical paintings that I did in
that period leading up to the Second World War had to do with some of
the socioeconomic problems in the period. I think that all one has to do
is to examine the work that I was doing at that time to see that these
external forces in the world were very much a part of my consciousness
and, there- fore, a part of my painting at that time--not exclusively,
but certainly they began to play a more important role and were present
as they had not been during the period of the early thirties. This was a
totally new time. Since I have a feeling, always, that my work is
largely autobiographical, I would have found it very surprising had I
been able to, somehow or other, go through that period in kind of
schizophrenic fashion with my painting being totally unrelated to my
other social concerns.
-
COREY
- It seems as if the war years and directly postwar years must have
affected you a great deal because, although there's a very strong social
comment in such paintings as Give Me This Day, by
the time we get to 8 A.M. , there's a real,
almost, anger that is much more directed.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, yes, and again this had to do with the times. You see, the period
of the war, in terms of my painting, was a completely unproductive
period. I've never made a count, but I don't think that in that entire
span of four and a half years I painted a dozen paintings. The few that I did were related, somehow or other, to the war. I did a
great deal of work directly connected with the whole war phenomenon. I
was in the state guard, which wasn't very time-consuming, but I was
teaching in a government art program — not an art program as such, but a
war-training program, which was funneled through one of the art schools
because it had to do with graphic work. And I was working with an outfit
which I helped found called Art in National Defense. I was working with
the USO, and I taught art in hospitals for the Red Cross. And the fact
of the matter is that during this whole period, I not only literally did
not have time to paint, but painting, as I had known it in the past,
simply was not on my personal agenda during those years. However, you
spoke of the character of the work which showed up immediately after the
war years. The Cold War, as it's come to be known, started almost
immediately after the hot war, and this was a tremendous blow to all of
the people who had felt that the war was going to usher in a period of
cooperation, peace, understanding, and forward progress. Quite the
opposite took place. As you probably know from your reading--you ' re
too young to remember the period--there was a great deal of feeling in
the world, the military in particular and large sections of the
political spectrum, that now that the war was over, the thing that we
had better do while we still had a viable war machine was to immediately
fight the Russians. [They thought] we would have to do this sooner or
later, and since we had a good ongoing war machine, we should use it
while we were strong. Well, as I say, this was a terribly disheartening
factor for all those people who had hoped that the agonizing period of
war and misunderstanding was over. This whole phenomenon of the Cold War
brought about widespread intellectual repression and the destruction of
a great deal of the cultural life of the country and, for many of the
people who had feelings similar to my own, a sense of complete
revulsion. Since, as I indicated a moment ago, I have the sense that my
painting is largely autobiographical, my feeling about this whole period
was so strong that it colored, probably to a greater degree than it ever
had done before (and certainly than it's done since), the quality of my
overall art production. This is not to say that I still did not paint
portraits during that period or an occasional landscape. But if one were
to draw up a kind of a ledger of what channels my work went into at
various times in that whole Cold War period, the major thematic channel,
certainly, had to do with my feeling of complete dismay with what was
happening in the country .
-
COREY
- This didn't happen very quickly because there's the painting — I believe
which was done right after the war- Sepulveda
Dam. You seem very intrigued with man and his technological powers
and almost look at it as something very creative and very positive. I
mean, it's a very beautiful, calm painting of a dam, and then you go
right into the horrors of ... .
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you've raised a very interesting point, which I'm very eager to
discuss. I think that those of us who are concerned with what we hope is
a forward direction of mankind in general (humankind if you're a
feminist) have to feel that our concern is for all aspects of humanity
because we feel that there is a great potential for good in the human
being. I have never felt a traumatic dislocation in being able to say,
"This is what man has done and can do, and this, by contrast, is the
horrible thing that man can do, is doing, and has done." These are the
two faces of a single coin. We are in the dual position of being able to
witness the most stupendous achievements of mankind done during
precisely the same period when 6 million Jews were consumed in the gas
ovens , when an atom bomb wiped out Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Precisely
during this period, there were enormous strides made in the discovery of
the peaceful possibilities for the very atomic energy that was used for
destruction. Atomic energy, theoretically, can be used to create a
totally liberated humankind. The fact that it isn't is a weakness of
man. I know that this problem of dualism disconcerts one — people say,
"How can you paint a gorgeous landscape and turn right around and paint
a horror." I say these things unfortunately coexist. So I can paint a
Sepulveda Dam, which I still think is very
beautiful. (Incidentally, I first saw the Sepulveda Dam when I was going
to the Birmingham Hospital for the Red Cross to conduct a class in
drawing for wounded soldiers.) Well, I can only repeat, for me, these
are the two faces of a single coin. And while I glory, really, in man's
potential, I'm aghast at what man can do with this potential. The fact
that I paint the two sides is, I think, indicative of both my hopes and
my fears.
-
COREY
- It did interest me that you did Sepulveda Dam,
Cypress, and then The
Headless Horseman in the same period.
-
BIBERMAN
- They were done in exactly the same period. As I say, this period of the
Cold War was a period in which I painted, I think, some of my most lyric
landscapes. At the same time, I was painting some of the horrific things
that deeply disturbed me. The Headless Horseman
was, of course, my horror at the fact that two or three or four years
after the end of the Second World War, with 40 million people destroyed
all over the world, idiots were again talking about war as a solution to
problems that we faced. This is horrendous. This is really the military
man without a head, which is what I tried to paint.
-
COREY
- What about 8 A.M.?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, 8 A.M. and that whole series of paintings
that have to do with the position of the blacks in this country relate
to the fact that all of us have been brought up living with a great
contradiction in this country. I know that as a child growing up in
Philadelphia, on my way to school every morning, I used to see black
women waiting on the corners for streetcars to take them to do a day's
work. They also worked in my parents' house. I knew that before they
came to our house to do the menial work, they had already cleaned their
own houses, and that they were going back to their own houses after they
left ours to feed their own families. I grew up with this, as you did,
as most of us did who came from a middle-class background. We accepted
black servants, just as we accepted the fact that the blacks, even after
the Civil War, had been subjected to economic servitude and second-class
citizenship and all the other terms we can use to describe the
condition. Anyway, I was very much aware of this all through my life and
deeply troubled by it, and because of that, I have tried to paint things
that have to do with this. In terms of that particular painting, 8 A.M., I
can tell you a story that I think is pertinent. There was no model for
this painting. For me, the woman whom I painted was a composite of every
poor, elderly black woman who had spent most of her life doing daywork
for white folks. I invented this particular person. When the painting
was first exhibited, the gallery owner called me one day and said that
there were some people who were interested in purchasing the painting
and wished to meet me, and could I come to the gallery? I did, and to my
astonishment and pleasure found myself being introduced to a black judge
named David Williams, the first black judge in Southern California, who
with his wife had fallen in love with this painting and bought it. He
wanted to meet me because he was very interested in understanding how a
white artist could have painted this particular canvas. He said, "Mr.
Biberman, there's no way in which you could be aware of this, but you've
painted a portrait of my mother." He said, "My mother did daywork. She
was a fine, hard-working, wonderful woman and mother, and all that I can
tell you is that this is a painting of my mother." Judge Williams lives
in a very beautiful house on Sunset Boulevard near UCLA, and this
painting, for all of the years that he and his wife have owned it,
occupies the most prominent place in their living room. A number of
years ago, Look magazine was conducting a survey
of well- known blacks in the United States; blacks who had "made it."
One of the people whom they interviewed was Judge Williams, and the
magazine wanted to come and photograph him and his family. He said,
"Fine, I would like to be photographed in front of Mr. Biberman's
painting." Obviously, I tell this story because it moves me very deeply.
And I've had other experiences which I cherish which have to do with the
reactions that I've had to some of the paintings that I've done of
blacks. I don't presume to have any special understanding or expertise
in this area. Very frankly, I enter it with trepidation, but I also
enter it with a feeling of obligation. I do the things that I want to do
in this area, as well as I can, hopefully, and on occasion I find very
interesting and moving reactions, such as the one I just described. You
want to hear another one?
-
COREY
- Yes.
-
BIBERMAN
- On the ceiling mural which I referred to some time back (showing the
four races) I used a quotation from Walt Whitman. I think I can remember
it exactly. If it's not exact, it's very close. It goes like this: "Each
of us inevitable,/ Each of us limitless,/ Each of us with his or her
right upon the earth,/ Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the
earth." This, for me, expressed everything I wanted to show in having
these four races contributing their special talents to the state and to
the nation. The story that I want to tell has to do with the night that
we mounted the mural. The mural had been done on canvas. The walls were
too green to paint directly on, in fresco. Since the building was
already in use, we were asked to put up the painting at night, so that
we wouldn't interfere with the normal business conduct of the post
office, which was on the ground floor of the Federal Building. We
started work early evening, and we worked all the way through to about 6
A.M. By that time, the mural was in place. But along about eleven
o'clock or midnight, the lobby was pretty deserted. The only people who
wandered in were people who were coming in to put a letter in a drop or
something, and the guards who were on duty were very bored because there
was nothing to do. They walked back and forth for whatever their
allotted period was, and you know it was pretty boring for them. Well,
the guards on duty that night were delighted because something was going
on. Here was a crew of people putting up a mural, with workmen all over
the place, and I was supervising. They were delighted with this
unexpected show and stood around watching. At about two o'clock in the
morning, the guard changed, and two new men came on. One of them was a
black cop and one was white. Just at that point, we were putting up this
legend, "Each of us inevitably,/ Each of us limitless," etc. And the
black cop stood and watched this whole lettered circle thing go up. When
it was finally up, he turned to me and he said, "Mr. Biberman, that's a
very beautiful quotation." I said, "Yes, I think it is, too." And he
looked at me, and he said, "It's just too bad it isn't true." Well, I
wanted to pull down the mural. I wanted to go home. I wanted to forget
the whole incident! These are terrible stories, but these are the
contradictions that are a part of our culture, too.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
FEBRUARY 19, 1976
-
COREY
- I would like briefly to go back, chronologically at least, to the
portrait of Dashiell Hammett. Was that a commissioned portrait?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I'm trying to think back. The portrait was painted in 1937. He was
in Hollywood at that time, working, I believe, on a script. I had met
him--under what circumstances I don't recall, since it was almost forty
years ago--but I was familiar with his work, which I found very
innovative. When I met him, I was fascinated with his quality, visually.
As you know, he was an ex- tubercular patient, and like many people who
have that type of arrested tuberculosis history, he had a very pallid,
rather pink, almost translucent skin. He had close-cropped, iron-gray
hair, a sandy mustache, and he was tall and thin. What with his visual
quality and the fact that I admired his work so much, I wanted to paint
him. Most of those early portraits which I've mentioned were not done as
commissions. They were done because I was intrigued by the personalities
and interested in the physical qualities of the sitters. This portrait
came into being in that fashion. I think he probably posed a half a
dozen or eight times, and the experience was, for me, very pleasant. We
chatted, as I usually do, during the periods that he posed, and I found
him a very sweet and interesting person.
-
COREY
- Jumping ahead to 1947, that was the time you did a portrait of Paul
Robeson.
-
BIBERMAN
- It was either '46 or '47. You know, there have just been two memorials
here in Hollywood, and I think that my chronology may be inexact. You
know, now I never date my paintings. I haven't dated them since 1931.
-
COREY
- Why is that?
-
BIBERMAN
- This is an amusing story in itself. I was still in New York in the early
thirties, and I was beginning to exhibit my work quite a bit. A friend
of mine who had some connection with the Knoedler Galleries, which were
then and still are a very prestigious firm, arranged for one of their
vice-presidents, I believe, to come to see me. He was interested in my
work, but since they dealt primarily with blue-chip paintings and old
masters, he was not proposing to handle my work commercially. But he was
very interested in what I was doing. At one point, after I had shown him
a great many of the things that I had done, he asked me why I put dates
on my paintings. I said, "Well, it's just a habit. Doesn't everybody
date paintings?" He said, "Well, I know that it's the custom to do that,
but I think you're making a great mistake." He said, "You know, for a
young painter to date a work will very often, in terms of an audience,
either make the people say, 'Well, maybe we should wait to see what he
does next year,' or they might say, 'Well, I wonder if what he did this
year is really showing the promise as against what he did last year. '"
He went on, "This is so extraneous to what you are doing and what you
want to do that I think that you ought to disarm people simply by not
putting dates on your paintings. Then they'll either have to accept them
or not." It sounded like very good advice at that time, so the last
painting of mine that carries a date is 1931. Now, to come back to your
question about the date of the Robeson portrait. For years I thought
that I had painted it in 1947, but now I am told that it was 1946 that
he was here with Othello. Since I painted him
when he was here with Othello, it must have been
1946. I presume you want to know the circumstances?
-
COREY
- Yes.
-
BIBERMAN
- I had met Robeson first when I was still an art student in Philadelphia.
I used to do some occasional bit acting with a little-theater group
outside of the city, and Robeson came there to play The Emperor Jones. My job was to help carry him in after he
was shot with a silver bullet--you remember the play? He's shot offstage
in the [Eugene] O'Neill play, and two men carry him in and dump him
stage front. My job was to carry one end of him. I was a pretty husky
young man, but he was an awfully big man. Someone had the other end--I
don't remember who it was— but we staggered in with this man and barely
managed to dump him. That was my first meeting with Robeson. Then a
couple of years later when I was in Paris, he was there concertizing,
and I heard him sing, and as I recall, I went backstage to say hello.
Then over the years, we would meet occasionally, so that when he came to
Los Angeles to play Othello, I decided to ask him
to pose, not as a commission portrait but out of my very great desire to
paint him. That's how it happened.
-
COREY
- What were the sittings like?
-
BIBERMAN
- Hectic. He was very busy. As a matter of fact, he was really very kind
to have taken the time to pose. When I say the sittings were hectic, we
were never alone. He would always make several appointments here for the
time that he was posing. Earl Robinson would be sitting at this piano
banging away a new tune that he wanted Paul to hear, and somebody would
be reading a script, and somebody else would be interviewing him. All
that I can tell you is that the sessions reminded me of the old drawings
that you see of the Renaissance court painter who's off in a corner
painting a member of the nobility while musicians play; somebody else is
reading poetry and so forth. That was the character of the sittings. We
really had very little conversation because there were too many people
around. Instead of my having to do what I usually do when I paint a
portrait--that is, to keep up a running conversation to keep the sitter
animated--I had no problems. I just tended to my own job, and everybody
else kept Robeson interested and amused, so that we had no great
personal contact during that period of sittings. There were just too
many other people around. I think he was very happy with the portrait
when it was completed. After we finished, on the basis of my memories of
him, I painted a small head, which very shortly after that was bought by
Herman Shumlin, the theatrical producer. I haven't seen it since then,
but I had an offset lithographic reproduction made of it, which has been
exhibited a great deal. You may have seen it. But, for me, it was a very
fascinating experience because Robeson was, as we all know, a most
extraordinary person. It was a piece of good fortune that he consented
to pose for me.
-
COREY
- It was also around that time that you did a portrait of Lena Horne.
-
BIBERMAN
- Again, this was something that I wanted to do. I had never met Lena
Horne, but I had friends in the black community--writers and
performers--and I think it was through Carlton Moss, who was a black
film producer, [that I met her] . I had told Carlton that I was very
fascinated by Lena and wondered if he could interest her in posing for
me. He spoke to her, and she came to the studio, and I showed her some
of the other portraits that I had done, and she agreed to pose. She
always came with her personal hairdresser because she was very concerned
about her appearance, particularly the grooming of her hair. But we
were, unlike my sessions with Robeson, able to converse. I found her to
be a very, very lovely person. She had none of the qualities that one
might have expected from having seen her as a nightclub performer
belting out popular tunes. She was a very intelligent woman, very
concerned with social issues, and a very soft-spoken, lovely person. It
was a fine experience for me to have had the opportunity to meet and to
paint her.
-
COREY
- Would you find it difficult to do portraits of people whom you did not
have some kind of feel for, or who you felt were not in some way decent
or good people?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see, I have never been a portrait painter in the commonly
accepted sense in which that term is frequently used. People don't call
me and say, "I would like my portrait painted. And what is your fee? And
how many sittings will be involved?" In most cases, or almost all cases,
the portraits that I've painted are portraits of people whom I've wanted
to paint. I've very carefully indicated ahead of time that I'm not a
"fashionable" portrait painter, that I want them to see my work, that I
want them to understand that I have a personal point of view about the
way I paint portraits. If they are interested, fine; otherwise, it would
not be interesting either for them or for me. I've never been put in a
position, let me say, of feeling antipathetic towards someone whose
portrait I was painting.
-
COREY
- About what year was the painting The Informer
painted?
-
BIBERMAN
- That was painted during the height of the [Joseph] McCarthy period. As
you probably know, the inquisition hit Hollywood with a great deal of
fanfare, which is probably why it got its greatest publicity here. This
was one of the reasons, I'm sure, that the [House] Un-American
Activities Committee chose Hollywood--because of its news value. In that
period, a great many terrible things happened, terrible not only in the
sense of people whose careers were ruined, but terrible also because a
great many people capitulated and became informers. This had its own
kind of special horror. The portrait that I call The Informer is a
portrait for which no one posed. It's almost a composite, although I had
someone very definite in mind whose name I am not really interested, at
this point, in divulging. But this was a woman who had a great many
close friends in the motion picture community who herself became an
informer for the committee and ruined the careers and indeed the lives
of many of her former friends. She was a very attractive woman
physically, but I painted [the picture] without a sitter but with this
definite person in mind. I changed the features enough so that I don't
think it is a photographic likeness, but this [picture] was based on the
horrible incident of a woman who, out of self-interest, informed on her
former friends and was instrumental in ruining their lives. The time was
approximately somewhere between 1948 and 1950, the period of the height
of the Un-American Activities Committee's incursions into Hollywood.
-
COREY
- How did the incursions of the committee affect the art world in Los
Angeles, California, and the nation?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, it didn't have quite as dramatic an effect on the artists as it
had in the entertainment industry because the artists whom it hurt were
not public in the sense that actors or writers or personalities in the
entertainment industry are public. Nonetheless, it did hit a great many
artists. The art community here was not attacked as directly as was the
motion picture field, but in the animation studios, there were a number
of people who were called in because they were sort of tangential to the
motion picture industry. However, a number of painter friends of
mine~-colleagues , and in a couple of cases, ex-students--were called
before the committee. Some took on the role of what came to be known as
"friendly witnesses" and became informers. In several instances, my name
came up in the hearings, but I was never called before the committee.
However, there was a very direct personal effect that this period had on
my career. I have to digress slightly and indicate the fact that in the
art school in which I was teaching at that time, there were two men in
the administration who were not only themselves very reactionary persons
but whose relation to what was going on during that period was very
direct. One of them--and there is no reason why his name should not be
mentioned—later became a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education;
his name is [J.C.] Chambers. He was one of the directors of the Art
Center School where I taught. During that period, there was an
organization called the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the
Arts, Sciences, and Professions. I was a member, and on numerous
occasions, I lectured for them on current events which affected the
cultural situation in the country. There was a large convocation called
to protest the beginnings of thought control in the United States. A
three-day conference was held at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a number
of very important, distinguished participants. My relation to that
conference, in particular, brought me into public prominence, since my
role was that of a spokesman in the field of art specifically concerned
with social issues. I found on several similar occasions that the man
whose name I've just mentioned would be in the audience taking copious
notes whenever I spoke. It was perfectly obvious that he himself, either
personally or with surrogates, was keeping a very close watch on my
activities. I know that I had the really disgusting--I can only use that
word—experience of seeing students of mine, whom I knew were assigned to
cover my exhibitions, and who would spend an inordinate amount of time
hanging around the gallery, presumably to see who came to see my
exhibitions.
-
COREY
- Assigned by whom?
-
BIBERMAN
- Assigned by this very man, I'm sure, or by E.A. Adams, the head of the
school. This kind of surveillance, and I think that's a very exact term,
was something that I was very much aware of. In 1950, when my brother
was sent to a federal correctional institution for having refused to
cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, I realized
that because of that situation and my own participation in
activities--which I was by then certain were frowned upon by the
administration of the school--it was only a question of time before I
would be asked to resign. I decided to beat that particular punch and
asked for a leave of absence, which was very gleefully granted me; and I
simply never returned to that school. [My] teaching position, which had
lasted for twelve years, came to an end very dramatically and very
directly because of this particular climate. There were other problems
that I had. Exhibition facilities, in several cases, were closed to me,
and other minor harassments in the professional field took place. But I
must say that I had none of the very crippling and acute problems that
so many people in other fields had-- people like my brother or those
others who were openly blacklisted and whose professional careers ended.
My professional career, it is true, was warped for several years, but
after all, no one could interfere with my painting. Some exhibition
channels were open to me. Although I didn't teach, I had the opportunity
to undertake speaking engagements. So that although these were
difficult, unpleasant years, my productivity within the walls of my own
studio was probably as great or greater than when I was painting full
time, with no days lost in teaching. The product that came out of my
studio during those years certainly reflected the general temper of the
period and my own relation to it. What I am implying, obviously, is that
during that period, since the climate of the time was so much a part of
my psyche, there were more paintings with a topical basis than at any
other time.
-
COREY
- That's a period when you seemed to bring children into your paintings.
Is there any specific reason for that?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, children under specific circumstances. They weren't portraits, but
paintings of children in relation to war situations. This was the period
of the Korean War, and some pretty terrible photographs appeared in the
newspapers. The plight of children—the innocents, so to speak--moved me
deeply. This was also a period in which, although there was no specific
intensification of socioeconomic problems of the blacks in this country,
there was, nonetheless, that factor present too. During this period,
it's true, I painted some black children, though not in problem
circumstances. In the year of '51, we took a summer trip to Mexico for
two and a half months, and during that period, simply by happenstance, I
painted a Mexican child. She was the very beautiful little daughter of a
woman who came to do our cooking and housework. So it's probably true
that in those years I did several paintings of children, but I think
that they were done in each case out of specific circumstances. They
didn't just happen.
-
COREY
- Going back briefly, again, to the period of McCarthy and to your brother
Herbert. Aside from your position in the community as an artist, that
was a very direct connection with the beginnings of the horror of
McCarthyism. How was that dealt with?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you mean I suppose specifically by me, personally? All that I can
tell you is that during the five months that my brother was in the
federal correctional institution, I did practically no painting. I spent
almost all of my time working with a committee which was seeking to
either reduce the sentences, or secure parole, and to do whatever
educational work could be undertaken to try to expose the horrible
effect that the committee and similar committees all over the country
were having on our nation's cultural life. During the specific period of
five months that my brother was imprisoned and denied the opportunity to
do his work, I, in good conscience, could not just go normally into my
studio and carry on my profession. I did very little painting in that
five-month period and spent most of my time, as I've said, working with
the committee, which was [also] trying to care for the dependents of
some of the people who had been sent to prison. In many cases, families
were left destitute, so that there was a big campaign to raise money to
help support the families of the men who were imprisoned. These
activities, then, consumed practically all of my time. So far as how the
period was dealt with generally, I must say that there was a great deal
of resentment on the part of a large segment of the cultural community.
On the other hand, there was a tremendous amount of fear, and many
people simply did not want to find themselves in the position of being
blacklisted, banned from their profession, and therefore ran for cover.
They either remained silent or, in some cases, became willing tools of
the committee. But I must say there were a great many very stalwart
people who did what they could, at great risk to themselves and to their
careers, to help ameliorate the situation. It was a horrible period,
aptly dubbed by Dalton Trumbo as "The Time of the Toad."
-
COREY
- Prior to Herbert's imprisonment, did you ever think it would come to
that? Was it something that was anticipated?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, the whole question of the legalism of the Cold War period is very
complicated. The fact of the matter is that I don't think that anyone
ever had the feeling that this political atmosphere would actually
deteriorate to the point of physical imprisonment. The legality of this
period is, in itself, an engrossing story. There was a significant
change in the composition of the Supreme Court, and as a result of the
change, the test case--which is what the Hollywood Ten had tried to
bring to the Supreme Court-- was never heard by the Supreme Court. Had
the court which [had been] sitting at the time when these cases first
took place been in composition the same as in this [later] period, the
likelihood is that the former Supreme Court would have heard the cases
and thrown them out. The committee's power to declare people in contempt
would never have been successful.
-
COREY
- Even with the atmosphere of the country?
-
BIBERMAN
- Even with the atmosphere of the country. The element that really brought
about the jailings was, as I think I've indicated, the change in the
composition of the Supreme Court. Test cases were carried up the whole
legal ladder in the firm belief that when the Supreme Court heard these
cases, they would, as I have said, be thrown out.
-
COREY
- And that would stop the committee?
-
BIBERMAN
- That would have stopped the committee's power to hold the threat of jail
over people who did not cooperate. Unfortunately, this did not happen.
Careers were ruined, and many people suffered physical imprisonment.
-
COREY
- Given the social and cultural atmosphere in America at that time, did
the activities of the committee, or your own surveillances, come as a
surprise?
-
BIBERMAN
- A great surprise. You know, it's hard for us to believe, even in
retrospect--and especially hard for young people today, to believe —
that these things happened. Young people today, when they see plays like
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, which is
based on the hearings and is currently playing, sit in utter disbelief.
They just can't believe what they see. Well, many of us at that period
didn't believe that these things could happen. But they did. This was
the Cold War period, and the activities of committees like the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and local committees of a similar
nature, were part of the political scene. It was hard for us to believe
it then; it's difficult for us to believe it now. But one has to
understand the total quality of that period.
-
COREY
- Once you began painting, after that five-month period, what types of
pictures were you able to produce?
-
BIBERMAN
- You see, the worst elements of that era didn't really begin to disappear
until the final put-down of McCarthy himself. Here again, one would have
to go into a full discussion of the politics of that whole period, but
there was the famous confrontation of McCarthy with Robert Welch, the
lawyer. And finally the stench--and I use that word advisedly--the
stench of that whole situation reached the point where eminent public
figures, senators, and people of impeccable integrity, began to be
pilloried, until finally not even the fabricated Cold War situation
could persuade the country to stomach the kinds of things that were
happening. At this given point, McCarthy himself was put down, and this
began the end of the nightmare. There started a process of unwinding
that took several years, and slowly the horror of that whole period was
dissipated. To come back finally to your direct question, I continued to
concern myself with issues that were still largely topical through a
good part of the fifties. It was only by about the end of that period
that I began to feel that I wanted to or could turn to elements in my
work which had a more lyric affirmative quality rather than the bitter
statements I was trying to make about situations which were themselves
very, very negative .
-
COREY
- On your trip to Mexico City in '51, that was a time when many people
were leaving the country because of McCarthyism. Did it ever occur to
you to leave?
-
BIBERMAN
- No. No, it didn't, because my own feeling was that I wanted to stay and
sort of ride out the situation, for whatever it might bring. As I said,
I was never called before the committee. I did not have that experience
of a direct confrontation, although the possibility was always there,
since my name did come up several times during the committee hearings.
But at no time did I seriously think of leaving the country to avoid
this kind of possible confrontation. I thought about this a great deal,
and I just decided that leaving the country was not for me. Our trip to
Mexico was a holiday trip. We went there after our daughter got out of
school in the spring, and we came back in time for her to reenter school
in the autumn, so it was a summer holiday. It was never meant to be
anything else. Out of that summer, which was fascinating for me, came a
whole series of paintings based upon the Mexican experiences.
-
COREY
- There is a painting which I imagine came out of this period, Tear Gas and Fire Hose. Is that about a specific
event?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. This had to do with an earlier episode, however, still in the whole
Cold War period. I am very hazy now about the exact date of that
painting, but there had been a strike at the Warner Brothers studios
with some pretty rough tactics on the part of the studio police. The
organization that I referred to, the Hollywood Independent Citizens
Committee, had asked for volunteer observers to go out there to see
whether the violence was called for or not. I became a volunteer
observer and was witness to the kind of incident I showed in that
particular painting. The painting, however, is a composite. I did not
myself see that exact sight, but situations of that sort were
photographed and did occur. I saw some of these things, and the painting
which I call Tear Gas and Fire Hose came as a
result. There was the use of tear gas, there was the use of fire hoses,
and there was, very definitely, uncalled-for violence used against the
people who were exercising their legal right to picket in front of the
studio.
-
COREY
- Later on--I assume it was around the time your brother Herbert was
directing Salt of the Earth --you did the
portrait of Rosaura Revueltas.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. Now that was really not a true portrait of her in the sense of a
painting based upon sittings. My wife was part of the production crew on
location in New Mexico during the making of the film, and I went there
to see her for a short visit. As I recall it, it was rather a long
weekend, or about half a week. During that period, I met Rosaura, who
was the star of the picture. I was fascinated by her looks, and I did a
painting which is not called a portrait of Rosaura. I call it Woman of Mexico, and it is based on her physical
appearance, plus my feeling about many of the women whom I had seen when
we were in Mexico in '51. So, although I think of it as a painting which
would never have been done had I not met Rosaura, it is not really a
portrait of her. Had I wished, I probably could have made a truer
likeness than it is. It was not designed, in other words, as a portrait.
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
FEBRUARY 19, 1976
-
COREY
- Now, beyond that entire period, you began a series of paintings
concerned with buildings. There's The Carpenter,
The Plasterers -- city scapes, I guess you
call them. Why that change? Actually it wasn't so much of a change, but
a recurrence?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it wasn't a real change. If one were to go back to the work that I
did while I was living in New York, for example, it would be apparent
that I was always fascinated by the look of cities and particularly by
the structural qualities of buildings with both an architectural and an
engineering personality. When I lived in New York, I painted the George
Washington Bridge. I considered it to be an absolutely beautiful
structure. I was talking to someone about this just a couple of nights
ago, as a matter of fact, and I said there was a painter who deserves to
be much better known, the American painter Charles Demuth. [He] painted
a canvas that I saw when I was quite young. It was a painting of two
great wheat silos, probably someplace in Kansas, and he titled that
painting My Egypt. Now, I knew exactly what he
meant by that. When I say I've always been fascinated by cities,
engineering, [and] structural forms, I speak of something that has,
emotionally, touched me very deeply. This interest has always been
present in my work when I am not impelled, let us say, to paint things
with an overtly social quality. You see, I think of myself as a very
lyric painter. I love the look of nature, and I also love the look of
many of the things that men build. I find both of these very wonderful,
stirring, lyrical experiences. When I turned again to painting
structural forms and the workmen constructing these forms, as in the
plasterer series and the carpenter series, two things were combined.
First of all, I've always liked to work with my hands. In addition to
being a painter, I've always liked to work with tools, and for an
amateur I'm a pretty fair carpenter. When I studied fresco painting, I
had to learn how to plaster, so I became a fair plasterer. These things
touch me, move me, deeply. I've always had the feeling that had I been
functioning as a painter in a period of political calm or social
well-being, I probably would have found almost my entire output very
lyric in quality. I would have painted people; I would have painted
landscapes; I would have painted the structures that men build — all of
which, as I say, have a strong emotional impact on me. So turning to the
matter of the cityscapes, I was not suddenly "discovering" a new art
territory for myself. Los Angeles has its full share, both of stirring
structural forms and engineering forms. It also has, for me, some very
fascinating, tacky forms, to use that term. The old, beat-up parts of
Hollywood, with the tall, spindly palm trees and the old stucco houses,
and the look of other decaying parts of the city fascinated me as a kind
of a social document. As someone who's interested in urban life, this
has been a very fertile field for me. I find the city replete with
material that I'm anxious to record. It's not something that I suddenly
came to as a release or an escape or a substitute for something that I
was really more interested in.
-
COREY
- Do you feel at all that the cityscapes were possibly the easiest
transition from the more horrible social themes that you had been
painting--that a cityscape was safe?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I don't know that I'd use the term "easier." You see, on many
occasions I've found myself trying to explain the diverse channels into
which my work has fallen over the years. I've already indicated the fact
that the lyricism of nature and structural forms has always interested
me, so that I don't think that the term "easier" is exact. It's a matter
of turning to another facet of my interests. A show of mine was once
hung in four completely compartmentalized sections — one section only
portraits, one section only landscapes, one section only social
paintings, one section only structural forms. If all of Gaul was divided
into three parts, maybe all of Edward Biberman is divided into four
parts. I've constantly plumbed these four areas. The greater emphasis,
at certain times, has gone into one area as against another. I didn't
find it easier to paint the cityscape than to paint a social painting or
a landscape. Circumstances probably dictated where the flow was
directed. If, for whatever the reasons, a channel was either blocked or
purposely shut off in one area, the flow then very naturally went into
another area without my undergoing any great traumatic experience. Even
in the period when the bulk of my work was topical in quality, I would
turn very frequently to a landscape or to a portrait. My own feeling, in
terms of my own work, is that this represents my totality, and I would
find it very difficult to isolate any one or any two elements and say,
"Well, that is really what I've always wanted to do."
-
COREY
- Do you feel that many artists get caught up in that?
-
BIBERMAN
- That kind of a division?
-
COREY
- No, not the division so much, but falling into being one-sided. "This is
what I've really always wanted to do; therefore I'm going to do it."
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I don't know. You know, there are painters who have been known as
landscape painters, and there are painters who have been known as
portrait painters, and there are painters who have been known as
still-life painters. Maybe they're very lucky. Maybe they don't have
their interests or their energies diluted. Maybe it would be nice to
feel that there is only one thing that one wants to do and to plumb that
continuously. I've never felt that. A friend of mine, the very fine
black painter Charles White, in an interview that I once had with him on
television, made a statement that I've always thought of with great
envy. He said — I think I'm quoting him exactly--"All of my life, I've
only been painting one picture." Well, I know what he means. He was only
painting one picture because all of his life, really, he painted nothing
except his relation to the black experience which he is a part of. Maybe
Charles White is lucky. Maybe he's very fortunate. I've never found
myself satisfied with any one single area. As I've already said, there
are many areas that I've wished to examine, and the emphasis has varied,
depending on the circumstances.
-
COREY
- Do you think being an artist, living in California, you've been able to
do that more easily than if you had stayed in New York--or in Europe,
for that matter?
-
BIBERMAN
- That's always speculative, but let me say this: I think that at one
point in our discussion, I said that one of the things that I liked when
I first came to California was the fact that few people here were really
interested in art. You could sort of settle down and paint and solve
your own problems without the frenzy of a very frenetic art scene. I
don't know what would have happened, obviously, had I stayed in New
York. I don't know, obviously, what would have happened had I stayed in
Europe. I can only speculate. Since I am very unhappy about much that
has happened in American art--let's say, from the period of the Second
World War on— I think that it would have probably been more difficult
for me to have pursued my own interests in the face of the more bitter
art scene which existed in New York. However, this is speculative. One
can never know. So far as Europe is concerned, I obviously could not
have stayed there, because by the end of the thirties, the Second World
War broke out. I would either have been thrown into a concentration
camp, as a Jew, or I would have hightailed it back to the States, so
that I think one would have to eliminate your question in terms of
Europe. In terms of California, the art scene here has, in a sense,
always reflected the eastern scene. A great many of the fashions,
trends, and a great many of the schools follow the fashions and trends
of schools of art in the East. They have never been quite as sharp here
as they were in New York. I think it probably would have been more
difficult for me to have stayed with my point of view in New York than
it was here. However, this too is kind of an iffy answer to an iffy
question. These things have to be guessed at. I can only hazard an
opinion.
-
COREY
- What is it about American art that you're unhappy with?
-
BIBERMAN
- That's a long story, isn't it? The emergence of the so-called abstract
expressionist school of art and the nonobjective attitudes in American
painting really had their greatest moments starting with the end of the
Second World War. I always find it not without a kind of coincidental
interest that the height of the abstract expressionist movement was also
the height of the McCarthy period. This may be, again, speculative, but
I have always found the point of view of nonobjective art to be a very
limited one. Action painting, abstract expressionism, and the avoidance
of associative values in painting have, for me, not been constructive,
despite the fact that historically this has been considered to be the
emancipation of American art. Most of the people who write about the art
of the middle of the twentieth century speak about the fact that the
center of art and the center of the experimental movement moved from
Europe to the United States, and that the so-called New York School
(which means the abstract expressionist and the action school) signaled
the emancipation of American art, and that for the first time American
art moved to the center of the world scene. From my point of view, if
this is the center of the world scene of art, it's not a very good
center. I don't enjoy it, I don't feel comfortable with it, and I don't
feel it's a very contributive point of view. My speculation as to why
this particular point of view, which avoids subject matter, coincided
almost exactly with the Cold War is something which one cannot prove. The painters of the abstract expressionist and action schools did not
have to wrestle directly with contemporary social issues. A great many
artists and critics maintain that this is a very positive outgoing
manifestation of the individualist, democratic, forward-looking point of
view in art. I do not subscribe to this thesis.
-
COREY
- Then you don't think that the purported radicalism of the New York
School, if you can call it that, is in any way grappling with or making
a statement about social issues or society. You don't believe it's a
reflection of a fragmented society?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, there is a partial truth here. I think it was Ben Shahn who at one
point said, in effect, that there is no such thing as a totally abstract
painting. Even an abstract painting makes the statement that the subject
is of no importance, which in itself is to me a very significant
statement. You know, this question has to be wrestled with, and I think
there is a certain validity to my argument. I assume you mean the formal
qualities when you speak of the radicalism of the abstract
expressionist, action schools-- whether this was a positive, liberating
force, or whether it was not, one of the things that has to be
understood is the fact that this movement lasted precisely ten years. If
it was as radical and as liberating and as constructive a statement in
art as was claimed, I think one would have to wonder why, after ten
years, it disappeared. There's nothing in the world today more tired
than an abstract expressionist painting. Nobody's painting abstract
expressionist paintings any more. They are dated. They're already like
last year's styles — out of fashion. So that I have to wonder why so
many schools, like the ones that we've already mentioned-- and like op
art, for example, which lasted maybe two years — disappeared after such
great fanfare. You see, if such an enormous contribution was being made,
one would have to say, "What kind of a statement exhausts itself in a
period of two years, five years, or ten years? I have the uneasy feeling
that the short life of some of these movements may have some relation to
their intrinsic worth. I'm being very subjective, obviously.
-
COREY
- What do you feel is the contribution of the artist?
-
BIBERMAN
- Potential contribution? You know, we now have the perspective of about
4,000 years of the recorded history of art, and from our vantage point,
I think that it's possible to make certain observations if not
conclusions. I think that being able to look at better than 4,000 —
5,000 — years — from 3,000 B.C., there is, as we examine the history of
art, a very fascinating relation between the art of any culture and the
total quality of that culture. Although I don't think that in any one of
those years, the artist sat down and said, "How can I best relate to the
culture of my time?" I think there is, on evidence, a significant
relationship between the totality of a culture and the art that the
culture produced. If we look at the scene today and say, "What is the
obligation of the artist?" the artist, whether he consciously wills it
or not, is more than likely reflecting some aspect of the culture in
which he lives. He may be reflecting some of the good elements of that
culture or some of the negative elements. My feeling is that the artist
of today who is literate must be aware of the art of the immediate past
and the remote past. I mean, we're not isolated in time. We have the
means, through books and travel and cultural experience, to know the art
of the past. We are in a particularly fortunate position, and I think
that somewhere along the line, we ought to question our relation to our
own time. The only thing that I can suggest, although I would hesitate to be
dogmatic about a matter which has long engrossed aestheticians ,
philosophers, and scholars--I can only respond very personally to this
question and say that some sense of one's own time (and some decision as
to whether or not one has an obligation to one's own time) has to enter
into this question. I know that I have been conscious of these factors.
I think that the creative artist today should be aware of these matters,
and how he reacts is then going to be evident in what he does. The
matter of the artists' responsibility becomes a social question and will
be answered one way by those people who have a strong feeling about
their relation to the social ambience and will be answered differently
by others who, presumably, couldn't care less. However, I feel that
those who "couldn't care less" are also expressing a very interesting
social attitude. I think back to the wonderful formulation made by the American
philosopher Barrows Dunham, who said, in an article called "Art and
Politics" (I'll have to paraphrase it) that the avoidance by an artist
of a sense of social responsibility is in itself a very significant
social attitude. These are the only general terms, I'm afraid, in which
I can respond to your question. What you're asking has to do with
ethics, with morality, with philosophy, and with aesthetics; and I don't
know of any short answer that I can possibly give. I think that I have
indicated the areas of my own concerns, and I have the feeling you know
by now that I am unhappy with the reactions of others of my colleagues. Maybe this is why I feel as I do about certain aspects of contemporary
life. I once had a very interesting conversation with Aldous Huxley, who
for many years was a neighbor of ours. We were talking one day about the
general question of abstract art versus art that employs a series of
associations, and he said something which I found fascinating. I have
quoted it on many occasions when I have been speaking publicly on this
question. He said, "You know, I am a great lover of Chinese porcelains,
and I know a great deal about Chinese porcelains. I am also a great
lover of the paintings of Titian. If someone were to ask me to examine
the most beautiful Chinese porcelain that I've ever seen, and asked me
to look at the most beautiful Titian that I've ever seen, and then asked
me to make a choice, I would have to choose the Titian. I would choose
the Titian because it touched on the greatest number of levels of human
experience." That, I think, is a pretty good answer to your question.
For me, the number of levels of human experience that are touched on in
abstract and nonobjective art are very limited. I enjoy the work of
Josef Albers, for example. In his series, Homage to
the Square, I am very aware of the great sensitivity with which
a rectangle encompasses another rectangle, but after having satisfied
myself that he has created the best possible relationship between two
rectangles, I have the annoying question of how many levels of human
experience this touches. This is my subjective response to the problem.
This is basically why I feel that the entire period of abstract
expressionism, action painting, nonobjective painting has been a minor
period in the history of art. I can't prove this because the history of
art is going to have to deal with this question many hundreds of years
from now. It's my own feeling that this can be, when practiced well, a
very beautiful visual experience but a limited one. Hence my own choice.
-
COREY
- The kind of art which you are talking about, which you seem to wish
for--is it something which is taught? Why has it not come about?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I have to disagree with your formulation. I think that it is
coming about, but it's coming about in areas that are not the accepted
and fashionable areas of contemporary art. For example, the art that is
now being produced in this country by the blacks, by and large, is not a
nonobjective art. However, there are many blacks, it is true, who are
nonobjective painters and sculptors. The art that is emerging, in
California particularly, out of the Chicano community is not, by and
large, a nonobjective art, although some of the kids who go to the
universities here feel that this is the thing that they should do. But
if you saw an exhibition a couple of years ago at the County Museum by a
group called "Los Four," or if you saw, about a year before that, an
exhibition by a group of black artists also at the County Museum, you
would have seen two strains of contemporary art in this country which
are not the fashionable, accepted strains. There is also a kind of an
underground of painters who have never — and I use the word "bought" in
quotes--who have never "bought" the abstract thesis. I call them an
underground because they're not fashionable. I have the sense that we
will probably witness- not a return, because that implies a kind of
regression, but a reconsideration on another level of the associative
elements in art. I feel [these] have the richest possible potential,
have in the past, have in the present, and I think will have in the
future. When you ask why they are not in evidence or why they are not
being taught, the only thing that I can suggest is that for many reasons
which are highly complex, this is not the fashion in the art
establishment of our time. Who controls the art establishment of our
time is another big can of beans which, if we were to open it, would
involve a long period of discussion. It's a very fascinating subject,
and the question as to how an art style or how an art form comes into
being in a period when art is not openly subsidized—which it is not in
this country at the present time—opens up a vast area.
-
COREY
- A vast area, but a very interesting one and difficult to let pass. Who
does control the art world— what is produced or the manner in which
things are produced?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I recently approached UCLA Extension — for whom I have over many
years lectured — with a proposal that we do a series of sessions to be
called "The Art Scene," subheading "The Tastemakers , " in which we
would try to examine this precise question. And for that examination, I
suggested we call into the discussions the following groups of people:
number one, the producing artists; number two, the art teachers; number
three, the art historians; number four, the art dealers; number five,
the museums; and number six, the critics. These six elements, in
combination, produce the thing that we call "the art scene." Who
contributes how much of it and in what context was the question I wanted
to examine. I can't possibly, on a tape, indicate all the feelings that
I have about these six areas. This would require, as I saw it, a series
of at least six full evenings of discussion. All that I can suggest is
that at the present time, unlike periods in the past, we have at least
these six major groups, all of whom, in concert, are together producing
the thing that we call the contemporary art scene. This is a relatively
new phenomenon. You see, up until about 200 years ago, there was no such
thing as today's art museum. Up until 400 years ago, there was no such
thing as a vested, published art critic. The matter of sponsorship, of
subsidy and how it has changed over the 5,000 years that we've already
mentioned and for what reasons has to enter the picture. The old
question of "who pays the piper plays the tune" also has to do with the
art scene. The pattern of who paid the piper over 5,000 years has
undergone a great deal of change. It's a vast subject, and as I say,
honestly, on this series of tapes, we just can't do it.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
FEBRUARY 25, 1976
-
COREY
- I'm still curious about one of the things that you mentioned last week.
You said during the McCarthy period, although there were surveillances
and you were aware of people watching your activities and your
paintings, that there was always gallery space available to you.
-
BIBERMAN
- No. If I said that, I either made an incorrect statement or you
misunderstood what I did say. In fact, gallery space was not always
available to me, and this presented obvious difficulties. Some of the
galleries where I had previously shown never came out point blank and
said, you know, "We can't show you," or "There's a problem." But by
implication, I was aware of the fact that there was a kind of — well,
the parallel is the "gray list" in other professions. I soon realized
that it would be embarrassing, both for the galleries and for me, to
have the request for exhibitions refused. There were, however, during
that period, a few galleries, the owners of which were themselves very
irate about what was happening, and they made their facilities
available. So that access to exhibitions was not impossible for me in
that period, but my choices were not always the ones that I would
normally have made.
-
COREY
- Was there any movement among artists in California — or Los Angeles--to
open up a cooperative or private gallery area during that period?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, not during that period. There had been efforts of that sort at an
earlier time, but not for the same reason. There had been efforts made
at an earlier time to have a cooperative gallery. One actually existed
which was run by an organization called Artists Equity Association, but
it was started for purely economic, not political, reasons. The gallery
actually operated for about two years on a cooperative basis. There was
a very nice exhibition space. I don't remember the exact location--
somewhere in the MacArthur Park area--but the project folded simply
because the gallery-going public was not accustomed to go into an
offbeat area. We [also] had problems staffing the gallery.
Theoretically, everybody manned it for a certain number of hours per
week, but this proved impractical. People didn't show up, and the
gallery was not opened when it was supposed to have been, and the
project finally folded. But the fact is that during the period that I
speak of, the McCarthy period, since there were relatively few
exhibiting artists who had problems in exhibiting, there- fore there was
no need for this kind of a cooperative effort.
-
COREY
- The cooperative effort that you just spoke of, was that merely for
exhibition space, or was it . . . ?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it was for general art activity. We had lectures and symposia and
art film showings and things of that sort. It functioned both as an
exhibition area and also an educational area during the brief period it
was in existence.
-
COREY
- You had a book published in 1954, The Best
Untold. How did the publication of that book come about?
-
BIBERMAN
- In a way, that involved a very close painter friend of mine, a very
talented artist named Ted Gilien whom I had known for many, many years.
[He] had been in the army and was with a unit — I don't know whether it
was a combat unit or kind of a clean-up unit — but in any case, his army
unit came into Hiroshima a short time after the atom bomb had dropped.
He was completely shocked by everything that he had seen in the war in
general, but his mind was blown by what he saw in Hiroshima. When he
came back [to the United States] he painted like a demon to kind of
exorcise all of the horror that he had seen during this period of
military service. After several years--I don't remember what the timing
was exactly, but I would guess in the early 1950s-- he had published by,
I think, one of the humanist groups a book which he called The Price, which reproduced a series of his
paintings that had to do with his own war experience. I was so impressed
with the book and so intrigued with the idea of an artist collating a
group of his own paintings for a given objective that I began to wonder
whether, in terms of my own work, something might be done in terms of
presenting one of the threads that had been running through my own work. One evening, I took a sheaf of photographs that I had taken of my own
work over the years and laid them out on this living room floor--in the
very room that we're sitting in now—and began to examine them to see if
there was a thread of continuity and, if so, what that thread was. I
soon found that indeed there was, for me, a definite sense of
cohesiveness in one group of paintings. They were originally painted not
to illustrate or follow any particular theme, but once having been done,
they bore out my concern with topical elements in my work and certain
sociological directions. I therefore assembled a group of the paintings
which established an interesting sequence--not necessarily a
chronological sequence, but a thematic one. I found that I then needed
to write a short text to lead from one painting to the next. I didn't
think of this, in any sense, as the final text, but rather, in
submitting the project to anyone who might be interested, I felt that
some written continuity would be helpful, so I wrote what I felt would
establish a needed short narration for the paintings. [I] didn't know
quite what to do with the completed material once I had finished it
because this was still the period of the very peculiar political
situation in which I found myself. I had heard that a publisher in New
York might possibly be available. On the suggestion of a friend of mine,
I sent the material to Howard Fast, whom I did not know and whom I have
never met to this day, with the request that he might, on behalf of our
mutual friend, if he felt so inclined, take the dummy of the material to
a publisher. Posthaste I received a reply from Howard Fast saying that
he was enormously impressed with the material, that he himself had been
having difficulty with his former publishers, but that there was a small
publishing house called the Blue Heron Press which was very eager to
publish my material. I wrote back and said, "Well, that sounds very
good, but who will write the text?" He in turn replied, "Are you out of
your mind? The text is perfect the way it is. We wouldn't change a word
of it, and we would like your permission to publish both the paintings
and the text as is." I was doubly pleased, number one, to find that I
had a publisher, and number two, to find that the material that I sent
[as a guideline] apparently had a very profound effect on someone who
was himself, of course, a well-known literary figure. So in short order,
the book appeared.
-
COREY
- Fast wrote the introduction?
-
BIBERMAN
- He wrote the introduction, and I wrote a kind of postscript, which we
called an "afterword."
-
COREY
- What type of audience were you trying to reach or hoping to reach with
the book?
-
BIBERMAN
- I really didn't know. Never having been a published author, I didn't
think in those terms. I had no idea of how a book was publicized, and I
more or less assumed that whoever published the book would go through
the normal channels of seeking an audience. I knew that in Los Angeles I
could certainly make the book available to both individuals and groups
through personal solicitation, which I did, but I made no attempt at the
national distribution of the book. It was not a large edition. I think
that the total printing was probably not more than 2,500 or at the most
3,000 copies. It apparently did not flow into the normal distribution
channels in the East. I don't know whether it was because Howard Fast at
that time also had his normal publishing channels closed, or whether the
publication house, which was a neophyte in the field, just didn't have
the necessary connections. So far as I could tell, there were no
important national reviews of the book. The book was given a kind of
brush-off locally and, as a matter of fact, was attacked by the then art
critic of the Los Angeles Times, who felt that
the book was highly political and was therefore very suspect — doubly
suspect since it carried an introduction by Howard Fast. However, over the years, the entire edition of the book sold out, and it
is, at present, a much-sought-after work and a high-priced collector's
item. There simply are no more copies available. I myself have about six
copies which I hoard and part with only under very special circumstances
because it's impossible to procure a copy of the book.
-
COREY
- Along the idea of the artist communicating with the public, looking over
[your] papers it seems that you've devoted a great deal of time to
lecturing or teaching, not only in a technical sense, but in a more
theoretical sense. Why is that?
-
BIBERMAN
- The first reason is purely economic. The fact of the matter is, as you
know, that there are probably only a handful of practicing artists who
can live entirely on the sale of their work. Most artists find that they
have to supplement their income by things other than the sale of their
work. For example, although I have a pretty extensive exhibition record
and am fairly well known in the art world, I, to this day, do not
subsist entirely on the sale of my own work. I lecture [and] do all
sorts of related activities in the art field. All of my early teaching
and lecturing started out as a purely economic gesture, but the
direction of these extracurricular activities has changed over the
years. I indicated, I think, at our last conversation, that the teaching
I had done for a period of twelve years at one of the art schools here
came to an abrupt halt because of the political situation I stopped the
"how you do it" kind of teaching at that point, and as I look back on
it, I am very pleased that that was so — although I'm not happy with the
circumstances that caused it. As I began to lay greater emphasis on
lecturing on art history and on the philosophic and theoretical
attitudes of the artists' position in the contemporary world, I found
that this was much more exciting and interesting than teaching how you
put two eyes and one nose and one mouth and two ears together. So
because of circumstances, there came about a shift in the areas in which
I was functioning, and the fact of the matter is that from 1950 until
the present time--a period of twenty-six years--I have not, since that
1950 rupture, done any of the "how you do it" kind of teaching.
-
COREY
- Beyond the economic reasons, are there any reasons, as an artist, why
you feel it is either necessary or important to communicate with the
public?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, I do--and I'm sorry that I have to say yes to that question. I
think it would be wonderful if a painter or the practitioners in any one
of the arts could simply function with no need to either explain,
apologize, or account for the direction of their work. However, I don't
think that we find ourselves, at the present time, in that particular
kind of euphoric situation. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] I'm
sorry that I have to find that occasionally verbal communication is also
necessary for someone who is dealing with visual communication. At the
present time, I think that there are probably two groups of artists who
find this necessary on occasion. First [is] that group of artists--of
whom I don't consider myself one--who work in visual idioms which are
very difficult for the lay person to understand and who therefore feel
that they have to explain them verbally. Since I am a figurative
painter, I don't feel that this is precisely my problem, although I am
not a painter whose work is traditional or photographic in the normal
use of those terms. However, very often I find that my choice of
material rather than my idiom is offbeat. I also find that I have to
explain why I choose to be a figurative painter in a period when most of
my colleagues are working in a non- figurative idiom. In my lecturing,
if I have a critical audience, I'm often called on to account for the
seeming aberration. Some people seem to feel my work is going against
the current fashionable stream, and I therefore try to account for my
choice of both material and technique. I don't mind doing this--as a
matter of fact, I rather enjoy it — but as I said a moment ago, I think
it's too bad that a painter finds himself in a position where he has to
make such explanations. Theoretically, the old Chinese proverb, "A
picture is worth a thousand words," should apply. Factually, it just doesn't under all circumstances. Perhaps we're in a
period where saying that the picture is "worth a thousand words" does
not apply, and you have to have the picture and--if not a thousand,
perhaps a hundred words to go along with it.
-
COREY
- Why do you think that is?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, we've discussed the whole question of the direction of a great
deal of contemporary thinking in the arts today, and I don't know how
far we want to reenter that particular discussion. For reasons which
are, I suppose, both historic and philosophic, many painters feel
impelled to work today in an abstract, nonobjective idiom. For the
painters who do not find themselves swayed by this particular approach,
there is very often, as I've indicated, the need to account for the
choice of thematic material. We are historically in a period where both
the matter of form and of content are undergoing a great change. I think
that both of these tendencies can be accounted for historically. We are,
after all, in a technological culture, and it would be rather strange if
all of the tools of contemporary technology did not have some effect on
how we see and how we reproduce our feelings. The other question--and
that is the question as to whether a change in subject matter can be
best portrayed nonobjectively or figuratively — I think has to do with
our feelings about contemporary life, about how we communicate, and on
what level of human consciousness we choose to function.
-
COREY
- Do you feel that technology has just affected the way in which we see in
terms of art, or is there more?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, it certainly has had a profound effect on the way we see, but it's
also had an effect on some of the other art forms. For example, the
impact of the motion picture, of television, of advertising, [and] the
impact of reproduction techniques of all sorts have had a very profound
effect on how we see and what manner we choose to restate our vision.
For example, until the invention of the camera, the ability to duplicate
completely that which the eye sees, the whole school of painting called
" trompe-l'oeil," the "deceiving the eye" technique, was considered a
tremendously valuable accomplishment. Once the camera, and particularly
the color camera, was able to reproduce pretty accurately that which was
set before it, one whole type of painting obviously became--if not
invalidated, certainly less important than it had been. That certainly
has to be considered to be one direct effect of the camera. The development of both the motion picture and television have affected
profoundly, I think, the way we react to visual stimuli. The fact, for
example, that in the motion picture we accept the flashback, the
cutaway, the close-up, [and] group shots, has affected many painters. I
know that it has affected me in many of the things that I do. Very
recently, I showed a painting of some flowers in a landscape to a writer
friend of mine. From my point of view, [it is] a very lyric painting of
a poppy field. There is a large single poppy in the foreground, and then
I rather arbitrarily designed a group of flowers in a poppy bed behind
it. I showed it to this screenwriter friend, and he looked at it and
said, "Oh, isn't that interesting? It's a close-up and a two-shot." Of
course, from his craft point of view, he was absolutely right. It was "a
close-up and a two-shot." Now, had I been painting in a period where I
was unfamiliar with the device of a close-up and a two-shot, or fade-in
and fade-out, I don't know whether I would have thought of presenting my
own experience in precisely those terms. So technology has had a
profound effect. Now, the painting materials that we use also have
undergone a certain amount of change. Up until very recently we were
using the very same materials that had been used for about 2,000 years.
With the development of acrylics and polymer resins and other
synthetics, a type of very quick drying pigment is available which we
did not have before. This hasn't had a tremendous effect, but it has had
an effect on some techniques. There are certain types of underpaintings
and glazings which in the past were rather laborious techniques. For
example, we're told that Titian would underpaint his canvases in umber
and white, and allow them to dry for a year, and then superimpose on
that underpainting a series of up to forty transparent color glazes. Now
if we want to use a similar technique, we don't have to wait a year for
the underpainting to dry because we have quick-drying binders for our
pigments. So that there are certain technical problems — not problems; I
should say "possibilities"--open to us today which we didn't have
before. In addition, there is the whole new scientific concept of our
universe that we have today. For example, we are aware of the fact that
we no longer live in a three-dimensional world. The whole Einsteinian
theory of the fourth dimension and space-time physics has had a profound
effect on how we think of our world. As a matter of fact, just a week or
so ago I was asked to speak at an evening devoted to the memory of three
Pauls--Pablo Picasso, Pablo Casals, and Pablo Neruda. I was asked to
speak about Picasso, and I indicated that whether you liked Picasso's
approach or not, you had to understand that what he was trying to do in
a certain period of analytical cubism was to try to parallel, from his
painter's point of view, the theory of space-time physics. If you looked
at a head, and did not confine yourself to a front view, three-quarter,
or profile, you could scramble all of those views simultaneously and
make a composite. This is what we see in the typically scrambled Picasso
head. Now, whether you want to do it that way or not presents you with
essentially a philosophic choice. But I don't think that anybody, until
the emergence of space-time physics, would have embarked on Picasso's
particular approach to that visual problem. Obviously technology has had
some effect on all of us.
-
COREY
- What you were saying about the poppies with the close-up and the
two-shot--is it really, in a case like that, so very different from
plain old perspective?
-
BIBERMAN
- Completely different. You see, the plain old traditional perspective, as
you have spoken of it, is really Renaissance perspective. It's what we
call, technically, three-point perspective, with two vanishing points
right and left and a vanishing point above, so that all forms,
theoretically, taper and converge to these given points. In what we call
linear perspective, objects farther away from the spectator get smaller.
Also, in what we call aerial perspective, colors, as they get farther
away from the spectator, diminish in their chromatic intensity. Now,
these two concepts are at the heart of Renaissance perspective, which
marked a departure from the two-dimensional art idiom which preceded it.
The contribution of Leonardo da Vinci and others, who did painstaking
research into the laws of three-dimensional art, resulted in the whole
theory of what we call Renaissance perspective. Most art students are
taught Renaissance perspective. There's no great mystery to it anymore,
even though a couple of hundred years ago it was considered almost
magic. Strangely enough, for many painters today, there is a kind of
dissatisfaction with this traditional perspective. The awareness of
space technology and the impact of some of the other factors that I've
talked about has made a great many painters seek to create certain new
psychological illusions on a two-dimensional surface by other means. I
know that I find that I often rely on certain devices other than three-
dimensional perspective, but I still use traditional perspective on
occasion to achieve certain specific optical qualities. If you were to
ask the next logical question, "Why do I do this?" I would simply have
to say that there are times when a more contemporary idiom creates
greater visual impact. I can't prove it. I can't pinpoint it any more
precisely than that. For many painters today, the traditional techniques
are no longer the complete answer for what they're trying to do.
-
COREY
- Is the perspective that you're talking about a variation of, let's say,
a close-up or a two-shot, or is it something more beyond that?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it's quite different. Think of the simultaneous depiction of a
close-up and a two-shot, and if we wanted to go even farther, a distance
shot, each superimposed on the other. This is quite different than in a
Renaissance painting, which has a foreground, a middle distance, and a
distance, each existing in its own section of a painting. We often try
to present the emotional sense of this kind of traditional perspective
by different means. It's like the thing that happened in the theater,
where the classic theater simply assumed that the fourth wall was
nonexistent. You saw the back of the stage and the two wings; and you,
the audience, were behind the fourth wall. Now we find that some
theatrical devices are expanding into the theater-in-the-round to try to
establish another sense of how we create illusions. In all of the arts,
there seems to be a desire to expand certain hitherto accepted modes of
expression and direct them to more contemporary feeling. Sometimes this
may be necessary, sometimes not, but the fact is that historically,
there has been and there always is change, as we examine the movement
evidenced in the whole history of art.
-
COREY
- For yourself then, what do you find that those means are?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let me try to put it this way. The surrealists (basing much of
their theory on Freud) wished to establish the validity of a world of
the unconscious or the subconscious on the theory that perhaps those
worlds were more "real" than the world of waking consciousness. There
are certain visual and emotional devices in the surrealist idiom that
have always interested me, although not necessarily the Freudian
content. However, the juxtaposing of two seemingly unrelated concepts —
be they concepts of optical fact or of content--has appealed to me
strongly, I would say, throughout a significant portion of my painting
career. I have never hesitated to juxtapose seemingly unrelated color
sequences and unrelated thematic relationships if I feel that those
juxtapositions can bring about a greater emotional impact than simple
visual, optical reality.
-
COREY
- What about your choice of color in paintings? Why a particular color?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, color, as you know, in itself has a very strong emotional appeal.
We can make cliches about it, you know — we can say that we "see red,"
or hell is a place that is red-hot. This changes sociologically,
however. We normally, in the Western world, associate the color black
with mourning, but in the Far East, the color of mourning is not black,
but white. Sociologically, people establish different relations between
color and their emotions, so that we find that certain colors at certain
times and in different places have carried varying associations. "Royal
purple" was royal in the past only because this pigment was very costly.
[tape recorder turned off]
-
COREY
- Beyond the emotion in color, then, are there particular reasons for your
choices of color?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you know, one chooses color for two reasons: either for
duplication of a local color that one sees, or for purely psychological
and emotional reasons. For example, German expressionist painters never
relied on the optical truth of the color they saw. If they felt impelled
to paint a sky a bloody red or black for emotional reasons, they didn't
hesitate to do so. There are two problems that enter into choice of
color. Trees in the spring have green leaves which they gradually turn
golden — and if you're in the Vermont hills, they later turn red and
other beautiful fall colors. These are local colors, so if the aim is to
paint the perfect truth of an Eastern fall landscape, you paint it in
autumn colors. It wouldn't under those circumstances occur to you to
paint it, let's say, in black, or in some color totally unrelated to the
optical facts. However, if you aim to say that something is really terrible, and you
want to establish a different mood and psychological atmosphere, then
you use color for its impact value, bearing in mind that it's fallacious
to think that a given color will have the same emotional effect all over
the world at a given time. However, if we're talking about the audience
with which we normally communicate, then we can certainly say that a
cool lavender has a totally different emotional reaction on the average
Western psyche than a bloody red does. All of these factors come into
play. I know that in my own work I am constantly having to weigh the
question of how faithfully I wish to reproduce the optical effect of
that which I am painting, against the possibility of saying the
emotional impact that I want to create with unreal color is more
important. Under certain circumstances I will deliberately change that
which the retina of the eye registers as a color. These two factors
constantly have to be weighed, and I think that the outcome is
determined largely by what it is that one is painting.
-
COREY
- By the subject.
-
BIBERMAN
- By the subject, and also by the total content.
-
COREY
- What about color in terms of structure?
-
BIBERMAN
- The structural use of color is a factor that we recognize as we examine
the history of Western painting-- although in the Eastern tradition,
color structure probably plays a quite different role. For example, we
don't have, in the Western tradition, anything like the Eastern
tradition of sumi painting, in which an entire range of grays
establishes the feeling of color where there's no chromatic color at
all. Certainly an Eastern sumi artist thinks differently about the
structure and use of color. This different concept results in a
different idiom. For us, the fact that colors have certain
wavelengths--causing certain colors to seem to advance while other
colors tend to recede— this fact becomes part of the structure.
-
COREY
- Do you ever deal with color in terms of projecting where a particular
painting may hang?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you see, one of the problems of the easel painter is the fact that
he never knows where his painting is going to hang. In a sense, this
question also applies to the whole choice of content. The only factor,
therefore, that can possibly be foreseen is whether a painting is going
to be seen under natural light or under artificial light. But to try to
tell in advance where a given painting is going to end up is obviously
quite impossible. I know in my own case, for example, [there are] many
early paintings which I have lost track of completely. The original
owner may have died, I don't know who the heirs were, and I therefore
haven't the foggiest notion as to where a painting is at the present
time. Even if I were to try and outguess the time the original owner of
the painting would keep it, I could never know for certain how long the
painting was going to stay there. So that this is a question that,
frankly, I don't even try to cope with.
-
COREY
- Getting back to what you were saying about the technical changes in
material, how has that affected you directly?
-
BIBERMAN
- It's had no effect on me directly for one purely personal reason, and
that is that technically I paint slowly because I like the quality that
I can achieve by a very slow build-up of oil pigments. Therefore, all of
the fast- drying acrylic and polymer-resin-based pigments (which are
marvelous for very quick work because they can also be overpainted very
quickly) have never been the qualities that I felt that I wanted. I do
have those colors in my studio, and once in a while, if I want to make a
very quick color notation, I will use it. But ordinarily, I have not
worked with watercolor to any great degree, nor have I worked with the
contemporary polymer- and acrylic-based paints. They don't suit my
technique, but a great many of my colleagues, of course, use them
extensively.
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
FEBRUARY 25, 1976
-
COREY
- In terms of the techniques—changes and developments- would you say that
you have stayed fairly consistent with both oils and silk screen?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, silk screen presents a different problem. As you probably know, the
material used is rather different in that the vehicle, the binder, is a
different binder. Also, the technique, which is a technique of
squeegeeing color through silk and producing a series of two-dimensional
images which, if superimposed one over the other or juxtaposed, can
create something only fairly close to the three- dimensionality that one
achieves in oil. The two techniques are quite different, and there are
many things which I would not even attempt to do in silk screen. It is
next to impossible to get certain subtle gradations which are very
easily achieved in oil and are one of the oil medium's great virtues. So
there are many things in silk screen which I do not attempt, and there
are many changes which I have to make if I'm endeavoring to translate
something which I have painted in oil and am attempting to reinterpret
as a print using the silk-screen process. The qualities of each medium
are quite different, and therefore the use of the silk-screen medium has
to be completely on its own terms
-
COREY
- Do you ever take the same subject and silk-screen it as well as oil?
-
BIBERMAN
- I've done that with a number of my paintings, but looking at a painting
done originally as an oil and looking at a serigraph or a silk-screen
version of the same work will immediately make the differences apparent.
I have done a number of interpretations in serigraphy of paintings that
I've originally done in oil; there is no possibility of confusing them
if they were examined side by side.
-
COREY
- What is it that will make you choose to do something in oil or
serigraph?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, let's go back to the question of how I started to do serigraphs.
The question as to what things I choose to paint in oil, I think we've
probably covered by now. My interest in serigraphs, which I've done for
the past fifteen years, came about in an almost accidental fashion. A
long time ago, when I was living in Paris, I became interested in
graphic techniques. At that time a very good friend of mine, an English
artist named Stanley William Hayter — who has since become extremely
well known because of his teaching in a school which he called Atelier
17 — was teaching etching techniques. He was doing it for the young
artist's usual reasons — to make a little extra money. I studied the
technique of hard-ground etching with Hayter, and also the soft-ground
etching technique. Later on, with someone else, not with Hayter, I did
some experimental work in lithography, which as you know involves
drawing on stone. In all of these areas, although I found the technique
interesting, I never felt any great desire to do extensive work in them,
and I have only one or two examples of things that I've done in these
techniques. I think that the reason is that at that time, one was
usually limited to working in black and white. Since I love the use of
color, I felt that working in black and white was not what I wanted. I
dropped further study and simply looked on those experiments as
interesting pieces of technical information. However, about fifteen years ago a painter friend of mine named Joseph
Chabot, at whose gallery I'd had an exhibition some five years before,
said to me, "Why don't you do some silk screens? You know, there are a
lot of people who would like to have your work, and they can't afford to
buy your paintings. I think that you would find this a very interesting
technique." I recounted my experience with the other graphic techniques.
He then said, "This is entirely different. It's a different medium, and
the most important thing from your point of view is the fact that you
can go as completely into color as you wish." And he continued, "I have
a workshop upstairs. Why don't you make a drawing, something that you
can interpret very simply in two colors on a toned background, so that
you will end up with three major color values, and see how it works?" So
I prepared a simple drawing, a version of a painting of mine, and I went
at it. Almost immediately I became absolutely fascinated by the medium,
so much so that shortly after that, for a period of a little over a
year, I did only prints and no painting at all. Then I felt that enough
was enough and that I'd better space my efforts out a little bit more.
So for the past dozen or so years, I do about two serigraphs each year,
and the rest of the time I devote to painting. But I did find that what
Chabot said at our initial conversation was true, and possibilities were
open to me which were totally unlike the ones that I had experimented
with before. Now, it's true that in color lithography today—and in
certain types of color etchings-- one has an even greater technical
latitude because some of the limitations that I've talked about in
serigraphy do not apply. [However,] they involve the use of a great deal
of special equipment, such as printing presses, and also the service of
professional printers. Serigraphy, [however,] is comparatively simple;
one can do it with a minimum amount of equipment. Since I, for various
reasons, didn't want to go through the routine of working with heavy
presses and professional art printers, I have stayed with serigraphy
[for] my printmaking, although I realize the greater technical latitude
of color lithography or color intaglio.
-
COREY
- Technical latitude in what sense?
-
BIBERMAN
- Serigraphy, as I've already indicated, is a series of superimposed,
two-dimensional idioms, whereas color lithography permits some of the
visual devices and modulations that one employs in painting when using
an oil medium.
-
COREY
- So that it would alter your representation of a subject?
-
BIBERMAN
- It would. It would give a greater technical latitude, but the virtues
inherent in the simplicity of serigraphy, for me, outweigh the values of
the other medium. Since I don't wish to spend too much of my time in any
of the graphic techniques, I've not experimented with the other graphic
devices which are now available.
-
COREY
- Through the years you've had a number of exhibitions. How are those
arranged?
-
BIBERMAN
- The usual procedure for a young painter is to enter work in competitive
group exhibitions, hoping that the work will come to the attention of
dealers who will then be interested in arranging a one-man exhibition
and a continuing relationship. In my own case, the procedure was pretty
much as I indicated. My first exhibitions were in group shows in Paris,
and then came the two one-man exhibitions, which we talked about before,
in Paris and Berlin. When I came back to the States and started my
seven-year residence in New York, my work came to the attention of
several important people in the art field. As a result of their
interest, they convinced my first New York dealer, a man named N.E.
Montross, to invite me to have a one-man exhibition. I had two such
exhibitions with him in the early thirties. On his death I shifted to
another dealer in New York, the Reinhardt Gallery, with whom I also had
two one-man exhibitions. By that time, I'd also been in a number of
important group shows, so that I'd begun to enjoy a certain amount of
recognition, and I no longer had the problem of trying to convince
people that my work merited showing. It was then a question of trying to
find a dealer who was compatible with my thinking and what I was
painting and then establishing a working relationship. This is the basis
on which I've carried on in this community also.
-
COREY
- Comparing California, New York, or Chicago in terms of the art world and
art dealers, what, for you, has been the function of California art
dealers?
-
BIBERMAN
- They're not appreciably different than the dealers anyplace else. If I
were to compare, for example, my relations with the two dealers that I
had in New York with several dealers with whom over the years I've had
contact here, I would say that the general situation was basically no
different. First of all, the dealer has to have an interest in your
work. Although dealers operate commercially, they're in a special kind
of commercial undertaking, and usually they don't like to try to sell
something which they themselves don't like. It's not as though they were
selling shoes or groceries. There's a special kind of relationship that
has to be established with a dealer if the relationship is to be
effective for both. The artist has to feel that the dealer is genuinely
interested in his work. The dealer, on the other hand, if he is to do a
good job for the artist, should operate with the belief that he is
trying to sell work in which he himself has confidence. That situation
is pretty much the same, I would imagine, all over the world. I've never
known it to be any different, unless you speak of vanity galleries,
where you simply buy a period of time in a gallery. There, the dealer is
usually interested only in the amount of money that he receives and not
in the work of the artist. He is guaranteed a certain return for the
time that his premises are occupied. These vanity dealers are paralleled
by, let's say, the private book publishers. If a novelist can't get a
recognized publishing house to accept his work, he will very often go to
a vanity publishing house and pay for the publication of a book. This
type of activity, although it's prevalent, is usually frowned on
professionally because neither of the two parties concerned is very
happy about that kind of relationship.
-
COREY
- For you, then, the terms "gallery" and "dealer" have been fairly
synonymous?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, although at the present time, due to the fact that we are in a
depressed economic period, there is a change in the norm. There is,
increasingly, the phenomenon of dealers who do not have public
galleries. They are the private representative of the artist but do not
have commercial galleries in the sense of a shop which opens at nine and
closes at five. The people who operate on this basis do so for economic
reasons — that is, they have a very limited overhead. But this type of
relationship has certain limitations, too, because the very fact that it
does not have the normal commercial aspects limits the critics'
willingness to review and limits the potential audience. You can't go to
a private dealer and knock on his door and say, "May I come in and look
at your paintings?" It's a totally different "by-appointment-only"
relationship. There are a number of private operators of that sort in
Los Angeles at the present time. There are a great many in New York, and
I would assume in other parts of the world as well.
-
COREY
- In trying to explore the avenues for exhibition, there are, obviously,
the small art galleries. What do you feel the function of the larger
museums is for the United States?
-
BIBERMAN
- Of the museum as against a gallery?
-
COREY
- Yes.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, a museum has a totally different objective and, therefore,
organization. First of all, a museum is not geared to sell work. It may
sell out of any of its exhibitions, but this is not its prime purpose.
Its primary purpose usually is educational--to combine a historic
perspective of the field of art with contemporary presentations. Most
museums over the world combine these two educational functions. If they
have an exhibition and there are works which are available for purchase,
they will not be averse to selling. But very often, because of their
setup, they will not effect the sale themselves but will refer the
purchaser directly to the artist. So, to repeat, the museum is generally
oriented in the direction of education, whereas the gallery is oriented
toward exploiting commercial possibilities.
-
COREY
- Do you feel that there's a role that is not being fulfilled by museums
in terms of supporting contemporary artists?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, there are two possibilities. You see, theoretically, as I would
look at a museum, unless it is completely historic in its collection and
a kind of a library of art, it would seem to me that the function of a
museum should be to relate the present to the past. That's its
theoretical function, as I would see it. Now, there's a great deal of
unhappiness on the part of many living artists who feel that too often
there is an imbalance in this relationship, that there is too great an
emphasis on documenting the past as against exhibiting the present.
However, this situation varies enormously depending on what museum
you're talking about and where. A museum, for example, like the Museum
of Modern Art in New York does not attempt to be historic. Its very
name, the Museum of Modern Art, indicates what it sees as its function.
But even in those terms, there are many artists who feel that there is
bias on the part of the museum, that although it may, programmatically ,
desire [to]--and in effect does — exhibit contemporary work, its choices
do not reflect the kind of catholicity that many artists would like to
see. So there's a certain degree of unhappiness. Theoretically — and
ideally, I suppose--the situation would be one of a fair relation
between the present and the past, and the present [would] evidence the
kind of catholicity of taste in which there would be a representative
showing of divergent contemporary points of view. This is the ideal
situation. If you ask me if it exists, I would, unhappily, have to say
that I know of no place where it exists in those terms. It's better in
some places, worse in other places. In Los Angeles, for example, there's
a great deal of unhappiness with the L.A. County Museum, a feeling on
the part of the artists that the County Museum is not fulfilling its
function in terms of showing enough work by the contemporary artists in
Los Angeles. On the other hand, when there was, in Pasadena, the
Pasadena Art Institute—which did indeed show contemporary work almost
exclusively—there was a great deal of discontent on the part of people,
artists and public alike, who felt that the bias of that institution was
so completely directed toward the avant-garde that there was no
opportunity to assess other contemporary points of view in the area.
Unfortunately, most artists are not too happy with the museum situation
for the many reasons which I've just outlined.
-
COREY
- Even with the emphasis of the Pasadena Museum on the avant-garde, it
seems to me that there was still a great tendency to ignore what was
happening in California and in Los Angeles--not only currently, but in
the past twenty years--and that the only place that was open to artists
were the smaller galleries.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, maybe that's the reason that the Pasadena Museum passed into
limbo. [It] has now been taken over by Norton Simon, and the policy now
is totally different than it was before. At the present time, at least a
half of the museum is devoted to the historic past in painting, and the
contemporary material which is being shown is mostly the display of
German expressionist works and of the contemporary holdings of Norton
Simon.
-
COREY
- As an artist who happens to be living in California, how great is the
frustration? There doesn't seem to be a very cohesive art direction in
this town. It is going into many fragmented directions and nobody is
stopping and saying, "Okay, this is going to the place where we really
can show." As I said before, there are the small art galleries, but
there doesn't seem to be a very cohesive trend or movement.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, that's true. There is, as you probably know, as of about a year
ago--and due largely to the demise of the old Pasadena Museum— an
institution called the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, which
is housed in Century City. As its name indicates, it is designed to try
to fill the avant-garde gap and is concerned largely with contemporary
works by the younger painters, sculptors, and concept artists in this
area. Early in its exhibition schedule, however, it tried to pay tribute
to a group of older painters, and it put on a four-man show of works by
four painters who were important in this area in the past. But here
again, it chose four painters whose work it felt preceded the
experimental preoccupations of the younger group. Had they wished to
document the contribution of some of the older painters in this area,
they certainly did not cover the entire art spectrum in their selection.
By and large, they are fulfilling what is probably a very important
function—that is, the display of one segment of the art that is
currently being done in this area. The other, less experimental artists
who are working in this community are more or less forced to seek the
commercial outlets that we spoke of.
-
COREY
- Has there been any attempt by that group of artists to form a cohesive
center or group, not only for displaying but for support within the
community, within the art world?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, this brings up something that we touched on in our last
conversation, and that is the whole question of taste and who makes it.
This really involves such a lengthy discussion that I don't think that,
in these interviews, we can go into it more deeply than to say, as I
tried to indicate the last time we talked, that the problem of making an
impact on the art community involves many diverse groups. It involves
the producing artist, the dealer, the museum, the critic, the educator;
any single art group trying to make a dent or an impact would have a
tremendous organizational job in trying to influence all these disparate
elements. This would probably involve a number of artists stopping work
and going into organizational activities which nobody is particularly
interested in doing. I think most artists would rather suffer an unhappy
situation than to stop work entirely in order to organize that
theoretical vehicle which might allow them to make a greater impact on
the public consciousness.
-
COREY
- Is this a problem which is unique to California?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, I would imagine this would probably be true in any area in which
there is a large, functioning group of painters and sculptors and people
in the visual arts. If there is a large functioning group, it would
probably be just as fragmented as in New York, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, or Chicago. This is rather a symptom of the time in which
we're working and living.
-
COREY
- In terms of the smaller gallery shows which you have had, the ones in
Los Angeles, do you usually hang your own shows?
-
BIBERMAN
- I like to when possible because I have certain feelings about how I like
my works to be juxtaposed, one against another. Sometimes, however, the
gallery owners themselves like to take on this particular pleasurable
activity. Hanging an exhibition is very much, I think, like playing a
musical score. If you have a piece of music by composer "X," you can't
change the notes. The notes are already indicated, but the challenge
becomes that of how you interpret the music. When you hang an
exhibition, you are given a body of visual material. You can't change
the material, and you're faced with the fact that x-number of paintings
are to be hung. The way you arrange the paintings can enormously
influence the effect. You can work either for opposition and shock
value, or you can work for harmony, or for any variation or combination
of these elements. I always feel that hanging an exhibition is a minor
art in itself. I enjoy hanging shows; and, given the opportunity, I
always like to hang my own shows, though I don't always succeed in being
able to.
-
COREY
- Going back again to communication with the public, there was a TV show,
"Dialogues in Art," which you worked on. How did that come about?
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BIBERMAN
- About ten years ago, I approached UCLA Extension with a proposal to
conduct a series of art interviews with contemporary artists. This came
out of similar series of this sort that I'd had in other institutions,
but I approached UCLA with this idea for two reasons. First of all, I
felt that artists in this area were not [being] given all the exposure
that they deserved. I felt it was very important to increase their
opportunity to show their work and talk about it to the public. The idea
was looked on with favor at UCLA Extension, and in two successive years,
I conducted a series of art interviews called "Dialogues in Art." I
insisted, incidentally, [that] if I were to do it, [that I] go,
figuratively, from left field to right field in the spectrum of art. We
were in a period of great differences in the points of view of very
sincere people in the art field, and I wanted to have each artist given
the opportunity to show his or her work and to talk about it—technically
, thematically , emotionally, aesthetically, philosophically, whatever.
Painters, sculptors, and printmakers, men and women, revealed the most
diverse attitudes. These were not debates. I didn't heckle, I didn't
cross examine. These sessions were designed, from my point of view, to
provide a platform, and I think that they did that. The two series were
well received. Then I had the feeling that the audience ought to be expanded because,
although we had good attendance at the sessions at UCLA, nonetheless,
the attendance was limited by the size of a lecture hall. I approached
the Extension people at UCLA with the proposal that we try to get
television coverage, utilizing the same general interview idea. We had
conferences with the L.A. County Museum which also, to my great
pleasure, agreed to participate. I really think that they cooperated
because of a sense of guilt, since this is precisely the kind of thing
they should have been doing and had not. The people from UCLA who were
instrumental in the organization of the project then spoke to NBC. NBC,
which, like all the networks, has to put on a certain number of
so-called "public-service" programs per year in order to keep its FCC
license, then agreed to implement this proposal. We did a series of
twenty half-hour programs under the triple sponsorship of the L.A.
County Museum, UCLA Extension, and NBC. The programs were aired locally
and nationally in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Washington, where NBC
has affiliate stations. There was a great viewer response to the series,
and the artists who appeared as guests on the program — I took on the
same role as I had at UCLA, of commentator and host--were delighted
because what it actually meant was that each of the artists had a
one-man show in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Washington, and Los
Angeles. Since the programs were done in color and since we had a very
good technical crew, many of the artists said that they felt quite
honestly that their work looked as good or better on TV than it did in a
gallery or in private showing. So everybody was very happy with the
series. However, the unfortunate thing is that these programs, which
were put on as public-service programs by NBC, were not money-making
programs from NBC's point of view. They didn't bring in the advertising
revenue because they weren't interrupted every few minutes by a
commercial. We ran each program straight through from beginning to end,
and studios don't make money that way. Since television is unfortunately
designed to sell products in the commercials, what happens between
commercials, from their point of view, is incidental. Once having done
their good deed, they said in effect, "Well, that's fine. We're off the
hook for a while, and we don't have to do it again." I had wanted to have repeats of this kind of television program, but so
far have been unsuccessful. I just this past year approached KCET with a
similar project, but unfortunately KCET also is in a money bind. They
would be very happy to do the same kind of thing, they said, if I could
get the programs underwritten. However, I'm not anxious to leave my
painting and my studio to look for sponsors for KCET. So until and
unless one of the studios, whether it's PBS or a commercial studio, can
subsidize the project, I will have to wait and hope that one day it can
be reinstituted . But this is precisely the kind of art activity which I
think could be of enormous value because it did two things: it gave the
artist the wide exposure of simultaneous one-man shows in the major
cities throughout the country with their work looking great, and [it]
gave them an opportunity to talk about their work at the very same time.
It also — and this was proved by the enormous amount of fan mail which
came in--gave an art-hungry audience all over the country an opportunity
to not have to worry about where to park the car but to just sit in
their own homes, turn the dial, and look at an art program. This is the
kind of exposure to art which, theoretically, should be happening more
and more. I do all I can to try to plug it, but I can only devote a
certain amount of time to this kind of spadework.
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COREY
- For the artists who were on the show, I assume that you also decided to
choose a broad spectrum from left to right .
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BIBERMAN
- Oh, yes. This again I insisted on. We had a kind of a horse-trading
session, in which I presented my point of view and the museum presented
its point of view. NBC was perfectly willing to accept whatever we came
up with. We had a master list from which we chose the final group. There
was a certain amount of give and take involved when we came to
controversial areas, so we had to very frankly say, "Well, if you put
so-and-so on, then will you allow me to put so-and-so on?" We didn't
always see eye to eye on the choices, but I think that we arrived at
what was a very fair investigation of a very complex aesthetic field.
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COREY
- Were the artists primarily from California?
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BIBERMAN
- Not from all of California but only from Southern California. The reason
was that although every artist who appeared was paid, they were paid
minimum scale. We couldn't use out-of-town artists because we just
didn't have a large enough budget to pay for transportation and
expenses, so we were limited to those people who resided locally and
were willing to appear for minimum scale.
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COREY
- Did you find people who were unwilling to appear?
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BIBERMAN
- Yes, there were people who were unwilling, for two reasons,
interestingly enough. There was one — and I don't want to mention his
name; I don't think it would be fair--but there was one artist who said
that he was being exploited at minimum wage and therefore would not
appear. There were other artists who were very worried, frankly, by the
fact that I was the moderator, and although I tried to assure them on
the record that I was not there to badger them or to proselytize or to
debate, they were very worried, apparently, that they would not be
treated fairly and for that reason refused to appear. However, these
were not the usual responses. The usual responses were those of great
willingness and gratitude.
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COREY
- Do you have a history of badgering artists?
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BIBERMAN
- No, I don't, but the point is that I've been around the art community
for a long period of time. People know both my work and my point of
view. If they are worried and insecure, they don't want to take a chance
because, for better or for worse, they don't wish to find themselves in
the position of having to debate or to argue, and they could not be
convinced, in two cases, that I was not arguing or debating but simply
offering a platform. However, a few were unconvinced and therefore
refused.
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
MARCH 4, 1976
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COREY
- I would like to go into the period of the sixties. There was a lot
happening and I'm curious as to how the early sixties, the whole social
and political energies in the South, Selma and marches, and how that
affected you in terms of your painting?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, let me start by saying this: beginning with the tapering down of
the whole Cold War period, a great many of the issues that had been
springboards to many of my paintings were less in evidence. Anyone who
has followed my work from the period of, let's say, the late fifties to
the present will be aware of the fact that there was a numerical shift
in the overall content of my work. Although there continued to be
paintings based upon the political, social, and economic problems of
that period, they took less of my total painting time than the
landscapes, the portraits, and subjects from the urban life that I've
always so enjoyed painting. However, in that period, there was a very
definite concern with the whole civil rights movement. A number of
paintings that I did in the period of the early sixties stemmed from
some of the horrific things that were happening, particularly in the
early civil rights movement. I was not in the situations that stemmed
from Montgomery or from Selma; nonetheless, I was keenly aware of them.
And a number of my paintings from that period reflect that interest.
These events were very definitely a part of my consciousness and, again,
a part of the work that I did.
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COREY
- What about the later developments of the sixties?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, before we really get into the later sixties, I did two portraits
that I felt, and still feel, were very important in light of my
preoccupation with interesting personalities. One started from the fact
that Aldous Huxley had been a neighbor of ours for a long period of time
and a good friend. I prevailed upon him to let me do his portrait. He'd
been painted and sculpted many times, but I was very anxious to do
something of him. I didn't want him to sit formally, but we spent a lot
of time together, and I made notes and drawings and sketches from which
I made the painting. It was shown in a New York exhibition that I had in
the year of '64, I believe it was--either '64 or '65. The painting was
done in 1963, and it was the last portrait ever done of Huxley because
his death occurred, as I recall it, almost the very same day that John
F. Kennedy was assassinated. A great many people never knew that Huxley
had died because Kennedy's death had the headlines, whereas ordinarily
the death of an Aldous Huxley would have been banner-headline material
for many days. Thus this news made only the back pages, or the inside
pages. Also, during the same year, I did a portrait of Dr. Linus
Pauling. We were guests at a dinner party one night, and I was struck,
as I had always been, by his fantastic head. I kept staring at him all
through dinner, and all I could think of was the famous Houdon head of
Voltaire, which I'm sure all of us are familiar with. For me, there was
a certain resemblance and a sense of familiarity with Pauling's head
because of my feeling about the Houdon portrait of Voltaire. Pauling's wife happened to be seated next to me, and I asked her when he
had last been painted. And she said, "Well, he's never been painted." I
then said, "Well, I'd love to do something about that." I arranged later
in the evening to speak to him. I told him I didn't want any formal
settings--he was at that time at Caltech--and I said that I wanted to go
to Caltech and spend as much time there with him as possible, making
notes, drawings, and sketches from which I [could] paint the final
portrait. I consider the two portraits of Huxley and Pauling two of my
important later portraits, and I think that this also has to be
remembered in terms of my work in the sixties. Then, as we move into the
later sixties ....
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COREY
- I have one more question about the Pauling portrait. In that portrait,
as you mentioned in Time and Circumstance, there
are certain symbols as background. As I was looking through and noticing
the other portraits, very few of them seem to have that. Why does that
particular portrait have symbolic background symbols?
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BIBERMAN
- Although many of the portraits reproduced in the book may not have
backgrounds which relate to the activities of the sitter, I have done
this type of thing before and since. This is, in portraiture, what is
known as a "heraldic" portrait, one in which some of the attributes or
preoccupations of the sitter are used as background material. Since Dr.
Pauling had received two Nobel prizes — I think that that is unique in
the history of the Nobel awards; I don't know if anyone has ever
received two--I decided that I wanted to put two of those symbols behind
him. Then I became very intrigued, particularly after having been at
Caltech, with some of his other scientific research artifacts, and I
included two more. Actually, in the portrait, there is the dove,
symbolizing the Nobel Peace Prize, and also a section showing the
sickle-cell anemia forms. There is also an alpha helix and, in the
foreground, the symbol for the carbon molecule. I used all of these
because the shapes were visually very exciting for me, and I also felt
that Dr. Pauling, since he had never had his portrait painted, should be
shown surrounded by some of the things that had made him world-famous.
That portrait, incidentally, no longer belongs to me. It doesn't belong
to him either. It was purchased by the Westside Jewish Community Center
eleven years ago. This coming Saturday night, the portrait will be shown
at a dinner honoring his seventy-fifth birthday at the Ambassador Hotel.
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COREY
- Moving on to the period of the mid-sixties ....
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BIBERMAN
- Well, the entire period of the sixties was a very exciting time for me,
for a number of reasons. First of all, I had, for a long period of
years, been totally absent from the New York exhibition scene. The
obvious interruption of the war years and the resultant fact that I had
severed my connection with the art establishment in the East almost made
me feel as though I'd never had any relation to that community--that is,
the art community. I felt that this was a great lack, and I made a trip
east with the idea of arranging for an exhibition. [I arranged for an
exhibition] at the ACA Gallery [in New York] in 1965. That was the first
one-man show that I'd had in New York for a period of almost twenty-five
years. I think the last one before that was in 1940 or 41. I found that
the New York art scene and my reactions to it created a final impression
of disenchantment, so definite that I wanted to have no lasting part of
it. I stayed in New York for five weeks--both before and through the
course of the exhibition. [I] found that I disliked the city cordially;
I wanted to return to California as quickly as possible, and I did as
soon as the exhibition ended. I have since then made no serious efforts
to keep up a continuing relationship with the New York art scene. However, it was in the period of the late sixties that I began a very
stimulating association, namely with the extension department of the
University of California, Los Angeles. I began my series of lectures
[for them], and this has been an ongoing relationship which has
continued up to the present time. It was one of that particular series
of "Dialogues in Art," which was also done in San Diego and at Irvine,
that finally evolved into the television series which we have already
discussed. Also in 1967, I was approached by the directors of the Ward Ritchie
Press, who asked whether they could bring out a book on my work. That
was a very exciting project also. These, then, were very interesting
times for me. However, this was also the period of the start of our
deepening involvement in Vietnam, and this, too, became reflected in my
work. Several paintings which I consider very important in what I can
only refer to as my "topical" vein came out of that period. Also, the
great confrontation in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, in
'68, with all of the drama that stemmed from it, resulted in a series of
paintings based upon those incidents. As we continued into the later
period of the sixties, I felt a very rich period of my life unfolding,
both in terms of the variety of things that I was doing--the lecturing,
the television program, and the publication of the book of my paintings
— and also in the fact that the great excitement of the time was, again,
reflected in my painting. When I thought of the title for the book, Time and Circumstance, the title really came from
what I'd already begun to feel and still feel about my work — that it
develops out of particular times and particular circumstances . In that
sense, my work, like most people's works, whether they're dealing in the
visual arts or any other area of the arts, are probably largely
autobiographical. And so, as I began to assemble the work for a very
important exhibition which came a little later, in '71, I became once
more aware of the fact that the paintings that I assembled really
constituted an autobiography. I wanted the book also to have that
quality, which is why I added the running text, which, with the
paintings, tries to tell the story of the forty years of my life which
the book covers.
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COREY
- You were talking about the one show in New York. I sense more than
disdain for the city. What exactly was it about the whole atmosphere of
New York?
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BIBERMAN
- First of all, I found the city itself distinctly unpleasant. At the time
I first left New York for California, I carried very fond memories of
the city, both visually and emotionally. When I lived in New York, for
example, we used to walk over all parts of the city. I used to love it.
When I came back, I found that New York had become a city with a very
high crime incidence. When, one evening, I had gone to dinner at the
apartment of some friends who lived on the West Side, and I told them I
had walked alone across Central Park, they were absolutely horrified and
said, "My God, you should have never done that. People are getting
mugged right and left in the park." This came as a great shock to me,
because in the period that I lived in New York, we used to walk all over
and think nothing of it. So that — added to the reasons that I've gone
into before in our talks together — made me unhappy with the city and
disappointed with the art scene. I really felt there was very little
point in my staying there after my exhibition and making any concerted
efforts to continue a relationship which might require my periodic
return.
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COREY
- Do you think that L.A. is more receptive to your work because of what
your work represents, or because L.A. is more receptive in general?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, as I think I've intimated, though this is now the second largest
art arena in this country, the characteristics of the art world do not
have the sharpness or the intensity that they have in New York. Although
many of the things that I felt unhappy about in the art scene [in New
York] are also present in Los Angeles — in a lesser quantitative sense,
if not in a qualitative sense--they are less obvious, less troubling. I
felt that I could function here with much less of a sense of dislocation
than I could were I to return to New York or to continue ongoing
relations there.
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COREY
- In terms of some of the types of art which developed out of the
sixties--you ' ve talked about the op art and how quickly it came and
went— there's also an art which came out of a social energy in the
sixties, like the happenings, Sister Mary Corita [Kent], or people
writing on themselves, painting on themselves, painting on anything.
What are your feelings about that kind of art? Do you think it is art?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, one of the hardest things in the world to do, of course, is to
give a short, snappy definition of art. It is a question which always
arises at a symposium. Somebody will always say, "Well, now, what is
art, and what do you mean by art?" It's a very difficult matter to try
to pin down with any degree of definiteness . I have no quarrel with the
fact that the format of the hitherto accepted art forms has undergone,
and is undergoing, a change. I see no reason, for example, why one has
to sculpt in marble or wood or stone, or why one has to paint in oil or
watercolor or tempera, or why one has to print in one of the accepted
graphic media. It is perfectly understandable that there may be a time
in which these rather rigid art categories may break down. We are
probably in such a period now. I don't have any objection to people
working in what is, from my point of view, a cross between the visual
arts and the theater. If something cogent can be better expressed in
those terms, I have no desire to insist on the hard-and-fast rules of
the past, so that things like happenings and concept art and some of the
other manifestations of the present art scene don't bother me because of
the provocative quality of their format. The only thing that I do find a
bit troublesome and difficult to accept is the end objective. If
someone, for example, wishes--as has been done--to wrap a cliff in
plastic or to stretch a curtain between two mountain ranges, I don't
object to the fact that it isn't painting or sculpture; I just feel that
the objective that is being pursued is not very profound. If the cliff
is successfully wrapped in plastic, it might be an innovative
endeavor--and certainly is attendant with many physical difficulties.
Ditto stretching a curtain between two mountain ranges or plowing up
fields and creating earthworks. It's simply that I find the goal, in
most cases, is not worth the effort entailed. But the fact that a
breakdown in the form of the arts may be occurring doesn't trouble me in
the slightest. And one or two people, I think, have been very
successful. For example, in some of the works of a man like Ed
Kienholz--who is a Los Angeles artist--it's very hard to say whether one
is looking at a still life or a charade or a stage setting. I, in many
of Kienholz's works, find that I am very moved, and the fact that I
can't say that it's not painting or it's not sculp- ture or printmaking
doesn't bother me at all. But I find that works of that sort are few and
far between. It's the efforts which I think are simply a tour de force
or a pointless objective that I take exception to.
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COREY
- So essentially you're saying that the goal or objective is extremely
important for an artist.
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BIBERMAN
- Well, I think that unless the objective is of primary importance, it
just isn't worth doing. Then it becomes simply decoration, or a pastime,
or a kind of self-indulgence .
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COREY
- In terms of exhibitions, during the period of the sixties, were there
any particular shows or exhibitions which really did what you would
expect an exhibition to do?
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BIBERMAN
- Not in the sixties. During the period of the sixties, I was exhibiting
rather extensively. I had the New York show and three or four other
one-man exhibitions. I enjoyed them because they were the means for me
to show the paintings that I had done out of a particular period of
time. However, the exhibition that really excited me and, for me, was
the high point of my exhibition career did not occur in the sixties but
occurred in the early seventies, when the director of the Palm Springs
Museum invited me to have a retrospective exhibition of my work. He
spoke to the director of the Municipal Arts Commission here in Los
Angeles, who agreed to cosponsor the show. That show opened in the Palm
Springs Museum, and subsequently came here to Los Angeles and was shown
in the newly constructed Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. The
show covered the period from 1926 into 1971, forty-five years of work.
This was very exciting because paintings for that show were brought in
from private collectors and from museums all over the country, and I saw
works in that show that I myself had not laid eyes on for forty years.
There were many early paintings in that show that my wife had never
seen. The fact that I was able to see assembled representative examples
of work covering the span of forty-five years — a span of my entire
professional painting career— was a very, very moving experience for me.
The two exhibitions were beautifully assembled, they were very well
hung, a very good catalog was prepared for them, and all of this was
done by the two museums for me. I had no financial obligations in the
entire undertaking. It was one of those marvelous events that I hope
every artist at some point in his career can enjoy because it was very
fulfilling for me and very satisfying.
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COREY
- How do you deal with that? What do you feel about that sense of loss
that you must end up having with so many of your paintings? I mean, a
writer can always go back and reread his or her work.
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BIBERMAN
- Well, you know when you paint professionally, you simply take for
granted the fact that very important works will be acquired, that they
will leave your hands. However, I do keep a very complete photographic
record, and since color photography became perfected, I have a good file
of color slides of my work. It's not, of course, like having the works
themselves, but I don't feel possessive about my own paintings at all.
There are a few things that I've never wanted to sell. Out of every
year's work, for example, there are usually one or two paintings that I
like to hold on to so that I can look at them as often as I want to. But
even in that case, I realize that ultimately they may be sold later,
[and that] they will go someplace. As I say, I don't have a possessive
feeling about my own works, so that I don't shed tears when a painting
is bought or when it leaves my studio. As a matter of fact, I'm very
pleased to feel that someone wants it badly enough to purchase it and
hang it. It's comforting for me to know that in so many places in this
country and a few places outside of this country, works of mine are
hung. It's a source of great self-satisfaction which far outweighs any
feeling of proprietorship that I might have were all of the things to
remain in my own possession.
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COREY
- To get to the manner in which all those paintings are dispensed, or
sold, the Heritage Gallery was your representative--or still is?
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BIBERMAN
- No, it was . We had a relationship that lasted about ten years. They're
no longer my agents because, finally, of a mutual dissatisfaction. There
were certain things that the gallery did not want me to do
professionally that I wanted to do, and there, in turn, were certain
things that I wanted the gallery to do for me professionally which it
did not do. This is a common complaint among painters and sculptors and
printmakers . There is a great rate of attrition in the relationships
that artists have with their galleries; a certain amount of shifting is
constantly taking place. This is not an unusual situation, and the
director of the gallery and I are still very good friends, and we came
to a parting of the ways with no hard feelings on either side. That
situation terminated just about the period of the large 1971 shows that
I mentioned. I've had no big exhibition, no large public show, since then, a period
of almost five years. I've had, however, a couple of private
exhibitions. One of the reasons, very frankly, is that after that really
very, very exciting retrospective experience, the idea of having just
another exhibition in another gallery, to which x-number of hundreds of
people come, just doesn't hold out a very exciting prospect for me. From
the point of view of my professional activities, I will have to resume
that public exhibition pattern, and I probably will again in the very
near future. But I will do it with, I must say frankly, very little of
the excitement that I used to feel in the past when I had an exhibition
because all the one-man shows that I've had in the past, I now weigh
against that large retrospective exhibition—and very frankly, they
looked like small potatoes to me.
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COREY
- What are your expectations of a show? Is it mere exposure?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, there are two things that you always look for in an exhibition.
First of all, if you are a professional, you want to make sales, and you
always hope that the critical reactions will be good. This is not only
ego- satisfying, but it also helps financially because there are many
people who read the critical reviews of an artist's work and, on that
basis, decide whether or not they wish to make a purchase. There are
certain people, of course, who couldn't care less about a critic's
opinion and are motivated entirely by their own reactions. But there are
many people who are timid about acquiring something if they feel that,
critically, the artist is not being well received. So as I say, two
things are always looked for in an exhibition: the immediate financial
returns and the critical returns. Also, the artist benefits by seeing
his work in a new setting .
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COREY
- I'm assuming nothing was for sale in the retrospective.
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BIBERMAN
- No, that's not true. Some were. Although many of the paintings were
borrowed--I think at least half of the things were out of either private
or public collections-- not all of the others were for sale. Some of
them were private paintings, like the paintings of my family, my
mother's portrait, my wife's portrait, and the self-portrait. Despite
the fact that these museums did not operate commercially, four paintings
were sold out of the Palm Springs show and several were sold out of the
showing here in Los Angeles. Even though neither galleries operate on
the basis of pushing sales, people made inquiries; and if they found
that a particular work was available, they either contacted me directly
or they made the overtures through the museum. So actually, that double
exhibition was also rewarding financially, although that was not the
purpose of the show.
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COREY
- During the past ten or fifteen years, you've also continued to hold
discussions and lectures. I was noticing in a brochure from the Westside
Jewish Community Center that you held a discussion called "Art and the
Erotic Revolution." What exactly did you mean by that?
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BIBERMAN
- I'm trying to recall that round-table discussion. The fact is that the social mores of our present time have changed, and
what is known now as permissiveness is very much a part of our
consciousness. It's no accident, therefore, that precisely during this
period there was a reflection of that theme in the paintings, prints,
sculptures that were being executed and shown. The title for that
particular symposium is not one that I dreamed up. I participated in it,
and I don't remember the others, but as I recall it, we had a discussion
of eroticism and its relation to the visual arts. At that evening, as I
recall it, we had a psychiatrist, two artists, and some other people who
were, professionally, peripheral to both of those areas. We discussed
the significance of the relationship between the permissive quality
generally and the eroticism in the arts which was prevalent in the
period. This was a time when there had been a great furore over two
exhibitions in Los Angeles, one of which was temporarily closed by the
police on the grounds that it was pornographic. That was simply a
reflection of the temper of the times. That symposium was designed to
discuss the phenomenon of permissiveness, the open eroticism in hard-
and soft-core porno movies, the sex shops and adult bookstores, and so
forth-- all a manifestation of the same attitudes. That evening then
simply discussed its impact on the art community.
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COREY
- What do you think the impact was in terms of ... ?
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BIBERMAN
- The fact is that a great deal of very erotic art was being produced and
shown.
-
COREY
- Is there an influence which is beyond mere pornographic or
permissiveness? Do you think that a permissive or erotic sexual
environment will lead to an artist thinking in permissive terms in other
areas or freedoms in other areas?
-
BIBERMAN
- I think that there's no question but that a certain group of people in
all the arts will turn to this. You know, the history of eroticism in
the visual arts is very ancient and a very documented tradition, and
includes not only such things as the famous frescoes in Pompeii but the
quality of both sensuousness and eroticism which we find in a great deal
of Oriental art and Occidental art also. I mean this libidinous quality
in art, as a theme, is a fascinating study in itself. There are some
very beautiful art books, for example, which are devoted entirely to the
erotic in art. There have been periods in certain countries where this
was a very major art force, and there are other periods where it played
a very minor role. I would say that in the United States, a great
preoccupation with the erotic in art was quite a new phenomenon. This
was a very puritan country in its art, up until very recent times.
Although a certain eroticism was present all through the great periods
of art in both Asia and Europe, I think that it came very suddenly to
the United States, and very recently.
-
COREY
- Eroticism is one avenue of permissiveness, and certainly it would seem
that, as an artist, it would be easier to paint what you want to paint
in a society which is open, not just in a sexual way but in a political
and social way as well, and that all those are reflections, assuming
that one signifies another.
-
BIBERMAN
- It's easier, yes--you see, this brings up the whole question of freedom
in the arts. It's easier, both theoretically and actually, to be very
free in the choice of one's subject matter today than it was in a period
when the artists worked almost entirely on commission. However, like a
great many freedoms, that particular freedom also carries with it
certain problems. The fact is that one may be free, for example, to
paint out of political motivations. However, the difficulty lies in the
fact that unless you are subsidized, you will probably find that those
paintings have a very small sale, so that there is implied or covert
censorship in that sense. It is very easy, in theory, to do a great many
things today because the cost of producing a painting is very minimal.
It's a matter of a few dollars for paints and canvas. Most of the
expenditure has to do with time. If one places a value on one's time and
has to be reimbursed, one is free to invest that amount of time. One is also very doubtful about whether the hours invested will ever be
paid for, because, as I say, there is censorship of an implied sort in
the fact that the painting or the sculpture or the print may or may not
be purchased. It's perfectly true that we are free, but we are not free
when there is the problem of economic necessity. I'm talking now about
the art market.
-
COREY
- In line with the art market, do you foresee, or do you wish for, a time
when certain legal royalties, if they can be called that, will be given
to an artist?
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes. As a matter of fact, this is a matter on which I have been, along
with many of my colleagues, engaged over a very long period of time.
There was formed just after the Second World War a professional
organization called Artists Equity Association, which was very much like
the Musicians Union or Actors Equity or the Writers Guild. [Its] purpose
was to try to arrive at some kind of a code of economics, ethics, and
behavior in the field of the visual arts. Such a code had never existed,
since there was never, in the field of the visual arts, anything like
the kind of organization that the professional musicians, actors, and
writers have had for many years. The question that you asked relates
very directly to a number of the items which were set out in this
original table of demands, one of which had to do with the question of
royalties on continuing sales. The history of art, as you know, is
replete with examples of a painter selling his work for a pittance, and
then, as he became better and better known, the value of the work
skyrockets to the point where it becomes almost obscene. Contemplate the
figures, for example, at which a van Gogh painting was sold, when the
poor man, through his entire life, sold hardly a single work. In order
to cope with this problem, royalties on each successive resale were
suggested. There were also provisions drawn up for payment of a rental
fee to the artist whenever his painting went on public exhibition, and
for a while, this actually happened. I received, for a very short period
of time, small royalty checks whenever my paintings were publicly
exhibited in museums.
-
COREY
- Was this through the government?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, the commission was paid by the exhibiting institution. For example,
if a museum had a group show and your work was shown, the museum paid
you a rental fee--a very modest one, but a principle was being
established. However, that practice fell by the wayside because the
museums pleaded poverty, and additionally, a great many of the younger
artists who were terribly anxious to have their work shown would say,
"Well, if you show my work, I won't charge you a fee." There was no
viable organization to stop the latter practice, and unfortunately the
whole program collapsed. But that, and the question of the governmental subsidy of the
arts--which was a very, very big question- all such things have been on
our agenda. When I say "our" agenda, I'm talking now about art
organizations for as far back as I can remember. And they're still very
much on the agenda today because, at the moment at least, we are in a
period of economic recession; the plight of the artist is very bad. The
artist is always the first one to suffer in a period of economic blight,
so that problems like royalties, rentals, and subsidy are very much a
matter of concern.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE
MARCH 4, 1976
-
COREY
- Would you prefer starting with the King portrait? The Martin Luther King
portrait was done in the early seventies?
-
BIBERMAN
- No, it was done later than that. Let's see, when was the assassination
of King? Certainly not in the early seventies. Three years ago, four
years ago? Well, in any case, let me just say this: all of us were, I'm
sure, very shocked and disheartened by the assassination of Dr. King,
and although I had never met him, I had always been fascinated by the
man, by his voice, by his appearance. After the assassination, I felt a
compelling need to do something about him. I wanted to do a painting
that had to do with his look, and I discovered a very interesting thing.
And that is that when I thought about him, I could visualize him,
really, only down to his mouth. I could see his eyes and his nose, his
mustache and his mouth, and for me this was his face. So, rather than
paint the full head, I decided to paint only those features which made
the strongest impact on me. The painting itself, therefore, stops just
below the lips and goes only above the eyebrows, and is very large in
scale, the features being, I would say, about five times life-size. And
[in] the portrait, the mood is created mostly by the eyes, which are
looking directly at you. My feeling about this approach was based very
much on a quality that I've always felt in Egyptian sculpture, painting,
which always moves me enormously. There is a haunting quality in
Egyptian art when the eyes look directly at you and seem to not only
look at you but through you and keep on going. It's not a difficult
problem technically. It simply means that you don't bring the eyes quite
to a focus, so that the gaze does not stop at you, it goes through you
to a distant point beyond. In painting the portrait of Dr. King, I
treated the eyes that way, and I believe they did what I wanted my
painting to do--that is, to give the sense of the eyes not finishing
their emotion with the spectator but carrying their message beyond. The
interesting thing to me was the fact that although the entire head is
not shown, I have never shown that fragment of the head to anyone who
isn't immediately aware of the fact that it is a portrait of Dr. King.
The problem [of painting the portrait] was compounded for me by the fact
that, of course, I had to work entirely from my memory of the man and
from several photographs that I obtained. The painting was also in the
retrospective show.
-
COREY
- Where is that portrait now?
-
BIBERMAN
- Let's see now--if the painting was in the retrospective show, it
obviously ....
-
COREY
- He was killed in '68.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, obviously he was killed before '71. Strange how our memory of the
years plays tricks on us.
-
COREY
- Where is that portrait of Dr. King now?
-
BIBERMAN
- I have it. As a matter of fact, there are several portraits, as I
believe I've indicated, that I've always felt were public portraits, and
they're not private. My feeling is that no individual should own them.
I've never made an effort to sell the Martin Luther King portrait
because I hope that someday it will find its home in a public place.
Although I've exhibited it in public galleries, I've not offered it for
sale because of this feeling.
-
COREY
- In line with that, where is the Robeson portrait?
-
BIBERMAN
- I still have the Robeson portrait, and we're now trying to see if we can
place it in Rutgers University, which is very anxious to have it.
-
COREY
- The other thing we had talked about was the Vietnam War.
-
BIBERMAN
- Yes, I want again to emphasize the fact that topical considerations in
my work have remained constant, but the quantities varied. In the period
of the sixties and into the present seventies, there is a much greater
emphasis on landscapes, cityscapes, and so forth, but it's important to
restate the fact that the paintings of a topical nature were still a
concern. Out of the period, for example, of the Vietnamese War, there
are two paintings that I consider extremely important. One is the
painting which I call The Offering, which is
based on the absolutely horrific photograph that I saw several years ago
in Life magazine, of the monk who immolated
himself in a public square in Saigon, surrounded by a group of people,
none of whom made the slightest effort to extinguish the flames. I felt
that this was both a gruesome and a very significant attitude on the
part of the people who, from my point of view, allowed this man, quite
willingly, to sacrifice himself. I felt that they were acquiescing and
therefore, in a sense, also sacrificing themselves. At least, this was
my interpretation of why no one, in the hundreds of people surrounding
this burning figure, made any effort to put out the flames. The other painting coming out of that period was also based on the very
famous--or should I say infamous — photograph of the little girl who,
after a napalm attack, ran screaming down the street of a village
somewhere in Vietnam. [She was] completely naked--had torn her clothes
off--and ran screaming in terror. This for me, also, was a painting that
I had to do because I had to exorcise the horror that I felt. Also in pretty much the same period there was the terrible situation in
Africa, with the war in Biafra. Again [I did] a painting which I based
on the photograph of a child dying of hunger, the typical manifestation
of the swollen belly and the spindly arms and legs. In this photograph,
too, the child [was] all alone, squatting somewhere. There must have
been people around because the photograph showed the legs and the feet
of many people. But the child seemed, however, to be surrounded only by
emptiness. There was a terrible sense of horror which I tried to
parallel in the painting. In this period, incidents such as these became the compulsion for me to
make a visual statement. But in quantity, there are less of these
paintings than, let us say, in the period of the late forties into the
middle fifties. But this, again, perhaps is a reflection of the times in
which my paintings were produced. I would be very happy, at some
hypothetical point in the future, to feel that I could happily paint the
lyric, beautiful, and challenging aspects of life on this very lovely
planet. For example, I was very moved when one of the astronauts looking
at the earth from outer space talked about this "beautiful blue ball in
space." You may remember it. I was struck by the feeling that it was
such a pity that from the point of view of someone in outer space you
could see the splendor of this beautiful blue ball and not its troubles.
Very frankly, I'd love to have been able to spend my life painting this
beauty, had there not been all the problems, some of which I shared in,
many of which I observed. Perhaps the period that I find myself in now
is one in which I can state my feelings about some of the things that I
love, rather than feeling impelled to paint the disturbing, the
horrifying, and the deeply repugnant aspects of life. But I know that
these things I have to do also.
-
COREY
- In your more horrifying paintings of the Cold War period--and there is
horror in those, obviously, but there's a different kind of ugliness and
horror than in a painting like The Offering. Do
you think it's because the times have really changed that much, or is it
that technology has brought the horror more directly into our homes?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I think it's both. I had a very strange experience recently. My
first book, The Best Untold, I think I told you,
has long been out of print and has become a collector's item. Recently,
a number of people who have been rereading it commented on the fact that
even though the book was published in 1954 and was based upon paintings
done between the period of 1937 to 1954, that a great many of the
incidents painted in that book again seemed timely and very apropos.
[They] suggested that I ought to have a second edition of the book
published. I sent a copy of it to a literary agent in New York, who took
it around to a great many publishers, and for a time it looked as though
there would be a reprint. But I reacted to that, as I told the agent,
with very mixed feelings. I said, "You know, I think it would be
wonderful if one could look at this book as an historic document and
say, "Wasn't it terrible between 1937 and 1954?" But, very frankly, if
that book should ever be reprinted, I would want to write a new
introduction. I would want to say in that new introduction that I am
ashamed of the fact that in 1976, we reissue a book indicating that some
of the horrors that took place between 1937 and 1954 are happening again
today. Have we learned nothing? I would therefore look upon a
republication of that book with these mixed emotions. If and when that
ever occurs, then my introduction will have to say precisely what I've
just said. I wish that it could be reissued only as a social document of
a period long gone. I don't like the deja vu aspects of the present, as
I look at that book out of the past.
-
COREY
- It being 1976 and you're saying that, what do you find you are drawn to
need to paint now?
-
BIBERMAN
- The greater number of the paintings that I've done over the past year
have been based on landscapes, cityscapes, the structural forms that I
love so much. There are relatively few that reflect a direct topical
interest. It's not that I'm happy about all the things around me at this
point — I'm very unhappy about many of them — [but] I don't quite see
the way in which to visually depict them. They're a bit more intangible
than some of the happenings which gave rise to very specific paintings
in the past. I don't feel comfortable about our present situation, but
the problem, as I say, is the way in which to interpret my feeling of
unease. I don't prefer to be symbolic in my paintings, although I have
dealt with symbolism at various times and for various reasons, but I
don't always like reliance on symbolism. I would usually rather be more
specific. How that quality of being specific will show itself, I don't
know, but I would really not feel entirely comfortable were I to find
myself in the position in which George Grosz found himself when he came
to America. You know that George Grosz, when he lived in Germany in the
period of the First World War and after, became the acid chronicler of
that particular period. He made the most brutal and revealing statements
about the war and postwar German society. But when he came to America,
his work changed almost overnight. In this country he had no immediate
social problems, he found himself politically at ease, he had no one to
hate, and he became a very beautiful painter of very lyric, East Coast
landscapes. He was no longer an angry man; he was happy. Many people
say, "Isn't it too bad that George Grosz became happy? Because the
paintings that came out of his unhappiness were so much more interesting
and exciting." There are many people, similarly, who are very impatient
when I paint landscapes or structural forms. They say, "You know, there
aren't very many artists who, in this present period, have turned to
some of the thematic material that you have, and we think it's really a
pity that you dissipate your energies in painting the other things. We
wish that you would spend your time with your social preoccupations."
Then there are other people, by contrast, who feel that to be a "social"
painter is not properly the direction for a contemporary painter. These
people say, "You know, it's fine that you have a social conscience, but
why don't you keep that out of your work? Why don't you paint your
beautiful landscapes and wonderful structural forms?" I can only answer
both these criticisms by saying that things will occur in my work when I
feel them deeply enough to have to paint them. At the moment, I find
myself in a much more lyric and generally agreeable relation to the
world around me, even though the disturbing factors that I've indicated
are very present. How the latter will manifest themselves--if and when
they will manifest themselves — I cannot, at this point, say. They will
happen when they have to happen. And beyond that, I am as curious as the
next person.
-
COREY
- Do you then, in all your painting, irregardless of the period, wait for
motivation?
-
BIBERMAN
- I don't wait for motivation. Motivations are all around us, but they
produce different results. I'm reminded of the wonderful story that they
tell about William Faulkner, who was being interviewed by a lady from a
Northern paper — and I think he was living in Jackson, Mississippi, at
the time. She was asking him a number of questions about his work
pattern and so forth, and she said, "Mr. Faulkner, I'd like to find out
something about how and when you write. What are your work habits? When
do you write?" And he thought for a moment and in his nice, Southern
drawl, he said, "Well, ma'am, I work whenever the spirit moves me, and
the spirit moves me every day." And I can only tell you that unless
there are certain unforeseen things that happen, I work in my studio
every day. It's not a question, and I know that you didn't mean to
phrase it that way, of "waiting for motivation." It's rather a question
of exploring the motivations that are present at a particular time. I've
usually found myself in the position of being a couple of paintings
behind, in terms of what I wish to do. Only rarely have I had the
experience of sitting in front of a blank canvas, like a writer who
finds himself sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper on the
typewriter saying, "My God, what do I put down next?" This, of course,
has happened to me on occasion, too. There are periods when one works
better, and others when one works less well. But in general, as I've
said, I usually find myself a couple of paintings behind.
-
COREY
- You seem terribly disciplined, and I'm not even certain that discipline
is the fair word. What is it that gets you into your studio every day?
-
BIBERMAN
- I really don't know. I happen to be, by temperament, a rather methodical
person, and I also am a person with a conscience. I am also very
grateful for the fact that I have been able, all of my life, to do the
thing that I love most to do. Very few people find themselves in that
fortunate position. Most people--who was it? was it Eliot who said,
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation"? I have been able to do that
which I wanted to do. I have a conscience about that, and I feel a sense
of deep obligation, therefore, to those circumstances which have made
this possible for me. So when I get up in the morning, I have breakfast,
and I go into the studio. It's a very natural thing for me to do, and I
never feel as though I'm being chased into the studio. Quite the
contrary, I thoroughly enjoy going down those stairs. As I say, some
days you work better, some days you work less well, so although my work
habits are disciplined, they don't come out of any discipline that's
been forced on me. As a matter of fact, I think that, by and large, this
is true of most people who work in creative areas. The fiction of "the
starving artist in the garret" who waits around for inspiration to
strike is, I'm afraid, a very nice piece of fiction which comes out of
La Vie de Boheme but is, in my experience at
least, not a true picture of the artist. There are people who goof off,
of course, but most of my colleagues, most of the people whom I know,
are very serious about their profession. They practice it diligently,
and very few of them can afford the luxury of being bohemian. Some of
the most bohemian people I know are stockbrokers, bankers, doctors, and
so forth. Most of my artist friends are rather disciplined, sober,
hard-working people.
-
COREY
- What happens to you when you leave your studio?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I don't really leave it. You see, my studio is exactly fifteen
feet away from where you and I are talking, and I like it that way. I've
only once in my life had a studio apart from where I actually lived, but
now I seldom leave my studio during the working day. I don't leave it
emotionally; it's always there. I don't have the nine-to-five syndrome
of going to an office at nine o'clock in the morning, and closing the
door at five o'clock in the afternoon, and saying, "Well, thank God I
don't have to go back until nine o'clock tomorrow morning." It's a
different feeling. And interestingly enough, you know, in most
professions that I know about, men and women say, "Well, at a given
point, I'm going to retire." I've never known of an artist who retires.
What would an artist do if he retired? He would continue to do precisely
what he was doing. Many people who retire take up painting or music or
some other time- and energy-consuming hobby. I don't know of any painter
[who,] at a given point in his life, [has] said, "Well, that's that. We
close the book on that. I'm hanging up my palette, I'm putting down my
brushes, and I am now retired." It's a different relationship entirely.
You never leave it. You know the marvelous stories about Renoir when he
was crippled with arthritis. He used to have brushes strapped to his
hand so he could continue to paint. Or Matisse, when he was bedridden
and couldn't even hold a brush, got big pieces of paper and cut out
shapes with a scissors. This is the norm. We don't "retire" from our
professions--this is one of its great compensations.
-
COREY
- Part of what I meant in terms of leaving the studio was not leaving it
professionally or leaving the art but was in regards to discipline and
thinking about your work. If you are walking down a street and an idea
comes to you, do you quickly jot it down in some form, or do you just
let it pass?
-
BIBERMAN
- Both. If I happen to have an envelope in my pocket, I try to write down
my Gettysburg Address. If I don't have an envelope in my pocket, I try
to remember it. What usually happens is that I try to go back to the place the next day
with enough equipment so that I can make sketches. You see, I very
seldom paint on the spot. I haven't for many, many years. Most of my
paintings are composites, really, of drawings, notes, sketches,
observations, and thoughts about things. I'm not a literal painter in
the optical sense, although some of the paintings may look as though
they are very literal. They are based on fact, but they are very
carefully edited and reordered. I usually start with notes and sketches
and add to them certain memory factors. These are usually all that I
need to continue with a given piece of work. I'll very often go back to
the spot which has provided the original impulse to see if the impact I
originally felt is being returned — not in straight visual terms, but
psychologically. But the answer to your question is that I generally
have a pencil or scrap of paper with me. If I don't, I try to rectify
that omission as quickly as possible.
-
COREY
- If the impulse doesn't return, do you assume that it was incorrect?
-
BIBERMAN
- If it doesn't return, then I have the sneaking feeling that it wasn't
very important to begin with. If it stays with me, then I usually do
something about it. But in most cases, if something stops me, it usually
has an element of continuing preoccupation. I know that since I do a lot
of paintings of the city, for example, I'll be driving along, and if I
suddenly see something or am aware of something, the first impact
usually has for me some valid basis. If I've not been able to stop--if
I'm driving, for example-- I've found that in returning to a spot which
first gave me a psychological punch, that on returning, it is no longer
there. If there's a kind of first empathy with a visual situation or an
idea, it usually stays.
-
COREY
- Do you think that's perhaps why many of your paintings, as you say, may
appear to be real whether they actually are or not?
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I think that's so. Although usually I don't set much store by
critical opinion, the late Merle Armitage, who wrote the foreword to an
early catalog of mine in a New York exhibition, said something which I
would like to believe is true. He said that I had the ability to carry
the spectator to the exact psychological spot where I myself had
been--I'm paraphrasing it now. I hope that what he said is true, because
if what I do seems to be "real," I think it is due not to the fact that
it is optically exact but that it is psychologically and emotionally
parallel to my own initial reaction. If that is true, then I think it
can register on the spectator with equal validity.
-
COREY
- Making a bit of a jump, I came across a booklet from the American
Graphic Arts which contained three examples of prints of yours which
could be purchased. I was curious about who did the choosing of those
prints. And if it was you, why those particular prints?
-
BIBERMAN
- I have to confess that I really don't remember how the choice was made.
And I also have to confess that since I haven't seen that brochure in a
long time, I don't remember which three prints they were. But I'm trying
to think back.
-
COREY
-
Woman of Mexico, Hail and
Farewell, Farewell, and The Yellow Door.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, now that you've refreshed my memory, I have the feeling that I
chose them from an early period of my printmaking. That brochure,
incidentally, is at least a dozen years old, and at that time I hadn't
done very many prints, but I probably chose those three because of my
fondness for them. Hail and Farewell had to do
with an emotional feeling about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and The Yellow Door came out of the period that we
spent in Mexico. Woman of Mexico is based on the
actress who played the lead in Salt of the Earth.
These prints probably were also chosen in consultation with the people
who got out that particular brochure.
-
COREY
- I was just curious in terms of the use of prints, the whole idea of
prints, as being another means of interacting with the public.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, I've already indicated that that's one of the things that I like
about printmaking, and I also like for that very reason, if possible, to
make large editions of my prints. The per-unit cost can then be kept
very modest, which is an area of disagreement that I have with some of
my colleagues. We may have gone into this before; I don't remember.
There are two schools of thought about the size of editions in
printmaking. Assuming that the quality of the print does not suffer, I
am of the persuasion that likes a large edition at a low unit cost,
rather than a small edition at a higher cost. If one assumes that for
the hours expended on a given graphic work that x-number of dollars have
to be returned, that sum can come in one of two ways: a lot of sales for
a little, or a few sales for a great deal. To repeat, I go along with
the school that likes to see the edition as large as possible--without
deterioration of quality--and the unit cost as low as possible. Perhaps
I'm right because there are a lot of my prints all over the world, and I
often wonder if there would have been that many had the availability not
been so possible.
-
COREY
- Another thing that I was wondering about in terms of different ways in
which you view your own painting: there's the painting Golden Hills, which you mentioned was part of a series. I was
wondering why you view any of your work as being part of a series and
why an artist would attempt to paint a picture as being part of a
series.
-
BIBERMAN
- Well, you know, for someone who was born and brought up in the East,
where the summer landscape is mostly green, I was very moved by the
Western landscape. We may have discussed this once before, but the fact
that I suddenly found myself in a country which, at least in the autumn,
was gold and black and blue struck me with a tremendous emotional impact
and I just couldn't express it all in one painting. I found that I kept
returning to that initial impulse many times before I could get it out
of my system. I painted the golden hills and the visual impact of this
landscape in autumn, I would say, probably in about a dozen canvases. At
a given point, I will probably decide that there's nothing more I can do
with it, but I don't think that I've yet reached that point. I think
that I will still want to go back to that tremendous fascination for
this visual challenge. I think this is the only reason one does a
series. If the statement can be made once and with a sense of finality,
then I think it should stop there, but if there's a feeling that it has
to be chewed over again and again, then the final statement has not been
made. And at a given point, maybe one can say, "Well, that's really all
I can do with it." At which point, one should stop.
-
COREY
- I have a question about a specific painting, the Sardine Fleet- Brittany. When was that done?
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BIBERMAN
- Well, that painting has a very peculiar origin. I told you that I was in
Brittany for two summers in 1926 and 1927. I did a lot of painting,
mostly figures, but I also did a lot of drawing. One was a drawing of a
lot of little sardine boats tied up overnight in a little sheltered
area, an artificial quay. The boats were rocking with the gentle
movement of the swells; and being very small, and the sails down and the
one mast up, they looked to me just like a series of dancing musical
notes. I put the drawing away and never painted it at that time. I go
over my old sketchbooks every once in a while with a kind of nostalgic
interest, and I remember over the years I often wondered why I'd never
made a painting of that drawing. I didn't know why I hadn't, and
finally, about forty years after I made the original drawing, I finally
decided to paint that picture. I've often said to my friends that for me
it's the longest period of gestation that I've ever had with a single
painting. But it happened that way, many years after I left Brittany and
after I had done the original drawing.
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COREY
- Was the final painting very different from the original drawing?
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BIBERMAN
- Was the final painting much different? Essentially, no. The quality of
these little dancing boats, I think, still has the feeling of the
musical notes. The treatment of the entire canvas, however, was probably
a little bit more semi-abstract than it would have been had I painted it
at the time I did the original drawing. When I re-viewed the sketch
after that long period of time, I was already painting in an idiom which
was not the one I used at the time of the sketch. But I think that the
feeling of little boats looking like musical notes still remained the
heart of the painting.
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COREY
- If you were to invent or describe what you would consider the ideal
community for an artist to live in, what do you think it would be?
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BIBERMAN
- You know, offhand, my reaction would be to say, "a community at peace."
And for me this would be one of the essentials. However, the unfortunate
fact is that the history of art is replete with very many great
paintings and sculptures based on absolute horrors. I'm now thinking of
things like Goya's Disasters of War, and any
number of paintings and sculptures which depict pretty awful things and
are undisputedly great works of art. One always faces this dilemma. If,
historically, we find that some of the greatest works of art are rooted
in periods of bitter struggle and strife, one would be tempted to say,
"Well, then the ideal climate for great works of art is a period of
struggle." If on the other hand, one can say that man's greatest
challenge is not with his fellow man but with his efforts to understand
and use the forces of nature, then we would have to say, "Well, there
are many kinds of struggle." So if I were to answer your question, I
would say that for me, the greatest struggle that man faces--and I'm
using man in the generic sense, humankind--I would like to see mankind's
greatest challenge to be against the unknown secrets of the world,
against the mystery of the universe, against the forces of nature that
surround him and of which he is still so woefully ignorant. This, for
me, is a much more meaningful struggle than who crosses whose boundary
and for what reasons. So that if you ask me for the ideal situation, I
would like to envisage it as a period in the history of the world where
man's new outlook might give rise to a new kind of art, a different kind
of living, based not upon his need to fight his fellow man, but based
upon his great need to understand, to encompass, to enjoy, to celebrate,
and to explore the great mystery of the universe, the great wonder of
life, and the greatest mystery: why we're here and what we can do with
our lives. I would find this the ultimate challenge.
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO
MARCH 4, 1976
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BIBERMAN
- I am enormously fascinated by the fact that we, on this tiny planet
revolving around a minor sun on the edge of a minor galaxy in endless
space, know so little about the vastness of the universe. And if a
reincarnation were ever possible, I would dearly love to find myself in
a time when one could break out of the narrow confines of this very
minor solar system and find out something of the potentials of this
completely unknown universe. And for that reason, I've envied the
astronauts. I followed their exploits with tremendous interest. I
deserted my easel and was glued to that little TV screen. And again,
recalling the phrase of the astronaut who spoke about "this beautiful
blue ball in space"--this , for me, had a stirring, evocative quality I
was just fascinated by. So to end this rambling, discursive answer to
your question, I think that though the fact of struggle is continuously
present, I can envisage it being pursued on a much higher plane than
it's ever been carried on in the past. I would dearly love to think that
ultimately this might be possible. Obviously, in our lifetime this will
not be probable--a probability. But hopefully, and since we're dealing
with both a hypothetical question and an ideal situation, I would hope
that at some time in the future, the race of mankind on this planet and
its artists will be able to face the most challenging ideas of all--some
understanding of the universe, some understanding of life, and some
understanding of our place in the cosmos. On which point, I think we
should end.